The cube lesson

A building like any other, a concrete cube, was the Faculty of Architecture in Iasi when I first stepped on its threshold in 1996. My first experience in this space was not an aesthetic one, but it was related to the awareness of a sensation that I was beginning to understand more and more clearly - the detachment from everything that high school had meant in my perception - an experience that revealed the world to us as a labyrinth of information, made up of moments inhomogeneous in interest and clarity, which we passively received from people different in their capacity to be good pedagogues, to inspire us and to reveal to us the fascinating unity of the great diversity of the world.

Here, at the faculty, the information we received was interconnected and used to create the architectural object, it was a real working tool. Teachers and students were communicating on the same level of creativity, of the fulfillment through beauty of everything that was the home of human life and activity. For the first time the whole process of learning had a meaning and a purpose which required total involvement, active and creative response.

Everything was so new, so challenging and demanding that the space of our new life, its conformation, its light, its details, existed naturally, so well thought out and realized, so well matched to what we needed, that at first we did not even realize or understand them.

Very soon, we enthusiastic students who wanted to impress everyone with our drawings would realize that ARCHITECTURE was so close that we only had to look up to see it. We were surrounded by a true lesson in architecture that expressed the unity between the tectonic and the imponderable, between admirable functionality and rich plastic expression.