My Pandemic Chair

AUTORS: The Challenge Academy - Lorena Brează, Daniela Preda, Elena Cinzeacă, Andreea Istrate, Naomi Borsan, Georgian Preda, Otto Constantin

COLLABORATORS: Romanian Order of Architects, Blauhaus Community, PAB Group, AZERO, Nod makerspace

LOCATION: Romania, jud. Sibiu, Săsăuș

Blauhaus Community has recently purchased a house in Săsăuș, wishing to activate the area through various events that will take place here.

My Pandemic Chair was the first workshop in this series, targeting Architecture students and generating a broad discussion about pandemic education for three weeks. We shared our thoughts from the same position for a year. We communicated actively, but without putting our bodies in motion. We populated many evenings with each other, often in the mood for deep debate. We feel, however, that we didn't know each other well enough. We went through a lengthy process of brainstorming what a summer school might look like at the end of a static, anxiety-ridden year.

We wanted to hear students' stories

In the My Pandemic Chair workshop, students were given a wooden chair, handcrafted by a craftsman from Banat, through the customization of which they told the story of their pandemic education - a process that mostly happened sitting in the chair in front of the computer. My Pandemic Chair is the component that helped us to get to know each other in a way that the pandemic year did not give us the opportunity to do, to witness the exhibition of our thoughts materialized in a small-scale artistic object, which we see as a powerful communication tool. We therefore established a relationship between the OBJECT - as a pretext for the stories of education in everyone's pandemic - and the FRAME - this bright pavilion where everyone exhibited and "told" their chair -, a relationship through which we brought to the table the debate about what the school of the future would look like, now that the way we learn has changed radically in a very short time.

Conferences and workshops

The conferences were conducted in an open-ended way, whereby we explored the possibility for students to take part in various initiatives that suited them. They therefore benefited from discussions with our guests, who were open to telling them about the process of building the projects they were part of and guiding them towards direct involvement. Specifically, during the 4 workshops, the guests talked about architectural competitions as tools for training architects (Tamina Lolev), about the link between architecture and entrepreneurship (PAB Group), about urban experts and people who make good connections on a macro scale (Grațian Mihăilescu) and, last but not least, about print and what we need to know to print our plans well as architecture students (Ciprian Furtună - AZERO).