The design as a memory recovery: some urban furniture made from building elements of the National Dance Center of Bucharest (NDCB), currently in full demolition. On Saturday night going into Sunday, during the project Occupied NDCB (see Zeppelin 94), Eduard Gabia started to cut metal artifacts and share them with the participants. Equipped with gloves, goggles and overalls, he cut pieces of the railings with a metal cutter.
Text: Justin Baroncea
Foto: Adrian Dobre
This article was published in zeppelin magazine number 95.
The result: some calligraphy made out of pipes and meshes; iron ideograms, memories of what once the National Dance Center of Bucharest was, currently under demolition like other cultural areas in the building so as to restore 1960s’ National Theatre image. People were leaving happy / melancholic taking with them relics from extension that Ceausescu ordered in 1980s.
While Edi was cutting iron pieces, the idea of recycling railings emerged. Andrei Dinu and me continued Edi’s work on Sunday and Monday. We removed two pieces of railings just for two items of urban furniture: a bench and a chair. And, while cutting we were also tailoring the design of the objects. We managed to get the cut material out without any adventures or problems and carried it to Nona ?erb?nescu’s workshop on Batistei Street. The iron pieces were stocked for a while along with painting stuff.
The story ends with making the items of urban furniture where original railings may be identified. We wished to work with the major parts of the railing without altering them. The idea was not to use the metal as raw material but to preserve the image of basic metal works not minimalist at all that were mounted in the 80s extension.
The resulting furniture is antivandal and fully compatible with the use of public space. The bench and the chair are both designed as prototypes for a recycling system. All metal parts of the railings pertaining to the ongoing demolition extension may be converted into street furniture and placed in the TNB area. Thus, part of the demolished extension would remain in the public space; it would become meaningful and symbolic. It would restructure the relationship between memory and site based on a simple mechanism of reconverting debris resulted further to demolition into accurate use objects.
We recycle materials; we recycle memory and have NDCB out in the street. Part of the NDCB becomes NDC_B with a “B” from benches, not from Bucharest. NDC_B in the public space.
AUTHORS: POINT4
Eduard Gabia, Andrei Dinu, Mihai Burun?ia, Radu Enescu, Justin Baroncea
BUILDER: Habitual
