Edito: Falling with the plaster
Text: Ştefan Ghenciulescu

confess that this editorial was initially supposed to be about Ukraine. Obviously, whether we speak of architecture or any other part of culture, we have no right to just go on with our activity and concerns and ignore the terrible tragedy close to us. I wanted to write about war and architecture, about the cities destroyed, about the blocks of flats and public buildings, similar to ours, that were levelled to the ground, about how the underground in Kyiv was turned into a sleeping space and about much more.

However, we have decided to do so in a more thorough and continuous manner, with informed articles, on the website and in the following issues. Not war-porn, not ruin-porn, but respectful, in-context presentations. In fact, we are starting right now (…)

DOSSIER: SuperBANAL

Introduction

Text: Ștefan Ghenciulescu

This dossier’s working title has oscillated between “discrete architecture”, “silent architecture”, and “invisible architecture”. Since the beginning, we were considering less spectacular projects, at least at a first glance, projects that should be quiet and elegant, less picturesque, but with more depth. But we were not just interested in refined simplicity, but in the type of architecture that is very difficult to define, which, at a first glance seems banal, mundane, part of the large mass of constructions, whose value is more difficult to discover; an architecture which is at the same time tolerant, and which undertakes subtle contradictions, and which allows for multiple levels of reading. (…)

Banal, irritating, charming Fala Atelier: six recent projects

Intro: Ștefan Ghenciulescu

Round mirrors… um… sort of banal, but we’ll take them. You can, of course, easily take them down and get a cleaner space. Geometric pattern decorations on the interior and exterior walls: debatable. Yes, we also saw this abstract panel split in De Stijl’s work, but they wouldn’t have added ornamental elements (the horror!). A strong concrete column which, on the ground floor, is cut right above the flooring: this is not good at all, because joking around is dangerous in architecture, we don’t do decorations with (pseudo)structure, where we have to be serious and all that seems to bear must actually do so. But perhaps the most scandalous of all are the winding bannisters, a supreme symbol of kitsch and of architect-less layouts.

The results should be terrible, if we were to consider lists such as the one above, and, undoubtedly, they definitely are to the purist architects. There is an apparent and deep relaxation in how Fala Atelier make use in their projects of motifs from the modern urban and architectural vernacular or from the pop culture. I said “apparent”, because this is not some yielding to customer pressure or commercial architecture – a field which, if we were to be honest, is nowadays also swallowing up and regurgitating Modernist, minimalist, parametric and other themes. (…) 

• fala 050
  very tiny palazzo, porto

A tiny palace in a narrow garden. The luxuriant environment suggested an ambivalent approach to the architectural object. At human height, the palace is transparent, but its crown is proud, adorned with precious stones, and spanning across the perimeter walls.

• fala 077

house around a chimney, amarante, 2020

Some say that renovations of beautiful buildings should be respectful and polite. Some say that they should be assertive or bear a punk attitude. Not choosing would be tepid. Here is an attempt at doing both.

• fala 079

suspended house, porto

In an artery connecting the city centre to its suburbs, where individual houses are being demolished daily to leave place for bigger housing developments, conceiving a new individual house is a delicate task. The façades of the project stemmed from a rough conjugation of both building types, sitting in a fragile ambiguity. A rational order, following the logic of the plans is superimposed with a set of seemingly inordinate elements: row windows, erratic marble frontons, seemingly arbitrary drainpipes and pink marble discs unbalancing the composition. The house is an exercise on uniqueness as much as it is an exercise on banality.

• fala 097

apartment. waves of glass brick and clouds of metal mesh, porto

A ground floor shop in a banal and narrow 70’s housing block was to be transformed into an apartment for two. The program is clear, the layout not so much. Waves of glass brick and clouds of metal mesh solve a non domestic space that could remain as such. The project is a spectacular answer to a non spectacular question.

• fala 098

fireworks in white, porto

Almost pure interior, the space is an elaborate composition of fearless geometries. A grand entry and a sly glass brick window become a plinth of an ugly duckling, finishing the timid yet intricate composition of the entire building.

