BAAB is an architecture, research and urban design studio established by Irina Niculescu and Alexandru Belenyi in 2015. In the past 8 years Irina and Alexandru together with their collaborators and colleagues have developed numerous architecture and design projects for both private and public customers such as boutique hotel in Vama Veche or the CDRF building in Bucharest comprising a café space, exhibition hall and classroom, all dedicated to teaching and promoting photography. In more recent years the company designed and implemented several tactical urbanism projects for the improvement of public space. Their most recent project, “City as Classroom” focused on involving high school students in building third spaces for youth, as a means of regenerating the Urban Historical Area of Brașov.
BAAB Architecture and urbanism is based in Bucharest, Romania.
Project description in English
In the Historic Center of Brașov, there are about 4,000 seats at terraces and around 200 public seating places, placed wherever there is still room. "Urban Game" is a set of 5 chairs of different sizes, located in the same Historic Center. It is a playground disguised as an art installation and a subtle irony towards the excessive privatization of public space with terraces. The smallest of the 5 pieces is the size of a child's chair and is probably the only piece of urban furniture in the area meant for children. The largest of the chairs is a little over 2.5 meters high and for an adult, it is what a regular chair is to a three-year-old child – a pretext for play and an object open to interpretation. Hence, the research question of the project (a little ironic): what can we do with a chair, besides sitting on it to consume?
Our starting point was reading and debating Eric McLuhan's text on Aristotle's formal causality, questioning what the primary sketch of a chair is, its most schematic form.
To develop a formal understanding of the chair as an object, we analyzed 10 chairs representative of different eras. Each chair was abstracted so that only its essential lines were represented. After abstracting all the chairs, a grid was constructed around each scheme. By superimposing all the grids, a common space of the studied chairs emerged. By gradually modifying the scale of the chair, we set the ground for a discussion around it as an object.
The sought grid is not equivalent to a patent drawing indicating the various angles of the seat and backrest. We did not seek the boundaries that allow the chair to be efficient in use. The grid does not aim to describe a series of ergonomic possibilities or utilities. While the patent drawing results in a formal variety of chairs through the flexibility it allows, our grid aims to collapse all these variants into a form that seems to say: "precise utility is not important here, but the idea of a chair."
Given the above, we were delighted to discover that a kindergarten operates in one of the nearby buildings. For almost two years, children have been playing on the chairs every day.
