Aaron Florian Apartment Building
Nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Award 2017.
One of the first housing projects of the office, the Aaron Florian Apartment Building, completed only two years ago, is an honest answer to a particular urban setting: an irregular plot, the closeness of the opposite building raising privacy issues, a blind wall to a difficult neighbor and an inflection of the street. All these produce an atypical configuration - a building with floors successively recessed, the upper floors providing more light to the narrow street and the exterior spaces directing the views along it.
The retracted plinth gives the building a lightsome, almost detached appearance, connected to the ground only by the tectonic effect of the stairs leading into the building. The transparency of the ground floor allows for commercial or office spaces to open themselves to the street, thus livening this rather narrow and trafficless blind alley.
Floors 1 to 3 comprise three apartments each, while the last floor contains two larger apartments with terraces both at their level and on the rooftop, that provide spectacular views of one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in Bucharest.