Thematic folder

My experience

Thematic folder

My Experience

text: Constantin GORCEA

In our profession, competition is present from the preparation and examination phase. The drawings and projects in the syllabus were graded by exposition and comparative appreciation.
I first learned about international architectural competitions in my first year of college, when by chance I ended up helping to make a model for a housing competition for Abu Dhabi, in which a group of assistants were participating.
I watched with admiration the entries of older students from Timisoara in the Shinkenchiku competitions of the late 1970s and early 1980s published in JAPAN Architect.
The first participations in exhibitions, together with the group Form Trans Inform (formed together with some colleagues as an alternative form of manifestation to the school and its curriculum) also stimulated the competition component. The experience of working collectively, which is very different from the individual way of developing projects, was important. I cannot forget the chance to take part in a phase of a competition for an architecture museum in a group in which the late Professor Anton Dâmboianu agreed to be our partner. I remember when, after a passionate support of some ideas, he asked me where I was from and replied with a gentle irony: "Ah! The grass is greener in Bukovina...".
The participation in the 5th year (1984) in the international competition William van Allen - A Museum and Cultural Center in Haifa for students only, as a subject of study and work by a single author, was the most important experience of this kind during my student days.

Project block 149- photos of the realized construction and competition model (year 1987)
Source: personal archive

It was a great exercise for my diploma project and for many other complex projects that I participated in later. Of course, on the night of the handing over, I was helped by all my colleagues in the dorm, and the following evening, the party celebrating the successful handing over of the competition project started with the burning of the model in the courtyard of the student dormitory at Izvorul Rece. It was an illustration of a principle that is also valid in sports competitions: the important thing is to participate!
The enthusiasm and state of grace of this action was a measure of the quality of involvement in any project that I have subsequently undertaken.
I also practiced the form of taking over a work through a competition unexpectedly in the County Design Institute in Suceava. The head of the team at the time, Mr. Ion Rizea, architect, had the initiative to propose an internal competition within the team to adapt a typical project for the realization of a complex of five blocks of flats with a floor area of 8+8, with three architects from different generations being given the competition theme. I still have the 1:200 scale cardboard model of the block, which was then used to draw up the project.
Immediately after 1989, when the Society of Orthodox Believers of Bucovina contacted the County Design Center in Suceava for the realization of an Orthodox Cathedral in Suceava, in my new capacity as head of the architectural studio, I proposed and supported the idea of a national competition for the selection of the project, with a representative jury from the beneficiary, the UAR, the Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs, etc. The competition was held in two stages, in the first stage a limited number of guests were selected to participate in the second stage.
The collective of architects who worked on that project created the nucleus of the current design company - AGD (Arhitectură Grafică Design), where I have been practicing my profession for 25 years. It was the great gain of this experience with a disappointing ending... Although our project won the competition without the obligation to obtain the design contract, after repeated procrastination, the project was contracted. We worked on this project for 10 years, on the basis of which only the basement up to ±0.00 on a foundation of approx. 260 reinforced concrete piles of 12 m long, driven with a pile-driver, after which the project was changed, and one of the thousands of irrelevant churches built in Romania after the revolution was built. I cannot forget the meeting with the architect Augustin Ioan after something very similar happened to him with the Mânturii Neamului Cathedral in Bucharest...

Project of the Orthodox Cathedral of Suceava - plans and competition model - 2nd stage (1991) Source: AGD archive

The penetration into the forms of exercising the profession specific to the new capitalist order that we were to build was also based on winning a minor but relevant competition: the competition for the logo of the first company established in Suceava after 1989, the commercial company ALISA.
But I had my first contact with the world of professional architectural competitions in France, in the two architectural firms I worked for - AARD (architects T. Georgesco and Ch. Tanascaux) and Constructiones Civiles (architect Remy Butler) for a period of almost three years. I then participated in at least 20 competition projects with more or less important assignments. Understanding the system by which average architectural societies (about 10 members) produced on average one competition project per month was a real revelation for me. I had the impression that quality flour is also coming out of this constantly grinding mill, that the architects who are constantly practicing are like well-trained athletes.

