The Reghina Blue in Timisoara offers a prospect of a low density residential area as peaceful as it gets. Not wishing to affect the environmental features, the Reghina turns a simple volume towards the street, horizontal and painted in ethereal blue. In its back, it organizes the service industry according to the mild and traditional formula of the precincts, around a scenery oasis meant to sustain the calm and anti-urban meditative atmosphere, anti-obscurantist and atypical, as it is breathed in and out by the entire hotel.
PROIECTANT: S.C. ANDREESCU & GAIVORONSKI SRL
AUTOR PROIECT: IOAN ANDREESCU
COLABORATOR: DAN MUNTEANU
TEXT: SILVIA GUGA
FOTO: ARPAD ZACHI, OVIDIU MICSA

The tourists don’t crowd the streets of Milan during April: the weather is not sensational. But the city is full of design lovers, furniture manufactures from Italy and not only, dealers, journalists and, high society, in general. Right in the middle of the month it is scheduled the Milan Design Week or, in other words seven days of absolute news, experiments and ideas, exhibited within the dozens of galleries and showrooms downtown, but also within the ancient Fiera di Milano.
TEXT: MIHAI GUREI
FOTO: MIHAI GUREI

It is a new and lonely house located on a street with a painter’s name, and it well stands among the other respectable houses on the same front. It is not at all showy, it takes up proportions, and a certain outlook decency, given by the veneered plywood screwed with stainless bolts and by the transparent bricks who stress its shape. The interior doesn’t count too many rooms (a post-December Revolution welfare sign), it numbers only enough rooms necessary to a family with a kid and a grandma. It wins yet due to the wide open and high space, also known as the living room. This space involves the dinner-place, austere and wenge, as much as the kitchen endowed with the latest news in the magayines, a type of furniture which lures one more towards looking than coocking. The story includes two bedrooms and a captious dressing, with all necessary racks and drawers. The furniture is chromatically unitary to the one in the living room, yet from the bedroom class at MobExpert. The architect wished the matrimonial bathroom would be more unusual and more interesting: the black barisol ceiling, the ostrich egg-shell bathtube, a window through which one may see the street’s progress. The house’s penthouse has been built in the American „baloon structure” system, with a precise number of tolls. As the very architect of this building told us, this is a „collection house”, for the private collection of those dwelling inside it, so that the reppresentational function must become as visible and plenary as possible: precious objects, famous designers’ signatures... a house similar to a visiting card.
PROIECT: FLORIN ADAMESCU
TEXT: LUIZA ZAMORA
FOTO: SERBAN BONCIOCAT

In 1984, the German-Jewish American Richard Meier was granted the Pritzker Prize for Architecture. This is the moment that really opened his long list of architectural projects, designed to house art: the Art Museum in Atlanta, Georgia; the Decorative Arts Museum in Frankfurt, Germany; the Contemporary Art Museum in Barcelona, Spain; or the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, California. Inaugurated in Octomber 2004, the new building destined to shelter and exhibit the Frieder Burda Collection is planned in the shape of a villa – an architecture inspiring creativity and arousing the event state.
TEXT: OANA TANASE
FOTO: SAMMLUNG FRIEDER BURDA/ VG BILD-KUNST

The historical area of the Bucharest, practically the geographical center of the capital, covering an area of approximately 50 hectares, constitutes a veritable urbanistic and cultural patrimony, which confers identity and prestige to the city. Even though there are ample studies and projects already elaborated for the rehabilitation of the technical-urban infrastructure and for the rearrangement of the architecture (from the approximately 520 buildings present within the area, 38 % are recorded as being architecturally significant), there were no concrete measures until recently. The first determined gesture, the decision of the mayor Liviu Negoita of denying the access of the vehicles within the historical area was a controversial one, resulting in debates related to the manner in which this rehabilitation should be accomplished, mobilizing, at the same time all the building owners within the area to form an unprecedented association.
ANCHETA: VIORICA BUICA
FOTO: SERBAN BONCIOCAT