A winter night's dream

Alexandra and I have a very special friendship that didn't need very frequent meetings. We've known each other for a long time, since the "60 Wooden Churches" project when she was discovering Șerban Sturdza and I was breaking up with him.

I talked to Alexandra in the middle of winter about summer!

My dialogs with her remind me of summer. Although our meetings took place in Bucharest, when we meet, we are two girls, no more than 12 years old, on summer vacation, on a big grassy hill, looking at the clouds passing overhead, eating peaches dripping down their elbows, and talking about the moon and the stars. We've both read the same books, we've both dreamed of schools where they don't teach law by talking about anything, maybe just moods. We both dreamed of meeting the most interesting people, we fell in love with Bernea (me first, because I'm older).

She knows how to listen and not only people tell her their innermost thoughts, but also objects.

The "Little Architect", with whom she is always traveling, is a curious child who has not forgotten the language of birds; he carries with him the grass of beasts and resembles in substance the Little Prince. Alexandra's warm imagination takes him through the starry sky, past old houses, past craftsmen who know how to tell stories and who have unlocked the mystery of time. He knows how to wander back and forth through time and space and he knows how to touch everything he meets. He has tamed materials and objects. Everything speaks to him and everything listens to him. Here:

"On some evenings, I am lucky, we go to play my favorite sport, collect the ambiences and the various lights that emanate from the lighted windows of the city or the village. From the very beginning I felt drawn to the subject matter, we easily became friends as if we had known each other forever. I asked each object to teach me something. I would sing with a pendulum. I bathed with a coral. I talked to the hardest brick behind the plaster. And one day they began to tell me their stories in silence."

Below you'll find just a small part of our three of us chatting over a glass of red wine the week before Christmas. We were at play, two girls and a boy, two architects and a journalist.

What I ask her, perhaps at times a little provocative, are not mere curiosities, nor did I set out to do an interview. They are my own concerns and questions to which I have not yet found an answer, but I put them to Alexandra with the confidence that she has found it.

I wanted to know from Alexandra if, when she was a student, she dreamed of a school like the one she now runs in Țibănești.

If the "Beating Iron at the Conac!" experiment looks like them, the ones who started it, or if it modified them. I was curious to find out how he met Șerban Sturdza and what it's like working with him.

I was curious to find out if many years of experience in a field contributes significantly to the quality of a work or, on the contrary, does a little experience make you more free, critical, less radical in your opinions? What is experience? Isn't it strange that in the Romanian language we have the same word to define a sum of accumulated and especially practiced, routinized knowledge and the same word to define an unexpected experience, a trial?

Ioana Alexe

"And I put a nail in your path..."

Ioana: What's the difference between the architecture school in the city and what happens at "We strike iron at the mansion!"?

Alexandra: The communion I find is not the same, you don't have a professor at a desk in a position of power that you sit and listen to. I plaster with them, I knock with them, I mean, I participate!

We eat together, and at the table with everyone, most of the essential things actually happen. In this experience things are organic, spontaneous, very intense, diverse.

All these threads that interweave and make a day that can be told for two more days. Whereas in college it seems like it's predictable, dead, boring, and it doesn't stick with you the way a story sticks with you.

It's also perhaps a slightly mystical experience. You sleep in something that feels like a little cottage in the country, but it's actually quite a mansion. There are a lot of contradictory, unexpected elements, and to understand what they're doing there, you go on a voyage of discovery.

It's only here that you dare to have a dialog with the teacher, and he tells you a different story than he would tell you at school, and then you start to learn rather by being inspired.

You awaken something in them, they become curious, they're in a quivering state. Very rarely do bored people come who can't wait to leave or finish. They don't wait to finish anything, everything is incredibly interesting.

Here you have a different pace and there are so many new, different things that make you constantly motivated, challenged.