Thematic file

Architecture contest, an opportunity for reflection and research in adverse times

Thematic dossier

Architecture competition,
an opportunity for reflection and research
in adverse times
text: Vlad GAIVORONSCHI

Fig.1

At a time when thinking was standardized by a poor dialectical materialism, the architectural competitions proposed by Japan Architect, Architectural Design magazines and other institutions provided an opening for the young generation of architects in the 70s and 80s. It was enough to find in the pages of Japan Architect answers to the speculative themes of competitions of this type, such as "House at an intersection", in the years '75-'⁷⁶¹, and we, students at that time in Timișoara, at the Architecture Department of the Faculty of Construction, immediately asked ourselves the question of participating in such competitions in the future.

Once we became fourth-year students at the "ION MINCU" Institute of Architecture in Bucharest, having got rid of the stress of the barrage of passing from third to fourth year, as was the rule then, we coagulated into a study group, together with Florin Colpacci, a former assistant at Timișoara, and Adrian Ionașiu (1979-'80). It was a period of very interesting dialogs, we had a meeting with the architects Andrei Florian and Dan Coma, discussing on a possible theme for reflection - the ISLAND. The summer of 1980 found the three of us, plus architect Adrian Cristescu, working on a theme launched by Japan Architect - Shinkenchiku, which posed the question of reinterpreting tradition, a fundamental topic at any time. The theme allowed to approach any example of architecture specific to a certain culture, nation, location, etc. and reinterpret it. We remained in a local-national key, we operated imaginary on the Cartianu Cell, projecting our professional lives inside it and philosophizing in a manner typical for those years, influenced by Constantin Noica and Lucian Blaga. Not coincidentally, the project was entitled "The House of the Opening Closure" (fig. 1). It was the interesting First Prize, with Adalberto Libera's Villa Malaparte on Capri being reinterpreted in a movie by architects from the Soviet Union. At the time, Mr. Ludovic David was the eye and ear of the Union of Architects, careful not to leak designs or thoughts that were not in line with the ideology of the time. Without approval from the Union of Architects, you had no chance to send projects abroad. However, the following year, in the enlarged formula of⁵², we managed to successfully participate in the competition "A CHAPEL OF MEDITATION" organized by Japan Architect and Central Glass, winning an unexpected 2nd Prize. The effort related to that moment was to go through Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" along with conceptualizing the metaphorical function of architecture and intuiting the potential relationships between the urban built environment and the perceptual/psychological/symbolic (Fig. 2).

Fig.2

The project was a drawn and written essay, with the theme of the labyrinth as its leitmotif, both as an urban exterior environment and interior as a spiritual journey, and the jury's report resulted in the sympathy for our work of its chairman - Fumihiko Maki. Many years later, in 2011, listening to him at the UIA Congress in Tokyo, with his lecture on the anthropology of Japanese space, titled "Japanese Modernity: language, scenery and communality", I realized that his presence then in the jury, not only as an architect but also as a scholar of culture, was our good fortune. On the other hand, the 1st Prize, won by a young Japanese colleague, reminded us of Constantin Brâncuși's vocation as an architect, his influence on the young Japanese being very ^clear3. In the years that followed, we were constantly reminded of the example offered by this project, of the intrinsic capacity of architectural language to be sufficient, even more powerful than a whole story drawn and written. The month of December 1981 meant the Symposium "OM, ORAȘ, NATURĂ", in Iași, where, in a broadened formula, I presented the theme of architecture as mirroring, and my colleague Ioan Andreescu gave a short and powerful speech on this theme at the symposium held in the Palace of Culture, attracting the sympathy of the late Dan Hăulică, Aurelian Trișcu, and Andrei Pleșu.
The spring of 1982 was a new opportunity to understand architecture's mechanisms of symbolization of the major stages of existence, on the occasion of the competition organized by Architectural Design magazine on the theme "THE HOUSE OF THE BIRDS". A seemingly 'innocent' theme led us to anthropological studies of the child and childhood in the traditional world on the one hand and the bourgeois world on the other, leading us finally to the fundamental themes of childhood and death (fig. 3). The fairy tale "Youth without Old Age and Life without Death" was helpful, especially its ^ending4.

