It’s been 20 years or more since I started my own architecture company. Since then I also had to deal with the needed marketing for my business. I learned about marketing for architects the hard way. Actually, for some time, I didn’t even know what I was doing. In my head, it was all about…
The Building Permits System in Romania Romania has one of the most complicated and time-consuming building permit procedures within the EU. It was ranked as the 50th in the world. The system is also rigged by some corruption phenomena. You should not be concerned about corruption, but they might interfere[1] with your project. To obtain…
As one read „The Building Permit in Romania” one might think that all related construction industry is bureaucratic and nonsense. However, the Construction Quality Control System is coherent and functional. But all parts involved in the construction have to do their jobs. Within the System, there is little room for error. The Exigencies The Law…
First I found by accident the ”Convenient Houses: With Fifty Plans for the Housekeeper” by Louis Henry Gibson, Architect – 1889. Then I searched for more! He also wrote ”Beautiful Houses: a study in house-building” in 1895. Gibson starts his text with a pledge for the convenient house, a house that is the best fit…
OAR (Order of Architects in Romania) sent the open call for submissions at the 20th Salon of Architecture in Novi Sad, Serbia. The Novi Sad architects organization is DANS. I am impressed how our Serbian colleagues, the architects from Novi Sad, opened their salon to international participation. The international exposure and the open competition will only help to…
I feel so frustrated to find stuff online that I feel I had to read it much earlier than I do. „Someone Has Built It Before” is such a website. If you are an architect you should follow this blog. If you are not, you also should follow it! What should you see on “Someone…
My colleague, Costin, who is also an architect, has shot these awesome images of this home we designed back in 2013. I am very pleased to finally show a set of pictures of this house that I designed in 2013, and that was built last year.This is a small home, no larger than 1900 square…
Day by day, I am more amazed at how new technologies change our lives. I discovered with a little help from social media that people are more the same than we imagined. On the other hand, all of us are so unique! It is not too hard for an architect to picture in his mind…
Justin Shubow wrote in Forbes,” Architecture Continues To Implode: More Insiders Admit The Profession Is Failing.” This gentleman thinks that architects lost their contact with common people, and this happens mostly with modernist architects. Starchitecture Is Not Modern Architecture The contemporary architecture that bothers Mr. Shubow is not Modernism. Moreover, it is rather something similar to what Mannerism…
Walking The Architect Shoes is my second post on Linkedin. Well, it is about being an architect nowadays. Nothing fancy, just like the shoes I used to wear that day. I also wrote an article about the chances of a competitive market for young architects to get a job. I received many CVs both from…
I wrote a few time ago an article about the condition of young architects on Linkedin. Young Architects – Not Good Enough to Design? In many countries, including mine, a graduate student with a bachelor’s or master’s degree in architecture is not allowed to design and sign his/her architectural projects. This right is related to…
The Greeks tried to find the perfect beauty in architecture. They searched and studied and finally designed sets of rules on how to design beauty. Their architecture is beautiful. Later the Romans took classical Greek architecture and used their forms and rules to go further. They built beautiful buildings, too, and for centuries, Europe used…
Romanian Construction Quality Law sets a few architectural requirements for the building design, named: Design Requirements These requirements are not solely for the design, they target the building from the design boards, the construction phases, and the use of the buildings. The developer of any building is responsible for all these tasks solidaryly with the…
I’ve just written an article related to the high rise fire safety in Romania under the Building in Romania Category on my company website. Please also read: “The Constructions Quality Control System in Romania.“ The starting point was not the concern regarding spreading the word on the construction industry in my country but a LinkedIn…
I am still wondering if my parents wanted to build a house or if they just were too proud to have a son studying architecture. My first architectural project was a house for my parents on a plot of land in the Carpathian Mountains. I found by chance two pictures of the first house that…
