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Project: RoundRobin studio
Text: Anca Mihalache
Photo: Radu Malașincu

A bit of history

The main part of original building was built in around 1825, as the Haberdashers’ Almshouses. Later in the 19c the building was used as a school, and in 1898 this was purchased by the London County Council for use as Shoreditch Technical Institute.

Project: Mount Fuji Architecture Studio
Text: Masahiro Harada
Foto: Mitsumasa Fujitsuka & Mount Fuji Architects Studio

Text: Ștefan Ghenciulescu
Photo: Cosmin Dragomir

Romania suffers from a terrible lack of museums. Not only are there few museums made, if any; more than 100 museums or memorial houses have disappeared over the twenty-something years, especially through retrocessions (and out of the authorities’ lack of interest in purchasing them). Under these conditions, a new museum, especially a museum of modern and contemporary art, is an event. Should true architecture also show up there, so much the better.

Text: Dorin Ștefan Adam, Elena Viziteu
Photo: Laurian Ghinițoiu

Most tourists and Alba Iulia locals taking a stroll through the magnificent Vauban citadel are happy with the main public spaces – plazas and streets. Few of them realise that the place is much richer and much more complex – a sophisticated and labyrinthine system of spaces, with wide arched halls within the walls, passages leading to places that are undisclosed on a first walk.

Text: Mihai Duțescu
Foto: Andrei Mărgulescu, Mihai Duțescu
Plans: survey by the students of the atelier of Prof. Mircea Ochinciuc, 3rd year, Ion Mincu University, Bucharest, 2009-2010; assistants: Melania Dulămea, Mihia Duțescu, Adrian Moleavin

Text & photos by Ștefan Ghenciulescu

Let’s say you have an overcrowded school (grades 1 to 12), with limited space for games and sports in two small schoolyards. How do you go about it? Easy: You convert the front schoolyard into a teachers’ parking lot. And you do it properly, neatly marking the parking places with paint. The children can go on playing there, you don’t forbid it, but they will have to adapt their games, squeezing between the cars.

Laura Paraschiv is an architect. She collects objects and cultivates them in Circa 1703-3701 (Precinct 1703-3701), the place in Bucharest where you can find unique pieces of design from all ages.

Report: Dorothee Hasnas
Photo: Cătălin Georgescu, Ioana Pârvan

The architects’ deliberate lyricism-devoid text (below) is missing any reference to aesthetics or “philosophy”. However, when I visited the (yet unfinished, at the time) museum with Miguel Roldán, I felt it as a poetry-filled project, even yielding a slight dream-like character: the light turns almost material, the same bright colour is layered over new and old elements, to which we may add the delicate articulations and curved gaps cut in the old walls, and even the repetition and obsessive overlapping of vertical metal items.

The former Technical School of Aviation from the outskirts of the town of Mediaș, at the exit towards Sighișoara, was about to be degraded into disappearance. However, lately, it has been changing functions, some buildings are disappearing, others are rehabilitated, new buildings pop up. A social program – protected workshops for vulnerable people – has found a place in the former mess hall. ADP’s project is an example of reinventing a construction, but also of re-densifying the town’s outskirts, of building a public pole as well as an argument in favour of limiting the uncontrolled expansion of the town.

Intro: Modern by sound omission. The virtue of abstinence

Text: Cosmin O. Gălățianu

We make a note on the work seen from outside: it is clear that retrospection to the work, to the working, has a modernity of itself. In other words, the way the work is regarded, for instance the work of architecture, legitimises or not its modernity. Such a regard, a recent one, we may say, has twisted towards a type of architecture that is convenient (and here we mainly refer to the architects) by its implacable righteousness.

How does one build nowadays, in a central, tethered and characteristic historical fabric, a new public building? The FKM project of Oradea started precisely from this question, and by modelling the morphology against the city’s neighbouring spaces was the first step.

Project: Atelier FKM
Text, Photo: Andrei Mărgulescu

Intro: Captive autonomy
Text: Cosmin O. Gălățianu

The city, but mostly the European city, keeps its body under surveillance. It fears to have its healthy components excised, it feels the ghosts of the amputated ones, and it treats its dysfunction with cautious motions – very much like someone with a heart disease takes care of their body.