NEOCOVER

Thinging Studio is an architecture office founded by architect Octavian Gugu in 2006. The projects vary in scale and approach diverse programs from a contemporary perspective. The office constantly strives to position the design discourse in an interrogative stance towards both the discipline’s models and the clichés generated by them, aiming for the rare position of innovation. The office consistently enjoys professional recognition at events such as the Bucharest Architecture Annual or the Romanian Design Week exhibitions.

Cover me softly, over me softly, over softly, or softly, or fly. This was just an abstract exercise of interpretation, inventing an incidental rule of finding words within words through subtraction, getting sample after sample until the initial message is diluted. But, leaving a simple abstract play of words aside, we know that covering something (which is the opposite of taking out) is adding a layer. In a dramatic sense, the ‘cover’ will have a physical impact: temporal, sedimentary, gravitational, irreversible. It will deteriorate and crush. Civilizations will disappear and things will be forgotten. And no one is responsible, because it may not be a deliberate act. But to dis-cover can be. So, in a sense, covering something softly is a latent process that will eventually end with a later discovery of what was once hidden. And of course, after you dis-cover, you want to re-cover what you have found, like an archaeological restoration. But things are missing, times are different, you are presuming, and the recovery has an anachronistic taste. Cover me slowly, dis-cover, un-cover, re-cover me quickly. There are many factors that can lead to the cultural crisis of a discipline. Among these, cliché or intellectual conformism are at the forefront. To ‘re-cover’ has become the most fashionable way of being contemporary, in which the unknown ‘new’ is no longer desired, as if it would lead to something hazardous. Instead, the ‘neo styles’ are taking the place of the uncertainty of the new. We have an abundance of neo-brutalism, neo-rationalism, neo-Kahnian ism, neo-art-deco, neo-postmodernism, neo-contextualism, neo-constructivism and so on. Architecture is always in search of a meaning. Returning to the things we passed by, we will see them just in the ‘reversed way’. And we will be charmed by the illusion of that ‘new’ perspective, so comforting both for creators and their mesmerized public.