123 – AS2025 – ALT. CORP. ARCHITECTS SRL & SHAFT A.D. SRL
Autor principal / Main Author: ALT.CORP. ARCHITECTS SRL: Cosmin O. Gălățianu, Alexandru Cristian Beșliu, Cosmin Georgescu, Andrei Theodor Ioniță, Octavian Bîrsan; SHAFT A.D. SRL : Alexandru Moldovan, Andrei Barbu
Coautori / Co-authors: arh. Andrei Mitrea, arh. peis. Alexandru Gheorghe
„Acest proiect este apreciat pentru abordarea sa conceptuală robustă. Referința la sistemul de organizare spațială specific proiectului modernist nu este estetică, ci mai degrabă programatică. Caroiajul de 7X7 metri devine o regulă unificatoare pentru organizarea teritoriului, care este alcătuit dintr-un mozaic de tipologii spațiale. Acest sistem riguros este susținut de o bogăție de straturi succesive și de un limbaj de design consistent aplicat pe întreg amplasamentul, de la organizarea spațială generală până la designul meticulos al materialelor.
Detaliile atent realizate și mobilierul personalizat creează cu succes o nouă identitate pentru oraș, relaționând subtil cu patrimoniul industrial al orașului Tulcea.” – aprecierea Juriului
THE TOPOMETRICAL PROTOCOL
NEW CLIMATES AND NEW URBANITY
Recent nature-based European strategies for resilient cities focus on seamlessly integrating climate awareness, landscape design, architecture, urbanism, socio-cultural components, memory and heritage into a broader assemblage of codependent vital elements. Beyond these aspects, any recent public space interventions in most of Romanian cities needs to deal with a post-traumatic topological tension induced by the dissonant inconsistency between the centuries-old historical urban fabric and the communist era urban ideal translated
into geometric systematization.
In the sense of this all-encompassing ecosystemic construct that also has to be responsible for dealing with this type of conflict, our proposal endeavors to find a common ground that can effectively accommodate such a vision – a geometric system of procedures that can alter itself and adapt in accordance to each particular urban situation and its immediate necessity – the topometrical protocol. After subsequent fine tunings, a 7/7m cardinally oriented grid came to develop into this virtual infrastructure for Tulcea’s new urbanity, a rational instrument devised with the sole purpose of carefully adjusting already existent potentialities, as opposed to the previous era’s brutal use of highly invasive abstract and hermetic ordering systems.
MENTAL MAPPING THE TERRITORY
GEOGRAPHY AND GEOLOGY
The history of this city’s becoming is intimately close to its geographical coordinates and topographical particularities. With regard to this aspect, our proposal suggests some key adjustments to the previsioned urban framework by prioritizing certain aspects related to long-term strategies for major traffic flows and urban renewal catalysts. Heavy car traffic is envisioned to concentrate exclusively on the main roads that go around the city – “Barajului” and “Viticulturii”, and the ones that come into the city from the East – “Isaccei” and “Babadag”, with a short diversion towards “Kogălniceanu”, “Dobrogeanu Gherea” and “Păcii” in order not to disrupt the new Civic Center.
By means of this diversionary tactic and making use of the envisioned transformation of “Păcii” street into a green corridor that can also accommodate pedestrian and bicycle traffic, our course of action also suggests creating a green belt that connects Tulcea’s most important geographical landmarks, its literal and metaphorical founding “corner stones” – the city center, the waterfront and Aegyssus fortress (“Monumentului” Hill) – to its peri-urban ecological buffer zones – “Zagen” micro-delta and “Bididia” Quarry. The proposal also suggests two other direct green corridor shortcuts to the main hills following “Gloriei” and “Mahmudiei” street. A subsequent development phase would imply extending the waterfront promenade towards the downstream port and towards “Ciuperca” and “Cașla” lakes by adaptive reusing and regenerating the Eastern former industrial area (“Alum”, “Feral” etc.).
