NEXT, the VIII-th edition – September 8 – November 3 2002 Romania, mon amour – the metaphor / title of the exhibition organized in Romania’s pavilion. ‘Romania had an OK presentation! I had a positive feeling, partly due to some cute events that took place at the opening. On the other hand, I believe that every architect, any man of culture, must reserve time and interior space in order to vision a manifestation such as this. It depends, in truth, on the own attitude towards the act of creation, which must be seen as a global, contextualized creation. In the pavilions’ area, my surprises were related to France, Germany and England. The first two were interesting through the attempts of entering an inedited area, beyond patterns: formal attempts, without theorizing. The French were heterogenic, unlike Spain, for instance, who was dressed in a media shirt. And England presented very well through the atmosphere and media means a project: the Yokohama terminal of Foreign Office – already made. It is true, you can present yourself in a group context if the feeling and theme are common, but, at the same time, each has his own searches, from the same atmosphere, but particularized.
COMISAR: ARHITECTUL DORIN STEFAN
CO-CURATOR: ARH. MARIO KUIBAS, CARE NE-A ACORDAT, CU PRIETENIE, UN INTERVIU.

The nine condominiums with rentable residences on the Gafencu street, performed by the BBM Group and known as La Mesteceni, manifest exactly this vocation of the event that Lyotard is talking about: the sovereign event, where the characters, costumes and d飯r ? as well as the public ? are always shadowed, simple elements of props integrated in the glamorous, spectacular, unforgettable EVENT. Conception. The ensemble with the impact of urban event of which I speak is the result of the marriage between the fertile and prolific interbellic modernism of Bucharest with the creating force of the BBM Group. The option of the BBM architects for the above-named muse is founded on a thinking of a rare deference and sensitivity towards the city, starting from the analysis of the built fund of Bucharest, which still, after so many ?rewritings? (Augustin Ioan), keeps high, broad concentrations (as surface, percent) and important ones (as structuring role in tissue, as significance under any type of cultural evaluation, be it esthetic, historical etc.) of modernistic architecture. The architecture of the buildings scavenges, the range between quote and comment of the interbellic modernism, with the absolutely irrefutable argument that I have already suggested: local REPRESENTATIVITY. The dialogue in time with a flourishing period from the town?s history, in fact the most flourishing, unfolds with respectful lines which paraphrases with the unconstraintness and boldness of the experiment and is able to synthesize competitive aspects, so that the final result would be a speech with its own personality, an erudite speech, with excellent documentation, but also fresh, young, with ludic accents. It is, at the same time, a rigorous speech, with all the footnotes necessary and with bibliography: cf. Rietveld, cf. Le Corbusier, cf. De Stijl etc.
PROIECT: BBM GROUP
TEXT: SILVIA GUGU
FOTO: BBM GROUP

Compared to the classical cases, in which the architect designs the interior spaces of the buildings ‘signed’ by himself or of some already existent buildings, the above-mentioned situation has constituted novelty for us through the complexity of the relationships created within the project. Thus, the architect – beneficiary or architect – beneficiary/proprietor type relationships have transformed, in our case, in an equation architect1 – beneficiary / architect2 – proprietor in which the delimitation of competencies between parties was one of the most difficult problems to solve.
PROIECT: ARH. BOGDAN POP, ARH. ROTTMAN ASTRID, ASDESIGN 95
FOTO: ARH. DAN CALCIU
MOBILIER: STEELCASE
MOCHETA: INTERFACE HEUGA
ANTREPRENOR GENERAL: OZER CONSTRUCTION, CONTRACTING & TRADING A.S.

The master, this time, is the architect Marius Marcu Lapadat (applause), the same whose wand brought the Moon on Earth in Piata Romana no.9 (Luna Bar) and yellowed an entire basement on Edgar Quinet (Yellow Bar). In Tunnel is preeminently used the most express post modernistic language: off-hand appeal to the past (the fresque kept, but completed without an excess of deference), borgesian dialogue between mirrors, the quote (which teams up nicely with the development for the rehabilitation of the old basement), parody (the ball hall, the saloon), the collage (fragments of décor from different époques, different environments, made with different finishing materials), the oxymoron (poor-rich or, vice versa, if you prefer, the minimalist opulence-austere sensuality etc.), the materials as found, sometimes also the solutions as found, so to speak. The result is that which I just told you, for a description did not seem to me to be able to surprise the essential qualities of the ‘tunnel’: its own life, the seductive-deceiving personality, the magic and mockery with which it bombards you as you cross its threshold.
PROIECT AMENAJARE: ARH. MARIUS MARCU LAPADAT
TEXT: SILVIA GUGU
FOTO: ARH. MARIUS MARCU LAPADAT

‘The distortions which communism has introduced are not only those that we characterize by terror, economic misery, surveillance, ideological propaganda. There is another aspect, deeper and less visible. With us there was produced a sort of psychological inversion, due to all those things but also due to the fact that we have been forced to live our lives in conditions which, without our will, don’t do anything else but reproduce the conditions of our enslavement. This seems to me to be the ultimate perversity of communism, because in the moment in which the traditional property structure has been completely destroyed, we would have said ‘OK! It’s sad, but we’re still alive!’ But the consequence is that something stunted in us, it broke and no longer functions properly. In the moment in which they falsified the judicial rapports between people, we said ‘OK! It’s sad, but they didn’t succeed in completing their village systematization plan!’ In fact, they have succeeded even if they haven’t destroyed the last place, for they have falsified urbanism, they have falsified the quasi-totality of the sites we live on. What do we do with the cities, with the typified and profoundly wrong civic centers, what do you do with the laboring neighborhoods? The Alba Iulia boulevard is the mixed formula of communism in capitalistic Spielhosen: concretes, metals and glass and the toupee of the capitalistic commercial’.