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DESIGN: pandapanda (Ştefan Batroş, Mihai Barbu, Ştefan Păvăluţă, Justin Baroncea)

PHOTO: Radu Malaşincu

TEXT: Justin Baroncea

PROJECT: ArhiBox

INTERVIEW: Ştefan Ghenciulescu

PHOTO: Bogdan Pop, Mihai Racu, Călin Lada

The rural heritage in Romania is going away at an even faster rate than in the cities: “poor” materials, lack of space, confort and apreciation from their very owners give old houses rather poor chances.

Designing a contemporary Orthodox Church is notoriously difficult. Dorin Ştefan’s project for a parish church on the outskirts of the town of Alba Iulia is perfectly canonic without simplifying or reinterpreting ancient forms.

Project: DSBA

Photo: Anda Ștefan

A former distillery becomes a connection  between past and future, between the historic centre and a decayed former activity area. The visionary intervention creates a new landmark on the map of cultural venues and also an evi­dent stimulus for neighborhood regeneration.

An apartment building from the socialist period in Slovakia is reinvented not just on the outside – with a new façade – but also through the inner planimetria.

Project: GutGut
Text: GutGut, Cosmin Caciuc
Photo: Jakub Skokan & Martin Tůma (BoysPlayNice), GutGut

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).