This series of long-term urban procedures would reinforce Tulcea’s amphitheater-like topographical layout, ultimately facilitating the possibility of a complete mental mapping of the city by walking along its encircling green belt ridge that integrates pedestrian and bicycle mobility, hiking trails, panoramic lookouts, or cultural and recreational spaces.
Simultaneously, this territorial reclamation hints to a key aspect of our proposal’s very materiality and its direct connection to Dobrogea’s geology, its heritage and, inherently, its surrounding quarries that currently provide crushed stone, chippings and aggregates for most of the structural and infrastructural worksites. In essence, we suggest that all hardscape surfaces and drainage subbase layers be made of these most affordable and easily accessible materials.
SHADE STATIONS AND URBAN CARPETS
As previously mentioned, beyond the grid’s inherent quality of bringing coherence to our proposal and providing – to an extent – a certain reconciliation between last century’s irreversible urban interventions and the old city, its topometrical protocol is not abstract and inattentive, but overly site-specific in its urbanity. Therefore, when this hypothetical undifferentiated urban-forest flood meets the city, it generates particular moments – the system’s “rule of law” makes use of vegetation canopies and hardscape urban carpets in order to generate so-called shade stations. Moreover, this protocol also tactically acts upon itself in order to adapt its inventory with new elements appliable to the grid: an intersection of axes may be a tree, but not necessarily the same species as the one next to it, while, similarly, a square is most certainly a surface, but sometimes not with the same texture or materiality as the neighboring one. This system opens up an infinite number of potential urban scenarios.
Most of the urban carpets in our proposal have a predominantly red tint which is reminiscent of the old city’s stone pavements still to be scarcely found at a closer inspection of the surrounding streets. Even though natural reserves of red marble or pink marmorized limestone have probably been fully extracted, local quarries like Carabalu and Camena still provide rhyolitic stone-chip aggregates with porphyritic textures for public infrastructure projects and regional roads. This type of affordable material can subsequently be used for both sealed and unsealed (permeable) surfaces meant for heavy or low traffic – smooth concrete surfaces with sealed joints (F01 – “Mircea cel Bătrân” Square), tinned (fine or coarse stroked) concrete surfaces with permeable joints (F03a and F03b – Crossing Square and “Trei Fântâni” inclined Piazza), stabilized red cinder (F06 – Waterfront Palestra), water- bound surfaces (F02a and F02b – “Mircea cel Bătrân” Square outer ring and “Unirii” Street Bazaar) and, ultimately, sublayers for sand and meadow areas (City Park, “Pansy” Playground and green spaces adjacent to “Păcii” street green corridor).
The same kind of accessibility and ease of implementation is involved when dealing with the shade station canopies; instead of building unnecessary shading pavilions and pergolas, we suggest shaping urban spaces through carefully selected vegetation species. At the same time, this strategy implies a certain civic responsibility with regard to the maintenance required (coppicing, pollarding etc.). Urban gardens are common goods to be collectively looked after by local communities and their definitive accomplishment takes time, patience and care. In essence, we speak of a continuous worksite whose site management plan and technical terms of reference span decades. This type of collective effort – and not necessarily architecture or monuments by and for themselves – is precisely the thing that consolidates identity and creates heritage, memory and tradition, be it ecological, or of any different kind.
WATER INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN EQUIPMENT
The top and bottom layers of the grid – the canopy and the urban carpets – are the protocol’s liminal parameters, the things that clearly define the interval for day-to-day life in the city. The in-between layering, however, is the intricate system that facilitates this unpretentious happening of things, from underground water mechanisms with collectors and canals to banal urban furniture and equipment.