Fig.3

The essay "From the Window to the Stained Glass Window", presented at the International Symposium on Architecture at the Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture in December 1982, once again emphasized the concern for the relationship between architecture and philosophy, namely its major function of being a metaphor, a mirror of a world. A concern that became increasingly present for us was that of the autonomy of the language of architecture in relation to its influencing factors, this was in fact the leitmotiv we invoked from the very beginning of the essay and conference, quoting from Philip Johnson, in this regard. The physical factors invoked then in our academic environment through the narrow glasses of a primary and impoverished functionalism seemed unconvincing to us, we were on the one hand "formalists" influenced by the spirit of postmodern times, on the other hand marked by the organic/tao-metaphysical character of the discourse of Ștefan Bertalan, a professor of form studies for us in the second year at the Architecture Department in Timișoara.
The period of approaching the theme of the language of architecture in a fundamentalist orthodox-nationalist key was to end with the studies on the typology of the bordei, which were the occasion for entering a new competition in 1983, organized by the same magazine Japan Architect. Our sketches of earth-encrusted mandalas emphasized not the bordei's vocation as an ecological model - as is the case today - but its symbolic potential and sacred atmosphere.
All that followed after this fundamentalist stage was a hurried journey from Aldo Rossi-type influences to the recovery of modernity.
The year 1983 was marked for us by the competition "A Theatre for Touring" organized by the OISTT in Prague and the one for "A Museum of Architecture" organized in Ghent. In the first case, we delved into the meaning of this type of program (Italian, Elizabethan, NO, Kabuki, etc.), on the other hand, it was an exercise in landscape architecture starting from a painting by De Chirico and interpreting one of the most interesting sites in Timișoara, the one behind the Hotel Continental (fig. 4).

Fig.4

It was the year in which our group initiated the exhibition and symposium "Timișoara, topos and appropriateness", the reinterpretation of the city's specificity and the regeneration of its places in the Cetate being major topics of ^concern5. The second case meant a very interesting meditation on the history and future of this type of program - the Museum of Architecture - and was the occasion for reflections unexpected for those times on its becoming in the context of the birth of the new digital world. It was 1983, and we had Orwellian intuitions about a promising network on the one hand, a bearer of culture and museum information at home, materialized holographically, but at the same time fraught with dangers of the potential for absolute control (fig. 5^)6.

Fig.5

At the same time we had the opportunity to see Ridley Scott's movie "Blade Runner". Our project for the "Style of the Year 2000" competition organized by Japan Architect in 1984 was clearly influenced by this movie: we imagined a totally immersed, underground architecture, sending only digital signals, lasers and holograms to the surface - a radical transformation of architectural language (fig. 6^)7.

A new competition - "A dwelling for today", organized by Architectural Design magazine in 1986, allowed us to rediscover modernity, reinterpreting it in a relatively new key, and intuiting a then emerging concept of the "global container". The result was a living model that was flexible on the inside, with intermediate spaces on the outside, generated by the interstices provided by the complex relationship between the 'homely' shell-container and the 'Mies-like' contents. It was an opportunity to relate two themes of architectural language, an interesting assemblage (fig. 7^)8.

Fig.7

In the years that followed, studies on the renewal of architectural language continued, the concept of "Nautilus" born during our conversations generated the beautiful (prize-winning) project by Ioan Andreescu and Dan Dăncilă for the competition on the theme "A poetic dwelling", in Bucharest, in 1988 (fig. 8).

Fig.8

The complex exercise of imagining complex programs, carried out for almost a year at the IPROTIM Institute, on the occasion of the project for the Cultural Centre within the great ^Timișoara Civic Centre project9 gave us the courage to enter, in 1989, the great competition organized by UIA for the TOKYO FORUM Multifunctional Centre. Deepening a complex theme delivered by the organizers in four volumes, understanding the functioning mechanisms of a 150,000 sq.m. complex, both in terms of spatial and functional organization with multiple use scenarios, located between the Imperial Palace area and the Ginza district in Tokyo, meant a consistent effort carried out over months of work in the spring and summer of 1989 (fig. 9⁾¹⁰ and was an excellent opportunity to work with colleagues from different generations.

