A Modernist block of apartments, typical of inter-war Bucharest, of the type that is nowadays demolished or butchered without any remorse. Here, it is carefully and respectfully restored and highlighted. Then, the new building, set against the old one, but not in a radical, ostentatious manner, but through subtle weaving.

A micro-city to work on, talk about and present art. Demolition scraps, found objects and new construction, architecture and furniture, the exterior and interior hybridize each other and turn the former car workshop into an extension of urban space.

Text: João Gonçalo Lopes
Photo: João Matos, Inês Costa Monteiro

The initial brief was to convert an old car workshop with 167sqm, into a collective work and event space for art related professionals. The work involved conception, coordination and construction of the interior elements like wood structures, furniture and lighting.

With big entrance gates, the space had the potential to become part of the street and bring the street life in. The project layout is based on a set of different courtyards, with different characters, around which the working pods are organized. This layout was made thinking of the gradations from public to private and the different events that can happen in each place. It also aims to explore the full volume of the space by adding a new level while keeping the openness and the flow of the overall space.

From the beginning the project we aimed to introduce old materials and explore possibilities of reuse. After the schematic design, we set up to collect and inventory of old parts from demolitions that were then used to shape and hack the basic spatial scheme.

Together with the potted plants, the material palette generates a sense of an exterior environment as if extending from the street, where the pods become the small interior universes within this “outdoor” space like in a small neighbourhood.

We saw the working pods as open structures to be contaminated by their occupants. According to the different personal character of each occupier and different moments, the pods would be able to be more or less open. This generates very diverse and dynamic gradations of permeability within the same frame.
Through the experience of building it ourselves we were able to tune each element to its final position, allowing us to think closer to the body scale. It became a very close and attentive process where each material and detail could be brought to its full potential.

This attention to the combination of materials allowed us to create different a micro-cosmos for each working area within the overall space.

Materialization

The existing concrete floor of the car shop was covered with grey epoxy resin and the walls repaired and painted white.

Starting from this grey and white canvas, our material palette comes essentially from the reuse and combination of found materials with wood structures. We intentionally looked for materials that could bring vibrancy and texture to the interior design.

Most of the basic structures and flooring of the working pods were built with pine wood, providing us with a basic framework that we were able to contaminate with the found materials.

Plants also became part of this palette: they work as soft mediators between privacy and exposure, breaking and blurring the hard edges of the wood structures.

Info & credite

Project name: Desvio, creative work space
Completion year: 2021
Gross built area: 167 m2
Location: Lisbon, Bairro da Estefânia
Programme: Creative work and event space
Architects: João Gonçalo Lopes
Project team: João Gonçalo Lopes, Guilherme Rodrigues
Construction: João Gonçalo Lopes, Guilherme Rodrigues, Gui Garrido
Electrical installation: Tiago Domingues, André Santos

A complex functional assembly which brings energy to the German post‑industrial historical city centre of Oberhausen, where urban agriculture, offices, and a track combine.

The scale regeneration of an entire romanian city, and not of an energic metropolis, but of a post-industrial town, is the subject of a Dossier coordinated by Lorena Brează & Mugur Grosu

The scale regeneration of an entire romanian city, and not of an energic metropolis, but of a post-industrial town, is the subject of a Dossier coordinated by Lorena Brează & Mugur Grosu

He started by folding metro cards. Now, even the categories of projects Alexe Popescu started on Origami principles number in the order of tens. The play has become increasingly more serious and fertile, turning into a design program and philosophy. (Zeppelin)

A great, small memorial, subtle and open to interpretations, worlds away from the emphatic, top‑down ensembles that seem to have come back in later years.

We cohabitate with animals for a long time. In the last hundreds of years, this cohabitation has profoundly changed, from the explosion of pets to industrialized agriculture, as well as our destruction of natural habitats and elimination of species.