Through sustainably designed urban drainage systems (concealed or apparent), tactically positioned sealed and unsealed surfaces (including water filtering rain gardens) and interactive water equipment, our proposal aims to transform the overall urban ecosystem by taking advantage of its topography and spatial characteristics. Thus, urban carpets come to be concave or convex, inclined or horizontal, while water is either trapped beneath this ground surface in technically efficient infrastructural networks, or brought to light and revealed through galvanized steel drinking fountain totems and continuous overhanging or vertical spraying nozzles. The intrinsic rationality of the topometrical protocol is a deliberately self-imposed limitation that evacuates, by all means necessary, any sort of overly-emphatic and monumental water spectacle for the sake of mere contemplation. Conversely, we suggest that urban water equipment should definitively be demystified and accepted as an integral and interactive part of mundanity.
However, two such unostentatious “water monuments” turn out to be key aspects of our proposal, pieces of equipment that we consider to be, in one way or another, memory vehicles: the “Mircea cel Bătrân” Square impluvium with its sealed surface precinct – the main gathering area where controlled jets can feed a central water puddle during summers, and the monumental fair table on “Unirii” street. The latter, found in front of the street’s portico, is, at times, an open gutter whose concave tabletop supports a continuous water flow that follows the preexistent topography. Beyond that, the table is a memorial piece reminiscing the history and heritage of the city’s thirteen ethnical communities, who, despite all their differences, have historically found a way to sit together, one next to another, or on either side of a similar piece of furniture, in the Bazaar, in the old food market, or at any other such public fair or important event. The table is set to be made up of a particular precast reinforced concrete whose binding material will also integrate adequate soil samples and aggregates from on-site excavations. Pedestrians can easily walk unbothered by the presence of this table form one passageway to another, crossing the water-bound surface of the continuous garden; however, we like to think that, in spite of this immediate possibility, they will take their time to have a seat at this table in order to reweave what has previously been torn apart in the city’s memory.
Other important pieces of urban equipment are to be found inside the “Pansy” garden playground – a continuous ever-winding galvanized steel pipe as a multipurpose urban play apparatus, on the sloped “Trei Fântâni” piazza – three water fountain and spraying totems, and inside the waterfront palestra whose columnar vegetation precinct considerately integrates the preexistent pine trees and the kiosk, while assimilating the necessary infrastructure for public concerts, gatherings and sports events.
Other less-equipped shade stations that still follow the protocol through more discrete additions include the chess area adjacent to the waterfront, the city park whose alleys are turned into a generous meadow with both preexistent and new vegetation patches and trees, the residential and the central store parking areas, the two semicircular residential gate-gardens found on either side of “Unirii” street and, of course, the vast urban forest found inside the elevated crossing square, an important area that adequately adapts to the current urban traffic layout, yet can immediately transform into a temporary or permanent pedestrian area, follow the grid’s “rule of law” by integrating anti-vandal galvanized steel urban pieces: three types of lighting fixtures, four types of water fountains and totems, bicycle racks, bollards and waste bins.
The final, yet most common and recognizable, equipment layer is the one that integrates standardized urban furniture components – galvanized steel “Palissade” chairs, stools, lounge chairs, armchairs and benches, or any other similar alternative. This last urban prop layer is the only one deviant to the protocol, a family of spontaneous instruments that become the sudden infrastructure of any type of urban events and scenarios in our envisioned activities portfolio: workshops and classes, flea markets and public fairs, unplugged concerts and festivals, or simply time-wasting lingering and loisir.
LANDSCAPING STRATEGY
In accordance with the given status quo and in compliance with the “New Climates” approaches, the landscape becomes one of the most important actors, placing the preexistent architecture, or any architecture, for that matter, in the background. Rainwater management through SuDS and unsealed surfaces, significantly reducing urban heat islands through continuous tree canopies and shade stations and, finally, educating ecologically responsible users with the prospect of their direct implication in the process of “building” and subsequently ensuring the maintenance of this entire project, can all be done according to the same implementation stages.
The overall strategy has three key aspects to be taken into account regardless of any moment along this process:
- Water management as an essential ecological infrastructure;
- Exclusively native vegetation to be added (shaded grid canopy, shrubs and perennials) – highly potent instrument for increasing biodiversity;
- Maintenance as a socio-cultural and ecologically responsible civic act.
