The Filaret bus station forms part of a larger industrial area undergoing transformation. In August 2022, it served as the primary arrival point for Ukrainian refugees traveling by bus to Bucharest, Romania.
The qualitative and quantitative on-site registrations in the images below was conducted and visualized by Daniel Clearwater, Maria Charlotte Thonet, and Stanisław Daniel Rudzki as part of the 2022 mapping exercise to identify suitable locations for emergency reception in Bucharest, and constituted one part of the studio’s collective Urban Analysis of Bucharest. The documentation and interpretation of local social infrastructure, spatial and material conditions, and flows of people, including movement of Ukrainian refugees, created the foundation for the design project The Burete, Flows and Forces at Autogara Filaret, authored by Rudzki.
The project, The Burete, Flows and Forces at the Autogara Filare, envisions a flexible reception system that can be activated during emergencies and scaled up or down due to shifting needs through a distribution system based on the former railway tracks. Some of the architecture, urban design, and landscape structures would remain in the host community between and after disasters. The project includes an on-site logistics hub with workshops for building and assembling structures for accommodation and social functions, and the main arrival hall with functions for emergency situations and for daily regional bus departures and arrivals.
Text by author below:
The site of Autogara Filaret is full of different flows and forces. Flows of people, money or transportation. Forces of green nature and concrete urban planning. As they all are present on the site they seem to need to be streamlined in the search of appropriate balance. The aim of the following proposal is to facilitate the exchange of these processes by providing a framework for the existing chaos becoming controlled one on both daily and extraordinary basis.
To provide dignified reception in an emergency situation the ones who receive need to be treated with dignity in the first place. The idea of creating a neighborhood even in a temporary situation can contribute to a dignified reception situation in a livable environment. Intuitive scale, access to green and open areas, public services such as collective transportation and health care, leisure, work and business opportunities.
Although the project is most importantly response to any kind of refugee emergency, eventually it becomes an answer to social, climate and planning crisis in everyday life. All these aspects are kept together through gentle and long-lasting landscape design that tidily harmonizes ecological, social, economic and aesthetic conditions by reclaiming former industrial areas and turning them into public and green spaces and creating a base for the ultimate change.
The Burete (eng. sponge) shrinks and expands, soaks up all the flows. Changes, varies and in the end gives away new forces. The forces of new Bucharest.