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Intro: Ștefan Ghenciulescu

This short dossier starts in fact before the introduction you are just reading. The opinion piece on rural space and the recent works of the Larix Studio closes the dossier on village architecture; it also includes a public space project, one of the most persecuted programs in a rural world that has to deal with underfunding, migration and abandonment, but also with individual interests and poor civic association.

Coordinators: Cătălina Frâncu, Ștefan Ghenciulescu

“The Countryside”. Introduction

The first lockdowns helped bloom the #cottagecore aesthetic. It is a trend born out of a wish for a simpler life, with low levels of stress, which would allow an easy connection to nature through activities like husbandry, gardening, picnics, etc. It’s also about nostalgia for good times passed, an imagery and aesthetic which stirs the spirits of a lot of people, from the radical left and minorities, to the ultra-traditional right

Text: Mugur Grosu
Photo: Alexandru Oglindă

Six Frenchmen get off the plane and start following a bunch of football fans, thinking they will lead them to the stadium. They reach a pub in the old town where the others start drinking. A couple of beers later they realize that the supporters were not Hungarians but Ukrainians, and what they thought was Budapest was in fact another capital that had once dreamed itself to be Little Paris, one of the hosts of this peculiar European Football Championship which has sent the fans on a fool’s errand through 11 European cities.

Delicate shifts of overall simple forms, archetypical elements and refined details give identity and human scale to both the cost-effective prisms in Wetzikon and the posh urban villa in Küsnacht.

The Centre for Electronic Industry (as the clients named it) or the Electra factory, as many call it, brings together manufacturing, office, technical and representation spaces, all harmonized within an assembly of three industrial halls. The altogether 11,000 sq. m. are built within the Miroslava Industrial Park in the Iași County, an area that will rapidly develop over the next years.

An articulation between the city and the Museum Island, between the water and the urban fabric, between the Neues Museum and the Pergamon Museum, between public space and the one for the culture, between tradition and today’s technology and culture.

The design for a coffee shop & ice cream parlor brings to front a woioonderful Art-Deco building.

Text: Ştefan Ghenciulescu
Photo: Alex Sacalu, Corvin Cristian

14 years ago, in issue 52 of our magazine, we published a dossier dedicated to one of themost inventive and bold architectural offices in the world. Curated with the help of Oana Radeș ( then a member of the bureau, now a partner at Shift Architecture Urbanism), that dossier is still one of our most important materials.

It might sound a little unprofessional, but we simply couldn’t come up with a single umbrella term for “collective apartment buildings with a reduced number of housing units”. The urban villa comes closest to the subject matter, but for many people the urban villa is quintessentially a detached building, usually surrounded by its own piece of land. There is also the Italian version – palazzina, which actually also means “small block” (specifically, the apartment building is a palazzo in Italian).

In Romanian society, one of the most common (and terrible) value confusions is, I believe, the one between beautiful, new or in good condition, on the one hand, vs. ugly, old, in poor condition, on the other. And it primarily shows when talking about architecture and the city.

Excellently located in the “old” sector of the former Carol Street—the commercial street of the once thriving market town of Mizil—across the street from the high school, the house is a reinterpretation of the good old “train car house” type. An ample eave is added on one side of the house, framed by two rounded gables.

In 2019, Kunsthalle Bega initiated the programme BEGA ARTPRIZE, the only curatorial prize in Romania which is awarded annualy, following consultations with a specialised jury, to a curator under the age of 40. The first laureate of the prize was Anca Verona Mihuleț, who over the last two years has been preparing a complex exhibition project dedicated to the cumulus of technologic and artistic mechanisms that validate our perception about the future