Fig.9

As for me, this competition was an opportunity to delve deeper into themes related to the Japanese specificity of space and architecture through books and studies then at hand, such as Günter Nitschke's MA Space studies, essays and texts by Arata Isozaki or Kisho Kurokawa. For me, these were the seeds of what was to come later, namely spatial anthropology studies, which contributed to my doctoral thesis ten years ^later11.

The year 1990 was not a threshold for me and my colleagues. Our earlier preoccupations had continued; studies of ecclesial space and its possible renewal in the 1990s were the natural continuation of our concerns of the eighth decade. The 1992 competitions for the Great Greek-Catholic Cathedral in Cluj-Napoca (fig. 10⁾¹² or the 1993 competition for the Martyrs' Church in Timișoara (fig. 11) are ^ample proof of this13.

The same goes for the concerns related to the Japanese space, the competition for the NARA CIVIC HALL in 1991-1992 was also an extremely interesting exercise for us, in which our solution, a large open container like a huge Shinto temple, integrated the different performance/conference spaces with their autonomous volumes, creating a covered relief landscape (fig. 12^)14. The first prize was to be won by this year's Pritzker Prize laureate Arata Isozaki, with his solution of an elliptical and fully encapsulated global container.
An interesting moment was the competition for the design of the Romanian Pavilion at the 1992 World Expo in Seville.

We made it to the final, but our reinterpretation of the theme of Trajan's Column, influenced by Salvador Dali, did not convince the jury of the Union of Architects, preferring the more down-to-earth solution of Alexandru ^Andrieș15.
Likewise, the 1993 competition for the regeneration of Timișoara's 700 Square (with Șerban Sturdza and Prodid as the winners) provided ^us16 with an exercise of imagination on two levels: the main flow of pedestrian movement in the direction of the historic centre-west of the city and the materialization of the solution using a lightweight, reversible steel structure covered with a tensioned membrane (fig. 13).

It is very interesting to analyze what has happened since then on that site, to what extent the proposals in the competition were relevant. For us, that project had a rebound effect, as the local government at the time wanted to develop a similar concept with us in another market, which is what happened. This is how, in 1996, in Badea Cârțan Square in Timișoara, our work, realized together with the late Prof. dr. dr. eng. Victor Gioncu, assisted by Horst Dürr and Reiner Essrich, the detail designers of the tensioned membrane. The work was awarded a prize by the UAR in 1996 and was highly praised by the commissioner of the Venice Biennale of the same year, the late Hans Hollein. Both the competition entry for Piazza 700 and its sequel marked a new stage in our research through the project, that related to the organic, intrinsic relationship between expression and structure, continuing our older concerns about the regeneration of the traditional urban fabric of Timișoara in a contemporary manner, as opposed to the pastiche approach, confident in intelligent innovation that can only enhance the traditional environment through contrast, in the case of Piazza Badea Cârțan and by framing. As for Square 700, by building the City Business Center there, we have taken up the old theme of penetrating the Citadel from the west through an urban regeneration project entitled "Gateway to the Center", with a landscape approach.
I will close not before emphasizing that, in spite of the new times in which ideological constraints have given way to a hurried rush and time contraction, punctuated by multiple commissions and architectural works, I have continued from time to time to participate in various competitions in Romania and Germany. I am referring to those for educational programs in Germany (1993, 2010) or those for urban regeneration in Timișoara, such as the one for THE OFFICE in Cluj-Napoca in 2012, or last year's one (competition with invited guests) for an important place in the city - the old Abator (fig. 14^)17.

These works have also been the occasion for research, from deepening the German concept of "Ganztagsschule"¹⁸ to adapting to the problems and specificities of Cluj, or studying the urban history of Timișoara and researching a place in the city and a monument - the old slaughterhouse designed by László Székely - and its potential for refunctionalization and restoration.
Like team sports, the competitions required concentrated efforts, teamwork, dialog and research through design. In retrospect, they have proved to be important moments in our professional destiny, with long-term effects, including the crystallization of our office since 1990. The phenomenon is ongoing, we are even now working on another urban regeneration competition with invited guests, for an area in a city in Romania, and the large ISHO project in Timișoara (under construction) in which we have been involved since 2015 is a prolonged, perpetual competition, punctuated, from time to time, with a workshop, with several teams of architects involved, with the chances of becoming a diversified architectural park and a new urban fabric of Timișoara with a specific character (fig. 15^)19.