• fala 101

houses of cards, tuias, porto, 2021

The maximum buildable volume was found to be a distorted box, two-storeys high. Refusing the fragmentation prevalent in the surroundings, the five houses pretend to be one. An object in tension between the collective and the private – a plural wedding cake.

Eight Large Houses

ADN BA: Apartment Building, Brasov

The real estate operation we are discussing here finds its place in a neighbourhood that was already complete prior to 1990, and which fully complies with the local regulations. Nevertheless, the density is still considerable, and it faced the architects with a series of essential issues: how to insert a large volume so as not to assault vicinities, how to create a development of several dozen apartments and garages on a plot with a steep slope, so that everyone should receive air, light, intimacy, and, inasmuch as possible, views, and, finally, how to fall within an urban context (and a natural one, as nature is still very much present on Brasov’s hills).
The solution in principle not only solves, but also takes advantage of the slope: the building is partially dug into, partially covering the hill.

ADN BA: ISHO A, Timişoara

Restrained monumentalitaty and delicate grain: this high-rise apartment building elegantly balances the various scales and urban situations. The project has brought a welcome change of scale in ADN BA’s office, as the first really tall building to be designed. This involved a careful study of the relationships to the (existing and PUZ-suggested) urban context, from both directions: from the building to the city, and from privileged city areas to the building, with the analysis of the new visual angles to be created.

OPEN Garage.

An Extra Room in the Loop

Authority, rationalism, utopia and the wild energy of tens of thousands of individual transformations. The Drumul Taberei neighbourhood, mostly designed and built in the 60s, is almost a city in itself, with its about 300,000 inhabitants. The project below is a bout a mapping and a series of interventions that highlight the needs, but also the wealth of places, activities and urban values from a territory usually seen as a symbol of uniformity.

142 m2 and Eleven Doors

SPEED Architects: House 1

SPEED is an architectural practice based in Oslo, founded in 2020 by Espen Robstad Hegger-tveit and Eirik Stokke, after receiving the DOGA Newcomer award.  This was the office’s first private commission, triggering the translation of artistic practices and paper projects to built matter. Building a house became building a practice, and the project worked as a testing ground for developing an architectural position and approach..

Transition Buildings, Joints

2 projects by Dyvik Kahlen

Intro: Cătălina Frâncu

A young team, with less than 10 years’ experience, Dyvik Kahlen succeeded the integration of practice with academic life in the form of the ADS5 Graduate Master’s Degree at the Royal College of Art.
The two projects are built in the same universe and use the same language. Although the materials used are cross‑laminatedtimber and, respectively, concrete, the projects present stilistical unity and are easily recognisable as works of Dyvik Kahlen. However, they are not at all out of context and avoid being pure sculptural statements as it too often happens. In both of them, references to classic architecture and interwar modernism are lightly twisted and sublimed in a harmonious and playful whole.

• WGP Nursery & Community Centre

The Nursery & Community Centre marks the entrance to the West Green Place housing community in Haringey, London, developed by Pocket Living. The building is a link between the entrance square to the community on the east side, the end of the terraced housing on the South and Downhill Park on the Western and Northern parts.

• Building 2, Residential Project in Klingelbeek, Holland

Building 2 is the second of eight buildings that Dyvik Kahlen designed for ‘Klingelbeek’, a park with a stately villa on the outskirts of Arnheim in Holland. The park is oriented towards the Rhine and wetlands on the other side of the river bank. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the villa was transformed into a monastery with allotment garden and pond, both now parts of the project’s new landscape. The architects designed a master plan that consists in a series of buildings placed around two squares, a new courtyard around the allotment garden, and one by the existing villa, as well as an apartment building that rises from between the large oak trees and the pond. The project is a mixture of terraced houses, apartments, a villa, a bathhouse, a workshop and a restaurant. Its main goal is to allow for community life to develop at all times of day. The park is shared by all residents and there are no fences between the housing units.