The new apartment buildings developed in Romania failed to target a specific market: the typical middle-class family. They targeted a more and more narrow market niche as the prices went up. The way that the bubble developed is not very important right now, but the opportunities opened. The market tends to be less and less…
As an architect, Lee Calisti is asking himself where creativity and Inspiration come from in his blog. He first describes a system that is very similar to the Gestalt theory about the human mind: a system that accumulates images and experiences that are used to solve new problems and face more challenges. It has an…
This topic is about the technical conditions required to Build in Romania. What makes a plot of land suitable for construction in Romania First of all, the plot of land should be constructible (buildable): Second, the land should be not in any of the situations when specific restrictions might apply: Ways to verify if the…
How to build in Romania: Zoning Urban Regulations in Romania are applicable in all areas: urban, rural areas, and even agricultural lands. Urban Regulations are set by: Typical Zoning, according to Local Urban Regulations: The RLUs have even more sets of rules, according to the importance of each zone, and might include specifications of building…
I used to post comments to this article that I found on ThinkArchitect. Lee Calisti wrote: “My question is can we give to the profession while serving our clients? Or is our duty solely to the client paying our check? Do we have a duty to the local community, the larger environment, and to architecture…
All visitors to the ancient ruins of Rome see that many of our contemporary understandings of the buildings are ancient: they built stadiums, public spaces, courts of judges, public facilities such as aqueducts, sewerages, public baths, and even seven-story malls. We invented less, but we consider ourselves more sophisticated than ever. I felt humble under…
Dozens of articles were used to reveal the huge demand for A-Class Building Spaces. Deficits of Hundreds of thousands or even millions of square meters were shown compared with Budapest, Warsaw, and Prague in 2007. Both Developers and important Real Estate agencies understood the multinational companies’ need for larger and larger, imposing office spaces. They…
The Romanian Building Code has a set of rules to support the edges of deep excavations in urban areas with slurry walls or piled walls made under the protection of bentonite. Pictures of construction works: Digging in the middle of the city Deep Excavations The next pictures are from a construction site in Bucharest, Romania,…
It’s been 20 years or more since I started my own architecture company. Since then I also had to deal with the needed marketing for my business. I learned about marketing for architects the hard way. Actually, for some time, I didn’t even know what I was doing. In my head, it was all about…
The Building Permits System in Romania Romania has one of the most complicated and time-consuming building permit procedures within the EU. It was ranked as the 50th in the world. The system is also rigged by some corruption phenomena. You should not be concerned about corruption, but they might interfere[1] with your project. To obtain…
As one read „The Building Permit in Romania” one might think that all related construction industry is bureaucratic and nonsense. However, the Construction Quality Control System is coherent and functional. But all parts involved in the construction have to do their jobs. Within the System, there is little room for error. The Exigencies The Law…
First I found by accident the ”Convenient Houses: With Fifty Plans for the Housekeeper” by Louis Henry Gibson, Architect – 1889. Then I searched for more! He also wrote ”Beautiful Houses: a study in house-building” in 1895. Gibson starts his text with a pledge for the convenient house, a house that is the best fit…
OAR (Order of Architects in Romania) sent the open call for submissions at the 20th Salon of Architecture in Novi Sad, Serbia. The Novi Sad architects organization is DANS. I am impressed how our Serbian colleagues, the architects from Novi Sad, opened their salon to international participation. The international exposure and the open competition will only help to…
I feel so frustrated to find stuff online that I feel I had to read it much earlier than I do. „Someone Has Built It Before” is such a website. If you are an architect you should follow this blog. If you are not, you also should follow it! What should you see on “Someone…
My colleague, Costin, who is also an architect, has shot these awesome images of this home we designed back in 2013. I am very pleased to finally show a set of pictures of this house that I designed in 2013, and that was built last year.This is a small home, no larger than 1900 square…
Day by day, I am more amazed at how new technologies change our lives. I discovered with a little help from social media that people are more the same than we imagined. On the other hand, all of us are so unique! It is not too hard for an architect to picture in his mind…
