Interview

Interview with architect Iulia Stanciu

"I think restoration has given me much more fulfillment than a new house. [...] It is touching the way in which, through each fragment, the house reveals itself"

Iulia Stanciu, interviu de Tudor Elian și Matei Eugen Stoean

authors: Tudor Elian, Matei Eugen Stoean

WE TALK WITH THE ARCHITECT CONF. DR. IULIA STANCIU, CO-FOUNDER WITH FLORIAN STANCIU OF STARH ARCHITECTURE OFFICE AND WORKSHOP TUTOR AT UAUIM, YEARS II-III, ABOUT THE PROJECT AWARDED AT THE 2012 BUCUREȘTI ARCHITECTURE ANNUAL, IN THE RESTORATION AND REHABILITATION SECTION. Tudor Elian: Tell us a bit about how you came to take on this project and the condition in which you found the building. Iulia Stanciu: It's a house that I have been watching over the years. It fascinated me for a long time, I used to walk past it and the fact that someone finally took it over and decided to recover it makes me very happy. It's a jewel, a house with a very high concentration of craftsmanship. Between 1995-1997, some work began, scaffolding was installed, alterations were made in the annex. I used to watch them as I walked down the street. Then they stagnated for a while. The scaffolding that remained meant greying on the facade, seepage, ornaments removed with the intention of restoration were never put back in place. It was almost ten years from the time of the first intervention until I entered the house through a concurrence of circumstances, not with the beneficiary, but with a real estate agent who wanted to sell the house and hoped to find a buyer among my clients. It was obvious from the outside that the house was an architectural gem with its combined eclectic style (neo-Romanesque and oriental). The interior was organized on the classic structure of such a house: the central hall and four quasi-equivalent rooms, on a very flexible typology, where rooms can change function according to how they are furnished. However, the interior was a total surprise: the hallway decorated with frescoes, the gables and each room with a different decoration, all preserved, but heavily loaded with successive paintwork, layers upon layers that diminished the brilliance of the colors and the finesse of the plaster details. The first step was to find someone to give this little gem to. I tried among my recipients and fairly soon after I had visited the house a friend who wanted to buy a place to live and had found something in the neighborhood sought me out. I went, I saw it, it was totally inappropriate for what she needed and far below the value of the house in Budișteanu St. that I offered her instead. That's how the affair began, with a person who was close to me, but who, initially, I don't think he realized what he was getting into because, although he was in the situation of having another house fitted out, he had never done any restoration and not with an architect. T.E.: So how was the relationship with the beneficiary? Did the repurposing of the house or the fact that it had no clear function influence your choices during the project and site? I.S.: The intention was to be a representative building for a liberal profession. Over time, the function changed several times.... perhaps it will continue to change, but that is no longer up to us architects. Mainly, when we started, there were a few things we knew we had to do to give value to the house: to be well consolidated, obviously, to restore the original material, to clean it of the added parasitic elements (dormer windows, access from the street directly into the basement), to try to integrate the volumetric integration of the remaining undecorated annex, and to do this as discreetly and in the style's naturalness as possible. We knew that there were things that could not be touched, beyond which we could try to change the functionality: the facade, the decorative elements and the ground floor. No matter what function the house took on, these would ensure the house's representative and valuable status. From this, any function was possible and this is something that the beneficiary understood. So there was never a time when function seriously affected these valuable things. T.E.: What were the first steps of restoration then? I.S.: It started as with any restoration. Generally, when I work on old houses, the restoration team comes in first. They are the first to start the surveys, the discreet uncovering and the study of the existing layers. Then the controlled uncovering, decoration sampling, molding, stripping, consolidation, restoration, refacing, etc. When I started the project, I thought the interior had been worked on in several stages: I suspected that the neoclassical decorations were from another, more recent period. The date carved on the back of the gables and the date in the signature of the fresco paintings showed the same year: 1896, and most probably everything was done simultaneously, but giving each room its own character. All of the ceiling painting in the entrance foyer was covered and has been cleaned, repaired, and chromatically reintegrated. The paintings in the hallway had 3 coats of paint added over the original and a thick protective varnish, which gave them a slightly kitsch look. The owner initially wanted to take them down, but nevertheless gave us the chance to come in with a specialist who identified their date and discovered that they were original, exactly from the time the house was built. And as the paintings and red-gray paintwork on the ceilings were cleaned, the space brightened. The paintings, while not extraordinary works of art, stay very much in place. In the rooms on the ground