The Museum of Collectivization

Second Phase

Started in the autumn of 2019, by the initiative of a group of history fans and entrepreneurs in the village of Tămășeni, the museum quickly became a reality, and its exhibition opened in the first three rooms a year later. Between 2020-2021, the Museum of Collectivization had a quick evolution, and managed to finish its exhibition in another four rooms and to open an entire circuit in the street-facing house. In 2021, the project was nominated for the Bucharest Architecture Annual award, the section for exhibition, stands and scenography.We published in the 160 issue of Zeppelin an extensive article on the first part of the project. The present article focuses on the second stage, while still looking at it as a part of a coeherent and long-term project.

Resilience

Claesson Koivisto Rune: ASC Center for Administrative Services in Novi Sanzhary, Ukraine

The prestigious Swedish architecture and design office Claesson Koivisto Rune has designed pro bono a standardized project for a center for administrative services in Ukraine, considering that each of us has at some point the duty to provide free services in support of a noble cause. The ASC in Novi Sanzhary seems to be one of their best projects.

ZOOM

The Sunny House, the Passive House, the Twins’ House

Raluca Munteanu: Passive Housing, Otopeni

This is a story of cooperation and patience, of team and trust, all started from an ambitious idea. The sunny house was born out of a beautiful dream – a house that uses the sun, a house built of wood, in the midst of an edible garden. It was lucky to be created out of the clients’ passion, supported by a non-formal association (Cooperativa de Case), and with the dedication of many professionals. Here is a short story about ideas, persistence, leniency, and friends, as told by the team involved.

Barracks, Gallery, Exhibition

The two-part article describes the development of the /SAC @ MALMAISON gallery and the first public project there – “Isolation in a series of liminal states”. Three spatial orders have come together here: a permanent and heavy historical architecture (heavy from all points of view), a light set-up based on archaeology and a cohabitation of the layers of the place, and a temporary intervention starting from historical and current corporal experiences in the former Malmaison barracks.

Mircea Eliade’s Bucharest

An Exhibition in the Attic of the Literature Museum

Text> Constantin Goagea

Starting from Andreea Răsuceanu’s book, which provides the title for this exhibition, we have undertaken to build a virtual tour of the actual inter-war city, and at the same time of fictional Bucharest as it appears in Mircea Eliade’s writings. A literary geography of Bucharest, viewed on maps from 1914, 1928, 1938, where we have marked real places, houses and streets, which actually existed, and which are largely preserved to this day. On the maps, we have marked not only the actual streets and buildings, but also characters and narrative moments or literary quotes which give significance to the respective street or house.

A Twist on Institution Building

TRIUMF AMIRIA. The Museum of Queer Culture

The imagination and staging of a new institution proved to be a fascinating process in the case of TRIUMF AMIRIA. The Museum of Queer Culture – humorously and realistically described as the most possible~impossible~fantastic recent art institution in Romania. To talk about exhibition design, local context and utopian energy, queering, institutional architecture and brave decision, Zeppelin invited the ones responsible for the You Feel ~ And Drift ~ And Sing series of exhibitions, showcased in Bucharest by TRIUMF AMIRIA in partnership with the MNAC: the KILOBASE BUCHAREST curatorial duo (Sandra Demetrescu, Dragoș Olea), and architect Laura Paraschiv / CIRCA 1703- 3071.

PLANS

Text: Ștefan Ghenciulescu
Photo: Cosmin Pojoranu

I confess that this editorial was initially supposed to be about Ukraine. Obviously, whether we speak of architecture or any other part of culture, we have no right to just go on with our activity and concerns and ignore the terrible tragedy close to us.

There are few CLT (Cross-Laminated Timber) buildings in Romania. There are even fewer quality architecture buildings made of this material. Therefore, the emergence of this small office centre close to Oradea is even more important. It is the first building in Romania to achieve the “Low Energy Passive House” standard, but more than that, it’s a complex and poetic work. Its creation was possible precisely due to an exemplary involvement of the client and to their collaboration with the architects, and a multidisciplinary engineering team. We talked about all these, but also about ecology, money, spaces, architectural expression, landscape, with architects Gabriel Chiș-Bulea and Mădălina Mihălceanu, and with Marius Șoflete, founder of the Inginerie Creativă office. (Ștefan Ghenciulescu)

From some points of view, this house is close to a student project – that is, when you imagine a plucky and smart student project, without an actual customer, but in a very real context, which really needs to be done, and which needs to be done well.

