Amenajarea Pietei centrale din Comuna “Copalnic Manastur”- Maramures

Autumn of 2017, I worked for a couple of months in a collaborative effort with Aedilis ( http://www.aedilisproiect.ro ), in order to refurbish the central plaza of a historical village of Maramures – Copalnic Manastur. The project is supposed to access European funding and the main idea was to bring back the old place of meeting/market that made the commune so famous in the past.

The commune is the administrative center of 13 other villages, and used to host, every sunday, the meeting where everybody met and traded crops, life stock and other commercial products.

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I took some of the serious issues into consideration when (re)designing the central market place in respect to the old one, that used to function back at the beginning of the century. The team designed the parking lots that populate the perimeter of the place, and I tried to furnish the interior space around the WWII Memorial that was supposed to be built with local funding.

The place features, alongside the memorial, a stage for media events. I also played with a water course that flows around the fragmented spaces, giving them a sense of unity and connection with the nearby flowing river. monument 6 monument 1 eye2 eye 1

To support the WWII Monument we designed a series of 13 pillars with the name of all villages that compose the commune, symbols for the heroic effort everybody made back during the war. They are rising nearby the column and sustain on a horizontal axis the verticals of the central memorial. comune 1 bird 3

The architect`s team met a few difficult tasks that nowadays life are imposing on modern village life : the lack of parking space, the need to bring to life some of the old features of such a meeting place. In addition, we were faced with the issue of integrating a new Monument, a memorial that is dedicated to WWII heroes that came from the 13 villages of the commune.

The memorial was conceived by local artist Ioan Marchis and is currently in the funding stage. The local community is supposed to gather the money to build it and it`s close to fulfilling the whole budget in a couple of months.