Architecture.
City.
Society.
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.
Text: Cosmin Caciuc / Photo: Cosmin Dragomir (Boldești-Scăeni)
In this issue we present some examples of good ecological thinking, that I would label as high green, due to their coherent, mature, integrated, financially prudent vision, and responsible, in a broad sense, for the future of the built environment: the education centre of Boldești‑Scăeni (Adrian Pop – Center for Sustainability in the Built Environment), a dossier of the 4th edition of Holcim Awards for sustainable construction, and VTree, a prototype of an urban autonomous mobile power generator from this year’s festival Street Delivery, in Bucharest, by Studio Act.
Between July 24th – August 1st an industrial heritage workshop will take place in Anina in the framework of the “Anina Mine of Ideas: Post-Industrial Cultural Identity” project initiated by Alba Verde Association in partnership with Anina Town hall, the Architects’ Chamber of Romania in Timiș, the Faculty of Architcture and Urbanism from Timișoara, and supported by The National Architects’ Chamber of Romania.
Text: Cosmin Caciuc / Photo: Daisuke Ohki
From Jules Verne’s novels I reckon that it’s not cool to be a scientist without being eccentric and particularly controversial, or at least declarative. Ray Kurzweil, artificial intelligence director at Google, occupied by predictions of the future and by the 100 pills that he claims he’s taking daily to live longer, is no exception to this rule. His vision, in short: all roads lead to nanotechnology, that is, manipulated matter at atom level, so that natural and artificial boundaries can be dissolved, even in human tissue.
The first Saturday of this summer comes full of Norwegian, Swedish and Danish movies – a rare opportunity to enjoy the Scandinavian cinema at Carol Factory (Halele Carol), but also to celebrate the national day of one of the invited friends, Sweden: on June 6th, just after sunset, the lights of the northern cinema arrive in southern Bucharest, in the former factory next to Carol Park, continuing our program of activating the old site.
creativity workshops for children
6 & 7 June 2015
Children had the opportunity to turn detective and architect and to shape the stories that we tell them or they create themselves. We worked with photographs, drawings, objects, models and stories that animate children.
Architecture.
City.
Society.