The fountain
2013
Bucharest
status: competition proposal
team: Anca Cioarec, Brîndușa Tudor
The fountain is our competition entry for a design competition organized by Roca and Zeppelin.The theme was a new concept for the bathrooms of the Central University Library in Bucharest
The host building is the first vector in our journey searching for a way of experiencing the public bathroom. We discover ourselves surrounded by an environment filled with historical values and a very important social significance through its knowledge dissemination role. These features are well expressed in its architectural language, therefore the relationship that it proposes is moreover a hierarchical one. You are invited to open all your receptors in order to receive what you are about to be offered. But it is a silent ritual, a reverential one. In the massive tall walls of this public aula, the bathroom corners are a parenthesis architecturally tailored to descend. They propose a short and condensed moment of passing through stages from public to private and of reencountering the other in a more honest way. It is a purification space, one that awakens and prepares you to go back in the world. This is why we have decided to invade the building’s materia, to reveal its insides and to propose a visceral experience. In its core, we have sculptured a hollow, similar to the holly public water fountains. The private stage is almost invisible and its mirror skin emphasizes the water feature and its shared experience. It is a place where people come together to share the water encounter.
The whole bathroom becomes a primordial bark of an infinite fountain.