Bad Habits was launched in 2021 as a specialty coffee shop located in the center of Craiova, in the oldest mixed residential and commercial building in the city.

Mira House & Claudia House give us the opportunity to analyse two almost neighbouring houses, located in the same district of the Valencian town of Benimaclet and built in the same period.

Dossier coordinators: Ștefan Ghenciulescu, Cătălina Frâncu

Intro

A first split into categories for this file sounds a bit like an index of materials – recomposed wood, glass and polycarbonate, metal, concrete, special textiles, and of technologies – 3D moulds, lamination, gas and heat recovery, smart buildings

Editorial: Creangă’s Plan

Text: Ştefan GhenciulescuThe plan on the adjoining page really moved us. Not only because it is novel (at least, we could not find it elsewhere), but also because the drawing does not belong to Horia Creangă1, the Modernist hero, but it traces the house of his grandfather, Ion Creangă. Belongs is a way of putting it, as Ion Creangă, a peasant’s son‑turned‑priest most certain­ly did not draw a single line on any paper. He actually didn’t build thedwelling, he bought it. It is a minimal house, in a poor district of the Moldavian city of Iași, and which had its share of issues since the very first years (…)

DOSSIER: IDEAL & MATERIAL

Coordinators: Ștefan Ghenciulescu, Cătălina Frâncu

Intro

A first split into categories for this file sounds a bit like an index of materials—recomposed wood, glass and polycar­bonate, metal, concrete, special textiles, and of technolo­gies—3D moulds, lamination, gas and heat recovery, smart buildings. Obviously, our aim was not that of creating a syn­thetic catalogue, but rather of discussing material and architecture, or rather the architecture‑defining material. This is an age‑old story—about intelligent building, (maybe dec­orated and) transfigured into spaces and form, or, on the contrary, about the form thought of in itself, in search for the structure to make it happen (…)

Wooden Landscape

Vertical Studio: Creatopy HQ, Săldăbagiu de Munte (Bihor)

Text: Gabriel Chiş‑Bulea, Mădălina Mihălceanu, Marius Şoflete, Ştefan Ghenciulescu
Foto: Kinga Tomos

There are few CLT (Cross‑Laminated Timber) buildings in Romania. There are even fewer quality architecture buildings made of this material. Therefore, the emergence of this small office centre close to Oradea is even more important. It is the first building in Romania to achieve the “Low Energy Passive House” standard, but more than that, it’s a com­plex and poetic work. Its creation was possible precisely due to an exemplary involvement of the client and to their collaboration with the ar­chitects, and a multidisciplinary engineering team. We talked about all these, but also about ecology, money, spaces, architectural expression, landscape, with architects Gabriel Chiș‑Bulea and Mădălina Mihălceanu, and with Marius Șoflete, founder of the Inginerie Creativă office.

Paris×3

The Return of the City

Three historic and public places. And three superstars: „Arc de Triomphe Wrapped”—Christo & Jeanne‑Claude, La Samaritaine—SANAA, Pinault Foundation—Tadao Ando.

L’Arc de Triomphe Wrapped

We start with a temporary event, which managed to mobi­lize, according to organizers’ estimates, over 6 million peo­ple, of which more than half came from outside the Parisian region. It is Christo and Jeanne‑Claude’s posthumous work, called “Arc de Triomphe Wrapped”, an installation they im­agined in the ‘60s, but which could only take shape after its authors were gone.

Then there are two buildings, located close to one another, in the city’s (epi)centre. The two projects are relat­ed to this vicinity, and also to the two initiators’ famous ri­valry. The Pinault Foundation, investing in the Paris Trade Exchange’s former building, is the response of billionaire Francois Pinault (owner of the Kering Group) to the Lou­is Vuitton Foundation construction (architect Frank Gehry, see Zeppelin no. 130). Nearly at the same time, Bernard Ar­nault, owner of LVMH (which holds Louis Vuitton) inau­gurated the new Samaritaine complex, in the presence of the President of the French Republic, just a few hun­dred metres away from his long‑time competitor’s founda­tion’s building:

Samaritaine. The Department Store

“The Department Store” (Le grand magasin, Fr) is an architectural/commercial typology which starts to appear in Western Europe at the beginning of the 19th century (the famous KaDeWe opens in 1805 in Berlin), then spreading throughout most Western Europe. The era’s cultural and economic context made this type of store a Parisian typol­ogy par excellence, as the French capital saw an explosion of “department stores”, which then spread out to the rest of France.

