ADN BA, selected for the central exhibition Reporting from 0the Front at Biennale di Venezia 2016

The team of architects ADN BA is exhibiting their Hilariopolis project at the 15th International Exhibition of Architecture centered around the theme „Reporting from the front” and organized within Venice Biennale. The exhibition is open to the public until November 27th; the 2016 edition is the first time a Romanian architecture bureau has the opportunity to attend.

Alejandro Aravena, curator of the Biennale, is the one who invited ADN to be part of the exhibition.

Participating to Venice Biennale’s main exhibition is, of course, a chance and a privilege for us. Not only we are one of the 88 architecture offices and workshops selected from all over the world for this exhibition (among which are many of the biggest names of the international architecture) and not only because it is the first time when an office from Romania is invited to participate the big exhibition of the Biennale. Of course those things are extremely honoring for us, as it is probably the specialized cultural even with the highest international scope, but our chance to participate is also an opening towards a different world, looked only from outside previously – the one of the way such an event is born and of the way some diverse answers, sometimes radically different, are put together to answer a common question and theme – Biennale’s theme, this time entitled “Reporting from the front”, by Alejandro Aravena, this year’s curator

Andrei Serbescu,

Partner ADN BA

The way the architects from ADN chose to present was an innovative one, preferring to photos and images mock-ups and drawings, all on paper or paper support. This way, they brought together 4 projects signed by them along with their surroundings, resulting a series of sits as an imaginary map.

Even if the projects are, in reality, close to each other, being proposed for the same neighborhood, we chose to redraw the place, in order to be able to direct the eye who was looking from outside and to help it stop on the corners, gatherings and details that give, for us, the substance of the place

Adrian Untaru,

Partner ADN

In Hilariopolis town, Suvenir and Dogarilor streets are intersecting, while Dacia Blvd is parallel with Dumbrava Rosie street. The imaginary map became a model 1:100 archived in a box, and the box became also a model 1:1. On all sides, the walls of the box became spaces bearing other spaces that one looks always only from the inside – on one side, ADN projects and some of the most representative buildings in the same neighborhood (a wagon house from the start of XIXth centyrt, a bourgeois house from XVIIIth, an appartement from an interbelic building and a series of appartements from a socialist flat building) and, on the other side, interiors, fragments of spaces, courtyards, terraces, balconies, rooms and so on.

We linked all these with a drawing showing a Bucharest which is both hilarious,  beautiful, dusty, crowded, oriental and occidental in the same time, the Hilariopolis existing two centuries ago but also today

Bogdan Bradateanu,

Partner ADN

Although marketing tries to convince us about another story, not the increase of people’s life quality is the one motivating the real estate developers: in the real estate world, architecture is many times barely a mean to make money. That is why I appreciate the fight ADN put up for architecture’s quality in this world of real estate, a world where apparently there isn’t any major conflict

Architect Alejandro Aravena,

Curator Venice Biennale

The sponsors of the project are Urban Spaces / Salzburg Real Estate Investment SA, EXCO INVEST, NOD Makerspace and HAI drawings.