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Residual Traces

Part 2 Project 2024
Ali Damani
Loughborough University | UK
Residual Traces connects Bucharest's subdued past to its potential future, creating an infrastructural social and cultural hub. Plevnei Street Station merges a metro station with leisure and retail facilities, reflecting the city above while addressing its car-centric issues. The project revitalises forgotten spaces and connects communities, including the abandoned Casa Radio building, Bucharest's largest leftover. These 'residual traces' are reimagined as assets with potential stories to be awakened.

The station integrates into the masterplan and wider context, transforming the network into a transit and event destination. The architecture employs additive and subtractive forms, creating interstitial moments by carving out underground spaces and enriching the landscape above. From urban scale to detail, the design fosters moments of discovery that transform mundane commutes. Cultural connections are woven throughout, with elements like decorative tiling, fruit stalls, and newspaper stands reflecting Bucharest's heritage and grounding travellers in the city's exchanges.

Residual Traces addresses both physical and social infrastructure, recognising value in the city's overlooked elements and reintegrating them into the urban fabric. This approach makes architecture a proactive force, using systems of reuse and regeneration to create a vibrant pulse of activity and exchange.


Tutor(s)
Robert Schmidt III
2024
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