What a thing this colouring of the blocks. If you ever moaned about it (no one who would have felt differently than that) that all blocks are alike, that they are boring and ugly, please come now and see that there is no difference at all anymore.
You wouldn’t need too much schooling to notice that what’s on Stefan cel Mare Boulevard was the lyrical functionalism of the 60s, a synchronous architecture with the productions of its time, and that in Colentina we have the tough years, the concrete prefab structures of the `80s.
Since a project of architectural chromatics is not available for this huge operation in the city, the case is the following: all windows are white (double-insulated), one size only, and the paint (an obsession for orange or English red mixed with a dubious grey), the same everywhere, practically annihilates any difference ever possible between those buildings. If any of the skilled ones would have imagined that at this huge scale painting is as easy as in one’s kitchen or house, it obviously turned into a mistake. There should have been certain overview colour studies to take into account the dynamics, the details, the previous materiality, the degradation in time, the identity of places, the routes between various locations in the city etc. And the care for details is nonexistent, since everything related to frames, cases, and windowsills etc. is filled, covered or levelled with polystyrene, the result being a complete levelling of all block buildings. As various hardworking people report on thousand of meters of thermo-system done on time, for the whole city the case is worse in terms of identity. I wonder if on this occasion, since honourable things were also done, the façades went into the property of the city hall since no one should be allowed to undertake individual, personalized interventions any longer, and we should know who fixes what and with what funding. I am sometimes so fed up with such colourful urbanism, that I take train and take a break from the involuntary humour we are part of.
Architecture awards at the Brasov annual
I used to go to Bra?ov and assist to the awards of the architecture annual (as a member of the jury) and was this time reading Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer awarded with the Nobel Prize for literature. While travelling, I learned that Pamuk studied architecture for about three years, and then abandoned it. I was reading his “My name is Red” (don’t worry, I won’t start telling the story) while trying to guess if I’ll meet a bit of the potential Pamuk architect.
On the one side he tells the story naturally, as if he’s there in the 500 years old Istanbul, describing streets, houses and palaces with the acuity of someone knowing what to look at, an education of the eye that few people can learn about. Then the writing with symmetries and coincidences, it shows a sense of construction of the story, almost graphical, similar to the façade or the plan of a Renaissance villa. Not as the last point, there are hints and details about that kind of determination part of the education of an architect, the overview, as if you look at the world from a top, privileged place, the sense of mastering the city, the rooms, or a place, the immediate perception of issues and the deep feeling that the world can be sorted out and saved by beauty, that is architecture. It could have been any gifted or well-documented writer with no class of architecture ever, yet for me everything was actually explained as a manifesto of the artist willing to build more and more significantly than architecture could offer in fact.
The return
Feeling tired after a fullfilled day is a great pleasure. Awards in Bra?ov were all given out where it was worth doing, and the award ceremony was actually an intense debate of great ideas. The awarded presented their projects which are more than mere images, and, to persuade potential clients, they need a story. They told the stories of their projects. Following the official moment, the corollary of this session was that organisers immediately thought about a competition on public spaces, which should take the shape of a letter of architecture and they kept telling me about the competition for the yard of the Black Church. One could say there is still a bit of good around.
And to avoid coming back empty handed, I got one of the awarded with me, Exhibit Arhitectura studio, which we will present right now in this issue. Read carefully please.
Photo: Adrian Dobre
Translation: Dana Radler
