News

Energy efficient or “green” mortgages represent a potential for Romania to take the lead in the region by introducing an innovative real estate financial tool for reducing energy costs, improving energy security and increasing adoption of better construction technology, materials and techniques.

A fire station showing the authors’ interest in both a dialogue with the surrounding landscape and a need to provide a tailor-made space for a particularly functional program.

Text: Andreu Arriola & Carme Fiol 
Photo: Sergio Belinchón, Beat Marugg, Arriola & Fiol
This article was published in zeppelin magazin number 99.

The rehabilitation of some spaces in the centre of a small Polish town increases the value of the place through reasonable investments, rigor and intelligent interweaving of old fragments and new interventions.

Text: Cosmin Caciuc
Foto: Tomasz Zakrzewski
This article was published in zeppelin magazin number 99.

A critical view on the difference between a true sustainability and the „green” demagogy in architecture.

Sustainability currently shares many qualities with God; supreme concept, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient; creator and judge, protector, and (…) saviour of the universe and the humanity. And, like God, it has millions of believers. Since we humans are relatively simpleminded and suspicious and need evidence before belief can become conviction, Green has come to represent sustainability; has become its incarnation in the human world. But sustainability, like God, might not have a form, nor a colour…

MASS Studio is showing that the architectural heritage left in an advanced stage of decay may be resuscitated, even though temporarily, through some inspired improvisations enlivened by a great idea.

Text: MASS Studio
Photo: Silviu Aldea, Victor Mech

This article was published in zeppelin magazin number 98

A single-family dwelling made by Ene + Ene Architectura Office in a traditional area in Bucharest is spatially defined by a cross-section rather than a plan illustrating the discrete insertion.

Text: Ene+Ene Architectura
Photo: Radu Malasincu
This article was published in zeppelin magazin number 98.

The intervention on a site located in an old Bucharest district was an opportunity we wished to get and we were actually offered in 2006 by a house on Vasile Lascar Street. The land featuring a 10 m opening, northern and eastern dead walls and a bare parcel border to the south stands on a side of the street that still preserves houses dating as far back as the early 20th century, more and more insistently aggressed by the past 20 years’low quality architecture.

City. Money. Architecture.
A super-debate in which you are invited to participate

National Museum of Contemporary Art
Friday, December 16th, 9:30–14:00.
The conference is in English. Free entrance.

How can our cities become more attractive, both for their inhabitants and for investment? By whom and how could new projects be implemented, partnerships being created, how could funds for all of this be attracted?

The building site containers were set up around Bucharest’s National Theatre. According to a project delayed for a couple of years, the theatre is supposed to be reinforced and modernized in the next three years starting from this autumn. The process will involve the dismantling the arcaded façade ordered by Ceausescu in the 1980s; the initial façade will be put in place along with the cantilevered roof, which means that the original project designed by Horia Maicu, Nicolae Cucu, and Romeo Belea will be followed in its outlines. Undoubtedly, the old functionalist project was thousand times better than the pompous totalitarian intervention.

The house on the outskirts of Sibiu is gently placed on a difficult plot and finds a subtle balance between openness and protection.
The house is located in a residential area with lots of terrains whose shapes and sizes come out further to plotting a steep land. After the Revolution, these plots offering a double access from the edging streets have been subdivided in an uncontrolled manner.

We live in the future-in the future that only the architects of 60’s imagined it, some even programmatically, like those in Japan, grouped in architecture Metabolism movement.

Mori Art Museum proposes to go back in their future through a fabulous show, the first in the world, until 15 January 2012. In Tokyo … If you did not know where you can celebrate The New Year’s Eve :)