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Arhitext 2/2019 – Travellers, Roads, Places The Tower. | The Nest. The Ruin?

Arhitext 2/2019 - Contents

8 Bucharest Triennale East Centric Architecture – 3rd Edition

As architects and urban planners, it is our duty to contribute with a positive storytelling of our countries, regions, cities and areas. We have a great responsibility of interpreting the modern technological and architectural tendencies of the global development into site-specific projects, incorporating local character and history. It is essential that we do not dilute our local identity in the quest of achieving a hyper modern city competing with other similar cities in a global race. Instead, we should create a carefully human made landscape that, on one hand, is inspired by the global knowledge and tendencies, but at the same time emphasizes the uniqueness of the place giving it identity and story. As architects and planners, we are storytellers and the buildings and cities we develop should tell the story of our past – making it “home” by drawing on collective memory, and not another copy-paste of how the rest of the world is looking. – Mark Jay

 

THE GRAPES COULD BE SOUR 

10 Ciszak Dalmas & Matteo Ferrari – Malababa Flagship Store

 

10 Ilinca Pop 
The Beautiful Life

 

12 Livia Ionescu
Infinite Desire

 

DE JUR ÎMPREJUR

16 Mihai Pienescu
PEISAJ URBAN CU (multe) MITOCĂNII

 

THEORY

TRAVELLERS, ROADS, PLACES

Issue coordinator: Mihai Pienescu

From home in other homes… From houses in other houses, on the road…

…to home (frame A1)
The paradisiac «home», with its blossoming cherry trees, with its sunny windows, where you can still hear (is it so?) your grandmother’s steps, and where a smell of ripped quince floats in the air, where your mother hugs you tight at her chest and Azorel(1) wagging his tail, coloured butterflies rest on your shoulders, and the kind grey-haired father reads the bible. Oh, God!
I am home!

…to home (frame A2)
Where it’s cold inside and the stove is cold as well, grandma barely sees you through her rope tied glasses, mother sweats blood (from far-far away, she’s not inside), Grivei(1) shows his ribs and barely knows you (his eyes are watering), fat flies buzz above the trash bin behind the door, and the drunk father swears like a sailor.
And still, this is my home…

…to home (frame B1)
We are in the virtual house of words, images and sounds – may they be harmoniously arranged together or skilfully scattered – enough to protect you of the unwanted or not understood mundane reality. You read, you watch, you listen, sheltered under the vault of thoughts and the founding souls.

 

18 Mihai Pienescu
Doors, Windows, Roads

 

20 Matei Vișniec 
Extraterestrul care îşi dorea ca amintire o pijama

 

28 André Trillaud
Tours autour du voyage

 

34 Rudolf Poledna
House and Home

Both international and domestic migration have consequences of a political, economic, social, cultural, religious nature, due to the appearance of groups of people with different experiences, with different values, attitudes, beliefs, socialization habits, compared to the majority of members in the community/society where they arrive. Migrants will try to integrate into societies that receive them especially if they try to receive them in their social space.
In the first instance, physical presence, body/material directness, requires the provision of physical spaces for the inclusion of these bodies. On the other hand, as far as social beings are concerned, social relations can occur only in the context of the possibility of being together, joining, coexisting in certain places and temporal moments. House and home are phenomena, but also fundamental existential experiences for social beings. The future of houses and dwelling depends on our ability to think of new forms of being = living = constructing = thinking = being together, in conditions of fragmentation and uncertainty in the contemporary world. – Rudolf Poledna

 

42 house pARTy

 

46 DECEBAL SCRIBA
Gates / Passages

 

PRACTICE 
The Tower. The Nest . The Ruin?

Issue coordinators: Ilinca Pop, Cătălina Frâncu

 

50 Ilinca Pop, Cătălina Frâncu
What Kind of Stories Do We Tell?

 

I. THE TOWER

We find the tower present whenever we try to «solve» any of the two directions the human mind: the real (practical) and the fantastic. If we rapidly leaf through the book of history, we immediately find this typology to be invested with a fair amount of meaning which has been inevitably carried through time all the way to the present: the tower as the ladder to knowledge (Babel), the tower as confinement (Rapunzel), the tower as surveillance (fortress towers) and many more. The tower has always been the go-to typology when wanting to show power, transcendence, symbol, and fantasy, but it also has its perks when talking about density.

 

55 WUTOPIA LAB
House on the House

 

58 WIRTH ALONSO ARCHITEKTEN
Water Tower Rehabilitation in Potsdam

 

63 STARH
Tower House

In a way, the house was already there, its layout being decided by the awkward condition of the place consisting of a perimeter, a 7.80 × 8.25 structural precinct within which something was to be built – which could be less difficult than it seems. We did our best to make a decision about the structural solution, being convinced that it is the architect who has to decide on it in the beginning. And yet, at least, a slant layout freed us in an unexpectedly from the coercion of the enclosure and would come to fix the interior layout.
The project resides in the unresolved tension between the strange apparition on that spot and the compensatory, resigned cultivation of an inner world. – STARH

 

STARH, Tower House, photography: Cosmin Dragomir

67 ISA – Interface Studio Architects
Tiny Tower

 

71 HERZOG & DE MEURON
Beirut Terraces

 

II . THE NEST

When we say «nest», besides thinking about the feeling of protection and safety it transpires, our imagination builds this image with a mud-coloured ambiance, maybe a smell of fresh cut grass or rain, a sense of harmony with the world from which one takes the «building» materials, and might it be…peace? Without exaggerating I might say that we unconsciously associate the word «nest» with nature, furthermore, with a being’s response to nature’s dares. In many cases, this «nest» means protection, but done in such a way that it does not go against, but it gives an answer to.

