HOME to Bunești

What is it like to live in a school?

Especially when the school is in the forest, the forest is instead of methodology and every school building is an architectural lesson.

What is it like to like school so much that you don't want to go back home?

In other words, to live permanently in a state of wonder, excitement and the joy of knowing the world. That's what happens here in Bunești.

My job? Place seeker

When I was a kid I thought I was interested in studying protozoa, and plants, and flying things, and anything that grows alive from the ground. Over time, I realized that I was more interested in place than anything else, so I was a kind of place scientist, if you could call me that. It's a profession that doesn't exist and it was very hard for me to choose to become something because that's what I've always been and I think architecture is simply the love affair with a place. In 2008, when I arrived in the forest of Bunești, everything that was beautiful and good was already there.

Ana-Maria Goilav

Simply nature

The river is a fantastic source of inspiration for everything we do here, as well as a resource for the building materials for the Bunești School construction site. Then there's the forest that surrounds us, the way it grows, the way it lives and dies, the way it resists our aggression, anthropogenic aggression. Nature is so intelligent that it can really become our teacher. And then, from time to time, we simply sit down or start listening to this immense lesson of the created universe.

Here, in Bunești, you learn to look at yourself from the outside, as others see you. And suddenly your discomfort no longer seems discomfort. This liberation from the self, from the ego, is the only way we can look with serenity at a certain kind of end.

Petre Guran

The "School of Bunești" project set out to rediscover this past, a past crossed by different nations and languages, by skilled craftsmen and learned scholars (what today we would call the international circulation of values and information), and bring it into the present. From the peasant art of the noble Moorish lords, from whom a few houses still remain here and there, scattered here and there, to the country squires' manors of the patriotic boyars, among whom the Brătienii or the Balotă family of Zenobiei Enescu from Bunești, to the refinement of Byzantine painters and craftsmen from all over the Levant, a world of beliefs, ideas and artistic sensibilities seek their place in a school of great rediscoveries. The name of the school is taken from the estate of the noble family eponymous with the village, known until the 19th century as Bunescu, whose genealogy we have sketched above from family memories. In the second half of the 19th century, the estate of Ghiță Enescu extended over the territory of the commune of Bunești, which, after the interwar territorial organization, included the villages of Bunești, Mănești, Zărnești and several other hamlets. Thus, the name of the school will also designate a revival of a forgotten and persecuted history in the second half of the 20th century.

The project consists first and foremost in outlining a place, the Greek topos in the motto, a living, meaningful space, blessed by the struggle with the angel (Genesis 32, 24-30), a place where the present realizes the junction between the vertical of time and the horizontal of geography, giving the moment of toil and grace the significance of a glimpse of existential horizons hidden from untrained eyes.

This place was initially addressed to architects and artists, to all those who wanted to feel how life used to be, when electric light had not yet turned night into day and day into night, to learn how building was once done, believing that building techniques validated by centuries and millennia of history should not be replaced from today to tomorrow with concrete, BCA, asbestos, polystyrene, thermopan, tile-like sheet metal and wood-like plastic. In this phase, the project is one of rediscovering traditional building techniques and rhythms of life.

In a second phase, this place appeals to those who don't think "civilization" necessarily means a traffic gridlocked city, slouched seated position in front of a steering wheel, shopping mall, supermarket, football stadium, night clubbing, TV or site surfing, tiled bathrooms with sophisticated faucets, kitchen fully furnished with electrical appliances, but whose owner eats fast food because he doesn't have time to cook for himself, the exotic weekend as a reward for a nightmare week, and the corollary of this distraction, the traffic jam on the road on the way out or in, etc. There are few who depart from this meaning of civilization, but they do exist. These are the ones who know that the earth breathes through forests and not through pockets and bank accounts, that tomatoes were once tastier in Romania because they were grown in gardens fertilized with the dung of farmyard animals, or that those eggs with chicken droppings on them break more easily than those laid in an incubator at the rate of 12 hours a day by the mechanism of electric light, because those chickens live by their own law. Also, and more importantly, they are the ones who would agree that the universe you walk through with your own two feet can be as rich as the one you fly through in an airplane, if and precisely because you take the time to observe it carefully. They also know that reading or listening to music is not a social obligation, and they do not read the cultural press to have something to talk about at cultural gatherings. They are the ones who know that "less can mean more". The second stage is therefore finding the measure.

In a third stage, the "School of Bunești" is aimed at those who want to read a dialog by Plato for the wisdom it evokes and not for a university career, those who do not dream of a well-paid job at a young age, those who think it is worthwhile to speak a language (at least their mother tongue) correctly, those who want to understand both the starry sky above them and the moral law within them. This will be the School of those who want to give up cultural studies and psychoanalyzing older and newer authors in order to read their works with a genuine interest in what they say in them, of those who want to think before they quote, of those for whom it is important to understand how Archimedes mathematically defined infinity and how Euclid thought that two parallels never intersect. It is the project of an alternative school, in which the pupil will learn to judge and even meditate instead of storing up knowledge without having the time to evaluate it. The aim of this school is to train discernment and the human and spiritual formation of the pupil. The third stage is therefore finding the meaning of school.

The purpose of the stages is to ensure that the project is dynamic in depth and over time, but they are seen as components of the project from the outset. They correspond to chronological and logistical imperatives. The vernacular architecture workshop is not only the site of the houses that will house the school in the third phase, but on the contrary, this site is itself a preparatory and preliminary school, a school of architecture.

The will to break away from the urban jungle in order to reacquaint our senses and our bodies with the strengths of the world's beginnings (the water of a spring, a plank of wood, the grass of the meadow and the thorns of the thorn bush, the wet or dry earth), to relearn the rhythms of the lights in the sky (the luminous darkness of the starry sky and the surprising moonbeam), is the transition and the link between the first and the third stage.

The "school" aims to set in motion an economic circuit based exclusively on local resources, on farming and animal husbandry according to local tradition (today called "ecological" or "organic"), on natural and clean energies, on animal-drawn means of transportation within the campus. In this topos, the measure is a state of a man (i.e. the height of a man), and everything that is done takes into consideration only what the man can do or touch with his hands. The maximum permissible height is below that of the surrounding trees, and the number of men gathered together will be only that in which the faces of all present can be held (this is also the etymological meaning of this locution).

This place wants to show that the way to a better life is not through devastating industrialization, chaotic exploitation of natural resources, cutting down forests and destroying riverbeds in search of ballast, that plastic rubbish is ugly, that children's happier future is not achieved by abandoning them at home to neighbors while their parents are away working abroad. Our initiative aims to awaken the desire to realize a community project and the ability to think about the future in terms of several generations and not just a few years; in terms of food reflexes, to bring back the fashion for cottage cheese or other local cheeses instead of processed cheese, for socata and syrup made from fir shoots instead of soft drinks that taste like medicine, to revive the taste for a linen or wool coat instead of polyester tracksuits, for natural colors instead of fluorescent colors. The city can return to the countryside for once, without stylistic extravagance and material abuse.

The aim of this experimental phase is not the realization of a building, but the realization of the experience itself. But the result of this experiment should one day become not only a functional building, but a prototype for reinventing country life. Thus, the architectural ensemble is slowly, slowly coming into being from the common will of the initiators and participants, in proportion to the human energies released by the project's milestone successes. The distant origins of the project lie in a growing dissatisfaction with what national education is becoming day by day.