Denisa Badoi

Year of studies: 3rd

Program: Rehabilitation

Collaborators: Popa Milena

Brief: The program was a rehabilitation of a building for student housing in Timisoara’s student campus. The main problems of the building, apart from a certain state of degradation, were the lack of common spaces, laundry facilities, lack of private bathrooms per each unit, and the student units themselves that were no longer compliant with the life style and needs of the students.

Summary: The strcural system of the building, mainly a brick construction, made any intervention upon it either very complicated or very risky. The concept of the final intervention came from finding a solution to this problem, it involved a metallic structure that covers the building and reinforces it The result was a complemetary structure, almost like an exoskeleton, that served more purposes than one. On this exterior structure, extra space could be added to each room, however, at this stage it did not solve the students’ need of more complexe and functional units. The initial units had room for two beds and little more, there were no boundaries between a night area and a day area. The solution was facilitated again by the metal structure. Through it, two units on different levels could communicate forming one bigger unit, with a night area upstairs and a day area downstairs. Furthermore, this meant that units no longer needed acces from each level and the long hallways of every other floor could be closed and divided into small bathrooms for each unit. This was perhaps the greatest achievement of this project, the ability to add private bathrooms and divide nighttime from daytime areas all while not decreasing the size of the units or the number of students the building could host.