The Westfourth Architecture PC office, founded by architect Vladimir Arsene in 1991, in the headquarters situated on the above mentioned street, was probably meant to become himself, a typical American conglomerate of creativity and rigour. In 1993 Westfourth Architecture SA Bucharest Company was established. A long-distance collaboration started between the architects and the engineers from two different worlds from the cultural, technologic and legislative point of view. The Mindbank Bucharest headquarters project was the first product of this collaboration. It was awarded by the Romanian Architects Union and it appeared in various architecture magazines. The project manages to mediate very different, apparently irreconcilable, constraints and influences. The bank institution programme, with specific architectural and technologic requirements, was supposed to be fitted on a long and narrow piece of land, as most pieces of land are in Bucharest. Moreover, there were some urbanistic constraints as well: keeping a lateral access alley, "cuplarea la calcan" with a future extension of the neighbouring building, the alignment to the cornice of a block of flats.
PROIECT: WESTFOURTH ARCHITECTURE, BUCURESTI/NEW YORK
REZISTENTA: PROCONSTRUCT SRL
INSTALATII: ROINSTAR SRL
TEXT: CALIN NEGOESCU

Downtown Timisoara, exactly in front of the cathedral, a jazz club was opened. The people in the know will certainly rush to blame me for the mistake, which I, myself, am eager to straighten out. Downtown Timisoara, exactly in front of the cathedral, a jazz club was reopened. Different. Another. Same name: Club 30. But, this time, the space became a scene truly fit for the spirit of music. In November 2001, the owner of the club, Mr. Horatiu Dejan, decides to initiate an architecture contest for the architecture students in Timisoara, action also supported by the city's architect in chief, Radu Radoslav, a great jazz fun himself. Thus, the result was a space where contrasting colours are ingeniously combined, contributing to the separation of the areas of different interest and functionalities. Within an atmosphere dominated by the bluish-grey of the walls, the orange painted niches recover "the warmth" appropriate to the sitting areas. The same orange hue, this time materialized in parquet, chromatically separates the area occupied by the central pieces of furniture. We also take notice of the solution chosen for the treatment of the ceiling, where any rigid finishing such cardboard-plaster or coffered ceilings, was ignored in favour of some grey canvases, whose domestic materiality, unexpected in such a place, strengthen the sensation comfort. Also a curb, fluid element these suspended canvases bring to the space, support compositionally the private, musical line of the furniture.

In the beginning, the Stavropoleos ensemble included a small church, built in an architectural style with Byzantine influences, but customized - "heterogeneous style ", was to say the scholar Al.Tzigara-Samurcas (roughly criticized for this by Mincu), and an inn, built after the model of the ancient Orient inspired Fanariot inns, with a patio providing shelter for the carriages of the tradesmen spending the night there. This inn-church association (as the church was the place where the over-night guests prayed) proved to be efficient, as the inn was able to support also a school on their expenses. It is not only the church that benefits presently from restorers' work. By the care and gift of the priest Iustin Marchis, the whole monasterial Stavropoleos ensemble slowly gains back its original glow. The restored halls of the museum, of the library and of the refectory gather inside jewels of Romanian religious art, many of them saved from the Vacaresti and Enei demolished churches...
TEXT: CODINA DUSOIU