mânadelucru

" Dorin Ștefan Adam / Mădălina Iftimi / Artenian Soldea

Simina Dron: What does Mânadelucru mean?

Dorin Ștefan Adam: The name Mânadelucru came later than the team itself. There were never more than five people in the company. A very small office, maybe not very atypical in the small number for what is happening in architecture offices in Romania. I think only on a small scale can you do something because as soon as the number of employees increases, I think it institutionalizes things and the rules by which they would operate very much. It becomes a commercial company with managers, with a pronounced economic character, where the business has to grow constantly to stay in the market and I think there's a higher risk of architecture becoming just a business. We are a small office, better or worse, but with a lot of enthusiasm and we do everything with quite a lot of effort.

The name Mânadelucru... As soon as I got out of college, I started a firm with the desire to practice, to have a "birth certificate" and to put stamps on the plans. The first firm had a totally uninspired name - Architectonic. The second was Mânadelucru, which came in the context when Mădă wanted, with some friends, to start a business with small-scale, short-series, self-made objects.

Maria Mădălina Iftimi: We made a small business and sold curtains, cushions, made with materials bought with parents' money, second-hand, and made with the sewing machine of the friends' mothers. It was absolutely unprofitable.

D.Ș.A.: It was a production workshop, making something. From very small pieces. After all, architecture is also about small pieces put together.

Coming back to the name, the third firm - Humaniac - had a name very similar to a shoe shop (Humanic) I saw in Vienna, which I always mispronounced, but I liked the resonance of it.

All the firms were on the income tax recital, i.e. a turnover of €100,000. It seemed like some kind of profitable foreseeable future. But two of the firms have already closed. So it was a short-lived forecast.

That left Mânadelucru, which I took more and more seriously, because in the beginning it was all a bit more playful, driven by the desire of a recent graduate.

My first entry into the architecture market came after graduating.

I worked with Dan Marin and Zeno Bogdănescu, after which I branched out on my own. The first houses were made with all the ignorance, all the doubts and total uncertainty, but with a lot of trust from the clients, gained through determination.

Things were somehow becoming more visible, and perhaps the seriousness of commitment to a project and inner responsibility must somehow take on a meaning, a maturity.

Returning to the people in the office, today we are three architects: Maria M.M.I., Artemian Șoldea and D.Ș.A.. Of the old guard, only me and Mădă are still in the new, smaller formula. Mădă, in the meantime, has graduated. I somehow worked with her during her studies. I was an assistant in her group and that's how we met, and things grew from scratch.

S.D.: Do you have any abandoned work or clients?

D.Ș.A.: I can't remember. I am very stubborn, and I often get more angry and vociferous than I am able to put into practice the decisions taken in anger and make them firm and irrevocable. In any situation I am always looking for meaning. I hardly ever abandon or "throw someone off the boat" (even if it seems to some people that I do). I've been accused of an inexplicable pragmatism by distancing myself from someone, but it doesn't characterize me.

M.M.I.: And at school, when you were still talking about a project, you would explain it in stages, and now, when we're all sitting at our desks thinking about how to do it, you say: "OK, we'll do it like this.

D.Ș.A.: Yes, it's also a waste of patience.

S.D.: Or a gain of experience.

D.Ș.A.: Not always. Because we never claim that we gain experience, although we have seen that experience comes if you work and, implicitly, make mistakes. Experience is gained through mistakes, but also through good things. I find it hard to believe that we do good things. I don't know why people talk good or bad.

Why is a criticism favorable or unfavorable? In any case, I would appreciate the criticism. In this sense I think that all architecture annuals and biennales mean a critique, and I'm glad that there are more and more of them, and that means a seriousness and a responsibility. But not an artificial responsibility like: what is the fashion? What's the jury? How do you win?

We relate to each house as something new, as if we know nothing. Each house, even though we've gotten many others wrong so far, is like the excitement of a newborn baby, except that the rush that Mădă was talking about spoils a lot.

M.M.I.: I put a post-it on my monitor with "I'm in no hurry!".

D.Ș.A.: I come into the office and hurry the others. Rushing, yes, is a problem. And another thing I've noticed: clients want you to be with them for as long as possible, and at some point they come into your life, and that can be very tiring.

S.D.: If they somehow become your friends, then things are much more difficult, especially as I've been through that experience.

DS: I wouldn't say friend, but rather close, and then you feel indebted, and you're part of his life, and you lose a freedom that you should have. You have to keep a minimum freedom of thought, of professionally justified decision-making. Clients often believed us by virtue of our determination, the credibility that they had directly with us as individuals, before they were fully convinced of our professional abilities. The clients always came through the recommendations of other people with whom we had a contact or for whom we had designed something, so after a face-to-face experience.

M.M.I.: But that can be an opportunity to experiment, because clients don't have the culture to structure their opinions. And then you allow yourself to test, to do an exercise.

Read the full text in issue 1/2012 of Arhitectura magazine.