The Last Nuclear Bomb Memorial

Drăgan Dragomir has been an architect since 2003 and runs his own firm DCXS Architecture since 2006. He is a socially and culturally active person. Drăgan Dragomir obtained nominations and awards in architecture while simultaneously developing his passion for graphics where, following invitations to local or international salons, he obtained awards for submitted projects. Within the architecture firm's activities, he adds the editing and printing of graphic albums, and since 2013, publishes the TDB/Terapie de Basm album series, with which he frequently participates at the EECC/East European Comic Con in Bucharest. He usefully combines the two passions, creating a particular personality for DCXS Architecture, the firm that operates at national and european level, with prestigious partners from France and the United Kingdom. The particularities, the history and the results obtained also help in the academic career where he works as an associate member, at the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning in Timișoara since 2005. In this context, in 2018 he was elected president of the Romanian Order of Architects in Timiș. Approaching heritage, preserving and promoting forgotten values, he develops a series of student practices that he organizes in Sebeș, in Alba County, where he is from. These materialize in the form of a doctoral study for which in 2020 he was awarded the title of Doctor of Fine Arts, on a topic that includes the restoration and protection of built heritage.

When you're in the dark and you find the light you might already be on the other side. The present project is dcxs architecture's proposal for the 3rd edition of The Last Nuclear Bomb Memorial international competition. The competition was a conceptual one without explanatory text, the drawing had to speak for itself. The solution came similarly when the right audio track challenged the imagination and encouraged the steps in composing the idea. We chose a graphic narrative to explain the concept without words. The message is one of warning and awareness of the global situation on the subject and theme of the contest. The given "what if" is left to be discovered, step by step, in the 9 boxes of the narrative. The squares in turn do a subjective cover of the aforementioned relevant track released in the middle of the last cold war. The key, even if independent and not necessarily needed to understand the concept, is symbolic, being placed in the nine boxes as nine syllables or musical notes, taken and should confirm and leave only a bitter smile, once deciphered. The site of the memorial, located in a disused nuclear silo, attracts the visitor and includes him in the installation, letting him discover step by step the scenography created and inevitably the light he steps on. Awareness of the reality beyond, from the other side, proposed, helps to perceive the reality in which you exist radically differently. What if… If you are already beyond...?