DRAGOŞ DASCĂLU –From Object-Architecture to Device-Architecture: Abandoning Naivety
Under diverse forms and informed by different ideologies, we assist today to a return of architecture towards individual and society. If we are to consider only the 20th century, we could say (even though it can seem simplistic) that it is a recurrent movement, or, better said, the role of the architecture in society is [...]
ALEXANDRU M. SANDU – Readiness of the Dispositif*
Explaining / interpreting / understanding the term “dispositif” (placed under debate) and the meanings of its content becomes much more complicated and difficult when such is told in relation to a specific reality and especially when one wishes to depart from a philosophical perspective. Our younger colleague has already told you several things in respect [...]
SABIN BORŞ – The Dispositif or the Double Articulation
Nowadays, architecture seems to be subject to three mandatory requirements, but also to a double articulation. The first requirement is to build (in) an already built-up city; the second is to become a political, genuinely responsible practice aimed at constructing the life space and communities; while the third, but not the last, requirement is to [...]
Florentina Badea – Empty Buildings – Between Incidents and Phenomena
Einstein: “A problem cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created it.” The real estate market is driven by supply and demand, and the private sector is always tempted to obtain maximum profit from luxury buildings. Investors analyse the market, but rapid transformations can lead to false wealth hopes, too high prices [...]
Silviu Aldea – Underground vs. alternative? A formula for a happy squat
Seen from the island of urban reality, the experience of squatting seems like a protesting act reserved for those belonging to the underground, the punk subculture, the neo-hippies, those marginalised or those at the periphery of society. An oddity associated with delinquency, considered as an equal to the illegality of secret techno parties and announced [...]
Ioan Andreescu – Metelkova Barracks, Ljubljana – Between Squatting and Mythology
Squatting, beyond its real problem, its social, economic and even political dimensions, presents – in certain communities – a delicate identity problematic. Here it is not about the image squatter communities project for themselves, about the reaction of the environment, about the complex management of these interactions; it is about a completely different thing – [...]
Bogdan Ghiu – In Squat We Trash
Trashdiction and Self-Squatting „Forced to squat our own home, the house that was built for us. Probably, a house is never lived in. Baudelaire’s „horreur du domicile”. (…) The monuments, churches ruin our houses from the inside. Our homes, always some layouts, some projects of living and death. To live well and to die in [...]
Wes Janz – Keith Knows Best
Dana Milea & Mihai Zachi: How would you define the notions of squatting/squatters? Wes Janz: I prefer a thesaurus to a dictionary, synonyms over definitions. I appreciate that some thing can be defined as different, but I start my understanding of some one based in what we share. For “squatter” my thesaurus offers: newcomer (new [...]
Sabin Borş – Squatters vs. Architecture
When reading through the posts signed by Robert Neuwirth on Squatter City (1), the blog that is part of the research Neuwirth published as Shadow Cities. A Billion Squatters – A New Urban World, the idea of questioning and radicalizing the “traditional” models of occupying the city immediately caught my attention. More precisely, models of [...]
Sabin Borș – StalkShow. The Dialectics of (Self) Screening, through the Screen
The passage from a culture based on knowledge to a culture based on communication seems to have taken place against many successive paradigm drifts, at the end of which the metamorphoses of the image have transformed communication itself into a relationing technique. The textual realities have been replaced by the virtual ones and the virtualization [...]
Mălina Conțu – The primitive remains primitive in architecture
In an issue which sets itself to debate the resources of the primitivism in contemporary architectural practice, before discussing its perception in architecture I will succinctly show the context in which the European culture’s interest for the primitive was born. Therefore, I opted for two factors: the Darwinist anthropology of the 19th century as a [...]
Ionuț Butu – Beyond Traces
The discussion concerning «Traces and screenings» was launched through a series of presentations within the Fluencies festival, organized by Arhitext at Timişoara last autumn. In the following pages, we propose to continue this theoretical demarche through a collection of texts which deepen the meanings and shades of the two concepts within the background of contemporary [...]
