Germoplasm Pavillion
The Pavilion is located in the Botanical Garden of University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Cluj, surrounded by orchards. The new building includes a ruin represented by a stone wall parasited by some small construction, which were proposed for demolition. Conceived as a multifunctional building, with an educational and research profile, the Germplasm Pavilion is hosting a conference room, guest accommodations, laboratories and a small library. The architectural solution makes the new building a bridge between the natural and built elements of the site,
thought as a discreet presence that highlights the stone wall and in the same time inserts new different and surprising spaces.
In this sense, the public spaces situated on the ground floor of the building open to a courtyard bordered by existing slope through large glass units, the protocol and accommodation spaces at first floor are enjoying the intimacy of a green terrace that is connected with the botanical garden, and the laboratories and research areas are hidden under a grass/green slope that repeats the spatial arrangement of nearby orchards.
The materials used for the facades propose a different reading for the character of existing spaces, by using white plaster for public functions and folding metal sheets for accommodation spaces, aiming in the same time to highlight the dramatic nature of brick and stone masonry.
The green terraces and slopes resume existing spatial design types from the botanical garden and from the orchards, offering wide perspectives of the city and surroundings by developing different levels. Interior spaces that host the conference room and foyers are flexible, allowing this way a complete opening of the space between them. Stone wall participate both interior and exterior space delimiting the access to accommodation area from the public area, maintaining in the same time a permanent dialog between its materiality and one of the rocks that support the vegetation from the slope, through the large widows that open towards botanical garden.
