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Radu Tîrcă and Ștefania Hîrleață are students at University of Architecture and Urbanism 'Ion Mincu', Bucharest. At present, they lead their theoretical research on the subject of thermal towns and diploma projects in Govora Baths under the guidance of Stefan Simion, Irina Tulbure and Ilinca Paun Constantinescu. As students, they won second prize and best student project in a BeeBreeders international architecture competition - Mango Vynil Hub, third prize in a Zeppelin national competition - Prototip pentru comunitate, as well as other mentions in other competitions.
fake
as an attribute, it strips away the added value of the supposedly authentic. As a metaphor, it opens up the dual discourse between the original and the reiterating. The fake is the rich moment of the double: not a certainty, but an inquiring reasoning. The absolute is being challenged by the open-ended work. As information proliferates at all the levels of our existence, all thoughts dwell on readymade: thinking as dialogue. Producing the authentic gets suspended in the state of the genuine copy. In the end, the original as a strong concept fades away. In this difficult landscape, the stake is double: grasping the meaning of the archetypes while dislocating it to new purposes.
as a strategy, it goes beyond the good-bad categories. It is ambivalent, inherent, high-risk. It is not about dwelling from tabula rasa. It could be about infusing significance to an existent situation, about recycling the difficult history and its physical remains. Confronted to real needs and fantasized desires, people in the city are caught up in a continuous process of disguising one into the other. It is an instable process in the sense that it triggers the newness.
Should this strategy be finite? Should it end?
stability
is a desirable condition when it comes to inhabiting a neighborhood. It is the mark of the dominant ideology: the modern middle class family that uses the city and in doing so the city complies to requirements such as security, continuity, functional mix, pedestrian routes, parks and plazas, maximum cultural and functional comfort for the individual understood as the generic human with typical needs/ a clear division between private and public/ maximum efficiency in land-use. The urban fragment is acknowledged as such by recognizing its character, its physical and atmospheric particularities. Identity and Authenticity are the founding concepts. They have clear boundaries, so it is the discourse of the inclusive-exclusive. It is the safe esthetic of the familiar, the nostalgic, the melancholic. It is the moral proliferation of the existing.
is the dangerous look away from the condition of the contemporary city. it is not seeing that the city is truly alive as long as it is the essential laboratory of the society trying to improve itself. Failure is just a pathway to progress. Failure is thus healthy if seen as an intermediate stage. New needs mirror new possibilities: mutual determination. Social mutations add up as consequence to technical breakthroughs, to demographic explosion, to the new economical landscape, to the state dissolution, to the planetary sustainable imperative, to our most fabulous desires as a species to explore and experience everything. The city is the main stage. What is necessary is the ethical investigation of how failed urban spaces can become resource to the community.
