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Intro: Cătălina Frâncu

The following two projects have in common the mediation between the human and the “natural” factor. This human-nature dichotomy was created long ago, and it has come to pit one against the other, giving rise to hyperpopulated, hyperactive and hyperbetonated cities.

Text: Ştefan Davidovici

Steinberg is for me, first of all, the New Yorker magazine – one of the most intelligent and open American publications, with a very distinct graphic style that includes a generous use of drawings and cartoons, born and fed by the amazingly rich cultural landscape of New York City.

Restrained monumentalitaty and delicate grain: this high-rise apartment building elegantly balances the various scales and urban situations.

A Modernist block of apartments, typical of inter-war Bucharest, of the type that is nowadays demolished or butchered without any remorse. Here, it is carefully and respectfully restored and highlighted. Then, the new building, set against the old one, but not in a radical, ostentatious manner, but through subtle weaving.

A micro-city to work on, talk about and present art. Demolition scraps, found objects and new construction, architecture and furniture, the exterior and interior hybridize each other and turn the former car workshop into an extension of urban space.

Text: João Gonçalo Lopes
Photo: João Matos, Inês Costa Monteiro

The initial brief was to convert an old car workshop with 167sqm, into a collective work and event space for art related professionals. The work involved conception, coordination and construction of the interior elements like wood structures, furniture and lighting.

With big entrance gates, the space had the potential to become part of the street and bring the street life in. The project layout is based on a set of different courtyards, with different characters, around which the working pods are organized. This layout was made thinking of the gradations from public to private and the different events that can happen in each place. It also aims to explore the full volume of the space by adding a new level while keeping the openness and the flow of the overall space.

From the beginning the project we aimed to introduce old materials and explore possibilities of reuse. After the schematic design, we set up to collect and inventory of old parts from demolitions that were then used to shape and hack the basic spatial scheme.

Together with the potted plants, the material palette generates a sense of an exterior environment as if extending from the street, where the pods become the small interior universes within this “outdoor” space like in a small neighbourhood.

We saw the working pods as open structures to be contaminated by their occupants. According to the different personal character of each occupier and different moments, the pods would be able to be more or less open. This generates very diverse and dynamic gradations of permeability within the same frame.
Through the experience of building it ourselves we were able to tune each element to its final position, allowing us to think closer to the body scale. It became a very close and attentive process where each material and detail could be brought to its full potential.

This attention to the combination of materials allowed us to create different a micro-cosmos for each working area within the overall space.

Materialization

The existing concrete floor of the car shop was covered with grey epoxy resin and the walls repaired and painted white.

Starting from this grey and white canvas, our material palette comes essentially from the reuse and combination of found materials with wood structures. We intentionally looked for materials that could bring vibrancy and texture to the interior design.

Most of the basic structures and flooring of the working pods were built with pine wood, providing us with a basic framework that we were able to contaminate with the found materials.

Plants also became part of this palette: they work as soft mediators between privacy and exposure, breaking and blurring the hard edges of the wood structures.

Info & credite

Project name: Desvio, creative work space
Completion year: 2021
Gross built area: 167 m2
Location: Lisbon, Bairro da Estefânia
Programme: Creative work and event space
Architects: João Gonçalo Lopes
Project team: João Gonçalo Lopes, Guilherme Rodrigues
Construction: João Gonçalo Lopes, Guilherme Rodrigues, Gui Garrido
Electrical installation: Tiago Domingues, André Santos

A complex functional assembly which brings energy to the German post‑industrial historical city centre of Oberhausen, where urban agriculture, offices, and a track combine.

The scale regeneration of an entire romanian city, and not of an energic metropolis, but of a post-industrial town, is the subject of a Dossier coordinated by Lorena Brează & Mugur Grosu

The scale regeneration of an entire romanian city, and not of an energic metropolis, but of a post-industrial town, is the subject of a Dossier coordinated by Lorena Brează & Mugur Grosu

He started by folding metro cards. Now, even the categories of projects Alexe Popescu started on Origami principles number in the order of tens. The play has become increasingly more serious and fertile, turning into a design program and philosophy. (Zeppelin)

A great, small memorial, subtle and open to interpretations, worlds away from the emphatic, top‑down ensembles that seem to have come back in later years.

We cohabitate with animals for a long time. In the last hundreds of years, this cohabitation has profoundly changed, from the explosion of pets to industrialized agriculture, as well as our destruction of natural habitats and elimination of species.

Text: Cătălina Frâncu
Foto: Roberta Curcă

I was in Paris, close to Quai de la Marne, when I entered a supermarket with my partner, Teodor, in search for daily pads (thin, for light flux, usually used after menstruation); we went in audibly talking in Romanian heading towards the hygiene racks, then took a walk to the pastry area, then the chips, and, after having paid, we headed towards the exit.