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Text, photo: Mugur Grosu

A story told by Witold Gombrowicz pops into my mind occasionally: if you see a crab overturned on the beach, shaking its legs, unable to turn by itself, you will probably feel sorry that it might die if you left it like that, you will bend and you will put on back on its feet. But what if you noticed then that the beach is in fact full of crabs overturned by the storm, what do you think you might do? How many times will you bend, and how many will you try to save on the endless beach, until you will tell yourself that it is not your job, after all?

Text, foto: Vallum

“The salt road from Sovata” project confronted us with a major problem: how to arrange the visiting infrastructure for hundreds, even thousands of tourists in a nearly untouched reservation of 70 hectares, located in the centre of the spa town.

Text: Ștefan Ghenciulescu
Photo: Tudor Prisăcariu, Ștefan Tuchilă, Ștefan Ghenciulescu

It all looks like a movie set gone crazy. You walk down the streets and alien constructions emerge behind some walls with cherubs and capitals. Or, conversely, familiar buildings seem to have undergone very bad plastic surgery, that shaved off layers of their skin and have irretrievably damaged their faces.

Text & Photo: Laurian Ghiniţoiu

The beginning of June 2016 was marked by the opening to the public of two buildings by Herzog & de Meuron: Switch House—an extension of The Tate Modern, and the Schaudepot at Vitra Campus, a new exhibition space for the Vitra furniture collection.
The opportunity to document the New Tate was a good reason for me to be revived by the noisy London, and Very shortly after, more by chance than for a precise purpose, I happened to visit Vitra, 2 years since my last time there.

Text: Mihai Duțescu
Photo: Andrei Mărgulescu

Unlike Rahova or Berceni, or other neighborhoods with clearly defined boundaries, Vitan – at least the way I see it – is a large nebula. Rather than a delimited territory, it’s a neighborhood where mythology beats materiality by far, where abstractions are more consistent than the actual physical features of the place. Perhaps because, after Ceaușescu’s bundle of demolitions of the old historical fabric developed along the commercial Vitan/Dudești roads, there was almost nothing left, the new chunk of the city which has been placed in its stead has nothing special.

Text: Levente Szabó

The Romanian Order of Architects, Timiș County Branch started an exciting venture in 2016 by organizing a series of regional events, which – not only for actors shaping the architectural public life in the narrow region – provided an example of what openness, curiosity of each other’s best practices and the willingness to cooperate might mean, particularly when these efforts are strengthened by a professional program organizing.

The project for Church of the Psychiatry Hospital in the village of Voila does not copy images, interpreting instead a spatial and structural logic

Project & text: Ana-Maria Goilav Guran
Photo: Costin Gheorghe, Emil Cosma

Text: Stefan Ghenciulescu
Foto: Rainer Schlautmann, Sebastian Asiedu

Which things make a city? But what about a good city? In September, a dragon, a chewing gum museum, a storyteller with love letters, a garden in the middle of the street and several other invaders slipped into a city of the Ruhr and questioned its identity and future. I was visiting the new city proposed by curators and artists and this is my story about it.  

Text: Ştefan Ghenciulescu
Photo: Dan Purice

What caught my eye from a distance was a small modernist building in Timişoara – simple, elegant, dainty and thus highly representative of our nice and moderate interbel¬lum. It was only when I came within a few feet of the building that I was able to notice the Art Deco monogram indicating the construction date—a typical feature of those times. That’s when I froze—the year did not belong to the 1930s, as I had expected. It was 1947. The inter-war building had not in fact been built during the inter-war period. Its owners finalized its construction and flaunted it in front of the whole world the very same year their own universe fell apart.

A small community, in a recent district belonging to a provincial romanian town, Mizil, gets its wooden church.

Project, text, photo: Abruptarhitectura – Cristina Constantin, Cosmin Pavel

Caught between the highway and the railway, plans for the new district appeared immediately after the revolution. Thus the authorities tried to regulate the people’s reawakened need for building a house. The place was called either “Han” (“Inn”), based on the name given to a nearby manor house, or “Dallas”, based on the fantasies of the era.

At the 2014 Awards Ceremony for projects in Europe at the Holcim Awards (now LafargeHolcim Awards), this was one of the works that impressed me most. Although, at the time, all you could see were plans and renders, the architectural and urban idea was clear and strong: an elementary frame, coherent, flexible and cheap, designed o shleter, bring together and celebrate public activities. No parametric fireworks or populist collage here, just a no-nonsense and robust construction, whose beauty lies in proprtion and light; a good example of a sustainable concept that does not rely  on gadgets , but on strategy and a capacity to endure and evolve. (Ștefan Ghenciulescu)

In a time when we only hear about walls, this is a very different kind of wall. One that shows that you can talk in a nice way about very serious things and merge utility and art installation. Atelier ARI’s wall is accessible and shelters instead of repelling, it’s a barrier that becomes a place (Z.)