Raluca Scheusan

Raluca's final design thesis is a proposal for an intervention on a historically-charged ruin in Bucharest. The project starts with the redesign of the cores of the building. This gesture seeks to re-define the building’s identity; aiding it to shed the layers of ideological, programmatic, material and structural heaviness that have rendered it obsolete. With a recycling plant for debris from the construction industry in its basement and an urban archive and museum of the city on its upper floors, the building is processing materials harvested from itself as well as from the rest of the city. In doing so, the proposal pursues a conversation with the current narrative surrounding the building - that of it being a permanent construction site- as well as challenges the initial purpose meant for it - that of cultural hegemony, or “Museum of Museums”. The architectural intervention is framed as a form of “lightness” - a passive revolution that introduces multiple local starting points, negotiating entropy in the city’s built fabric. Lightness becomes a layered design gesture, creating a simultaneous, rhizomatic dialogue between existing and new conditions. The building thus becomes a site to be harvested - both materially and immaterially - a true mediator between city and discipline, responding to how we might inhabit ruins, particularly those rich in complex narratives.