Architects on the rise

estplan

www.estplan.ro

Arhitectura Magazine: Who is estplan?

Estplan: An architectural office. The team: architect Călin Nicolae, architect Vasilica Tihan, student-architect Bogdan Gogoci.

R.A.: Is the prestige of the architectural profession in decline? Why?

C.N.: Prestige has been built by those who have made architecture a vocation and is apriorically linked to society's expectations of someone engaged in the "process of adapting Topography". Maintaining or consolidating prestige depends on the number of architects who will avoid the traps of consumer society, relating to the professional approach from an anthropological perspective.

V.T.: No doubt, yes, since, still, public space architecture betrays bad professional practice. This may be the consequence of an inadequate technical-professional training, superimposed on a false understanding of the daily needs that give rise to the order; among the practitioners of this vocational profession the exercise of seeking the useful at all costs has been lost.

On the other hand, the coagulation of a fairly coherent and consistent social group is evident, which knows what it wants, within which the cultural elites, and therefore also the professional ones, are real and formative. Among them are those who "know their trade", the good ones, the leaders of our profession. It is only through the prestige of such a guild that individuals and communities can once again come to recognize the importance of our profession in the social context.

B.G.: The prestige of the profession, if it still exists in the true sense, is only a legacy, a reflection of society. As representatives of a guild, we are not always worthy of the prestige we are accorded.

The profession of architect has lately been populated by the type of 'handyman', 'housekeeper', 'successful man', who does not understand the meaning of the word 'prestige' (you cannot call such a man a moral authority) and, lo and behold, he capitalizes on it and throws it in your face whenever he gets the chance.

The decline in prestige is mainly due to us, current or future architects; in the end, it is part of a man's basic mental faculties to distinguish right from wrong, to not compromise, to seek when he is not sure. To knowingly perpetuate an evil, to not constantly question oneself, to persist in something without evaluating the repercussions is pathological.

R.A.: Do you sense an obvious threat? Of what kind? How do you overcome it?

V.T.: Yes, the establishment, as normality, of the absence of social norms or values at the level of the individual or society, a state in which the absence of rules or their circumvention (most frequently those of urban planning, regulating the urban built space) become the rule, the model by which to measure whether or not you are "a successful person".

B.G.: Romanian architecture has lost the exercise of beauty, it has become a prisoner of borrowed forms, insensitive to the material and spiritual needs of the world it serves, it is like a mad dog, it doesn't listen to anything, it doesn't pay attention to anything. The mad dog is killed so as not to do more harm.

If I have to note a threat, it is society's rejection of the profession; in the end it is not indispensable, the world has functioned just fine without it.

Read the full text in Arhitectura 6/2013

P15

COLLECTIVE HOUSING