cleaning the archives

It took a while to find them, really not sure why, but I have found the full original building plans of Trakiya!

The structural engineer leads me down the circular hallway, looking back every once in a while at me trying to keep up with her, she explains the archives to me,

“Yeah, we never use them. We never need to. Once you understand one, you understand them all….”

“All we need to know is when people want to add things or take down a wall…”

“And we are here to make sure they don’t kill everyone else in the building by removing a load bearing wall…”

“People do it anyways, take down the walls, but they don’t get our permission, then we have to come in and bust down their doors with the cops…”

“So, well, we don’t really need the plans…”

“People rather measure and make new drawings for the small things they come to us for. And they have to have an architect. No one trusts the way it was drawn on the plans is the way it was actually built…”

“So they all are here,”

She opens the door for me, and we are overcome with the smell of old paper.

“feel free to use whatever you want. The plans you are looking for are in the back corner, they are out of order, but they are all there.”

I move back into the tiny corner that the light of the room is even incapable of reaching and begin scanning the old paper folders shoved on new white metal shelves backed by peach painted sheetrock walls. They moved into a new building recently, the municipality used to be located in one of the apartment blocks at the beginning of the neighborhood. Now they are in a brand new, bright orange polygon shaped building with a dauntingly tall entrance.

I start to dig through the piles. Everything is mixed up, no logical order, folders of all shapes and sizes in piles everywhere. With each folder I open, it releases a cloud of dust in my face.

So after,

3 dirty days,

lunches and beers with the engineers,

An archive inspection man wondering why a foreigner is being given full access to building plans,

and multiple teas with the nice ladies of the municipality,

I organized all the archive folders into a system, first by region and then by block.

As I went through I became pretty familiar with the drawings sets, what was very detailed and what was not. Something that stood out to me the most were the Balcony details. So many balcony details. A full set just for the railings of the balconies.

It makes sense. The original balcony railings vary throughout Trakiya, and are often the most salient design element. I wonder… did the architects see this as their chance for their most design freedom and so they just went nuts?

How did the architects feel about designing panel blocks? They had already been around for a good 20 years by the time they started Trakiya in the early 1970’s, and had been adopted by the soviets as a best practice, standardized and integrated into every satellite country’s 5 year plans for development.

Granted there are other attributes that make the panel blocks of Trakiya unique (i.e. the dual axis attachment of the entries, which gain blocks of this layout built elsewhere the name Trakiski Panels.)

What were they limited by and what was assigned and where did they get to play?

I know balcony railing did, but what else that I didnt notice from the drawing sets?