Bogdan Ghiu – Marginal, with My Hand on My Face (the Index-Symbol alliance)
We should, perhaps, project a small, trifling, anodinous, invisible, imperceptible because habitual, ordinary, automatic current technological condition (technological condition of the world, the world set into a new technological condition, the world is constantly set, it does not exist outside technological conditions, technology is exactly this: conditioning, creation of conditions, world-conditions themselves, ways of «making [...]
Elena Druncea – The (Primordial) Spirit of Architecture
The present text touches the ethical and immaterial aspects of spatial organization, while bearing in mind the sacred dimension of primitive architecture: transcendence, primary dwelling, interiority. Such a theme here is traversed by in parallel description of the experimental architecture project in Buneşti (Argeş) through an ethical phenomenological perspective. Simultaneously, spiritual geography and hermeneutics related [...]
Florentina Badea – Traces, Courses, and Aims
When we open the subject of traces, some have a reaction of archaeological nature, as if we’d be talking about sarcophagi bringing to light ornaments and hints, but also contagions and spirits, and which would better remain sealed, as some Pandora’s boxes. This reaction could (partially) rise from the confusion between the position shared by [...]
Doru O. Comșa – Primitive High End
le corbusier’s le cabanon in roquebrune–cap martin le cabanon is in fact a wooden nest. it is the smallest architectural object realized by le corbusier. square plan of 3.66 x 3.66 meters with a height of 2.26 m defines the inhabitable space. this small cube attached to the restaurant of a good friend [...]
Camelia Sisak – The Periphery in the Balkans
The topic «Traces and Screenings» is very vague and leaves place to various interpretations, while at the same time being very difficult to build a discourse that could easily go in a discussion from a panel. The main preoccupation has been to connect this subject to the current context of the Romanian space and to [...]
Alexandru Sandu – Think of a Trace
… every individual goes at least through one crazy moment when he goes into retirement because he must actually reorientate his existence … it is my current situation … under these conditions I have to tell you this topic launched by Arhitext regarding the trace I don’t know how but it somehow fell over this [...]
Ionuț Butu – The Primitive within Architecture
Within the theme «Primitive houses» we aim at exploring the means by which certain contemporary architecture works reassume and express primary / primordial features of architecture and of the act of edification. In order to identify such features, we suggest a look towards primitive architecture – an architecture which is the fruit of intuition and [...]
Marian Iulia – Just or Justice?
I remember the first hours of grammar, in middle school, when I’ve learned about the «implied subject». I also remember how in my mind, the subject acquired an enigmatic significance because I knew what it was doing, where and how, aspects that helped me through empathy, analogies and associations, to outline an absolutely personal picture, [...]
Luca Farinelli – Architecture, Anonimity, and Revenge
“It’s very small!” This is the comment Giorgio Napolitano, the running President of Italy, made upon visiting a balcony of Palazzo Venezia, in Rome, on the 31st of January 2011. From this very balcony, on June 10th 1940, Mussolini had declared war on France and England. It has since inevitably become associated with the leader [...]
Francesco Gatti – Architect Neurosis Confessions
This topic was born spontaneously because of those architects (like myself) whom don’t give a fuck about the final users of their architectures but design only to be published in CityVision and other cool magazines. Anyway we don’t want to admit we become cynical and superficial helping the invasion of our territories by the [...]
Andreea-Livia Ivanovici – Simple and Vague
Let’s begin with the idea that the city embodies a constant dialogue between its buildings, streets, squares and other specific elements. Let’s take a break while in the urban space, and for a few moments listen to what every building tells us. We will become receivers of a message that the city communicates. Or will [...]
Dana Pop – Life in the Blob, Clicking on the Touch Screen
The content of the urban space, of the public space is being stolen. Our activities move even more to the inside space, the outside being almost swallowed by architecture, better said by interiority. Only from a reductionist point of view, this interiority must necessarily be synonymous with architecture, which means that any defined, closed space [...]