The architects involved in this system were visible in this way both privately and externally. I realized this when I learned that the AARD team had been selected for and won the invitational competition for a tourist center at Porte de Gruyères in a Swiss canton, and their work was being followed in the professional publication Le moniteur d'Architecture in France, which covered all the internal competitions.
I was impressed by his continuous production of ideas, his experimental, sometimes even critical attitude to the theme. What really mattered was the idea and its support, and less if the elevators were not drawn in the same place on all the plans in the competition project.

The experience of the first competition won at Constructiones civiles for the extension of the hospital in Saint Die (author arh. Remy Butler) was practically the most complex, followed by a collaboration on the APD with fellow associates in Suceava.
In a competition project everything had to be evocative and support an idea. It was important in the supporting drawings that the sun's rays are perpendicular to the earth in Perpignan.
I witnessed a competition project in which the operating block of a hospital in Nantes was placed on the top floor above an urban courtyard, even though the theme in no way suggested this solution; the architect Remy Butler was congratulated by telephone, after the results were published, by Christian de Portzamparc, one of the competitors, on the solution proposed.
I had the feeling that, in the relationship between design companies that were sometimes associated, sometimes competing, in a geographically restricted area, ARCHITECTURE was the clear winner!

Heritage Restoration Area Laboratory Suceava- first sketch-1996

Suceava Heritage Restoration Area Laboratory-works reception-2018

In Romania, there was a time when tenders had a solution competition component because the technical offer was actually a proposal for a solution, not just a list of procedures to be applied in the project design, as is now required. The most important projects won in this way were the laboratories of the Bucovina Museum, which then took more than 20 years to complete, the Suceava airport canopy, which was built in a shape suggesting an airplane wing onto which all the modernization works were then grafted by successive projects over the next 20 years, and the Suceava Prosecutor's Office headquarters - which subsequently changed its location.

Suceava "Stefan cel Mare" Airport (1997) - competition solution and final project (2017)

Source:AGD archive

The lesson of outlining a clear idea from the very first phase, learned through the experience gained in the competitions in which we participated and sustaining it in the detailing and execution phases, allowed the realization of the works in such a long time not to distort what was important in the architectural solutions.
All the projects realized within AGD were conceived and approached, within the group of associate architects Constantin Stroiescu, Ioan-Doinel Spineanu and Carmen-Mariana Zorin who make up the firm, in an internal working formula in which the debate on the solution options proposed for each project, at the various stages of elaboration, also had a competition component. The solution applied was always the solution that was the best.

Modern Cinema Suceava (project 2009-realized) - highlighting the intervention and Fitting out of the cinema building Arta Suceava (project 2010-underway) - competition solution Source:AGD archive

The modernization of the two cinemas in Suceava, Modern and Arta, were the subject of solution contests organized by the Suceava City Hall.
The development of Suceava's Central Market was the subject of a solutions competition, but unfortunately, due to the non-recognition of the copyright for the solution proposed in the competition and resumed in the SF phase, the project realized in the PT phase and in reality distorts the ideas of the initial solution, resulting in a public space development that is not appreciated by the population.

Design of 22 Decembrie Square in Suceava: arch. Constantin Gorcea (2008) Source:AGD archive

The work on the Waterworks project had several competition components within the team of volunteers who participated, over several years, in this complex undertaking. The logo design competition for the Water Plant during the student workshop organized in 2011 - in which each participant rated the others - was a very successful experience, followed by a debate in which it was decided that the final solution would be a synthesis of the first two selected ideas.

Images workshop Uzina de Apă Suceava - logo realization.
First prize - stud. arh. Costin Niță
Source:Uzina de Apă archive

The competition for the Romanian pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014 brought together and online a team of mostly very young architects (Răzvan George Gorcea, Cosmin Tolbes, Sorin Bompa, Alexandra Arama, Alexandru Senciuc) and, by being nominated, it was very close to... The competition refreshed the special mood I felt during my school days.