\nText: Sabina Nechita<\/strong>
\nPhoto: Andrei Mărgulescu<\/strong><\/p>\n
Perhaps also due to the notoriety coalesced around King Charles III’s choice to buy a house here, Viscri has become a place-experiment of slow living, a pretext for reverse migration, from the urban setting to the village, increasingly seductive for city dwellers; it was a successful prototype, and its model would be adopted in most of Transylvania, especially in the Saxon villages.<\/p>\n
Our project was born under the same circumstances; the clients saved a traditional house, to become their refuge from the dynamics of life in the city.<\/p>\n
*situation plan<\/span> At number 82, there are two brick-wall constructions: a house and the oven shed. The house by the crossroads was built when the recipe for edification had already been crystallized, “on a planimetry developed and synthesized in time”*: a quasi-square plan, with a semi-basement cellar and an access on the yard-facing corner via a staircase, to the day rooms on the ground floor, “Stube” and “Stubchen” (The room” and “the little room” in German<\/em>), joined transversely by an enlarged corridor, with an open hearth and allowing further access to the attic. [*Historical study “CASA și GOSPODĂRIA nr. 82, Sat VISCRI, comuna BUNEȘTI, jud. BRAȘOV” (The house and the household at no. 82, Viscri Village, Bunești commune, Brașov County), author Art Historian Iozefina Postăvaru, specialist certified by the Ministry of Culture)]<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n The house shows the particularities of one-stage building; it is a prototype for houses with wealthier owners, who could afford their rooms a little larger, with two windows each, facing the street. After being expropriated by the Communist state and then returned to a family of tailors, in the 60s, the Stubchen windows were enlarged to meet the need for more light, required by the trade. The current owners took it over in ruins, the state of many of the dwellings left behind by the Saxons who massively emigrated from Romania during the communist period. This is how we found it, altered, its roof massively degraded, the gable toward the yard demolished, with traces of animals sheltered in the basement, from a toime when no one inhabited it and when it already seemed that there was no chance for it to be recovered.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n “To find the craft (of something) – to find the secret (of something)”<\/strong><\/p>\n The first step was to secure it, in order to be able to start its rehabilitation – a prudent one, as a testament to ordering simplicity, which will dictate the way to inhabit it, because, isn’t it?, that was also the reason sought, the circumstance that saved it from crumbing in the first place. Like any will and testament, an upstream investigation of a more or less enigmatic inheritance was necessary, a research where, throughout our endeavours, we were partnered with and were supported by the craftsmen who decrypted and who had witnessed the traditional way of building. Their craft is present here on all levels, from the foundation to the entrance gate, up to the wooden nails in the roof truss structure, it is the science of working ingeniously with the raw material to ensure its durability.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n As we have discovered, the traditional constructive and decorative repertoire reveals the village’s relative precariousness; the houses in Viscri are marked by conservatism and simplicity, things that we had in mind from the very beginning, keeping them as an intention throughout our intervention.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The road to rehabilitation, from ruin to a house, began under the skill of our team of masons, carpenters, and tinkers from Wagner Bau, who recomposed it piece by piece. We kept the utilitarian, austere character in the semi-basement, where there is a working room, a technical room and the main toilet. The mostly stone masonry is apparent here, so is the woven brick floor, as well as the bathroom’s partition wall; the room’s appearance is unfinished, rough, raw. The beams over the semi-basement were cleaned and reused, the wooden ceilings that were too degraded were replaced with others, rebuilt according to the existing ones.<\/p>\n From here, the ground floor is accessed via a closed staircase, with recovered oak steps, that reaches the corridor; as we climb, the necessity for minimum of comfort insinuates – the Stube and Stubchen will be sleeping rooms only; therefore, we have set up a small toilet, while daily activities will be transferred to the attic.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"P1_Viscri](\"https:\/\/e-zeppelin.ro\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/P1_Viscri-Plan-Situatie_zeppelin.jpg\")
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\n<\/em><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>*before the restauration<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n