Articles published by: Nickname

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.

We are learning from the press that architect Anca Petrescu has reopened a legal action relation to the National Museum of Contemporary Art, set up within the House of Parliament.  If it were only a matter of politics and economics, we wouldn’t even have mentioned this scandal. But the complaint also refers to professional and esthetical matters, accusing an aggression on the unitary nature of an architectural work.

In the early 1990s, the heritage contained in the communist neighborhoods was unbearable. It led to deep frustrations and neurosis due to their massiveness and complete absence of identity, but mostly by the general feeling that nothing could be done to change it.
The first reaction to that state of affairs in the town was compensated by the fantasy of the countryside ranch, the idyllic image intertwined with that of a swimming pool and the high wage that filled your fridge. Thus, it resulted in a true flight of the well off, less the middle class, almost inexistent at that time. At the level of motivation and reaction, this dwelling model is widely spread today.

I forgot to go on holiday, or that was somewhere around but I didn’t remember the word for it. It was a pretty hectic summer for our editorial staff: we represented Romania in the Venice Biennial, we designed the space for ¾ Gallery of the National Theater for the Bucharest Biennial, and now we are ready to bring in exhibitions and conferences from Japan to Bucharest, and last but not least, we are just about to hand in the issue on Venezuela of our journal. Maybe we can contaminate you into working hard, if you forgot about it, or into just thinking that it could be worse than that.

For some 50 years now, Japan has enchanted us with its exceptional architecture. Over this period, the center (the centers, in fact) of world architecture moved from one place to another, the countries or regions coming to the fore and then discretely withdrawing, maybe returning later full of vigour. Well, in Japan’s case the elite production seems seamless. In the 1950s and 1960s the fabulous monsters were especially Kenzo Tange or Kunio Mayekawa.

Summary: What role did architecture play in the process of forming the Czech national identity? What are the current architectonic and urban planning challenges in Central Europe and where does Czech architecture stand?

An Illustrated History of the Czech National Narrative: Architecture