Articles published by: Nickname

From a recent ruin to a house: recovering and repairing ask for an architectural action, that differs both from restoring and creating a new work.

The project of this house is a rather unusual type of intervention. This is not the continuation of a project or the adjustment to a context. We called it repair works. The repair works of a recent ruin is something else than the intervention on an old house. An old space has a couple of sensitive elements, a spirit, perhaps good proportions or well-aged finishings.

An Art-Deco house of Bucharest

Semi-detached on a small plot, with a stepped parapet in levels terraces yet hiding a gently sloped roofing, boat portholes (lighting the attic) and “cubist” surfaces made of plaster profiles. A nice Bourgeois house in the South of the centre, not listed as a monument, not included in any protected area, and in a rather poor state.

An exhibition and a catalogue including 14 recent projects that shorten the heavy official system and have already succeeded in getting the first substantive achievements in terms of creating public space, protecting the heritage, devising independent cultural centres and reaching social projects.

‘What are you staring at us for ? Why are you taking pictures ? Get away from here ! Leave us in peace !’
We saw the homestead at a bend on the road which passes through the Râmeti village in the Western Carpathians. An incredible image : a house, a shed and a barn exactly as they used to be a hundred years ago and which now seem to exist only in ethnographic museums. Three elderly people, patching a thatch roof with a sheet of metal.

Only available in Romania

Thursday, 4 june 2013,  15:30

An exhibition and a catalogue with 14 projects that have their first concrete achievements in the creation of public space, heritage protection, creating centers of independent cultural and social projects.

An exhibition about the reactivation of the Romanian architectural heritage
24 September – 17 October 2012, Assembly Hall of Carol I University Central Library of Bucharest.

This exhibition was based on a selection of 20 contemporary interventions to listed buildings. We have not chosen restorations of huge value monuments (where the interventions should be invisible anyway), but operations that breathed new life into old, fragile sites. Respectful repairs, but also infusions of new functions, strategies, community actions, added value for that particular location.

Over the last few years, Timisoara has grown to get close to what it once was in the 70’s, namely a place of youth and alternative cultural events, of avant-garde arts and good architecture. Thanks to groups of local artists, some still students, Timisoara is the yearly host of Studentfest, which makes the martyr-town bloom (also) into new ideas during the month of May. Furthermore, the first edition of “Arhirepublik – days of architecture”, organized by a few student-architects, raised questions on the fate of the town, of the historical urban fabric or of the Romanian public space; it included happenings fined by the constabulary, which have been in fact quite successful, discussions sometimes childish, at others times full of meaning.

A few weeks ago, I participated in a seminar on urban regeneration practices in Great Britain, organized by British Council as part of the project “To follow”.
At the end of the day, after the work session, I had an informal conversation with one of the invited architects, Fred Manson. He was eager to know about modern architecture in Romania, how it is and if it is produced and to what avail. Besides the few examples I could mention, I told him that it was a long-term project and that there was a strong opposition to modernity in Romania.

If before 1989 our towns were being transformed following grand initiatives coming from a high level – the state being both limited partner and designer in large urban operations – today, in 2006, having complete freedom, we are already witnessing an uncontrolled urban development together with the appearance of a new series of works comparable to those before the Revolution from the point of view of their scale. The tower near the Sf. Iosif cathedral or the one near the Armeneasca Church, the Esplanada project, the new project for Piata Palatului – on which you may find further details in the magazine – or the enormous building neighboring the Palatul Telefoanelor, which reiterates accurately a part of the former National Theatre, but is doing that with arcades built out of plaster, and embellished with decorations, on the hallucinating background of a smoky curtain wall… These are just a few recent projects and they are only in downtown Bucharest.