Bunești School. Protostructuralism

MANIFEST

EXTRA MUROS ARCHITECTURAL EXERCISES

The more sophisticated and comfortable city life becomes, the greater the need for simplicity. The "essential joys" remain the primordial joys. The workshops at Bunești do not propose an alternative to sedentary urban living, but build structures that invite to a complementary stage of minimal, ascetic living in the middle of nature. They are workshops in the architecture of shelter, of the bare minimum. The simplicity cultivated at Bunești is a way of life. The courage of this simplicity is radically different from the sensual comfort of modern minimalism.

MONOSTRUCTURE

The Bunești meadow is a great hall under the open sky in which the life of a school unfolds, a free plane in which places "float", points of community coagulation to which correspond structural, self-supporting forms of extreme conciseness: monostructures.

Monostructures involve the total identification of form-space-structure, using a single material, technique or construction principle, from the foundations to the roofing.

Only natural materials are used: wood, earth and stone. Their implementation is a major theme of investigation and innovation. This structural purism, which is matched by asceticism of expression, makes the dwelling tend towards a living sculpture: monoxyle, monolithic, monogee.

Monostructure is a meditation on the part and the whole. The instrument of this meditation is the module.

Through its camouflage, homochromatic and mimetic materiality, the construction merges with place.

The monostructures are pure forms, controlled by classical proportions and imbued with the symbolism of numbers, placed cardinally, in the light, according to their intended purpose.

The school at Bunești is composed of large-scale, handmade domestic objects, spatial extrapolations of the bed, the table, the chair, which become places for sleeping, eating, and talking. The world of these primordial structures is strictly dependent on the scale of man - anthropos methron.

THE EUCENIC ARCHITECT

The ucenic-architect does not set out to produce something new, but to learn. He "obeys" the natural building material. He is an apologist for the living material, in its frustrated state, which he puts to the test, to which he discovers its constructive energies in order to let himself be guided by them in the act of building. The ucenic architect is not a draughtsman, but a structural designer and builder. The execution process can be reversible. The Poiana de la Bunești has become a 1:1 scale model workshop, where the details of execution are born out of experimentation. The site has an initiatory role. The site is a Vitruvian school. The architect never knows at the outset how the structure he is building will look in detail. On a given theme, the means are discovered and enriched as the work progresses.

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Details on www.bunesti.ro.

Read the full text in issue 2/2013 of Arhitectura magazine

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