floor, a lot of work has been done to restore the ceilings and walls. In one of them, we discovered, by accident, an original 30% original hull, which was completely covered by a more recent undecorated quarter-circle. The initial probes were not around, but we were "helped" by a seepage from a heavy downpour that dampened the entire ceiling in the exact area where a piece of the hull was still hidden, and, wanting to see if the cane was still in good condition, the restoration team coordinator took down the additions and found the first fragment. In the room with the stove we found a 3 by 3 mm blue shard in the ceiling... very blue! A typical oriental decoration with this blue-white contrast. The lower area had a few orange with green fragments. I couldn't find enough information as to what the decoration was like, but I think this was actually the most chromatically spectacular area. We didn't know what to do here. It's actually the room that retains the style of the façade decoration. The room had a gallery for paintings and behind one butt of the gallery we found wallpaper and we decided to put the wallpaper entirely on the walls. It was pretty close in color to what we have now, maybe a little more greenish. It may seem a lot to say "we discovered"... but it's touching how, through each fragment, the house reveals itself. T.E.: The project also had an important strengthening component, how did you solve the structural problems of the building? I.S.: It was done. There were a lot of cracks in the masonry, especially in the area of the window mullions and parapets. But it was not so much the need for a major reinforcement, as the difficulty of slipping discreetly through the delicate decoration of the house. If you look carefully, the house has decorations on the outside where it doesn't have any on the inside and on the inside where it doesn't have any on the outside, so the idea of a belt to hold it on either side of the masonry was nowhere to be applied. We spent quite a bit of time trying to find the best strengthening solution that wouldn't show through and affect the decoration by taking it apart and redoing it. The system adopted is a mixed system that does not touch any of the decoration, none of the cane ceilings, and relies only on a network of metal beams sandwiched between the wooden beams, which rest directly on the load-bearing walls. This system was, in fact, the "tie-rod" tying the house to the attic level and allowed it to be raised in a way that was not very visible to the outside. Here we allowed ourselves a license that we "tested" during the building site: the cornice had to remain untouched, it was a given I didn't want to give up, and the whole system we applied was added on top, doubling the existing rafters and amplifying the cornice's shadow. The lift was substantial for full use of the loft. I added velux skylights in the roof plane. The house had some parasitic dormers added probably in 1995-'97, and in the rear area I kept only one of them whose presence I took advantage of, lengthening it virtually across the entire body of the addition and transforming it from a parasitic object into an eyelid that the house lifts over the rear roofs. The basement is slightly buried below ground level, it's a bright and pleasant space. The only drawback was that it didn't have a connection with the land, and that's where we intervened by creating a slightly wider excavated courtyard at ground level, which one of the rooms opens directly onto. In general, our interventions were minimal and discreet. We rather emphasized and nuanced what was already there. T.E.: The multidisciplinary approach is obviously very important for such a project. How was the collaboration with experts from other fields? Did you encounter any difficulties in finding a team with the right background for such a site? I.S.: With the restoration team it was not the first time. With Ștefan Neacșu, who coordinated the restoration of the stucco and painting decorations, I had already worked at Cafepedia in 2 Pictor Verona Street, where he had already done the mastery test with Florin Boca. They were then working for the first time as freelancers, after having worked at the Dimitrie Gusti House in Armindenului street, subcontracted by the Bog'art trust, when I watched them working on the plaster profiles, silently, on the scaffolding. As I couldn't find anyone to restore Cafepedia, I called them in to have their say. There used to be a lot of qualified artists who specialized in restoration. The budget was small, and all the bids far exceeded it. They weren't certified and they simply did the surveys, told us their opinion and asked for little. The client chose quickly. Obviously they worked at a loss and in very difficult site conditions, but what they did was remarkable. It was their chance and the house's chance. They were very young, Florin Boca in the meantime gave up and became a drawing teacher, came back to Reghin, Ștefan Neacșu formed a new team with whom I worked here. All of them are Fine Arts graduates in the Painting or Sculpture Department, with a specialization in restoration. Meeting them was one of the greatest joys I have had in my profession. It was a complex job for them and everything about home decoration is due to them. Very important was also the VLAD GROUP construction trust that worked and had specialists on each category of work separately: we had a team of carpenters, a team of masons, who redid the plaster on the facades, the mosaic on the plinth and the floors. There are few craftsmen who still know how to work using traditional methods. However, I believe