 

76 AB CHVOYA
House With a Chandelier

 

78 OFIS, C+C, C28
Living Unit on Ljubljana Castle

 

80 SOZONYCH
Lesom

 

82 MARTIN ZIZKA
House for a Violin Maker

MARTIN ZIZKA, House for a Violin Maker, photography: Martin Zizka

86 LLUIS AUQUER FRAMIS
Casa de Fang

 

III . THE RUIN?

We might be tempted to think that whenever we will be working with ruins, we will be also working on a certain kind of nostalgic architectural feeling, and we might be thinking that this kind of architecture is always tranquil, in beige, or white, or light brown.
But this is not always the case with Sala Beckett, an explosion of colour, passion, textures and intensity – here we will find nostalgia in the details: in the carvings of the wall ornaments, in the corner of the floor tiles.
Svetana Boym defines nostalgia as «a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images – of home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life.»(ii) Whether it lays at the center of the project or it turns into an element that we work with and on, the ruin is always on the border, where everything is really alive – even though it might actually seem hostage.

 

92 FORES & PRATS
Sala Beckett

«The ruinous state in which we encountered was of interest, not because we wanted to restore it, but rather to take the ruin forward and make it a participant, with its unfinished character of overlapped periods, in a new reality that would continue to be updated on this foundation. (…) The challenge faced by this project is therefore to adapt the building to its new use without banishing its ghosts.» – Flores & Prats

 

98 KARIN MATZ
HB6B

 

102 COLL COLL
Prádelna

 

106 Ilinca Pop, Cătălina Frâncu
And What Are the Stories That We Do Not Tell?

 

108 HASAN CENK DERELI
Forced Migration

Some of us are forced to dwell in motion for various reasons.
People flee from the war zones. Others flee for political reasons. Sometimes the reason might be economic – the one that sometimes forces people to travel long miles every season to unfamiliar territories in order to become agricultural workers. One other reason might be immigration to other countries because of not being able to imagine a future in the homeland – losing faith and leaving all that is familiar behind. Whatever the reason is, all forms of forced migration are violent. It leaves psychological and physical marks not only on the one who migrates but also on the landscapes, cities and cultures. In a blink of an eye, the roots that had been developing over time are torn by the forces of the migration. People are aloft with all these scars for the rest of their lives. – H. Cenk Dereli

 

East Centric Projects

«The eyes are the windows to the soul» says the quote – but the soul also seeks the world outside. The window is not only a one-way portal through which we peek into someone’s intimacy, and not only a perk of being the Other.
In the projects’ selection of this issue’s East Centric Architecture Section, it is the quality of the space that matters, the way in which it supports its inhabitants’ lives and the way it provides some sort of adequacy to the user’s activities. The public space is not only a place in which we want to be seen, and private space is not only the place that keeps us safe, separate from the world outside. There are many relationships between the interior spaces of a building, or a building’s fragments – as these projects will show – and many thresholds that become places. The windows – they don’t only allow us to see and to be seen, but they also connect our different worlds. – Ilinca Pop

 

115 Vratislavice nad Nisou / Petr Stolín Architekt
Kindergarten Nová Ruda

 

118 Matthias Bär, Bernd Riegger, Querformat
Schendlingen School

 

122 AMUNT
NUB

 

125 Plaini and Karahalios Architects
Apartment in Korydallos

 

128 HRYSTIA KOLIASA ARCHITECTURE
Menchuks Apartment

 

132 MIOLK
Ants House

 

136 AB+Partners
Dental Studio

 

138 DSBA
Oromolu Business Center

 

142 DSBA
«Sfinții Ioan» Church

In other words, this is a metaphor that merges the subtle volumetry of a bow-ship with the anthropological symbolism of religious conversion in its structure. The cruciform receptacle of the sanctuary becomes a bowl of light, a space of glory and transparency of an iconographic organized beauty, the palace of the divine feast. The wing of the protector angel of the church calls delicately into the archetypal interior of the porch, which also holds a rich maternal, paradisiac / protological and eschatological symbolism. – prof. Jan Nicolae

 

The idea forming this unusual endowment is that «the secular originality» of preaching the Church is incompatible with any kind of stereotype, including the architectural one, and overcoming the obstacle of stylistic tautology may be a sign of metanoia in the spiritual life of ecclesial justice. – prof. Arch. Augustin Ioan

DSBA, «Sfinții Ioan» Church, photos: Laurian Ghinițoiu

Review overview