Thematic file

Fighting the limits

Fighting the limits: An architecture written by people

text: Alexandra PURNICHESCU

© Lorin Niculae

A text about taming the limits, architecture at hand
and playing with words.

Dor Mărunt and Belciugatele, Călărași County, two lowland villages on the way to the seaside, the place where I spent a few days each summer, from the first edition in 2012until the sixth, which was held last year. For me, ArhiPera is and always will be about a solar architecture characterized by all the resulting attributes: warmth, openness, tolerance, universality.
Vacillating between witness and chronicler, I was on my way to getting familiar with architecture, despite certain individual contacts with the history, the styles and the aesthetics of architecture occurring during my studies, when I started to (re)discover, one step at a time, familiar things, but especially new, unexpected angles. More often than not, I was the only non-architect in the team, which was rather awkward initially. The „adoption” period was both captivating and moving. Besides, as has probably been the case for other members and participants, I was to uncover new emotional territories and different levels of comprehension and insight.
The summer schools I took part in helped me understand the ArhiPera spirit and presumably find the most adequate linguistic and cognitive tools to express, at least partially, both the mechanisms and implications of the built environment conversions and the poetry of the place.
I can still recall the messiness and silence enveloping the improvised workshops in the evenings, after all the students had left. I sometimes forgot my notebook, so I had to go back there after everybody had retired or was enjoying a few relaxing moments meant to help them cope better with the next day which promised to be at least as busy as the one that was just ending; outside, the air smelled of mellow grass and dust while the mostly clear night sky was proudly revealing all its constellations. The silence overwhelming the place made the bustle and commotion of the city seem hundreds of kilometres away. Inside, the tables and chairs were covered in scattered plans, scale model fragments, writing and drawing instruments, pieces of paper, architecture books and journals left open at different pages showing models or diagrams relevant to the ongoing projects. Material traces of the students’ path of evolution.
From a narrative perspective, the text unfolds throughout the reading process, the meaning is camouflaged by signs in its search for new forms of the indefinable. The structure is open, closely following that of the building. Heterogeneous limits. Interior-exterior. Constant reinvention. The relationship between man and the built environment. Houses in harmony with the environment, the inhabitants and society.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="567"] © Lorin Niculae [/caption]

Highly topical in the social context of the 21st century, the architecture practised and promoted by ArhiPera is grounded on atypically humanist approach focusing on community wishes and needs, and concentrates its efforts on its development while drawing on postmodern features – openness, spontaneity, participation, dispersion, combinations of angles and visions.
The space we encountered has its own rules and it takes time and intuition to decipher its mysteries. A representative of the vague, the site designates a continuous and seemingly homogenous anachronic territory where the public and the private are constantly interchanging. Small houses displaying simple decorations and surrounded by generous spaces spreading as far as the eye can see: the realm of freedom and thistles. Pits and garbage. Fragments of broken or used furniture. Roofs made of tin, tiles or plastic, boulder foundations and adobe walls coloured in different hues of blue or green.
Facing the reality of the place was by no means easy: highly precarious conditions, a feeling of abandonment, promising children lacking perspectives...There was an absolute need for interventions at different levels - the housing programmes represented the first essential step towards a contemporary repositioning and building opportunities for growth and evolution, especially with regard to children. An illustration of Hernando de Soto’s view on the crucial importance of owning a house as a fundamental prerequisite for a decent existence and equal opportunities.
My knowledge in the field of architecture underwent a restructuring with my immersion in the reality on the field. Establishing relationships with the beneficiaries is a delicate endeavour that needs giving up on preconceptions, tact, intuition and, more importantly, a considerable amount of empathy. Building a common language consolidates trust, an element crucial to a key dialogue meant to support the materialization and permanence of the enterprise. The concerted use of scale models, discussions, drawings and plans generate a code, a bridge joining territories otherwise impossible to join. In addition, an important role is played by the close observation of current practices and daily activities, as well as the conversations meant to bring to light the individual aspirations in terms of housing, work and study.

