Hotel National
Ongoing project, renegotiating the future of an abandoned soviet-modernist hotel in Chisinau, former city icon, currently under heritage protection but no plan, crumblingly waiting for its fate.
The project is about the specific building in Chisinau, but much more, it is about rethinking how we deal with the ‘trouble’ of discarded buildings. Instead of just rewriting its use and meaning, the proposal envisions a layered, delicate approach, with minimal, but very precise interventions, allowing for the history to be read, but also for a new future to be renegotiated.
Some projects take their time. This one started as an 8-month research at ETH Zurich, followed by a free diploma (master’s thesis). After that, it travelled and was exhibited in Aachen, in Basel at the Swiss Architecture Museum, received multiple awards (e.g. ETH Medal, SIA Master Prize Architecture) and was published in Switzerland. It was only 2025 that I dared to start bringing it, step by step, back to Chisinau. First as an extensive interview with Save Chisinau, then as a series of letters and postcards sent among others to the Moldovan president, the minister of culture and the municipality of Chisinau. All of them were happy to receive my ideas, but claimed to unfortunately not have the legal capacity to act on the building. I strongly believe this may change over the next years, so till then, I just continue sewing my seeds.
In planning is an exhibition in Chisinau and a publication on the hotel.
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