Romanian architecture bureau ADN BA, selected at the central exposition Reporting from the Front, at the La Biennale di Venezia 2016

The team of architects from ADN BA are showing their project Hilariopolisat the 15^th International Architecture Exposition that proposes the theme „Reporting from the front” and is organized during the Venice Biennalle. It’s for the first time that a Romanian architecture bureau is invited at this event. The exposition is open to the public until November 27^th 2016 and takes place in the Giardini and Arsenale pavilions.

Alejandro Aravena, the curator of the Biennalle, is the one that made the invitation to ADN to be a part of the exposition.

“The participation in the big exposition of the Biennalle in Venice is, of course, a change and a privilege for us. Not only because we are one of the 88 offices and design workshops selected from all over the world for this exposition (among which one of the biggest names in the international architecture world) and not only because is the first time that an office from Romania is invited to take part in the big exposition. Of course that all those things are honoring us extremely, being probably the cultural industry event with the biggest international exposure. But the chance of our participation is also the one of the opening towards a different world, seen only from the outside until now – the one of the way such an event is created and of the way are put together all those different answers, sometimes totally different, to a question and a common theme – the one of the Biennale, this time entitled “Reporting from the front” by Alejandro Aravena, this year’s event curator,” said Andrei Serbescu, partner at ADN BA.

The way in which the AND architects have chosen to show their work is a unique one: they chose that instead of the photographs and pictures, to use layouts and design, all made of paper or paper support. Therefore, they brought 4 projects, together with their environments, resulting in a sum of shits on an imaginary map.

“Even the projects are reality close to each other, being proposed for the same neighborhood, we’ve chosen to redesign the place, in order to be able to guide the eye that was going to look from the outside and help it stop on the corners, the associations and the details that actually give, for us, the substance of the place,” told Adrian Untaru, also partner at ADN.

Therefore, in the Hilariopolis city, the Suvenir Street is intersecting with the Dogarilor street, and the Dacia boulevard is parallel with the Dumbrava Rosie street. The imaginary map is a layout 1:100 archived in a box and the box became a 1:1 layout. On all of its sides, the walls of this box became spaces carriers of other spaces that you can always watch only from the inside – on one hand, the AND projects and some of the most representative buildings of this district (a carriage-house form the beginning of the XIX-th century, a manorial house from the XVIII-th century, an apartment from an interwar house and a series of apartments in a socialist building) and, on the other hand, interiors, fragments of spaces, gardens, terraces, balconies, rooms, etc.

„All of this aspects were put together in a drawing that shows Bucharest at the same time funny, beautiful, dusty, crowded, oriental and occidental, that Hilariopolis from two centuries ago, but also of today,” continued Bogdan Bradateanu, the company’s third partner.

„Although the marketing tries to convince us of a different story, not the rising of the people’s quality of life is what motivates the real estate developers: in the real-estate world, architecture is often just a simple means of making money. This is the reason why I appreciate the fight carried by AND for the quality of architecture in this world of the real-estate, where apparently there is no major conflict,” said the architect Alejandro Aravena, the curator of the event.

The project’s sponsors are: Urban Spaces / Salzburg Real Estate Investment SA, EXCO INVEST, NOD Makerspace and HAI drawings.