The project for this pavilion won a national competition for Romania’s representation at the congress of the International Union of Architects in Seoul. The theme of the congress was the soul of the city. The Order of Romanian Architects added a subtheme—a suggestion to also talk about the independent initiatives, the new projects that change the urban world.

The pavilion proposes an immersive experience in a place in Bucharest, a renaturalised site with a very peculiar recent history. Inspired by the dialogue between Marco Polo and Kubilai Han depicted by Italo Calvino, the place unveils itself in the exhibition context through atmospheric video recordings, sounds, smells, objects and plants. In the 3x3 space provided by the exhibition hall, two cubes were built‑up. The interior one serves as a a translucent environment for the panoramic videomapping, but also as a series of windows towards the space in between the two cubes, where a series of objects are exposed: living plants, old and newer objects from the site, sound recordings. The architecture can be seen asa an abstract grid but also may suggest some sort of glazed porches so typical of Balkanic architecture.

*this project represented the Romanian Order of Architects at the International Union of Architects’ conference in Seoul 2017. After Seoul, the pavilion lives on: it has already been exhibited twice in the National Museum for Contemporary Art in Bucharest and at Casa Mincu in Bucharest.