Each Morphosis project is a complex mechanism, a sum of deconstructed mechansims, rejoint in a sigle, unique one. Each projects reinterprets the urban condition, the program itself and the details of structure, generating a unique structure, impossible to repeat or to move into other place or time, a structure that emerges from the essence of its site but ends by redefining it in an unexpected way.
Proiecte: Morphosis Architects
Text: Ioana Paunescu
Foto: Morphosis Architecys, Roland halbe, Courtesy of Hypo Bank, Ernst Peter Prokop, Kim Zwarts

Slightly deviating the Vama Veche chorus a little more to the North, even heading against the traffic flow, on the road intersected by the very plenipotentiary president of the divans, Kiseleff, the Russian, somewhere on the right side, surrounded by the headquarters of the largest Russian counties and of local Socialists, 1 500 sqm of Canadian land stretches out.
A metaphor, obviously, but rather an interface between the Romanian eager of across-the-borders accomplishments and his adoptive motherland. If some are attracted primarily to the Terra Nova's GDP, others, more sensitive to beauty, are persuaded by this first gate to a better world. The gate is a building that tries to illustrate a certain scale and monumentality worthy of an official headquarters, without abusing of size in any way.
The limitations imposed by the urbanism certificate, both regarding the height conditions as well as the retreats from the road were not necessarily coercive, but they generated a spatial concept that approaches the relation between the site and the building in a different paradigm.
Proiect: Westfourth Architecture, Vladimir Arsene
Coautori: Onar Gerelioglu, Lucia Stoll, Zzing Lee, Calin Negoescu, Raluca Ionescu
Rezistenta: Z Group, ing. I. Zagaican
Text: Luiza Zamora
Foto: Florin Andreescu, Serban Bonciocat

Here lyeth Master Stepan, a servant of God, former Great Ban of Craiova. May his name be remembered forever! Departed during the reign of our faithful Prince Alexandru, a lover of Christ, and of his son Prince Mihnea, in the year 7082 (1574), the month of December, day 11. Such were the words carved on the tombstone that enclosed the body of the departed unto eternity in the Bucovat church narthex. He had not lived to see the murals on the church he had founded, and the room in which he rested was merely decorated with entwined vines and double cross motifs, and staged pedestal, for it was not becoming to leave the house of God unadorned. He had closed his eyes thinking that he would finally find the peace and quiet he had longed for in this place, erected just two years before, unto the praise of our Saintly Father and Great Hierarch, miracle worker Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, from Lycia.
Text: Luiza Zamora
Foto: Serban Bonciocat

In case you don't give in to your first impression of Mexico, the one provided daily by the Globo Television and by its hallucinating soap-operas, you may even get to think that in the Caribbean there still exist other people than the actors from “Marimar”, “Wild Heart” or… People who, apart from knowing the meaning of a really spicy dish or the taste of spirits with floating worms in it, also know how to recycle materials and how to use them in order to create a hotel. A Boutique design-hotel, more precisely, placed on a beach whose image some people use as wallpaper in their living-room, as a sum of their traveling and prosperity dreams of the 90's.
Proiect: Central de Arquitectura Jose Antonio Sanchez, Moises Ison
Design interior: Omelette Hector Galvan
Text: Luiza Zmora
Foto: Undine Prohl, www.designhotels.com, www.hotelbasico.com