CITY AS ATMOSPHERE

Liliana - Mihaela Petrovici is an architect, senior lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture in Iași, and creator of architectural education projects for children and young people: "THE CITY AS ATMOSPHERE", ”UN.SEEN, IASI. Stories. Architecture", "THE CITY WITH COLORFUL WINDOWS" and "BLUE HOUSES". Starting with 2017, she organized numerous guided tours, creative workshops, photography contests, and exhibitions to promote architecture and the less-known heritage of Iași city, co-financed by MeD and OAR, from the stamp duty for architecture. In 2017-2018 she was a volunteer architect in the "De-a arhitectura" program. In 2019, she won the MOLDOVA RAM REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE PRIZE in Section 5 - Studies, projects, and participatory architecture for the "UN.SEEN, IASI" cultural project. Liliana Petrovici is the author of 24 articles on interdisciplinary topics in national and international scientific publications; co-author in the collective volumes "Cultural landscape, architecture, trends" from 2012" and Architectural Space. Urban Space" from 2013. In 2021 she published the book "ARCHITECTURE & COMMUNICATION" at the ”Ion Mincu” Publishing House from Bucharest.

The series of events centered on photography "CITY AS ATMOSPHERE" is dedicated to students and aims to value the experiential and exploratory process of understanding architecture. The guided tours, workshops, exhibitions, and competitions "City as Atmosphere. Un.seen Iasi" use photography as a didactic, analytical, and descriptive tool to observe the built environment and understand the relationship between the city and its inhabitants. The city atmosphere is the specific energy of the place, created by fragments of old and new constructions, as well as by the everyday movement of people. In the tumult of the city's continuous transformations, the atmosphere is dynamic and at the same time keeps its identity, making urban spaces unique and differently experienced from any other place. The atmosphere is an emotional space, an entity that we cannot physically delimit. It does not have an outlined or palpable material existence, but it can be perceived and understood, caught in pictures, and reinterpreted semantically and compositionally, all these making it a particularly interesting subject for photographic art. As a communication vehicle of emotion and meaning, photography is suitable for capturing the specificity of urban images and valorizing them in memorable visual discourses. The CITY AS ATMOSPHERE workshops use participatory-creative didactic methods. The young participants are encouraged to express through photographic art a personal vision of less-known architecture and to transmit visual messages that can influence with their expressiveness and significance the public's perception of the Iași city. The proposed creative themes bring to attention less-known historical segments, from small streets, gangs, and urban alveoli, that are valuable from the point of view of architectural ambiance and have a rich historical and cultural semantic field. Picturesque sequences of the un.seen Iasi are creatively interpreted in visual discourses made up of space, light, materiality, and memory. The photographic compositions made by participants illustrate the uniqueness and vibrancy of the city, revealing spatial images that emanate special, charming experiences along the small hidden historical streets. The dynamic and vivid atmosphere of the less-seen city sometimes acquires an intense, vivid chromatic, and other times deep and gray layers. Emotion turns out to be the key ingredient, diverse and multi-layered.