A high flight, 134

134 ways of seeing tomorrow's world. 134 birth certificates of a new generation.

But really, when do you become an architect? When you enter architecture? When you graduate? When you get your license? With your first built project? Probably somewhere along the way or maybe even later. What we do know for sure is that one of the first signs of maturity is when, fresh out of college, you enter the most important project of your life so far in a national competition where your projects are public, in the media and around the country.
This brave gesture should be solemn and welcomed by the whole community, supported and appreciated. After 6 years of university, after a path guided with great care by their teachers, here are these young graduates crossing the threshold between school and profession. Many don't realize how sheltered they were at school, few know what awaits them in professional life. They all attended a school that taught them, encouraged them, gave them wings and protected them. Alongside them in the competition, in exhibitions and events, are their older peers who have succeeded. We like to think that the Biennale is the next step after university, the place where they come to present themselves to the public, without their teachers, without the school curriculum and without grades, face to face with the society they will work for, whose problems they will have to solve. Browse through the titles of the 134 diplomas, there are themes and solutions for what the new generation wants to support, change and innovate.
Arhitectura magazine has been publishing diploma projects for more than a hundred years, but it has never dedicated such a large number of issues to these projects. We did it this year, believing that we did it for the new generation and for the years to come. This issue is like a time capsule that will bear witness decades from now to what the new generation of architects and the schools that mentored them were thinking when they graduated in 2023.
The Biennale has this practical character, gathering under its dome only built projects and printed books, with the exception of the diploma projects, the projects in the Ephemer section and the Photography of Architecture, which has a large dose of the tangible in it. The diploma projects are a special subject in this landscape of national realities, they contain a large dose of hypothetical situations, courageous approaches, nonconformist explorations.
This is the third edition of the BNA with a "diploma" section and the participation was extremely numerous: 134 diploma projects from the faculties of architecture in Bucharest, Cluj, Timișoara, Iași and Chisinau.

Ioana Alexe