You can't be an architect if you don't know how to build

The most consistent part of the summer schools is the didactic part and the belief that the essence of architecture starts from the detail of execution. What I mean is that you can't be an architect if you don't know how to build! But to know how to build, you have to build, you have to have experience of building.

I asked my students to imagine objects starting from the detail of execution. A characteristic detail that tells you how a project can be made out of stone, wood, earth or brick. And the criteria by which they checked the validity of each other's projects was: "What I'm proposing here could have been done in another material? Could it have been done differently? Or is it obligatory and can only be this way?". And it worked.

Year I - 2022, "Ion Mincu" University of Architecture and Urbanism, Ana Maria Goilav workshop, theme Spatial Types

Pure construction, structural materials, classical architectural language

In the workshop, through models, we work in small what we do in Bunești. The students analyze a mentor subject, just as the School at Bunești targets architectural archetypes. Space-Structure is the central theme of the School at Bunești, everything there is structural form, architectural spatial formulas in which a building material is fully expressed until the last stage of execution. The students are divided into teams so that, at the end of the exercise, they get a panoramic view of four building materials and their associated construction systems: wood, stone, brick and reinforced concrete. Each material appears in structural hypostases that complement each other and are like facets of the same truth. In wood we have elastic structures, diaphragms, Fachwerk system and orthogonal stiffening system. In reinforced concrete we have underground structures, cantilevers, boxed floor slabs and concrete in its poetic version, imprinted, colored, patinated, left to degrade in a controlled way. The stone, also divided into four hypostases, competes with the brick. In the case of bricks, the emphasis was on mortar and ductile walls, while in the case of stone, on the contrary, we worked with megalithic structures, muro al secco, so precisely what stone can do that brick cannot. Each technique has been explored by a team of students, from the analysis of the mentor object to the model.

Buneștiul is a research by construction project

All summer schools have an experimental, architectural research component. We are people who build, for the architect this must legitimately be research. The story of Bunești also begins at the University of Architecture and Urbanism "Ion Mincu", in 2001, when I was finishing my university studies. At that time I had the idea of building a house and I said to myself: Shouldn'tevery architecture graduate build a house, a small house, at least a dog house, but something different? He would be a man who understands the world. I still ask myself that question to this day. It's a question that still motivates me. After three years at "Mincu" and three more years of university abroad, I came back to defend my degree. I dared to believe that I could give my diploma not with a drawing, not with some drawings, but with a building. In Austria, working a lot on construction sites, I thought: "How nice it would be to graduate with a construction site under my control!". And I hit a wall. Reinforced concrete. But time has validated the direction of the Bunești School. The project has been running without interruption year after year since 2008, since I started it, and has grown steadily, but more and more strongly in recent years, in terms of participation, interest and impact on others. I am energized and inspired by the need for such schools where architecture is fundamentally construction. So far, over a thousand students have passed through the Bunești School.

Man, forest, foundation

I have the same relationship with my architecture students whether we are at Bunești or in Mincu's studio. In fact, I have the same relationship with them, they don't have the same relationship with me, that's very interesting. The established institutional framework puts artificial barriers between teachers and students. When the students leave this space with its rules, with its spirit, and find themselves in the forest with the professor, only then does the relationship begin to have a foundation. And I don't mean the colloquial part, but the act of learning. That's where it starts. And why? Because that's where you meet the human being, beyond the matriculation number and the credits. Until then there's a lot of social convention. Nature puts you in another system of reference, somehow it is a metaphor, this virgin place where we started from scratch the construction of the school in Bunești, you erase everything you know, it is unschooling, you start all over again. But the fact that we went into the woods, we settled in a place where there was nothing before, is our philosophy. We're not criticizing the education system, we're simply building.

To do good architecture you have to ask the right questions

The really important questions, not just the questions that are related to the program, to the regulations, to the distances imposed by PSI, which are compulsory but insufficient. An architectural theme means asking the questions that always concern man. Man is the reason why we are building the Bunești School. The whole act of building, of the building site, is a metaphor for an inner process that you do not see, but witness. And it has a very important component through living in the community, because you cannot build yourself up on your own, the other is essential in building you up. You cannot do anything if there are not a few others with you, in Bunești there are things that can only be achieved together.