Edito: On‑site Representation

Text: Cătălina Frâncu
Photo: Roberta Curcă

DOSSIER: GROUND & UNDERGROUND

Intro

Text: Ștefan Ghenciulescu

With this dossier we remain close to the ground, even on the ground, and, a few times, a little under‑ground. Some of the projects are about public space and topography building through a minimum of gestures made to connect the terrain, the buildings and the landscape while also offering appropriate places to pass through and sit. At other times, public space sinks under‑ground because it has to—like in the case of the metro stations designed by Zündel Cristea architecture office, where Parisian tradition and Piranesian spaces come to pleasantly intertwine. Or it burrows just because sometimes descending under‑ground doesn’t necessary mean a trip to the inferno, but quite the contrary: access to a protected and controlled medium, a shelter, possibly serene, where one may comfortably sit together with others, in a good burrow. (…)

Earth Becomes Architecture
Junya Ishigami: House & Restaurant

Project & Text: Junya Ishigami
Photo: Laurian Ghiniţoiu

The project is a residence/restaurant for a French restaurant owner. He is an old friend of mine, and he was the one who commissioned the Tables for a Restaurant. I was asked to design a building as “heavy” as possible. “I want an architecture whose heaviness would increase with time,” he said. “It cannot be artificially smooth but rather something with the roughness of nature. Authentic cuisines require such a place.” He also told me that “it has to look as if it has been there and will continue to be there for the longest time.” His idea was to create a brand‑new long‑established restaurant. He was longing for something that is both a house and a restaurant, something he could pass on
to his children and grandchildren. (…)

Junya Ishigami: Plaza, Kanagawa Institute of Technology

Proiect & text: Junya Ishigami
Foto: Laurian Ghiniţoiu

The sagging sky‑like ceiling and the concave ground‑like floor curve to join in the distance, thus materialising a horizon within the architecture. People appear as they approach from the horizon and disappear as the move beyond it. The roof has 59 openings that illuminate the spaces directly beneath them, but the low ceiling prevents daylight from spreading throughout the interior. This play of light and shadow changes according to the hour and the weather. Since the openings are left unglazed, the natural elements can flow inwards. On rainy days, drops of water fall through these openings to form columns of rain inside, generating a hazy scene with the sight and sound of rain before one’s eyes. (…)

Concrete, Ceramics, Light
Atelier Zündel Cristea: 4 Metro Stations in Paris

Text: Grégoire Zündel, Irina Cristea
Foto: Sergio Grazia

The “metropolitan identity”—bevelled tiles and arches—is taken up. Distributed in small touches through out the monumental space, the texture of the materials is highlighted by the disciplined geometry of the forms and the contrasts between concrete, earthenware, and stainless steel. Stripped and detailed, the materiality of the walls is a white screen which shows the moving silhouettes. (…)

Turning the Red Carpet of the Starts into a White Carpet for All People
Piazza del Cinema, Lido di Venezia, Italy, 2018

Text: C+S
Foto: Alessandra Bello

Reacting to Lido losing its role as one of the most sought-after seaside resorts in Europe, the site an international competition for the new Cinema Festival Palace was organized. The project was also to be a part of the commemoration for the Italian Unification. The construction stopped under bribe accusations of the public management team, leaving exasperated citizens and the Biennale with a big hole in the ground. Starting a series of conversations with the locals, C+S decided that the main aim of design was that to give back the citizens a well-designed and adaptable public space made of a square and a park, which would be transformed during the three weeks of the Cinema Festival or during the year. (…)

Old House, New Ground
SUO: Café Reigan

Text: Takashi Suo
Photo: Laurian Ghinițoiu

This project is a renovation of an old building placed on a mountaintop with beautiful views. It used to be very famous for its sightseeing qualities. As tourism developed, the client built a hotel, a souvenir shop, a teahouse and some similar functions on their large property. When the number of visitors gradually declined, they demolished the hotel and only kept the teahouse and souvenir shop. (…)

The City a Common Good
Timişoara Architecture Biennial—Beta 2022

Text: Ștefan Ghenciulescu

I, for one, am a big BETA fan. This program has an ambition and a consistency that are extremely rare in the Romanian landscape – and the regional one, in fact. All the last four editions have in common the shift from the local event, almost exclusively centred on exhibiting and rewarding architecture production, to an international program with regional availability and the courage to speak of big and global issues, of putting architecture in a social context and of taking it out of the architects’ ghetto.

