HISTORY
Vlad Sebastian Rusu (b. 1981), Octav Silviu Olanescu (b. 1982), Anamaria Olanescu (b. 1982) and Anda Gheorghe (b. 1990) are four architects living and practicing in Cluj. Common concerns and interests have led them to initiate a collaboration for the architectural competition regarding the Revitalization of the Firefighter's Tower in Cluj.
ROMANIAN DESIGN WEEK APPEARENCES
2017//Revitalization of Firefighter's Tower in Cluj
Vlad Sebastian Rusu (b. 1981), Octav Silviu Olanescu (b. 1982), Anamaria Olanescu (b. 1982) and Anda Gheorghe (b. 1990) are four architects living and practicing in Cluj. Common concerns and interests have led them to initiate a collaboration for the architectural competition regarding the Revitalization of the Firefighter's Tower in Cluj.
ROMANIAN DESIGN WEEK APPEARENCES
2017//Revitalization of Firefighter's Tower in Cluj
Argument - the tower, built in gradual layers, used for defending the city and then for sightseeing, remains through our proposal an urban observatory, a place for contemplation and reading of the urban development. The third age is materialized by a discreet intervention, integrated and unified, which aims by simple and reversible means to obtain a consistent activation of the tower, while providing a reading of the past and future city.
The translucent core - it becomes the backbone of the new tower, which facilitates the accessibility to the upper level, allows the visiting of the interior space and provides structural rigidity. Proposed as a semi-transparent veil, the core becomes part of the third age of the tower, which leaves disclosed other stages and phases of its evolution.
The hierarchy of interior space - imagined as a downward path, the walking through the tower is initiated at the highest panorama level, where the visitor plays the double role: actor and spectator of a present reality. From here the route descends, going through spaces and different layers, providing a range of sensory experiences, along with an exhibition narrative thread that reveals the previous realities. The visitor experiences and investigates moments in the history of the city and the tower through the spatial scenes of dioramas and augmentative reality, presented along the visiting route.
The mirror and the city model - the experience of visiting the tower starts from contemplating the city as a whole, surprised in a reality of our times, from the very top, imagined as a living diorama without limits, only with a discreet outline in which the city is seen and reflected through the filter of each viewer individually. The medieval city model proposed at this level becomes the only element suspended in time, which is always reflected, keeping in the collective mentality the starting point of the history of the tower.
