During a late autumn day, a friend wished me upon leaving: "May you livelong enough to build a house in Bucharest". The next day I started to look for a terrain: not too big, not too expensive, not too far away from downtown, but with a lot of green around"¦ And I got a small, expensive one, in an area forgotten by the City hall, but considered by them as a "good" one with important perspective of development. Our land, with its 10x22 meters, "benefited" of the withdrawals imposed by PUD (Urbanism Development Plan) of 2,5 and 3m, plus a calcan, with height regime of B+GF+2+M and a very high phreatic water, at "1.95m, but it offered us all the possibilities for building spaces spacious enough for our continuously developing company. Within such simple spaces, the color and the texture of the floor became very important; different wood essences were used for every level: oak (dark brown, dense texture), ash (yellowish brown, irregular texture), hornbeam (yellowish, smooth texture), cherry wood (reddish-brown, dense texture) and paduc (reddish with golden accents, dense texture). The only interior "architectural" accents are the stairs: metallic inside the company, concrete with wooden finishing inside the apartment.
PROIECT: ARH. SILVIU MUSTEATA, ARH.MINA SAVA, ARH. STEFAN ILIESCU ? A STIL SRL
TEXT: MINA SAVA
FOTO: SERBAN BONCIOCAT

Known for the simplicity and minimalism pushed to the essence, the objects created by Konstantin Grcic suit the rhythm of the actual life style and mentality, in contrast with the contemporary minimalism fashion by what the author defines as functionality in human terms: a combination of the severity of the shape with considerable humor and mental agility "¦ For the German designer, the space-object relationship can also be translated by the architecture as a storage place: an extremely flexible, set design architecture, like a box of objects structured by the inhabitant in order to change the space, just like a theater stage is changing. "I always listen to music, especially surf-punk and electric guitar. I would like to be a Formula 1 pilot, and the country where I would like to live is the city". These are not random statements, but a series of real thoughts, confessed by a trendy German designer, who decided to amuse himself by using the "confessions" questionnaire published by Marcel Proust in 1892 (used frequently as a society game in the literary saloons from the 19th century). The ones expressed above reflect the creation of Konstantin Grcic, defined by using actual materials (polypropylene, polyurethane, stainless steel, aluminum, and glass), urban chromatic code, by creating an "ideal house" prototype for the type of living specific to the contemporary man. The designer, a Beastie Boys fan, transposes the characteristics of a life style into every day objects, adapting them to clearly expressed needs and aspirations, without "burdening" the design object with esthetic valences just for art's or for an ephemeral taste's sake .
TEXT: MIRELA DUCULESCU

By reuniting the contemporary art section of the National Art Museum and of the National Office for Art Exhibitions and Documentation, a new structure was composed, structure which, unfortunately, starts without a sufficiently serious collection, which may become the backbone of the future Contemporary Art Museum. As for the financial part, I will concentrate it by a comparison: a football player is worth 25 million dollars, while the construction and the endowments of the Romanian National Museum of Contemporary Arts will cost only half of that; 16 000 square meters, seven levels, five elevators, air conditioning and electric installation... Just to give you some other examples: the rearrangement of Brancusi's workshop from Paris, which is less than a thousand square meters, cost over seven million dollars, and the project for the Contemporary Art Museum from Sao Paolo cost 14 million dollars. There are still many people who think that this museum does not represent a priority, or that the location compromises it ab initio, or that it is managed by an old conservative dinosaur and sold to all the governments, that the space is demonized, that it will always be a dictatorship place and that is the reason why some artists won't exhibit their work there... We need clarifying moment, when we should start talking seriously about contemporary art. We must become able to take part in a dialogue by the actual standards of the contemporary art, because around us, in Budapest, Ljubljana or Tirana the spirit of this dialogue functions within a natural movement of the artists and of the curators from various countries, a normality of the European art market, to which we still aspire. Of course, this story of the dialogue to which such a museum is constrained to, must be sustained by a very clear introspective and retrospective view. A very important segment will consist of the documentation activity, started by us many years ago, which lead to the construction of an archive covering the past 50 years of Romanian art, containing over 9000 artist files, that will be partially accessible by a digitalized data base.