Graduation projects
The regeneration and adaptive reuse of the ‘Viorel Mateianu’ post-war stadium into a collaborative arts centre
Project description
“forms in the very act of being constituted go beyond the functions which they must serve” - Aldo Rossi, The architecture of the CityBuilt in 1953, by the voluntarily work of the population of Baia Mare, in one of the most important social and cultural cores of the city, only 250m from the historical city, surrounded by cultural functions like The Ethnography and Popular Art Museum, the Village Museum, The College of Art, the ‘Viorel Mateianu’ Stadium was for many years an important landmark and has a lot of potential for further development. In the present, it is mostly damaged, fragmenting the urban tissue and it became a danger for the population. With an important historical background in the art field, exactly on this site, from the XIX century (the ‘plein-air’ art centre created by Simon Hollosy) and also in the present as it is occupied by the visual artists under the tribunes, the stadium it is in itself a palimpsest, overlapping physical layers with immaterial layers such as individual and collective memory and meaning. The proposal for the ‘Viorel Mateianu’ Stadium aims to reactivate and regenerate the area, to re-inhabit the empty ‘shell’ as a collaborative arts centre (visual arts, performance arts, music, and education facilities), to adapt it for the present necessities and reuse it as a palimpsest that reveals the past in the present, for the future generations.In the conceptual process, there are 5 main important elements. The first one is fragmenting the volume, bringing it from a monumental scale to a human scale, to integrate it in its surrounding context. The second aim is to ‘open’ the stadium and use it as a tool for creating more connectivity both in the urban tissue and the social environment. The third one is about the creative adaptive reuse of the tribunes and their structure, and attributing them new purposes (concert hall, study spaces of the arts library, exhibition space, public space and common space of the artists). The fourth principle is about regenerating the tribunes that are severely damaged, and transforming them through landscape design, into a green public space that would be the canvas for the daily life of the community. The fifth and the last aim is to respect the past, while keeping the memory of the place alive in the present through design.The new, resulted volumes have a simple, white aesthetic, that creates the transition from opacity to translucence of the artists’ spaces (to visually open the arts centre and also, to keep the intimacy of the users in this social core), up to the transparence of the common spaces that communicate with the exterior and rise the previous opacity barrier that was on the site. Furthermore, the existing tribunes and the structure that are kept after the structural analysis, are painted in yellow, colour with memorial meaning, being one of the 2 specific colours of the football team from Baia Mare.
Author's presentation text
Diana Cânța is a young graduate of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism Cluj-Napoca, who combines the passion for architecture and urban design with the career as an international handball referee. Studying in Brussels in 2017, she began to be preoccupied by the paradigm shift in architecture, by what architecture means today and how the contemporary architect transcends the physical scale of architecture towards new roles, asking questions that vary from the participative design (about which she also published a theory paper in XXI Magazine), to the adaptive reuse of existing structures as a sustainable design approach, from the local to the global scale, subject that was developed in her dissertation paper: ‘ Palimpsest - The stadium as a canvas for new types of architecture’. This interest in architectural theory developed in the study years, also by participating in competitions, such as ‘Arhitectura Celuilalt’, wining prizes at the 2 editions that she signed up for.