that restoration craftsmen are special people. First of all, they have pride in their trade, which is rare, they are people who are masters of what they know, who are still passing the baton from generation to generation. The team of bricklayers who redid the plaster and mosaic (and who don't reveal any of their secrets) consisted of the mason who is 75-80 years old and can no longer do the heavy stuff, but is still at work, with the 55-60 year old apprentice and his two boys. That's one of the teams. It's absolutely delightful to witness some professional bickering between father and son. Great people who are easy to work with! Then I had constant support in coordinating the work from Mrs. Eng. Caterina Ciurel. She's still on duty, with the finishing touches. T.E.: You have realized several restoration projects: are there personal values and common principles that link them? Or conversely, what conclusions from this site can be extrapolated to future projects? I.S.: Without a doubt, I think that everything we have done is helpful. However, I don't think we often had the chance of a pure restoration, and almost all the houses where we intervened needed more restoration. Houses that have deteriorated as a result of recent interventions, houses where, more than restoration, it is more a question of the urgency of recovery, of restoring their lost dignity. That, on the one hand, made me feel useful, it's a nice feeling to see that you succeed in something like that. On the other hand, it also left me with the frustrating feeling of not being able to intervene every time on a naturally aged house, to find it as such, where I could restore and mark very clearly what I was adding. Or I've encountered situations where it wasn't about marking when you did something, but trying to mold to the existing style. It's a trap with good parts. Drawing ornaments actually gives you tremendous pleasure. Like, for example, when I recomposed the cornice and did the 1:1 hand detailing to make it make sense on the building site.... colorful! The craftsmen were delighted. You have a pleasure of pure drawing and you have the joy of taking over, of feeling that you're mellowing, that you're settling in well with what's there. T.E.: Anyway, working with something that exists, you have the satisfaction of having immediate contact with the real. I.S.: Yes, but it's also a danger, because in a new house we give a beneficiary dreams that he sees as we do, or he sees them differently, and only when they start to materialize does he become happy or, on the contrary, frightened. But an old house is seen from the beginning, and there is a danger that a beneficiary will immediately "know" what he wants to do with it, will start to combine it with what he has seen elsewhere, etc. Arguments for the originality of each individual object are harder to convey. It's easier when you offer a dream only in the dream state. If it has some concreteness, the convincing starts to get harder. On the other hand, anyone who buys an old house with the thought of fixing it up will surely do so by being mesmerized by something in it. In terms of contact with the real thing, I am tempted to try my hand sometimes. I like it very much! That happens in new houses too, not only in old ones, but here I spent a lot of time on scaffolding with the workers, cutting, drawing them over elements, on wood, on the floor, on the walls (obviously), trying patina on decorations... T.E.: You were very present on the site and you made several discoveries on the spot which, of course, could not have been anticipated. I.S.: Part of the joy of restoration work. And I had the office very close by. I also went to the site three times a day. With the discoveries, I was lucky. I think restoration has given me more fulfillment than a new house. Noticing what you find and the surprises you have along the way, discovering construction techniques that I realized I knew only superficially. Sometimes, an anchor perfectly hidden in a masonry that you wondered how it stands says more than a building site can say today, and these discoveries in old houses helped us a lot in making new houses. T.E.: What exactly do you think you manage to bring from these discoveries to the design workshop that you lead at UAUIM? I.S.: I think that's precisely that. I try to teach the students in particular to observe, to pay attention and to use the materials in their full sense because that's what I think I discovered in the old houses. Nothing that I have found here has been used in any other way than the material required. I do a lot of experimenting with students, and I often experiment with what we haven't had a chance to realize. To tie in with the restoration side and the student projects that you ask about, I think it's given me the pleasure - and I hope I've been able to pass it on to them - to work a lot with the materials and the forms that the materials are found in. Our students "have free rein" to any form. They don't necessarily have to live in topical formulas (who knows what else will come up when they work?). In our workshop we have declared that vaults, domes, capitals, decorations can be made, as long as they all find their meaning in the project. Of course, the didactic purpose is not necessarily for them to have the madness to apply them later in reality, but just to train them to work understanding the deeper meaning of each line, to be honest in what they create and to beware of false and imposture. T.E.: And I suppose when it comes to your own architectural practice you can say the same thing. I.S.: Yes, we try to work honestly, not to exaggerate.