Emil Burbea-Milescu has been practicing architecture in Romania for almost 20 years. In the first few years he collaborated with Dorin Ștefan Birou de Arhitectură, during which the main project that he worked on, Banca Transilvania, was nominated for the Mies van der Rohe awards in 2011. He later became an associate architect at Republic of Architects, where together with the team had a recognized activity on the local architecture scene.. At present, Emil Burbea is a founding partener of atelier dePlano, a creative workshop with architects Laura Covaci and Radu Ponta. In his whole professional path the permanent interest for the political idea in a larger sense has determined him to promote a necessary negotiation between the public and private interest with the purpose of a just configuration of the built environment.
Since 2008 he has been teaching at the University of Architecture and Urban Planning „Ion Mincu”. In the educational process he supports the necessity of understanding spatial practice as a common place, beyond solving different needs inherent to an architectural project. Accordingly he has published several theoretical articles or research by design co-authored with the students, as part of the Mazzocchioo team. Since 2019 he is a professional advisor for OAR, where together with Laura Covaci and Radu Ponta (the team at dePlano) he has been able to contribute to several competition briefs for Piata Sfatului Brașov, Parc DN3C Constanța and Rulmentul Brașov.
Project title in English
Difficult project: a building located in the protected area of Cotroceni; a house with no special character, a mimicked modernism for a building used in real estate speculation. During the interwar period, the photographer Willy Pragher rented the ground floor.
Complicated issue: the real beneficiary of the project is only one of the 3 apartments that overlap in the building; the brief required the extension of the top level apartment so as to make use of a very low attic, hardly noticeable from the outside. Therefore, the construction had to take place without interrupting the residents on the lower levels.
Only a light construction system, such as a timber structure, could be used in order to decrease the load on the foundations. At the same time, the entire building had to be consolidated only from the outside, by reinforcing part of the masonry walls and discharging the resulting load to a new foundation beam.
The extension was designed with respect for the character of the protected area, but without becoming a simple pastiche of a long-gone period. Thus, the fibercement cladding differentiates the extension from the existing construction. The latter is finished with sprayed plaster, characteristic for the interwar period. The construction site was monitored by atelier dePlano in order to preserve the original details, without intervening or modifying anything in the inhabited apartments during the construction work.