Uranus Conciliation
A Memorial and Urban Project

Project: Zeppelin, Ideilagram
Text: Ștefan Ghenciulescu, Dorothee Hasnaș, Ilinca Păun-Constantinescu
Photo: Tudor Constantinescu, Roald Aron, archive images, project team

Tabula rasa?
Well, sometimes not even tabula rasa is complete!
The “Uranus Conciliation” exhibition as well as the overall project explores the traces of the city destroyed in the wake of the ‘80s megalomaniac transformation of Bucharest. We talk about scenarios and proposals for the democratic and coherent development of the Uranus-Rahova-Izvor area, and how traces can become a resource for this process. A project within the “Uranus Now” program

Albu Architecture Office:
CC House, Prahova

Project, text: Pavel Albu

A simple, logical, and apparently ordinary house, which does not stand out in the peaceful landscape of Prahova hills and villages. Architecture arises out of proportions, scale distortions, a discreet monumentality of interior and exterior spaces, and out of non-traditional details.

Harvest Time, Kunsthalle Bega

Artist: Ioana Maria Sisea
Curators: Anca Verona Mihuleț, Iris Ordean

The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bega in Timișoara speaks about memory, deconstruction and reconstruction. But, from an architectural perspective, also about dwelling, space, materiality and co-presence. We brought here the curators’s text and a reflection from the architect-spectator

ZOOM

The Urbanophile
Osamu OKAMURA

Interview: Ștefan Ghenciulescu

Osamu is an architect, a planner, an activist and an educator. I met him about 15 years ago during his first visit to Romania, as the editor-in-chief or ERA21, the Czech professional architecture magazine. Since then, he became among others, program director of reSITE international festival on more liveable cities, a member of the Prague 7 District Planning Commission, and recently, a lecturer and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Architecture of the Technical University in Liberec.
His passion for cities, innovation, writing and architectural education for young people come together in his brilliant book ‚City for Everyone: A Manual of Urbanism for Beginners’, (Labyrint Publishing House).

Hyper‑Density, Openness, Identity
Graphic Studio: The New Giuleşti Stadium

Text: Ștefan Ghenciulescu
Foto: Vlad Pătru

Rapid football club is one of the most beloved in Romania. The passionate relationship between the neighbourhood inhabitants and the club is legendary, and it survived the Communist period and even the decline of Romanian sports over the last decades.
Recently, the old stadium made way for a new one – an expression of a worldwide phenomenon, where old arenas are no longer adequate and cannot really be adapted to the evolution of sport as a global-scale media phenomenon, to the functional, comfort, and security needs. The story of the new project is about such needs, but also about tough constraints, urbanity and memory, and about the relationship with a community.

House with 4 Palms

Project, text: Tudor Vlăsceanu

The Concentrico Festival proposes a rediscovery and re-understanding of the city through architectural installations and the spatial experiences they propose. The festival takes place in the city of Logroño, it lasts for one week, and it is in its 8th edition. This year I was happy to find myself among the architects invited by the festival.

Exhibition at Batthyaneum
Astro‑stories and mechanical animations about the Astronomical Observatory in Alba Iulia

Text: Constantin Goagea, Cristina Ginara, Cristian Mladin
Photo: Andrei Mărgulescu

We are in an unusual place in Alba Iulia, away from the hustle and bustle of the world, in a somewhat strange-looking building. A Trinitarian church and monastery, then a military hospital, then a novel-like twist: Bishop Ignatius of Battyán turns the building into an astronomy institute; And also, a public library. The year was 1798. (…)

eematico Architecture Kit
Architecture as Systemic Thinking

Intro: eematico
Text: Cătălina Frâncu
Foto: eematico Archive

Ion Neculai is an architect and education entrepreneur, co-founder of eematico. Together with his team, he is leading the way to innovation in educational programs, aiming to help children develop life skills for the 21st century. eematico does this through experiential, play-based learning, which is a fundamental learning process. Children’s confidence in their own strengths is deepened through building and designing ideas. Their main aim is to help children understand, rather than simply collect information. (…)

PLANS

Text: Cătălina Frâncu
Foto: Roberta Curcă

I was in Paris, close to Quai de la Marne, when I entered a supermarket with my partner, Teodor, in search for daily pads (thin, for light flux, usually used after menstruation); we went in audibly talking in Romanian heading towards the hygiene racks, then took a walk to the pastry area, then the chips, and, after having paid, we headed towards the exit.