Cluj / Current trends and local values

Beyond all the inherent tensions between generations, young people will always carry the hopes of an era. Whether realists or idealists, with a field of reference in the certainties of contact with matter or in the feverish dynamism of the virtual world, young architects express with the fervor of the times the same old refrain of the creative condition. It is in this effort to define themselves in the face of time, in their filial or antagonistic relationship with their native land, that the individual personality or the personality of a group asserts itself.

It would be difficult to define the generation of rising architects from Cluj by a common denominator. The tendency that animates them all is a balanced and beneficial openness to the world, an openness that previous generations could not enjoy. The highly mobile features of today's reality, globalization, technologization, media dependence and the widespread use of electronic media for all types of communication are clearly creating a new human type. Connecting today's trends - capable of erasing boundaries in space and time - with the values of tradition seems to be an impossible task. This is precisely the miracle that young architects from Cluj are presenting to the world.

Eco-friendly, low-tech, craftsmanship raised to mastery and technical performance - these are just some of the landmarks of a local approach to universality. Often minimalist in their architectural expression, many of them are maximalist in their aspirations, in their ever-renewed quest to adapt the regional to a broader, European framework, in their attempts to reconcile the technological age with nature.

Just as active in the civic space as in the rarefied area of architectural conception, some of the architects from Cluj propose striking attitudes in the face of indifference and neglect, in the face of the mediocrity of the local quality of life. Reconsidering the vernacular and integrating its specific values into the current field of architecture is a constant preoccupation.

With a remarkable presence in the cultural field, marking the territory of artistic endeavor sometimes with sensitive discretion, sometimes with unmistakable verve, the inhabitants of Cluj thus complete a complex, clearly defined profile.