The Foundation Pinault

The foundation which Francois Pinault imagined in order to be able to exhibit his important collection of contemporary art has a long and interesting history, which we will attempt to briefly tackle. (…) After many negotiations and discussions with the City Hall, the site of the former Trade Exchange (in itself the former Grain Hall) was retained, a building that is a registered historical mon­ument, sharing a beautiful symmetrical composition with the new building of the Parisian Halls. A building placed in the centre of the city, very close to the main tourist attrac­tions, such as the Louvre, in short, a perfect location for a new Parisian museum.

Vertical Garden and Roof Greenhouse

Kuehn Malvezzi: Administrative Building, Oberhausen

Text & project: Kuehn Malvezzi
Photo: hiepler, brinier

In Oberhausen, while the insertion of Europe’s largest mall—the Centro, brought along jobs and investments, it also killed off the trade and, therefore, the urban life in the central area. Beyond the economic and social issues, the city is severely affected by an erosion of identity and a lack of urban activities. The latest regeneration efforts are there­fore focused on the historic area and on injecting new and valuable energies in the medium and long run.

It is also the case of this operation, designed from the start not only as a functional perspective, but also as a model project. And not solely for Oberhausen. (…)

Residence for the Elderly, Rixheim

Lacaton & Vassal

The project of 18 rental dwellings in Rixheim (Mulhouse), carried out by SOMCO (public limited company of HLM) is devoted primarily for elderly people. It consists of a building on the ground floor with one floor forming two wings con­nected by a crossing hall, located on the edge of two public roads, to the South and to the West, on the place of a for­mer skate park. On its northern and eastern parts, the site has a steep slope planted by a mass of tall trees.

This implementation aims to preserving the exist­ing vegetation, in particular the alignment of trees locat­ed in the top of the slope, to keep the maximum surface in natural ground on the plot and to free the center of the plot for a garden.

Matrix in Wood

Peris+Toral Arquitectes: Social Housing, Cornellà de Llobregat

The residential building in Cornellà de Llobre­gat (Barcelona) is for now the largest build­ing in Spain with a Wooden Structure. It hous­es 85 dwellings on five floors and used a total of 8,300 m2 of wood from the forests of the Basque Country.

Topological Construction and Design

Svelte—the Story of an Innovative Technology Born in Brasov

Svelte is a startup created to deliver efficient manufacturing solutions for complex foamwork. The company develops fully in‑house a machine‑system working on an innovative technol­ogy that generates double‑curved moulds 60x faster and 50% cheaper than current solutions.

Baubüro in situ: Extending the Cycle

The Building Built with Construction Waste Received the Global and the European Prize at the 2021 Holcim Awards

The project consists of an extension of added floors that are made out of the demolition waste from other construction sites. An industrial building in Winterthur, Switzerland will be repurposed to create a series of 12 units/studios. The design process starts with the collection and classification of building elements sourced from dismantling and demolition operations, and the identification of their potential for recycling. An external steel staircase, aluminium windows, metal corrugated sheets, roof insulation and photovoltaic modules are all salvaged from previous buildings and given a second life. For example, steel beams are reused for the new structure and old façade stone cladding is redeployed as floor tiles.

ZOOM

The Venice Architecture Biennale

Between Superficiality and Substance. Is It Bad to Be Woke?

I read about this biennale that it’s the most relevant of them all, the most ideological, weak, conformist, obsolete, revo­lutionary, aware, visceral, unexpected, compliant, lacking in substance, irrelevant, woke, not woke enough, or all of it at once.

