Attila KIM Architects is the team led by the architect Attila Kim, an architect with extensive experience in the design of exhibitions and cultural events, restoration and architectural projects, nominated three times for the European Union Contemporary Architecture Award, the Mies van der Rohe Award, winner of several national awards at the Bucharest Architecture Biennale, Bucharest Architecture Annual, Transylvania Architecture Biennale, Arhitext Awards, and awarded in 2016 with the Arts and Society Leadership Award by the Aspen Institute for his contribution to Romanian culture.
Attila Kim is a founding member of the architecture workshops Studio Kim Bucșa Diaconu (SKBD) and Lundi et Demi. Since 2012 he has been working independently, leading a young and dynamic team, under the name of Attila KIM Architects. The team members are Attila Kim, Alexandru Szűz Pop, Adina Marin, Andreea Precup and Cristina Iordache.
Important projects include public buildings, residential buildings, showrooms, exhibitions and fairs, shops and restorations of historical monuments.
Starting from 2016, Attila Kim is the Commissioner of Romania at the Venice Biennale.
Project description in English
The military barracks in Piața Unirii in Timisoara, built during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is one of the most emblematic and enigmatic buildings for all visitors and residents of the city. Abandoned and closed for more than four decades, the building today has its facades without plaster, without the typical decorations of two centuries ago, being reduced to its structural elements, to the load-bearing brick walls, not even having glass in the remaining window frames. The interior space is without partitions, with the floors and plaster removed and the brick walls exposed. The building, which, due to its plan, is also called the U Barracks, is organized around a vast inner courtyard, where nature has organically penetrated, forming a small urban jungle.
After Sculpture / After Sculpture, part of the European Capital of Culture Timișoara 2023 programme, proposes a reopening of this building to showcase a series of permanent and temporary sculpture exhibitions, offering different curatorial and artistic points of views on the evolution of Romanian sculpture of the last 50 years.
The architectural project aimed, using minimal resources, to transform this abandoned building into a temporary museum of sculpture. The exhibition's architecture is the red thread, that leads us through the three levels of the building. Each level is marked by distribution corridors, aligned on the inner sides of the building.
The inner walls of the corridors have been doubled with a new wall, cut out next to the doors and windows, which marks the exhibition spaces and becomes the interface of each exhibition, being the physical support of the curatorial concepts, the biographies of the artists and the names of all the spaces. Thus, this frieze, through which each individual space is accessed, becomes a second skin of the building, also symbolizing the new museal function.
The building throughout has been preserved in the condition in which it was found and all the new interventions are perfectly finished, using only white or black elements, thus creating a contrast with the red brick of the building and the green of the exterior vegetation.
