Fascination Street

Project description

By the age of 30 we were all somewhat consumed. We had only briefly lived, worked and practiced architecture through the first speculative bubble of the Romanian economy, a time of never before seen spending and investment, when no one really had any time to stop, and look and think and take a breath... And then, it burst. All of a sudden, we had all the time in the world. Time for us, one realises in hindsight. But also, time to give, back where it was most needed; in our communities... and our community was that of the school. When it comes to responsibility it's hard to say what others should or should not do, so this will be mostly about us, the group of tutors teaching the first year studio at the Faculty of Architecture in Timisoara, and our decade long history of soul searching by looking at what unbuilt, therapeutic/ maieutic architecture can do. A time when we rediscovered the fascinating tool that architecture can be in forging groups and communities. We asked ourselves if we could engage 100 individuals to work together and prove their merit, not against one another but with each other? So, we built a city, a utopia, or heterotopia if one thinks of it more through Foucault’s mind. A city that is timeless, yet grounded in the problems of our time, limitless in its possibility to grow yet with a clear margin, styleless yet bound by form and its relation to the space around it, defined by the minimal resources from which it is built, a ship on which to sail on. We turned learning into playing, the studio into a game, the project into a process of discovery, its inherent competition into cooperation.This will also be our students story, and how playing a game about cities took us from the speculative avant garde thinking of Constant’s New Babylon, the surrealism of Guy Debord's practice of derive, the dialectical thinking of Lefebvre’s production of space, Kevin Lynch’s behavioural observations on the image of the city, looking for complexity and contradiction not for form’s sake, but for life’s sake.