Recentering, building, progressing – the concepts apply not only on the physical plane, with the construction or finishing of the house, but also in relation to the inhabitants’ and participants’ personal geography. Playing with the limits also involves the boundaries separating our inner mental territories, not just the exterior ones. Experiencing and physically recreating the spatial setting involves travelling the territory; converting it into image helps to grasp the atmosphere of the place and notice the particularities that can be rendered abstract, visualised, communicated and interpreted in order to find the optimal solution, a good illustration of the concept stating that form follows function. The subtle details captured by the camera lens compose a space that brings together. Analysing the atmosphere leads to a better understanding. Given that each great architect possesses a certain poetic structure enabling him to become an interpreter of his time, the instruments used for deciphering the human soul, when employed with an ability polished by time and experience, can reveal the stories of the place and the memory of space. One must let the place tell about people and people tell about themselves. In order to get a house right, you must first build it on words.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="563"] © Lorin Niculae[/caption]

A living organism, the rhizome house flourishes and grows under the action of human agency and affection. The house imposes a behavioural pattern upon those it shelters and acts at the level of community and cultural identity by means of representation. Since architecture needs to be right and serve as a faithful embodiment of life, attention turns to the hearth as a matrix element, human values and the beneficiaries’ involvement in the transformation stages and the development of the house.
In the case of disadvantaged communities, poverty entails a restriction of the freedom the architect is summoned to recover by means of his specific professional vision and methods. Rethinking the territory, the development of the built environment, the integrated nature of the interventions, community consolidation, all these ultimately lead to the creation of a „petite histoire” drawing on individual experiences characteristic to a given spatial-temporal context.

Apart from the range of courses and lectures focusing on various technical or methodological aspects less familiar to a philologist yet fundamental when designing for disadvantaged communities, my attention was particularly drawn to the workshops on photography and the art of Scandinavian light. Maybe it was because they referred to interpretation, ineffability, writing and symbols, thus helping me to organize the entire mix of image and words accumulated during the time spent with the architect teams and to work towards a more coherent rendition of the experience which was to be hosted by the pages of the summer school journal.
I was trying to gather words from everywhere: by following in the footsteps of the children playing among the building materials or scanning the students who were sketching or working by the house, from the initially elusive and distrustful looks of the people witnessing experiments and transformations, from the realm of the sky and the rhythm of the earth. The houses were evolving and the individual paths would follow their course revealing the new faces of hope.
Splitting time between radial workshops and the idea laboratory by the building site and dealing with survey plans, scale models and a composite mix of materials and tools, the ArhiPera students learn to take a look beyond the academic curricula and get closer to the human force and the social component with a view to rediscovering and reinterpreting vernacular architecture. Training for the future of humanity, exercises for the eye and the soul.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="538"] © Lorin Niculae[/caption]

As in other isolated or marginalised places throughout, children represented a community in and of itself, ever ready to start a crusade to needlessly redeem themselves. Instead, the fight should be carried for recuperating the essential rights, to play, education, protection against discrimination, violence and abuse, medical services and freedom of thought. The student architects got attached right away to the local children, began explaining different things to them and asking for their opinion and, most importantly, played with them. In their turn, led by curiosity and thrilled with the attention received and with the newcomers, the children gathered around the students and started analyzing the objects, asking questions, looking mesmerized at the drawings and models made on the spot or during the design workshops, willingly taking an active part in different activities. Many of the summer schools special memories are about events involving children, pure creations of the place.

If we are to measure time in summers, each finished house follows the one before it, resulting in a palimpsest of formats, textures, ideas and emotions. A series of still small triumphs over the limit. Similar to a lifelong exchange of letters with a dear friend kept away by distance or petty routine mechanisms but constantly adding to your emotional development and structure, the memories of those days spent in a seemingly atemporal and aspatial dimension despite tangible geographic coordinates, strengthened the human foundation of those who have been there, even if just for a short while.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="556"] © Lorin Niculae [/caption]

Year after year, the Bărăgan Plain acted as the setting for six editions of the summer school. Several families belonging to vulnerable categories were granted the real opportunity to move on, together with their children, who now have the possibility to improve their fellows’ lives thanks to the chance at educational development, and to pursue a profession, maybe even that of architecture.

On the telegraph lines, the bird silhouettes depict silent staves. Broad straps of sky, waterholes, sunflower fields swinging slowly among dusty clouds. A few children are busying themselves with some tools while others are watching them inquisitively. In the afternoon light, the students are working hard, adding the finishing touches for the next day inauguration. The ArhiPera members are looking straight into the lens: yes, they are the friends you can build castles with.

Romanian Version