Cerc Studio - Sustainable Architecture

Some houses aren’t empty.
They’re just waiting.

This is one of our current projects — a home started by someone who loved this place deeply, but couldn’t finish it.

Now we’re transforming it into 3 warm, energy-efficient and thoughtful homes.
Not by erasing its past, but by building carefully on top of it.

We’ll be sharing the whole process — from redesign to construction.

Follow us if you’re curious about what can happen when you give a space a second chance.

For the past few months, we’ve been supporting the House Europe initiative and we’ve been promoting it whenever we get the chance — to family, friends, clients, and basically every stakeholder we work with.

We think what really pushed us to speak up for this initiative is the fact that Romania has been living with the trauma of demolitions for the past 80 years: during the communist period, after that too, and most often now when investors want to squeeze more out of a site or a city than it can actually take. We’re used to having our memories erased, our neighborhoods cut out, our houses left to die — just so something else can be built in their place. Bigger, more concrete, more glass, more polystyrene.

This is our story in Romania. But every EU country has its own story — its own perspective, an urgent need, and a real opportunity to protect both its people and its buildings.

So, this initiative is trying to make governments take real action to protect the existing built heritage and make it more affordable to renovate spaces.

The main pillars of the initiative are:
• tax incentives for renovation works and for projects where materials are reused
• clear criteria for assessing the risk and potential of existing buildings (right now, most building codes barely differentiate between existing buildings and new ones)
• taking into account the embodied CO2 in existing structures (which is very different from the CO2 of demolishing an old building and then building a new one on top of that)

Sign it and share it! It’s actually really important!

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/052/public/ #/screen/home