In university school, as a student, you are alone

And this is a very tiring matter. What I do on the exam, what I did on the project, me, me, me, and you carry this burden of self with you until the end, when you graduate. At Bunești School the focus is on others, you don't understand anything if you don't pay attention to others. How can I help the other person, how can I reach out to them, who is the person next to me? My students didn't know each other in university school, they knew each other. There is a big difference. They started to get to know each other in Bunești, they started to sit together, to wonder, to sincerely wonder who the person next door is. I'm not talking about community as a sum of people enclosed by a fence in a space, but about a real, heartfelt availability for the other, for the person next to you. This is how I myself had the revelation of the team. Architecture is a team art, you can't do it alone, you can't coordinate if you've been a loner all your life.

The wooden house sits in the presence of an attempt at brevity. 2020, 60 architecture teachers and students, 2 carpenters, two months of work. Two complementary wood species, acacia, a hard wood for the infrastructure, fir, a light wood for the superstructure, a single constructive section. If the Greek stone temples interpreted proto-models in wood, here we have done the reverse exercise, translating a stone structure, a 13th century church, the church of the Noravank Monastery in Armenia, into a wooden building system.

The earth house is not a house either. It is, rather, an attempt to mold the earth from its foundations. And, by the way, the most beautiful part of the earth house is these very foundations, it is the unseen part. The foundations are made of successive layers of compacted clay, an old technical solution that we have revived here, not so much to test it, but more to convince us modern people of the validity of the old ways. One of the school's teachers, Mirel Bănică, told me one day that he can't stay in the inner courtyard of the earth house, he feels something, a kind of updraft that makes him immediately go outside. I never told him that this structure evokes a place on the Mount of Olives, Inbomon, a sanctuary that we know existed in the fourth century, a kind of portico built around the site of the Ascension.

The brick house represents a reverence paid to mathematics, the osature of architecture, the art and science that can attune the humblest object to the cosmic order. On the east aticulum we have marked the mathematical formula of beauty, the golden number, and on the west aticulum the number pi. The compact, structural brick, produced in a nearby village, is the meeting point for three worlds, Mesopotamia with its self-supporting vaults, Byzantium with its 11th-century fortification walls of Nicaea, and the trapeza of St Anthony the Great in Egypt. We call the place a 'trapeza' in reference to the table around which we gather, but which architecturally becomes this canopy sheltering our little community of 40.

We came to Bunești for two days

and stayed for three weeks

This year I stayed for two weeks again and I don't regret a single day I spent here, among students who are very interested in things they've never heard of. Why do you say September, write 7 and say 9? Why does the week have 7 days, why not 10? How do you discuss something that is about infinity? How do you talk about infinity? Things that a mathematician thinks about in a different way than an ordinary person who has never had contact with these things, but they are topics that, in the end, define general culture.

Mihai Zamfirescu, math teacher, German High School, Bucharest

HOW TO LEARN ARCHITECTURE ¹

"Architecture cannot actually be taught. That's why there are no good architecture schools. But architecture can be taught. That's why there are very good architects."²

Prof. Mimesis

What brings teacher and student together for a while is the call to architecture. In its absence, though circumscribed by the walls of the same institution, the two remain strangers. The student beneficially imitates his tutor, as in any vocational process of knowledge. The workshop project is a team project, not a solitary exercise, refereed coldly, objectively and fairly, with impersonal authority. And student gain is evidenced not only by knowledge but by character traits.

Places, not objects

The project must necessarily mean more than an object. Even when it is limited by its studio theme to abstract exercises in architectural language, the project "demands" place, "demands" topos, it needs the living, complicated and unrepeatable conditions of any settlement in space. Octav Doicescu, Henrieta Delavrancea-Gibory or G. M. Cantacuzino declined modern language - often "atopic" - through cultural tradition and critical regionalism.

