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From a distance, the house is a discreet part of a traditional landscape. As you get closer and the step inside, it reveals its contemporary layers

Project, text, photos: Traian Cimpeanu

Vänga is a small community of houses in the middle of rural farmland, just 60 kilometres east of Göteborg, Sweden’s second largest city.

Text: Constantin Goagea

See, I’m just walking to the office through the railway station, as every day, and in those three minutes and let’s say 30 seconds I need to cross the station, cross-cutting from the Grivita to the Dinicu Golescu Boulevard, I try to record my train of thoughts, which seems somewhat chaotic, so step one our railroad station is beautiful when it’s sunny, but today it’s cold and dreary, this is not relevant, here is an infinite universe of small and great events, it’s a bloody historical landmark, the station was built in 1872, I know because I read it on Wiki, it’s a metaphysical point of the city

Intro: Ștefan Ghenciulescu
Photo: Dan Vezentan & Sandwich

An improbable place for displaying art: a leftover of space, at one end of the world.

Combinatul Fondului Plastic (Arts and Crafts Combinate) is not that far away from the centre, nor is it so inaccessible – although there is some walking to do to the public transport stations, and quite a longer walk to the underground.

Intro: Ștefan Tuchilă, Ștefan Ghenciulescu
Texte: Brenac & Gonzalez & Associés
Photo: Ștefan Tuchilă, Sergio Grazia

In this article we speak less of buildings and more of façades. Building skin –solid, opaque, porous, light, transparent, with small or large apertures, loggias, balconies, porches and blinds, merged with the structure or autonomous has always been an essential architectural element. Nowadays, it is probably the main piece in any sustainability concept.

Project, text: Bogdan Ciocodeică
Photo: Kinga Tomos

A really special beer brand – Denmark’s Mikkeller is only around the world only in its own locations in some very carefully selected cities – like for instance Tokyo, Seoul, San Francisco, Los Angeles outside of Europe, and in Europe, with the exception of Denmark, only in Barcelona, Berlin, Stockholm and Reykjavik. It now has opened a beer-bar and bistro in the Charles de Gaulle Square, in a spectacular villa from the onset of the 20th century.

Ecology doesn’t need to show off. It can be a natural part of the building, woven into the general design, and choice of materials and details. We wanted to kick off this dossier on sustainability with a project that is before anything else architecture – beautiful, appropriate, refined and humanly scaled. Yet Steven Holl’s newest addition to the Iowa campus is also the result of a sustainability concept that is highly innovative and centered on the connection to the environment and the people that use it.

Photo: Jan Liégeois

An unsual investor – the art collector and dealer Axel Vervoordt. Art and real estate. A former peripheric industrial site. Recovery, densification and urbanizatiopn as an antidote to urban sprawl. A mix of functions and typologies. Vision, masterplan, three architecture and one landscape office. And well, a work by a great artist as a sign and first action of the project

Project, text: Mihai Duţescu
Photo: Radu Malașincu, Andrei Mărgulescu

The Antiaeriana neighbourhood is a long, narrow strip of land, running along one side of the road bearing the same name, approximately from the crossroads of Calea 13 Septembrie and Bd. Ghencea, and down to Soseaua Alexandriei. This is a rather packed borough when compared to other boroughs in Bucharest; like them, it was originally a suburban village, subsequently included in the city and still displays both urban and rural features.

A nice house. An accident and a loss. An interrupted reconstruction. A new house with the memories of the old one

Text: Attila Kim
Photo: Dacian Groza, Kinga Tomos, Attila Kim

Text: Ştefan Ghenciulescu

This is a serious and old problem and one ware have discussed on may occasions. But this particular text was triggered by two events.

Firstly, it just happened that, without noticing it until quite recently, a lot of materials in this issue , in some way relate to the topic of competitions. There are direct articles on competitions—“Prototype for Community” or the European stage of LafargeHolcim Awards, but also indirect ones, presenting good works, resulted from winning a competition.

In Romania, a lot of medium and low budget houses are built. However, few of them enjoy architecture, in the true sense of the word. This competition was initiated by Zeppelin and Holcim precisely to show that good houses can also be designed starting from reasonable budgets. Quality is not only about square metres, but also about how one uses them for efficient and good spaces, about how free commodities, such as light and air, are organized, and about distilling poetry from sometimes tiny resources.

Text, photo: Mugur Grosu

On the TV screen on top of a beat‑up metallic oven, a shamelessly familiar image from the civilised world: British adventurer Bear Grylls showcases one of his famous essential techniques of survival in the wild. I have no clue what he’s talking about, as the sound is cut off and the subtitle is in Arabic. Nobody in the room is truly interested, the image is left to flow on the screen as a background, as a sort of modern wall carpet of the Western mirage instead of the old style Oriental scenery.