Archinect - News

Oana Stănescu named curator for the Beta 2024 Timișoara Architecture Biennial

2024-01-11T13:00:00-05:00

Romanian architect Oana Stănescu has been named as the curator for the Beta 2024 Timișoara Architecture Biennial. In a career spanning two decades, the architect, designer, writer, and educator has offered a “profound reading of contemporary architecture and design,” according to the biennial organizers.

“I am deeply honored, excited and nervous, thrilled and moved all at the same time,” Stănescu said about the appointment. “We live our lives within the confines of architecture, which makes it the perfect excuse for urgent socio-cultural conversations, especially in Romania’s unique position, with its simultaneous proximity and distance to the West.”

Having completed her architectural studies at FAUT (The Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism from Timișoara), Stănescu ultimately established her studio in New York and Berlin, with notable projects including retail designs for Virgil Abloh’s Off White stores, large-scale installations at MoMA and Coachella, and a co-founding of the col...

Resilient cities How nature turned a failed communist plan into Bucharest's unique urban park

2016-06-15T20:00:00-04:00

The diversity of landscapes is fascinating. The northern edge is a meadow with wild grass, nut trees, poplars and elms, but venture deeper into the park, towards the three interconnected lakes at its heart, and the vegetation becomes denser and more characteristic of wetlands: various types of willow, Johnson grass and water lilies.

"The wild wetland of Văcărești is a symbol of nature’s resilience. Without human interference, wildlife has reconquered this abandoned lake and transformed it into a green oasis in the middle of one of Europe’s densest cities"

Dispatch from the Venice Biennale: rewarding obscurity

2016-05-31T17:22:00-04:00

Much will be published over the coming days about the Biennale's national pavilion winners—Spain’s “Unfinished” (with the Golden Lion) and Japan’s “en: Art of Nexus” and Peru’s “Our Amazon Frontline” (with special mentions). It is a phenomenon that conceals the terrain, limiting the perspective of the majority, and inaccurately reduces the dynamism of the lived experience. At the same time, after the fascination with the nominations wears off, it garners those passed over with a certain mystique. In the interest of representation and curiosity, then, it seems fitting to acknowledge a (very) small sampling of the more and wider.

Oh, Canada. This year, per curator Pierre Bélanger, the Canadians overcame “a list of every possible bureaucratic, logistical, and material blockade imaginable multiplied times three” in order to participate in the Biennale. With their permanent pavilion closed for construction and an agitator’s stance, the “Extraction” team’s contribution is all fight. They t...

Miniature manhole rooms highlight reality of Bucharest's underground dwellers

2016-04-15T13:30:00-04:00

Borderlife is a street art intervention by Biancoshock in which three abandoned manholes in Milan’s Lodi district have been transformed into miniature dwellings. [...] With Borderlife the street artist wants to make us aware about the distressing living conditions of many fellow humans who are forced to live in confined spaces, especially manholes. He got his inspiration from the reportedly hundreds of people that are occupying manholes and sewer systems in the Romanian capital Bucharest.

Images of the BORDERLIFE street art intervention via Biancoshock's website.

Subterranean theme park: photographer Richard John Seymour captures the new life inside an ancient Transylvanian salt mine

2016-01-18T15:11:00-05:00

Deep in the Transylvanian countryside lies an ancient salt mine dating back over two millennia. Today Salina Turda has become an unlikely tourist attraction, with thousands of visitors descending its vertical shafts each year to play mini-golf, go bowling and row around its underground lake. [...] British photographer Richard John Seymour recently travelled to Salina Turda in his quest to document human-altered landscapes.

Romanian Andy Pascali arrived at holiday home to find it had disappeared

2014-07-21T14:34:00-04:00

He said the property that he had inherited from his parents who had built it in 1986 had also been fully furnished with a brand-new fitted kitchen and bathroom. He added: 'I had been worried about thieves maybe breaking in and stealing the television or something, and so I put a barbed wire fence up around the house for added security. But they stole that as well.'

Photos of Bucharest's past

2013-10-05T23:58:00-04:00

Andrei Pandele is emphatic: "The Palace? Ha! It is a wall in the way of the people. A dam, even...I was an architect...I could find plans [and] approximate what they would destroy. Not exactly, no-one knew that. They were wild, totally out of control."

Tessa Dunlop traveled to Bucharest, Romania and talked with Andrei Pandele, who as a young architect in the 1970s, began photographing his home country.

Romania's church-building boom

2013-08-07T13:54:00-04:00

Romania's Minister of Religious Affairs, Victor Opaschi, concedes that there is a close working relationship between the church and politicians during electoral campaigns, and that this is "not a good thing".

Tessa Dunlop reports in from Romania where the Orthodox Church is in the midst of a growth spurt with as many as 10 new places of worship being completed every month, and the enormous Cathedral for the People's Salvation is slowly taking shape. However, Romanians have begun to question the use of public funds for such purposes, especially in one of the poorest countries in the EU.

Zimoun + Hannes Zweifel : 200 prepared dc-motors, 2000 cardboard elements 70x70cm

2011-04-26T12:44:24-04:00

If you happen to be in Bucharest, Romania these days, don't miss to check out the latest exhibition piece of Swiss sound and installation artist Zimoun, "200 prepared dc-motors, 2000 cardboard elements 70x70cm". The 15x9x4.5m (49.2 x 29.5 x 14.7 ft) installation is a collaboration with fellow Swiss architect Hannes Zweifel and currently exhibited at the National Contemporary Art Museum MNAC.