As long as it has the power to generate such strong and diverse reactions, maybe it is worth the question Why all the noise? It’s just the biennale—architecture magazines write about it every year, only architects speak about it, them and their unfortunate friends. It’s a wasteland of mod­els and scaled drawings hung in the air or on walls looked at by dedicated students from all over the world who come to admire & steal graphic techniques, to touch the pan­els that passed through the hands of the interns of their favourite architects and intimidate their colleagues who couldn’t come with their fresh knowledge, delivered proud­ly and with a sense of belonging to an elite group. How can such a dusty event finally incite so much revolt, disappoint­ment, admiration and pleasure? How is it possible that professionals who are used to speaking to each other in terms known only to them suddenly declare war on each other?

A Dense Garden‑City

Igual & Guggenheim: Apartment Buildings in Rapperswil, Switzerland

One pedestal, two monoliths, one folie and a common space. The new residential devel­opment breaks with the orthogonal system of the neighborhood, while extending, compress­ing and and then freeing again the surround­ing green space. The transparent annexes, the large roof eaves, the fine and textures and de­tails balance and tame the big general gesture. Classical principles are both affirmed and con­tradicted throughout the project.

A Silent Witness

Space Casuals: Rehabilitating the House at 30, Coandă St., Bucharest

This is the story of a house built in 1900 to a Bucharest of different flavours and different values. All this time, the house has been a silent witness, it has navigated history al­most anonymously, it saw two wars, a few different gen­erations and regimes, earthquakes and city transforma­tions. We found it as a dying and lonely patient, whose fate could have been that of many other similar ones, which fad­ed away just as anonymously, making place to a definitely more restless, more chaotic Bucharest, one devoid of land­marks and memory. Up to the end, it turned out to be a sto­ry about happy happenings and encounters, unfolding pa­tiently and passionately, with the occasional restlessness of not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, with unpre­dictable situations, solved on the fly, with disarming failures and happy endings. A silent witness, it stubbornly stayed put and continued to watch the city. It will continue so, we hope in a healthier, more dignified way and clothed some­what better, appropriate to its age and dignity.

Mora 35

Living in 52 Square Metres

A small space, hidden inside a post‑war building, built in an aristocratic residential neighbour­hood defined by the aesthetic and cultural vision of the elites of the first half of the 20th century.

Art Deco Luminaires. Dragoş Dogaru

Contemporaneity and Hystoricism in One Single Object

Art‑Deco, the French‑born modernism, is a structure for ar­tistic expression rather than a style, encompassing all that needs to be said after the abstracting‑essentialising pro­cess involving the geometrization of an element or an idea. Being so volatile, it easily infiltrates through the cracks be­tween the European illustration, print, cinema, art, music, etc. Not bypassing Great Romania, of course, it reverber­ates all the way to Bucharest.

Through the collection of lighting fixtures #newartdeco to­gether with the collection of textile design #opartdeco DragoșDogaru reworks the priceless heritage and lan­guage of #artdecobucharest whose promoter he has been for more than a decade.

Saul Steinberg

(Bucharest)–Milano–New York

This is the story of Saul Steinberg, born and raised in Ramnicu Sarat and Bucharest, educated in Milan, that survived fascism and war to bring his Eastern‑European accent and irony to New York, and draw his trace there.

Women ‘Enemies of the People’

An Exhibition at the Sighet Memorial Exhibition Space in Bucharest

As any other totalitarian regime, Communism did not take into account factors such as age, gender, state of health or cultural level of the people it repressed. ‘Enemies of the people’ weren’t only adults, but also children, weren’t only men, but also women. Countrywomen and female aristo­crats, intellectual and simple women, older women, teenag­ers or even girls, pregnant and postnatal women, as well as women with breastfed children were considered to pose a potential threat to the regime.

PLANS

This plan really moved us. Not only because it is novel (at least, we could not find it elsewhere), but also because the drawing does not belong to Horia Creangă[1], the Modernist hero of romanian architecture, but it traces the house of his grandfather, Ion Creangă – the hero of romanian literature.

An L shaped house with hidden pockets and green perspectives – extroverted, transparent, it opens itself to nature: from the courtyard, an exhibition of spaces, solid and void among which one may feel like hiding; from the street an elegant object, quite different from its built context, whose effervescence often generates a stop, inviting people to interact with it (neighbors told us).