International Workshop on Architectural Heritage of the Black Sea Region 4–10 May 2026

From 4 to 10 May, 2026 the architectural workshop on the heritage of the Black Sea region took place in the town of Eforie Sud, Romania. The programme brought together around 40 participants from Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Ukraine. These included master’s and doctoral students, recent graduates, and young architects already working in or intending to pursue careers in heritage conservation.

The workshop was dedicated to the study, documentation, and preservation of the architectural heritage of the Black Sea coast, with a particular focus on 19th–20th century resort architecture, modernist villas, casinos, socialist tourist infrastructure, and contemporary challenges of conservation. The case study was the town of Eforie Sud — a Black Sea resort established at the end of the 19th century. The heritage sites examined by participants, including public buildings, residential houses, and open-air complexes, were constructed from the 1910s to the 1980s and can be read as a palimpsest of ideas, ideologies, technologies, and aesthetic paradigms of the 20th century. In recent years, these buildings have fallen out of use, yet they retain strong potential for reinterpretation.

Participants worked in groups on six selected sites in the town, including a former Art Deco casino, an open-air theatre from the socialist period, historic villas, and the Teichirghiol lake  mud baths. Over the five-day workshop, students analysed the typological characteristics, architectural value, current condition, and existing challenges of the buildings, presented their observations and assessments to the municipality and local residents, and proposed possible scenarios for the revitalisation and adaptation of these structures to meet contemporary needs.

Such workshops are aimed at developing practical skills in the field of architectural heritage conservation, including methods of architectural diagnosis, multi-scalar building analysis, and strategies for revitalisation. École de Chaillot (as part of the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine) has extensive experience in organising international workshops of this format, regularly bringing together young architects and heritage professionals from different countries to facilitate knowledge exchange in the field of architectural heritage. This year marks the first participation of the Kharkiv School of Architecture in the programme, with master’s students attending as participants and faculty members contributing as tutors. This engagement represents an important step in the development of a collaboration between KhSA and École de Chaillot, initiated with the support of the French Institute in Ukraine.

The project is initiated and funded by the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine (through École de Chaillot, its training department) and the French Ministry of Culture. The main partners are the Romanian Ministry of Culture and the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest. The associated partners are the National Institute for Built Cultural Heritage of Bulgaria, the Technical University of Chișinău (Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism), and the Kharkiv School of Architecture.