Articles box

TEXT: Ştefan Ghenciulescu

If you like (to take photos of) clashes, dissonances, decadence and gaudiness, quaint and slightly sordid things, this city is for you. You almost don’t have to even try, the picture will just jump at you with a nice framework of old buildings and new ones, with improvised appendices and absurd details.

Otilia Mihalcea recently launched her own design brand, OVAL. At this edition of International Fashion Showcase 2016 (a section of London Fashion Week), her collection Neotectonics received a Special Prize for Accessory Design.

Photo: Alexandru Boghian
Model: Ada Tache

The building is located on a dead end street in the northwestern part of the old city center. The distinctive urban fabric, with various shapes of plots, heigths and stylesis suffers a strong speculative pressure, and most of the recent buildings are highly dissonant in scale and image.

Text: Ștefan Ghenciulescu
Project: ADN BA
Photo: Cosmin Dragomir

Foto: © Ștefan Tuchilă

Motto: “Don’t tell anyone, but I always wanted to be mayor!” (“Show me a hero,” 2015)

What would happen if the local residents of one of the less fortunate side of Bucharest would take their fate into their own hands? If they tapped the potential and advantages of the place, if they multiplied the good things that are already happening there? With these questions in mind, we launched an art project dedicated to the southern half of Bucharest and its inhabitants.

Text: Ştefan Ghenciulescu

Photo: Esenghiul Abdul, Christian Beros

When so many valuable buildings of the past are turned to dust, it seems hard to understand the efforts to preserve and work on an existing house that has no architectural value. Why not take it down and build, with far less torment, an entirely new one? Well, it’s not quite like that.

Text & photo: Mugur Grosu

I am one of those people who, although having lived here for so many years, never feels quite at home. Whenever I meet people like me, we joke saying we’re Constanța’s diaspora in Bucharest. It’s like in our veins flows a fundamentally different thing — a morose cocktail pounding adversely, in which the sickness of the golden fleece seekers collides with acute sense of exile, left by the shadow of Ovid at Tomis—which has remained, basically, the same barbaric land.

Text: Constantin Goagea

We always believed that office space and all its contemporary design has been and always will be absolutely incompatible with the great outdoors. It was either one or the other. Because when we think of nature, we think of leaves, grass and bugs, rain and mud (not potted plants and not office flowers lit with some super lamp, or even worse, some plastic print hanging on the plaster wall).

The 10 years construction period of this villa on the shores of a lake on the outskirts of Bucharest allows to read the evolution of the architectural philosophy of Starh office.

Text: Cosmin Caciuc
Illustrations: Urban Regeneration workshop #Tudordurabil

A few dozen students and professors from the Faculty of Architecture in Strasbourg and supervisors from Brussels had a clear vision on the way the public space can be improved with minimal resources and interventions, following an urban regeneration workshop for Tudor neigh­borhood in Târgu Mureș:

Text: Ștefan Ghenciulescu
Photo: Irina Pata

It is quite difficult to write an editorial about architecture and the city after the tragedy from Club Colectiv. The number of victims is growing, and among them there is a large number of architects and urban planners.

Text & photo: Ștefan Ghenciulescu

This article is not about the already famous gigantic cross with twinkling lights proposed for University Sq as a monument to the 1989 Revolution; it is only the latest in a series of authoritarian and pompous actions that have been rained upon us from various city administrations in the past years. Impaled potatoes, grotesque busts, monstrous princes, cumbersome allegories…

Beyond the lack of artistic culture of the commissioners and the fact that they waive any advice or public consultation, the problem seems to be the need for bombastic: in order to remember or simply to honor something good and beautiful, you must exaggerate, look for grandeur, size, magnitude and maximum visibility. They must be seen, literally jump at you. Otherwise, the monument doesn’t work, it seems.

Text: Cosmin Caciuc

In this issue we are publishing a dossier with projects rewarded at the European Award for Architectural Heritage Intervention AADIPA. These biennial awards organized with Catalan support occurred in the professional continental landscape only recently, in 2013. Unlike other famous European awards, such as those dedicated to the Eu Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Awards (from 2002, focusing on heritage conservation), The European Prize for Urban Public Space (from 1999, focusing on new urban interventions) and the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award (1998, for new architectural projects) AADIPA awards deal with a niche mediating between heritage and contemporary examples. It is an important signal of the need to reconcile social attitudes divided between history and modernization, of the strategic importance for the development of urban heritage, providing even a guide of best practices in protected areas, where integration and coexistence are fundamental keys to awareness and understanding.