Great Places

A didactic avatar of place has always been travel. No sedentary school or workshop demonstration can substitute for the experiences a Grand Tour has in store. Instead of a standardized curriculum, the architect follows his own itinerary, with individual encounters and revelations. What are Great Books for liberal education are Great Places for architectural education. For Le Corbusier, The Journey to the Orient has the vocation of a "personal manual" of architecture.

The building material. Childhood of architects

Another avatar of the place is the building material, which should be allowed to unfold as a theme of reflection, beyond functional solutions. Architectural thinking feeds on the building material. Materials hide within them spatial, formal and structural archetypes. Craftsmanship - i.e. the way of 'thinking with one's hands' not only through drawing but also through construction - is as much a part of architecture's childhood, up to the Renaissance, as it is of the childhood of many architects: Zumthor is the son of a cabinetmaker, Mies van der Rohe apprenticed in a stone workshop, Gaudi's father was a blacksmith.

Studying classical architecture and pre-modern language

The study of the work and intellectual biographies of some of the masters brings with it an understanding of the meaning of our adherence to the past. The fathers of modernism were classically trained. In Mies's Cartesian structural frameworks we can recognize the order that governs all classical architecture.

Classics must be brought from the course literature into the design studio and attended as a school of permanence, of the refined science of form, of knowledge of the principles of visual perception, of the basic rules of space and composition. The paradigmatic hypostases of the dialects of modern architecture cannot be practiced as formative exercises without the knowledge of the unique, Vitruvian model of classical architecture.

The study of liberal arts

Architecture as a complete formation and the architect-painter-sculptor-poet-poet-writer-thinker have, in most schools, fallen into disuse. The specialization that makes an architect a technologist may, however, amount to a "desacralization" of the vocation. From the cultivated builder of the early twentieth century, the architect has become an efficient service provider, leaving the horizon of culture forever in the rush of schooling. Architecture, however, involves practicing building as a cultural act. The school of architecture must remain par excellence the privileged place of reflective practice, of intellectual, humanist discourse. Schole for the Greeks, or otium for the Latins, was free time, unoccupied by work in the service of the city, time set aside for reflection and meditation.

Latin for architects

Loos made a point that is true for all times when he said that "the architect is a bricklayer who knows Latin"3. The Latin language is a universal tool for study and thought, a way of organizing abstract thought which avoids confusions of language. Knowledge of Latin is equally useful for the construction of ideas and meanings, both through words and architectural forms.

Form - the last resort

The material of pre-modern architecture is mass, while modern architecture works with space. The contemporary architect, often hostage to thinking of form exclusively in terms of space, risks remaining an iconoclast passionate about packaging. Architectural form is not a form in itself, it involves engaging in solving a complex problem of structure, context, function, it must be discovered and intuited.

Ana-Maria Goilav

NOTES

1 Text published in the collective volume 2,14 types of schools of architecture, I. Băncescu, A. Belenyi, I. Stoian ed., Editura Universitară "Ion Mincu", Bucharest, 2016, pp. 165-168.

2 Mario G. Salvadori, quoted in Enis Kortan, Turkish Architecture and Urbanism through the Eyes of Le Corbusier, Boyut, Istanbul 2015, p.1989

3 Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, Ariadne Press, CA 1997 ("An architect is a mason who has learned Latin").

What is essential at home in Bunesti

As with other places or summer schools, Bunești is beyond being a school of architecture, in a way it is a school of becoming, a school where you learn something about being human and I think it is not too much to say that it is a school that levels you, melts your ego a little bit through all sorts of things that happen. Here I'm talking about the mixing of people who are very different in age, in backgrounds, doing the same thing, the whole sitting around a table with stories, with lessons, with walks in the woods. All this hard-to-quantify time when something other than architecture is happening. One of the days I had to go to Bunești I came on foot. It was evening, it was getting dark, the road seemed endless, and as I walked on in the darkness and the blackness, I felt very strongly the sensation of coming home.

Alexandra Mihailciuc