ARChA

POLI_Linia is a design office set up in 2022 to support the various needs of the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning în Timișoara, for which Diana Giurea and Cristian Blidariu and Catalina Bocan act as administrators and creative directors. For the ARChA project Diana Giurea acted as lead designer, project and building site manager. Cristian Blidariu has contributed with design consultancy, site supervision while being a liaison with various partners and sponsors of the project. Catalina Bocan provided the management of the various documentations needed. Diana Giurea is currently serving as Department Director within the Faculty. Her academic as well as professional experience is embedded in the theory and practice of temporary architectural structures, and digital fabrication. In the past decade she has coordinated the design and build-up processes for the Plai Festival grounds. Cristian Blidariu is currently serving as Dean of the Faculty of Architecture in Timisoara and is also a deputy president for the Romanian Order of Architects. In this capacity he was the main initiator of FAST- Festival for Architecture Schools of Tomorrow, an initiative that was detrimental in securing the funding for the transformation of ARChA. Catalina Bocan is currently acting as Vice Dean of FAUT, and is an architect and technical expert with considerable experience within the field.

ARChA was born from the initiative of the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning in Timișoara, being an experiment of rapid transformation, with limited resources, of the abandoned space of the former canteen of the polytechnic campus, into a multifunctional center acting as an anchor within the Timișoara ECoC 2023 program. Built at the beginning of the 20th century by the architect Duiliu Marcu, improperly used in the last two decades as a night club, the canteen building presented itself at the time of its takeover by the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, as an sealed up space, with bricked windows, deprived of any natural light, emptied of its installations, and with a large part of its historical substance either lost or radically transformed. The current space, in this sense, is born from a sum of desires and compromises, through a careful exercise of in situ transformations and design decisions that led to the generation of a versatile exhibition space that can accommodate both workshops, didactic activities and conferences, the creation of a space for seminaries and two maker spaces. Carried out at the beginning of 2023, these first re-functionalization works prepared the space for the suite of events hosted by UPT in the second half of the year: the "Cultural Capital" dialogues with Cătălin Ștefănescu, the Atlas of Distances Exhibition within the TM2023 Bright Cityscapes station, the collective exhibition of architecture schools in Romania as part of FAST: Festival for Architecture Schools of Tomorrow, Florian Stanciu’s Plans exhibition, and now the exhibition of the Local architecture school, Future Days. In this first stage, intermediate until the finalization of the complex project that will bring into question the recovery of the historical image, the imagined space aims to create a black box-type scenography, reversible and transformable. Its main mission is to bring to the forefront the multifunctional prowess of its central space. The black drapery behind which the reopened historic windows can be rediscovered creates the premises of a magical box, inside which architecture can be exhibited and produced in all its forms. The two friezes of the central space were commissioned from the artist Dan Perjovschi on the occasion of the FAST festival. They capture, through text and drawing in white chalk, the questions and observations that could or should be written on the blackboards of all architecture schools in Romania.