ABOUT THE

SOCIAL COMMUNITY CENTRE

Demean Sergiu, Costeant Corneliu

The designing process of this project had begun a year and a half ago and was
completed on January 2010 as a part of the Timisoara’s School of Architecture
curriculum. It was intended to be a House for the Elderly but in the process it assumed
a roll of integrator of different social minorities such as old people, orphans, young
families with financial issues, people with no shelter, ethnic minorities and so on and so
forth. It has become, as we now like to call it, a social community center in which
architecture plays a major role in the difficult process of social inclusion and integration.
The aim of the project is to become a living part of the community, in harmony
with both the immediate surrounding urban tissue and the full scaled city. By “living” we
mean blending with the environment, responding to the community needs and
especially to it’s inhabitants. It exploits the subtle, but huge, potential of architecture as
an active mean of social integration.
This approach to architecture was derived from studying the actual needs of the
people in relation with the existing architecture and the inability to relate with the social
needs of the community. The suggested “ideal” site for such a project is consisting of
urban tissues filled with the typical grey block of flats bearing the marks of the
communist and fascist totalitary regimes so typical to the Eastern Europe.
The difference between a regular social centre and our Community Center is that
it provides homes for the social minorities and a place to bond with each other and with
the community. It is a place that gathers different people with different traits, needs and
social behavior and makes them a family which will soon be ready to connect with the
others through communal activities that are opened to the community such as sports,
movie projections, theatre, workshops, market for products exchange and so on.
Every inhabitant or family of this Community Centre will have his own place that
they can call home, and voluntary access to all the facilities of centre.
The principle behind this system is that we depend on one another. The children
need grown ups, the old need the infants, the young families need the experience of the
elderly. Another aim of the project is to create unity in diversity and prepare a solid way
for a successful reintegration in the community.
Another important aspect of the Community Center is that it can grow and
multiply, depending of the needs and site, allowing it to function between stages of
growth.
The Social Community Center is inspired from the Medieval City Centre. Every
major function of the Medieval Centre has it’s correspondent at a lower scale: the
church is represented by the chapel, the city hall is the administration, the hospital is the
health care area, the rooms are houses, the patios are plaza areas, the school is the
learning centre, the factories functions are incorporated in the workshops, the hallways
are streets, so on and so forth.
Another important aspect in the design is the simple structural system. Every
dwelling unit has it’s own separate and individual structure. We think that, in time, with
the slow growth progression, future inhabitants will be able to build their own “homes”
and continue the existing structure, using traditional materials and techniques. They
may receive financial support from the local authorities in order to contribute to the
growth of the Social Community Centre.

A few determinants we had incorporated in the design:

 Harmonious integration of the new structure in the existing one

 A special concern for the quality of life
 The understanding of the environment as it is influenced by materials, color
and textures
 Energy saving and sustainability