Text presentation of the author/office in English
Brîndușa Raluca Havași graduated from the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning in Timișoara in 2002, since then she has been working as an assistant in the first-year design studio. In 2020, she completed her doctoral thesis "Architecture and children. The space as a youth education environment". Volunteer in De-a arhitectura Association since 2013, Brîndușa taught the optional course "Architecture in my city" to primary school classes, and since 2015, he has been participating in the design and ongoing adaptation of the national program "My school can be cool", a participatory design program dedicated to middle school and high school students. Since 2018, Brîndușa has been coordinating the educational programs and projects of the De-a arhitectura Association for the western part of the country. In 2023, she gather a team of architects and teachers who designed and implemented the "Heritage and water - holiday workshops for children and young people" project.
Project description in English
What is a heritage building? How has the presence of water shaped the city's history and built heritage? How has the function of heritage buildings changed over time? But their relationship with water? What legacy do we leave to posterity? Heritage buildings - historical, industrial or vernacular monuments, represent the "built dowry" inherited from our ancestors. Water is the natural element near which the first human settlements appeared and developed, but which, in its accidental or ordinary manifestations (such as rainwater), can also destroy them. Between July 10 and 14, 2023, the De-a arhitectura Association organized, in partnership with the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism from Timișoara (FAUT), the Water Museum and the National Museum of Banat, the "Heritage and water" workshops dedicated to children and adolescents aged 8-14 years. In these workshops, children are encouraged to discover heritage buildings that are related to the history of water in Timișoara. Together with students and architects, they explored the history of the place, measured, drew and analyzed the urban and social context. During the workshops, the children played the roles of reporters, collectors, or detectives and interacted with guests from related fields (architects, geographers, landscapers, writers). They worked in teams and imagined a possible transformation (reuse) of the studied heritage sites so that they are more accessible to children, and therefore more accessible to everyone. The children represented their proposals for the redevelopment of the three heritage sites – the Theresia bastion, the water plant, the Bishops' bridge in models that were presented to the parents. These workshops resulted in didactic resources that can be downloaded and used by primary and secondary school teachers during the "Scoala altfel" program. The "Heritage and Water" project brings an interdisciplinary approach that correlates notions from the sciences (history, geography, mathematics, technological education, communication sciences, etc.) with skills from the field of visual arts, in a process of understanding and arguing the influences between the natural and built environment as perceived by people. Heritage and water is about working with what is already there; it means shelter, protection but also fragility and the need for protection; it means connections in time and space, memories; the curtain that hides or highlights.