Justin Shubow wrote in Forbes,” Architecture Continues To Implode: More Insiders Admit The Profession Is Failing.” This gentleman thinks that architects lost their contact with common people, and this happens mostly with modernist architects. Starchitecture Is Not Modern Architecture The contemporary architecture that bothers Mr. Shubow is not Modernism. Moreover, it is rather something similar to what Mannerism…
Walking The Architect Shoes is my second post on Linkedin. Well, it is about being an architect nowadays. Nothing fancy, just like the shoes I used to wear that day. I also wrote an article about the chances of a competitive market for young architects to get a job. I received many CVs both from…
I wrote a few time ago an article about the condition of young architects on Linkedin. Young Architects – Not Good Enough to Design? In many countries, including mine, a graduate student with a bachelor’s or master’s degree in architecture is not allowed to design and sign his/her architectural projects. This right is related to…
The Greeks tried to find the perfect beauty in architecture. They searched and studied and finally designed sets of rules on how to design beauty. Their architecture is beautiful. Later the Romans took classical Greek architecture and used their forms and rules to go further. They built beautiful buildings, too, and for centuries, Europe used…
Romanian Construction Quality Law sets a few architectural requirements for the building design, named: Design Requirements These requirements are not solely for the design, they target the building from the design boards, the construction phases, and the use of the buildings. The developer of any building is responsible for all these tasks solidaryly with the…
I’ve just written an article related to the high rise fire safety in Romania under the Building in Romania Category on my company website. Please also read: “The Constructions Quality Control System in Romania.“ The starting point was not the concern regarding spreading the word on the construction industry in my country but a LinkedIn…
I am still wondering if my parents wanted to build a house or if they just were too proud to have a son studying architecture. My first architectural project was a house for my parents on a plot of land in the Carpathian Mountains. I found by chance two pictures of the first house that…
The new apartment buildings developed in Romania failed to target a specific market: the typical middle-class family. They targeted a more and more narrow market niche as the prices went up. The way that the bubble developed is not very important right now, but the opportunities opened. The market tends to be less and less…
As an architect, Lee Calisti is asking himself where creativity and Inspiration come from in his blog. He first describes a system that is very similar to the Gestalt theory about the human mind: a system that accumulates images and experiences that are used to solve new problems and face more challenges. It has an…
This topic is about the technical conditions required to Build in Romania. What makes a plot of land suitable for construction in Romania First of all, the plot of land should be constructible (buildable): Second, the land should be not in any of the situations when specific restrictions might apply: Ways to verify if the…
How to build in Romania: Zoning Urban Regulations in Romania are applicable in all areas: urban, rural areas, and even agricultural lands. Urban Regulations are set by: Typical Zoning, according to Local Urban Regulations: The RLUs have even more sets of rules, according to the importance of each zone, and might include specifications of building…
I used to post comments to this article that I found on ThinkArchitect. Lee Calisti wrote: “My question is can we give to the profession while serving our clients? Or is our duty solely to the client paying our check? Do we have a duty to the local community, the larger environment, and to architecture…
All visitors to the ancient ruins of Rome see that many of our contemporary understandings of the buildings are ancient: they built stadiums, public spaces, courts of judges, public facilities such as aqueducts, sewerages, public baths, and even seven-story malls. We invented less, but we consider ourselves more sophisticated than ever. I felt humble under…
Dozens of articles were used to reveal the huge demand for A-Class Building Spaces. Deficits of Hundreds of thousands or even millions of square meters were shown compared with Budapest, Warsaw, and Prague in 2007. Both Developers and important Real Estate agencies understood the multinational companies’ need for larger and larger, imposing office spaces. They…
The Romanian Building Code has a set of rules to support the edges of deep excavations in urban areas with slurry walls or piled walls made under the protection of bentonite. Pictures of construction works: Digging in the middle of the city Deep Excavations The next pictures are from a construction site in Bucharest, Romania,…