Initiatives / Experiments / Visions
Neighborhood's Opening
Project description
Neighborhood’s opening can provoke new connections between the members of the community we are living in, it can encourage future similar projects, but also paves the way for a diverse range of experimental explorations. During the state of emergency, the spaces around our building block were intensively populated by the inhabitants, which ceased to happen once the restrictions were relaxed. We returned to our habit of going straight from our car to our apartment door, without stopping in the common areas. What would happen if we used, correctly and permanently, all the options offered by the spaces around our building block? The opening of this dialogue, through a hybrid workshop of discussions, graphic exploration, collective exhibition, but also relaxation, at the shade of lime trees, could build a small archive of different experiences of a group of individuals using the same space, in one of the tensest periods of recent years. So, we decided to bring the art gallery experience in the community and to present its residents with our experience as users of its space, to give them courage to tell their story, as well.This documentation exercise is the first phase of a 3 year project. Type-apartment building blocks’ Diaries is a platform which encourages the development of alternative ways of investigating, analysing and building architecture. This project aims to reconsider the hierarchical relationship between the architect and the user of the space, connecting, in the same time, civic actors, professionals, architects, architectural and design students and inhabitants of the socialist type-apartment building blocks, in a staged process, in order to impart knowledge.*I began the current investigation as a consequence of finding a set of 49 years old letters, near the type-apartment socialist building block in which I have been living for the last 5 years. The sweet sadness of the tumultuous love story and the evolution of one of the protagonist complicated disease, which was narrated by a fragile woman, Katerina, to her love interest, haunted me for a long time. While trying to find the owner of the letters, I became a “detective of the space”, I inhabited and documented trough texts and illustrations all that I could observe. I combined my experience as a researcher, architect and personal user of the socialist type-apartment building.
Author's presentation text
Mrs. Gențiana DUMITRAȘCU graduated from The University of Architecture and Urban Planning “Ion Mincu” and has finished her doctoral thesis at the above mentioned university. With experience working as a teaching assistant within the Faculty of Architecture and Interior Design Faculty, her research interests focus on the intersection between architecture and comic strips. She also manages Atelier Plăsmuit, a small studio, which focuses on investigating and designing the architectural space, using characteristic elements of sequential art for research, illustrations, experiments, workshops, installations and objects.