NOTES

1 The participants included Alisson and Peter Smithson, no age barriers were practiced yet.
2 Florin Colpacci, Ioan Andreescu, Vlad Gaivoronschi, Adrian Ionașiu, the late Claudiu Panaitescu.
3 "Japan Architect" magazine no. 1/1982.
4 In "THE ROMANIAN FEELING OF THE BEING", C. Noica refers to three essential moments of our culture in order to define his theme, along with Brâncuși and Eminescu, referring to this fairy tale.
5 Our diploma projects in 1982 regenerated sensitive sites in the traditional fabric of Timișoara in the Cetate, published in the magazine "Arhitectura" no. 4, 6 /1983.
6 The essay that accompanied the drawings is included in the volume "Andreescu & Gaivoronschi - Identity and Alterity in the Urban Space", published in 2009 by the Arhitext Foundation, pp. 55-58.
7 Ioan Andreescu, Vlad Gaivoronschi, Adrian Ionașiu, Ion Barbu.
8 Ioan Andreescu, Vlad Gaivoronschi, Adrian Ionașiu - the paper was published in "Arhitectura" magazine no. 2-3/1989 and the image of the model is on the East Centric Triennale poster.
9 Coordinated by arh. Șerban Sturdza, National Prize of the Union of Architects 1987.
10 Our project passed the first screening of the Technical Commission, remaining among the first 111 projects out of 400; In the competition catalog we appear alongside important names of architecture of the last half century such as Rafael Viñoly - 1st Prize, James Stirling - 2nd Prize, Kiyonori Kikutake, Chistopher Alexander, Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid, Hans Hollein, Shinichi Okada, Yona Friedman, Axel Schultes, Wilhelm Holzbauer, Zvi Hecker, Gilles Perraudin, Andrea Branzi, Justus Dahinden, Mark von Gerkan, Heikki Siren, Tony Fretton, Matthias Sauerbruch, Juhani Katainen etc.; among the Romanians I would like to mention Florin Biciușcă, Albin Ștefan Toth, Marcel Crișan, Adrian Bold, Adrian Nicolae, etc.; our collective was formed by Vlad Gaivoronschi, Ioan Andreescu, Adrian Ionașiu, the late Pompiliu Alămorean and Mircea Morovan.
11 Matricile spațiului tradițional, Paidea Publishing House, 2002.
12 Ioan Andreescu, Adrian Ionașiu, Mircea Morovan and students Marius Miclăuș and Lucaci Beatrice.
13 3rd Prize - Vlad Gaivoronschi, Adrian Ionașiu and students Sorin Ciurariu, Nicolae Porime.
14 Vlad Gaivoronschi, Ioan Andreescu, Geta Trâmbițaș and students.
15 "Arhitectura" magazine no. 1-6/1992.
16 3rd Prize - Vlad Gaivoronschi, Ioan Andreescu, Adrian Ionașiu and a group of students.
17 The work signed by Vlad Gaivoronschi, Ioan Andreescu, Mihai Danciu, Simina Cuc, Răzvan Dinu, Marian Râță, Cătălin Gavrilescu, Ovidiu Gabor, Ovidiu Micșa, Monica Manase, Patricia Murar, Bianca Ruxanda, Zeno Ardelean meant a huge effort, materialized in plans, two models, a movie and 3D simulations that can be found on the website andreescu-gaivoronski.com under the name given by us to the work - Zenit Views; it was presented at the UIA - BAKU 2019 Project Competition.
18 Project for the San Andreas Gymnasium in Schweich, 2010 - Extended hours education with a program conducive to socializing, volunteering, etc., published in "Arhitext" no. 2/2013; the project was realized by our office in partnership with architects Schon Consuela and Sebastian Schon from Trier.
19 Together with our office (urban planning, general coordination and landscape, road bridge, residential, hotel) architects from ADNBA (residential), Atelier 21 (offices and residential), Bogdan Zaha (pedestrian bridge, landscape), Blocher und Partners (interior design hotel) are involved in the project.