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Text: Elena Stancu
Photo: Cosmin Bumbuț

Five years ago, we were renting a cramped one-bedroom in Piața Rosetti, Bucharest. We lived in a cold, dark twenty-five square meter room with high ceilings, in a formerly nationalized building.

Proiect: Starh
Text: Ştefan Ghenciulescu
Foto: Radu Malașincu

A little context. Good practices, openness and modest heritage

Reporter: Ștefan Ghenciulescu
Photo: Arjan Bronkhorst, Fred Erns, Ștefan Ghenciulescu, Georgiana Ghenciulescu

The title above is not a journalistic metaphor, but is in fact the name of Amsterdam’s oldest museum (after the Rijksmuseum), established in the 19^th century in a very special 17^th-century house: the home of a rich bourgeois in Amsterdam’s golden age, which has a church as its culminating and hidden point. This is not a domestic chapel, but a public church, complete with an altar, pulpit, organ, upstairs gallery, vaults, statues, benches and seating for about 150 people, and so on: a unique example of a public space and sacred place, knowingly integrated into a civil dwelling.

Project, photo: Mircea Vasvari
Text: Cosmin O. Gălățianu

My colleague, Vasvari

I met Mircea Vasvari ten years ago, as we were both getting ready for admission to the university. I was coming, as many others were, as provincials (some absurdly coming from hundreds of km away), every Saturday and Sunday, to Bucharest, and we were attending five hours of drawing and descriptive geometry

Project initiators: Zeppelin, Ideilagram

December 22, 1989 marked not only the fall of the Ceaușescu regime, but also the end of the megalomaniac communist project to demolish and then rebuild Romanian cities. Thirty years on, the collective memory of these destructions is fading away, while the aggression against the cities continues, even in an opposite paradigm – that of ultraliberal development.

Text: Jean Craiu
Photo: Aleix Bagué

The MG house is in a residential neighbourhood in the town of Sant Cugat de Vallès, a small place, 5 km away from the outskirts of Barcelona (measuring from the les Planes neighbourhood limits), between the hills of Collserola and De Galliners.

The small yet functionally complicated building, uses all possible means to ensure a small scale and a dignified look, fit for the sensible historic areas where it lies. At the same time, the project literally digs up one of the city’s old water courses and generates a small space open to the public.

Modul Cărturești is a new bookstore and, in the future, also an important exhibition space in downtown Bucharest, on Academiei Street, accessible from the portico of the “Ion Mincu” University of Architecture and Urbanism. The library does not simply take up a space, but also transforms it, being a first step towards reconstructing and, in fact, carrying on its original public and transparent character.

A project within I’M UAU program of Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism – Bucharest (UAUIM)
Text: Justin Baroncea
Foto: Radu Malașincu, Cristina Ginara, Alexandru Ivanof

GEST: A laboratory that includes workshops of ceramic ‘confections’, lighting appliances, furniture made of recycled materials and pieces, cartoons on the walls, and a boiler on the ceiling.

This is a small house with a big interior, one that’s cheap in cost an rich in spaces. We get to hear not just form the architects, but also from the clients: about climbing stairs all day, about getting some time together at home, about how the house and the family grow together

Text: Andrei Răzvan Voinea, Irina Calotă

Historic lotissements and neighborhood communities—research for the residents

There were two main public institutions in charge of implementing Bucharest’s housing policy in the first half of the twentieth century—the Communal Company for Low-Cost Housing (1910-1948) and the Building Fund (1930-1949). The legacy of this policy consists of twenty-two lotissements with standard dwellings in Bucharest, some of them included as heritage on the List of Historic Monuments and/or qualified as protected built-up areas, a legal status that does not necessarily entail the conservation of the values that these districts embody.

Text: Mugur Grosu
Photo: Alexandra Savu, Dorothee Hasnaș, Mugur Grosu

Seven years ago, I spoke with the former chief executive of the London Development Agency, architect Peter Bishop, at the launch of his book, Temporary City. I asked him if there was any place for poetry in the big cities. Of course, he told me, and he recounted architect Jaime Lerner, who reached the position of mayor of the Brazilian city of Curitiba