Home and Workspace in the Traditional Urban Fabric of Bucharest

Working from home has been present in the majority of the historical city centres, the house with shop or workshop being one of the most common types of urban dwelling over the centuries. Some of these buildings, which made up a big part of the built environment, are still preserved today, but most of the time they go unnoticed. Following the Covid-19 pandemic there has been a major shift towards working from home. This had direct implications especially on urban housing which had to also accommodate the workspace, making it difficult to handle all the new challenges that appeared trying to balance the complex relationship between them. In this context, the historical buildings that managed to incorporate both hypostases may represent valuable resources for building resilient housing and workspaces in the future. The study will be based on some local works, as well as some case studies from the Bucharest’s urban space, relying at the same time on both bibliographic and archival research. Therefore, the paper outlines some typologies present in Bucharest, exploring the houses of the traditional urban fabric that combined the home and the workspace in search of a better understanding of their or-ganization, characteristics, and the potential that they can have in defining alternative approaches in the current post-pandemic context in which a significant number of people is working from home.