Due to the ingrate context" a reserve of land, surrounded by blocks of flats " and to the ample, but developed in depth, allotment, the project of Jumanca house had to deal with two difficult issues: the autonomous manifestation of the presence on a chaotic site and the capacity to intimately merge with its own field " just like a classical villa " by establishing a spatial " psychical and symbolical " hierarchy between front and back. These requests were initially answered by choosing a cross-shaped arrangement " with a transversal ground-floor occupying the entire width of the allotment and a longitudinal floor that created " physically and metaphorically " the relation between the two parts of the terrain, allowing the under-passage towards the terrace and the garden. The intersection between the two volumes consists, inside, by a zenithally lit two-level void " introducing a third axis in the coordinate system: the vertical one. We deal with a combination between a suprematist composition and a Palladian one, reproducing the matrix of the Malcontenta villa. The subsequent evolution of the project, by the appearance of two lateral apartments upstairs, will emphasize the classical dimension, but " paradoxically " the role of the longitudinal body in the internal organization of the space will be consolidated with its partial "drain" and the transformation in an upstairs family den-living, in direct diagonal relation " trough the central void " with the development on the ground-floor.
PROIECT, TEXT, FOTO: IOAN ANDREESCU, VLAD GAIVORONSCHI

House or hotel? The Miller's Residence is located in Notting Hill, a London district. A series of inedited and very original rooms. It stands out due to three qualities: the furniture and art collection, the happy coexistence between man and art in a proper and, not in the least, programmatic environment, a "maximalist" hotel. Martin Miller is the owner of this interesting composition. He is a furniture and decorative objects collector. He started collecting antiques since 1968. The very first piece of his collection was a Victorian copy of a 17th century Italian armchair. (And, one must take note, often, the beginning of a collection is as important as the first love.) Since then, for Martin Miller, the Christie's and Bonhams auctions became important resources for the house environments. The fact that Mr. Miller was, for a long period, the editor of two famous antiquities magazines ("The Lyle Official Antiques Review"and "Miller's Antiques Price Guide") proves a concerted attention to watching and discovering. These qualities, for an antiquities specialist, turn into profession. At a first sight, it is easy to observe the eclectic character and the subtle irony from Miller house. Here, art has a domestic score. The variations of the residential domestic extend from a precious bohemian to the antiquities collection. All the objects are remarkably well placed in space. The space has personality and that is why each ambient deserves to be recognized.
TEXT: FRANÇ?ISE PAMFIL

101 Citifood Cafe is a "deli", a sort of snack bar with some functional mutations which grants it a certain status, giving autonomy to its gender. If you wish to look for it, it is located on Park Avenue, in Manhattan. 101 Citifood Cafe is a hybrid situated between a self-service and a snack bar, the established nomenclature coming from the term of "delicatessen", by abbreviation "deli". The delis focus on a highly successful salad-bar, plus traditional dishes. The theme's requirements demanded a colorful, happy space, revolving around the longest salad-bar in NY. The available space is the whole ground-floor of a sky-scraper, with a more than generous surface. But the respective surface needed to be divided in sections with different culinary specific, exploiting American's passion to have at his disposal to benefit of quantity and international diversity. The way the restaurant was arranged is reminiscent of a puzzle (that is exactly what it is, from the culinary point of view), a puzzle which is based, not on the continuity of the formal elements, but on softly-taunting suggestions of some existent associations, such as the bar codes on the food-products packaging, stylized in the vertical compartments; then the contrast between the linoleum floor, a cheap and colored material, and the ceiling made of wire netting, beyond of which half a million dollars worth of illuminating systems and air conditioning installations can be seen.
PROIECT: ARH. VLAD ARSENE, ZZING LEE SI JOHN BRUNING, WESTFOURTH ARCHITECTURE
FOTO: LYN MASSIMO
TEXT: SILVIA GUGU

My relationship with the Architecture Institute is a sentimental one. When I was young, this was a very good functionalist school, with which my generation, including Dorin Stefan, for example, was in a certain conflict. Me, myself, I felt connected to the ideas of some architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto. In my opinion, nowadays, a lot of the quality from the past is lost. On one hand, because of the computer, which is an extraordinary instrument, but a very bad architect, and most of the students abandon themselves to it. On the other hand, no one insists on the capacity and creativity of representing and controlling the space anymore. By saying this, you don't have to assume that I am a conservative, not by far, but, this year, as a member of the diploma committee, I was terrified by the very bad drawings I saw, by the inability of a young architect to draw on the paper the shape of his thoughts. I believe that today the architecture school no longer develops the creativity and the capacity of space representation; it has, of course, an extra quality, namely the cultural opening, the much more direct contact with the international phenomenon, but that is not enough.