Nothing exceptional, out of the ordinary or spectaculous happened lately.
Work, work and more work. On the graphic side of the office.

I’m also working with Matei Ionescu (a fellow architect) to rearrange a brasserie in Icoanei Garden, a lovely little park in a very quiet neighbourhood in the center of Bucharest. It’s his project, i only help with modeling and rendering and some technical drawings. I’ll have some images uploaded here when i’ll finish the 3d model. Also, some pictures with the final result when it’s done.

Almost forgot: I won the Good Beahaviour Code from Guerilla Radio. I already figured out who’s gonna have it as a gift.

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We loved John Morefield’s solution to the ongoing crisis. For those too lasy to read the original article we’ll just say he found a way to get more clients and draw public awareness to his… office.

“It’s as simple as that, just starting conversations with people about their homes and what they want them to be” he says.

Inspired by his example, more American architects are opening similar “offices” throughout the US.
For once, here in Romania, we have been proud to be at the same pace with the rest of the world. We are usually a few years behind, “a few years” varying from one to ten years, depending on the subject. Of course, there are exceptions. In architecture, for example, we’re twenty years behind. But, not this time. Specialists reassured us that the effects of the economical crisis would begin here later than in the rest of the world. Well, they have been wrong. Here the crisis began the very minute we watched it on the news channels. Prices dropped, all investments were stopped, bankruptcies all over the place. So we got calls letting us know our on-going projects were indefinitely postponed or plain canceled.
We were not ready to take permanent leaves so we asked ourselves… “What else can we do?” So we remembered we used to build websites as students to make some extra money. But, hey! It’s a crisis, so people are not selling. And sites improve sales, right? People must need websites now. And we were right.
We’ve experimented for about a week building a site for ourselves and we started showing it off to everyone we knew letting them know we can make another, better one for themselves, cheaply and very fast. And it validates.
Fortunately, orders did show up. By the end of the first month we finished 3 more websites (1 2 3) and we had 4 more orders. We were surprised ourselves we were so busy.
Maybe the secret was applying our “architectural” recipe to web-developing. An architect must be:

• technical, to understand engineers
• a good listener, to be able to put himself in the client’s shoes and understand his needs and ambitions, no matter how strange they may seem
• an artist, to be able to blend the function and technical aspects with the special requests in one united and harmonious project.

Or maybe this isn’t it. Maybe the secret lies in… not having a certain style in web-design and constantly paying attention to the details that make up the uniqueness of whatever the site is about. Having that, putting it into details is just a matter of DTP. Did we say our clients love our work?
Or maybe this isn’t it either. Maybe we’ll keep the secret to ourselves when we find it out. Because that’s what secrets should be. Secrets.
Here’s the details of our web-services offer.
And… one more thing: the end of the first month is now, when I write this article. So I guess you’ll see the other 4 websites soon.
Stay tuned.

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The architect must be a prophet… a prophet in the true sense of the term… if he can’t see at least ten years ahead don’t call him an architect.

True. In order to make the best houses of my time I should know what living would be like in 10 to 20 years from now, right? But have you noticed the incredible pace the world is moving at? Have you looked outside your window… today? Because yesterday doesn’t count. It’s far gone. History. Staying up to date is a full time job nowadays.
So here we summed up some of the best feeds we could find about what is going on in the world. The real things. Movies, arts, architecture, music. No wars, no politics. And green. Lots and lots of green.