- Area: 375 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Cosmin Dragomir
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Manufacturers: Zomtobel Lighting
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Lead Architects: Vlad Sebastian Rusu, Octav Silviu Olănescu, Anamaria Olănescu
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Structure Engineers: Asiza Birou de Arhitectura, Ovidiu Rusu, Ludovic Kopenetz, Mihai Stanus
Text description provided by the architects. The tower, built in successive layers (15th Century, and 1870s), used for defense and then for watching the city, remains an urban observatory through the new age, a place of contemplation and reading of urban development. The new age is materialized through a discrete, integrated, and unitary intervention, which aims, by simple and reversible means, to obtain a consistent activation of the tower, while also providing a reading on the past and future city.
Most likely built in the last decades of the 15th Century, the Firefighters Tower, formerly the Weavers' Tower, was part of the second medieval precinct of the city, guarding the neighborhood for centuries. After the demolition of the gate towers of the city, in the early 1870s, the possibility of demolishing this tower of the fortified enclosure was also formulated, but the city council voted for it to be transformed into a firefighters tower. In 1960 a project was developed to restore the building, which meanwhile became a historical monument. The restoration was done in the paradigm of those times, introducing reinforced concrete floors and ramps inside, in strong contradiction with the heritage structure of the tower. In 1985 the tower was transformed into an astronomical museum, receiving a glass pyramid at its top, which replaced the old picket of the firehouse. At the time of the initiation of the restoration and revitalization project in 2017, the tower was suffering from semi-abandonment and disinterest from the public.
After the removal of all reinforced concrete elements, the new translucent core becomes the backbone of the tower, which facilitates accessibility to the upper level, allows visiting the interior space, and gives structural rigidity. Proposed as a semi-transparent veil, the core thus becomes part of the tower's third age, which reveals the other phases and stages of its evolution. Imagined as a descending route, the journey of the tower starts from the highest panoramic level, where the visitor plays the double role: of actor and spectator of the present reality. From here the visiting route descends, going through different spaces and layers, offering a series of sensory experiences, along with a narrative exhibition thread, which reveals previous realities. The visitor experiences and investigates moments from the history of the city and the tower through the spatial scenes of dioramas and augmented reality, present along the sightseeing route.
The ranking of the tower visiting experience starts from the contemplation of the city as a whole, captured in the reality of our days, from the highest point, imagined as a living diorama, without limits, with only a discreet outline. From this point, the city is viewed and reflected through the filter of each individual viewer. The model of the fortified medieval city proposed at this level thus becomes the only element frozen in time, which is always mirrored, keeping the tower's historic moment of beginning in the collective mind. All the new elements are proposed to be made of metal elements, which are detached from the inner and outer shell of the tower, generating a certain semi-transparency for reading the first two ages of the tower. The rest of the heritage elements of the tower have been restored according to the principles specific to historical monuments, conjuring the medieval age of the tower through traditional techniques.
