Between old walls a new world

Livia Pleşca works as an architect and interior designer and she is a graduate from Faculty of Architecture ”G.M. Cantacuzino ”from Iași. But besides architecture, Livia learned along the way that she can be a creative professional at the crossroad of multiple fields: she photographs with dedication interior spaces, places she holds dear or just discovered, writes stories about how the houses she design come to life, creates collages and wants to bring people and design closer.

Life is at its fullest in the citadel of Alba Carolina. The young and the old altogether making a presumably dead place their home, with open air activities, gentle walks for remembrance and sightseeing around the historical vestiges. All the people needed was already there for hundreds of years, the genius loci of the citadel, offering protection and nurture, something which any good space planning endeavour should have. When I first entered the citadel I had a strong feeling of shelter, of covering one's own with the protection of red brick walls, the harsh division between the inside of the citadel, a place on its own, and the outside city, the other, the unknown. There was peace and quiet, and also a curious sense of anticipation, arising maybe after guessing the incredible force of compression the tall support walls face, behind which the hill was majestically showing his crown of grass. When you open the gates with generosity, people inhabit the place with energy. The Citadel of Alba Carolina represents a wonderful project of reclaiming a place trapped in history, with a forgotten function. At its finest, it shows us that minimal interventions can bring us closer to our history and, at the same time, make us think about how we want to live forward in our cities and what can we change in order to feel the genius loci close to us.