Regenerate
ARCHITECTURE has maintained its balance since it was founded in 19061.
For some years now2 its editorial strategy has favored looking inwards rather than outwards. A transfer of interest from international to local, from global to specific and from generic to unique is encouraged.
Contemporary architecture in Romania3 indicates a filtered diminution of the fascination for various borrowed images, for spectacular constructions and appealing approaches that have descended into our reality through inabil mimesis or even bad imitation.
A period of more than 20 years with explicable decantations of major models, sources and images leads the current editorial team to a challenging role: to record, debate and criticize contemporary Romanian architecture.
Thus, the magazine's policy tries to respond directly to the professional and cultural communication needs of Romanian architects. The major tone is temperate. The architecture promoted excludes ostentation and notifies the most successful projects capable of constituting a model for architects and students. The thematic files are based on generous semantic concepts, they invite associations and broaden the architectural horizon towards art, philosophy, sociology, etc. The topics presented are intended to open discussions in a broad cultural register.
The magazine builds a plea for quality Romanian architecture, advocates the need for architectural culture, observes the elements of influence at an international level and, in a world somewhat invaded by slippages and anomalies, privileges the idea of regeneration as a current approach.
In Romanian architecture, 2013 is not so much a year of stagnation as a year of reconsideration. Even if some architectural offices are forced to reduce the number of employees and, in extreme cases, to discontinue their activity, there is also a beneficial aspect - contemplative time. In other words, architects now have the respite to study, read and debate things that, while important, did not previously fit into a busy project agenda. Contemplative time becomes a project, it becomes a working theme. Among Romanian architects, this project of otherwise dedicated time implies a certain densification of efforts towards worthwhile things. Noica said: "That leave shadows on the earth with meaning". There is an ethical approach to finding meaning. It drives architects' choices of involvement towards voluntary action, participation in national and international competitions and subsistence alternatives. Groups of rescuers of forgotten monuments, wooden churches, young architects inviting schoolchildren or even pre-school children to play architecture, summer schools with the purpose of learning to look at the sky, and many others, with or without the identity of NGOs, are emerging.
Heritage is also seen as a resource in specialist circles in Romania. The industrial one has created a certain cultural emulation since 2005. There are workshops on industrial archaeology, draft laws for the protection of industrial heritage, partnerships for its valorization, but also (already) generations of diploma projects on a building belonging to this category. All this demonstrates a certain attention to the notion of regeneration.
It is precisely for these reasons that the journal ARHITECTURA has embarked on an editorial project aimed at regenerating four types of attitudes towards architecture, heritage and the built environment.
1. The regeneration of public interest - but also of the architects themselves - in the knowledge of contemporary Romanian architecture (debates on the architectural profession, the architectural market, employment prospects, de-professionalization and reprofessionalization, round tables on the architecture of the regions of Cj, Md, Tm, the subject of special issues published by UAR - ARHITECTURA magazine).
2. Regeneration of civic spirit through knowledge of architectural values (guided tours of architecture, based on the ARHITECT itineraries published in ARHITECTURA/UAR magazine, presentations, conferences, round tables).
3. Regenerating interest in the built heritage as a dominant theme of debate. Assumption of examples of good practice through proper questioning of conversions, restorations and rehabilitations (critical reviews of realized projects and competitions at home and abroad).
4. Regenerating communication and dialog between generations of architects - the permanent presence of rising architects alongside effigies and profile (the magazine encourages the form of volunteering of students and young architects in distributing ARHITECTURA magazine to senior architects, an opportunity for acquaintance, discussion, debate and interviews).
ARHITECTURA is a means of promoting culture and responsibility for the built environment. We are in a permanent period of transition. Romania's recent history reiterates periods of transition.
We understand it as a phase, but above all as an opportunity to recover values, to repair, to modernize and to reconnect critically and with discernment to international culture. However, we are witnessing - sometimes too apathetically - a continuation of aggression against our heritage and out-of-control development.
Raising society's awareness of these problems and promoting valuable and responsible role models are thus no longer just a matter of aesthetics, but of immediate and vital public interest. That is why REGENERATE is an editorial platform to which ARCHITECTURE magazine has resolutely committed itself.
Notes:
1 Another institution established in 1906 is the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant - MȚR. About it we know and read that it is STILL CURRENT. SIN 1906.
2 In February 2011, the UAR completely changed the editorial team of the ARHITECTURA magazine, occasion of a strategic review of the publication.
3 Some architectural theorists claim that there is no contemporary Romanian architecture. However radical the labeling may be, it contains a kernel of truth or, rather, a characteristic of recent architectural production - namely that it is constituted by a multitude of cases rather than as the result of a perceptible phenomenon with common attitudes, clear reactions and obvious positions.