Ex libris

Architects, architecture and cities. About the profession of architect and how to build in recent Romania

The volume by Șerban Țigănaș is a collection of texts with the same common denominator: the reference to the profession of architect, to its results in relation to architecture and to the complex, but insufficiently understood, phenomena related to building. All the texts - articles, editorials, lectures, strategy papers of the Romanian Order of Architects, interviews, commentaries and dialogues with mentors or visionaries - come from the last ten years or so, from the period with the greatest influence on Romania's recent development (2001-2013), whether we are talking about the greatest economic and construction boom or the most complicated crisis.

The book Architects, Architecture and Cities. Despre profesia de arhitectia și cum se construiește în România recentă - which is based on a very careful selection of contents - can be perceived as a Pandora's Box of architecture and urbanism. Once opened, it can liberate and explain obsessions, traumas and phenomena related to the very recent history that is being fabricated before our very eyes, to which we are party and through which we learn as we go along how architects and architecture negotiate with themselves, with politics, with public administration and with the civil society that has been in the process of formation in the last ten years or so in Romania.

The book proposes for lucid analysis a series of recurring themes: the civic and cultural responsibility of the architect, the relationship with the client and with society, the organization of the profession, architectural education, quality and sustainability in architecture, recent Romanian urbanism, the architecture of public space, the disaster and the state of heritage, the state of the profession at the European level and its adaptation to the crisis. The author has an overview of the subject, being actively involved in the organization of the profession and its relation to society both nationally and internationally. Șerban Țigănaș is interested in the interface between the school of architecture, the community and the city, and within the Romanian Architects' Order he played a decisive role in the study of the architectural profession and the realization of the first policy for architecture in Romania, the culture of the built environment and quality of life (2010-2015), being president of the Romanian Order of Architects since 2010.

We are presented with a book that studies the way architects and architecture work and the way they relate to the world, a book of phenomenology, a contribution to the self-knowledge of the profession, to its opening to society. Moreover, the author offers us an accumulation of writings, skillfully interspersed, in which he problematizes and clearly discusses the independence of the guild of architects, the quality and definition of architecture (a recurring obsession, detectable in the attempt to provide precise criteria for a possible judgment), the variable geometry of the profession in the world, in conditions of economic and social upheaval.

Șerban Țigănaș writes well, with a critical and literary sense, with cold humor, revealing a cutting depth (a cross-section through the layers of society), which puts before us the mirror of the Romania in which we live. But he doesn't forget to add personal experiences related to spaces, places and houses, so that we are revealed, in an optimistic note, the architect and the man, that passionate professional that many of us know and who enjoys the guild he belongs to.

The writings included in this volume represent a valuable contribution to the knowledge of the profession, to its openness to social actors (I believe it is the first of its kind in Romania's very recent history) and perhaps, above all, to anticipating and building the future. The book aims to be an architecture through thought and word. Through the extremely special photographic essay designed by architect Andrei Mărgulescu, the discourse elaborated by Șerban Țigănaș is doubled by another key to reading, visual, timeless and disjunct, from which the subject is eliminated, articulating around the themes of the book, illustrated with contemporary architectural and urbanism projects and situations.

Author:

Șerban Țigănaș

Publisher:

Simetria 2014

The volume was published with the support of OAR, from the Timbrul Arhitecturii.