For an architect, the ideal client has unlimited funding resources, an aesthetically pleasing, generous space, is artistic, creative and open towards the new, has a well-trained eye and is willing to experiment and sacrifice for the sake of art. Since a real-life beneficiary possessing all of these qualities is very hard to find, the ideal client sometimes takes on the shape of a collective persona - in this case, a well-known advertising agency. While most companies invest in spaces aimed at clients especially (conference rooms, reception desks and lounges), advertising agencies treat their employees with equal respect, since they have to enjoy coming to work. After all, it is here that they spend most of their waking hours (and sometimes even a few of their sleeping hours) and, besides, creativity is vital for the successful completion of their work tasks. Therefore, although the sophisticated environment and certain graphic and tactile motifs provide the unity, each level of the building is designed in a different style, for a playful effect. After all, playing is one of the most efficient ways of creating.

Counted amongst very few renowned women designers (an all the more ‘valuable’ title given that the French have a very feeble tradition of industrial design), Inga Sempé has created objects that, far from being feminine, prove an uncommon sensitivity. Born in Paris of the 5th of January 1968, Inga Sempe worked for a photo agency before enrolling in the Ecole Nationale Superieure de Creation Industrielle (ENSCI – Les Ateliers). Shortly after her graduation from the French design school (in 1993), she took part in a conference held by Mark Newson and, impressed, she immediately wished to collaborate with him.
Her six months in the English designer’s studio were followed by a lengthier collaboration, nearing on two years, with Andrée Putman, and then by the founding of her own studio in Paris in the year 2000. Although she acknowledges that she gained a wealth of knowledge working with the two well-known designers, Inga Sempé talks of this time as of one of great frustrations, when she felt she was not free to develop and realize her own ideas. “Everything you do you do primarily for yourself, so you’d better be satisfied” is one of her mottos.

Simplicity is one of the risky desirables of architecture. Obtaining an object or a composition of objects at city scale, that are simple but not bland, readable yet unrepeatable and as such, memorable, actually involves an artistic gesture of unsuspected complexity. It is an act of sometimes fanatic courage to not for one second abandon the original creed of the concept, a permanent effort to adapt to it in concrete forms and dimensions; it is, in the end, proof of a deep understanding of the play of space, a space which it molds in such a way as to attract people to it. 3LHD have succeeded, in their sports centre at Zamet, to do precisely this. The base concept of the multi-functional centre in the Zamet neighborhood of the city of Rijeka (Croatia), open to the public for two months, has a lot to do with an appearance of naivety that architects usually try to avoid. The project consists of a series of ribbons, identical in orientation and finish raised above ground level at various heights, each of them sheltering a separate space entailed by the program of the centre.
What initially inspired this approach was “gromaca”, a type of stone specific to the town, which the architects of 3LHD recreated in ceramic plaques of their own design, that they used to coat the building’s metallic structures (which are, by the way, rigorously held in reign).

The office building designed by PZP on Calea Victoriei was the first that came out of the collaboration with the Aukett Fitzroy Robinson company, started in 2005. We can speak of a conflictual relation between the modernity of the architectural program, implying an external image that is coherent, considering the building's destination, and the urban context, with its important historical and architectural charge. The fourteen levels of the building (three underground levels, a ground level, a mezzanine and nine floors) occupy a total 14 000 sqm. The plan is relatively simple - according to the nature of the program - and shaped as a square, with extensions on he first five levels. The external image is relatively independent from the internal one, the only aspect they have in common being the simplicity and the accuracy of the expression, as well as the search for a unitary, but non-monotonous look. The concept used in the treatment of the facade aimed to suggest a game of pixels - represented by the glass and stone panels - based on a logic of "setting the volume free". And, as a matter of fact, the volume does become lighter as it rises, glass being the main material used on the upper levels.

A little more than five years ago, we were glad to let you know about the opening, in Bucharest, of a new kind of showroom, a sophisticated and dynamic space, designed in order to emphasize the objects that were to "inhabit" it. The owner, Claudiu Diamandescu, managed, back then, to create an unconventional space in order to showcase a wide variety of objects designed for bathrooms, signed by well-known designers and called it A(r)telier. The "r" was added to emphasize a double meaning: first of all, "revolution" and, secondly, as a lexical mark that brings together "atelier" ("workshop") and "art". The success the showroom enjoyed and its constant moving closer to the world of furniture design urged a reconfiguration of the initial space, without changing the brand's philosophy and image. At the end of 2009, the A(r)telier showroom gets "new clothes", designed by the architects of AA Studio and a new motto: "evolution". Starting from the idea of "re-fresh"ing, the architects reconfigured the entire space, in order to create an innovative and versatile environment for the luxury products exhibited in the showroom.