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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.
The mere drawing of a plan
Photo:© valerio olgiati, Plantahof Auditorium, Landquart, Switzerland, 2008-2010.
People have evolved so much that no one really knows who created language. No one is intrigued by how and who made it, it just seems native.
Imagine the moment before architecture became architecture, standing at the exact moment architecture starts. Far away from ancient structures such as the Parthenon, somehow, from a nebulous, abstruse place, architecture began to exist. As stated in the main text, there is an intuition that there exists a universality in the experience of space. It is the space that transpires wherever people exist. This immaterial presence is sought to be surrounded, captured, measured and mastered.
The mere drawing of a plan is sense-making. There is an agreement that a plan is the result of cutting horizontally through buildings, then taking a preposterous look from above – a fifth view. This settlement plays a crucial role in human endeavour, as it establishes a unit of measurement – a set of symbols and signs, dimension, a standardised quantity for space to be quantified. With all these variables, when one examines a plan, it occurs that throughout the history of architecture, plans have changed the least. Albeit restive evolution, a plan abided to some sort of tranquility and stillness.
A plan is quiet, obscure in a sense of being inviolate.
A plan has clarity. What lays in the human mind is cautiously (in a way that deliberately avoids harm or errors) translated into abstract language.
A plan has distinction. The act of drawing a plan is a cognitive avowel of oneself.
A plan is self-sufficient. Valerio Olgiati’s representations of buildings, for example, always lack context. Plans are secluded, kept away from any disturbance. The Plantahof Auditorium is pictured as an isolated, right-angled, autonomous room, where the pillar traversing the wall is a dotted line, almost invisible.
However, the most striking is the fact that a plan has some sort of timelessness. It carries over time an immanent presence, along with the peculiarity of finding strong resemblance between space.
The burden of a possible addendum has to do with neither the universe or how an alien would like some plans of architecture, nor to a brief summary of the history of building.
It bears the weight of the stupefaction of human mind.
Roberta Frumușelu graduated from UAUIM Bucharest receiving Best Diploma Award 2020 for an Architecture Archive of Bucharest. Since 2017, she works as an architect at STARH and a teaching assistant in Andrei Șerbescu’s studio at UAUIM. Roberta is the curator of cryptic-k, a raw, dense, and incomplete architecture archive, along with Eduard Untaru.