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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.
Building Stories
Image caption: Spread from the graphic novel, entitled ‘Laïsm’, produced by Dina AlHamdany for the course ‘Building Stories’ taught at TU Delft (The Netherlands) by Janina Gosseye. In her building story, Dina examined Climat de France, designed by Fernand Pouillonin Algiers, through the eyes of a child living in the complex in 1961.
Image credit:© Dina Al-Hamdany.
In the foreword to his 1987 graphic novel The Building, Will Eisner, the celebrated American cartoonist, writes:
As I grew older and accumulated memories, I came to feel more keenly about the disappearances of people and landmarks. Especially troubling to me was the callous removal of buildings. I felt that, somehow, they had a kind of soul. I know now that these structures, barnacled with laughter and stained by tears, are more than lifeless edifices. It cannot be that having been part of life, they did not somehow absorb the radiation from human interaction. And I wonder what is left behind when a building is torn down.
The Building imaginatively examines how the lives of four ordinary people unfolded in and around a fictional 14-storey edifice that for 80-years stood tall at a busy street corner until it was demolished to make way for a gleaming new tower. There is Monroe Mensh, who worked for two children’s charities housed inside the building; Gilda Greene, a dental assistant who every Wednesday met with Benny, her lover, in front of the building; Antonio Tonatti, an amateur musician who played the violin at the building’s entrance at noontime every day; and P.J. Hammond, a once ruthless real-estate developer who lost his fortune as he became obsessed with the building. The Building narrates the life of a building not through physical changes or spatial interventions – the moving of walls, the adding of wings, the construction of new floors – but through the social interactions that it shapes and affords. In doing so, it reveals how buildings are full of the layered residue of the remembered past and how they derive meaning, in part, from the ways in which people inhabit and use them. Building stories, such as Eisner’s, are a valuable tool to highlight the social and cultural importance of our built environment. Examining the life of buildings in this way allows us to better understand their (hi)story, as well as our place within it, as we imagine possible future stories that they might provoke or accommodate in response to evolving societal needs.
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1. Will Eisner, The Building (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006 [1987]),
2. Another beautiful example is Chris Ware’s Building Stories, from which the title of this contribution was borrowed. Chris Ware, Building Stories (New York City: Pantheon Books, 2012).
Janina Gosseye is Professor of Building Ideologies in the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment. Prof. Gosseye has previously held academic positions in Belgium, Australia and Switzerland. She is currently series editor of the ‘Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture’ book series (with Tom Avermaete), a member of the European Science Foundation College of Expert Reviewers, Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Queensland (Australia), and Honorary Member of the Australian Institute of Architects (AIA).