AluArtFORUM
The site for the new ALUARTFORUM building seems naturally suited for a specific and essentially distinct volume interpolated into a row of townhouses in Ilica – the city's main longitudinal axis. The architectural intervention here is obviously not a predictable response to a delicate issue of site-specific interpolations into the existing urban fabric executed in a typical, conventional manner.
The new building in terms of its conceptual design and architectural composition is clearly defined by its exclusive program, its immediate surroundings and its double north and south-facing frontage.
The immediate surroundings of the site create the overall visual impression of the new interpolation: a long street with its central perspective forms an urban context in which the building's representative street front narrows as it projects forward and blends with the existing buildings in a rhythmic pattern of a continuous row-type street frontage.
Owing to a harmonious proportioning of its horizontals and verticals, the new building is successfully integrated into the existing urban fabric.
This speculative hypothesis from the 1990s, although not always confirmed, can be tested everywhere and in this case too.
A contrastive approach is a complex issue, interpreted in various ways. However, a truly successful design is ultimately tested by the way the building is integrated into its surroundings. It is measurable precisely by pleasure that one can only rarely derive from viewing a building which is perfectly integrated with its site.
The gallery is intended to house permanent and temporary collections of the art works produced by the students and their professors from the Academy of Fine Arts. At the same time, the building itself should become a new landmark, a volume harmoniously integrated with the existing urban pattern, a creative inspiration for an integral conceptual design of the complex which accommodates the premises of the Academy of Fine Arts, and a facility with limitless possibilities for its future spatial and functional integration with its east neighboring building on 85, Ilica (at the basement level or possibly the second-floor).
Undoubtedly, this building is conceived as a cultural and educational center par excellence. With its architectural vocabulary of lasting value, it is designed for permanence. Its unique essential character is truly revealed in its architectural composition, its volumes and materials reflecting the polarity between the open and the enclosed, the front (representativeness) and the back (the park).
With its program strictly defined by the urban-planning competition criteria and in view of the requirement to adapt the building to the adjacent ones (on 83 and 87, Ilica), the architects have been obliged to restrain from any excessive tendencies regarding the volume or backward extensions. Accordingly, they have produced an architecture that seduces us with a reduced vocabulary in its underlying simplicity and introverted purity.
A slight shift of its main, orthogonal volume is the result of irregularities inherent in the site plan which is particularly suitable for architecture whose volume projections form a dynamic and attractive pattern both integrally and in detail.
An integral composition will truly justify its presence.
This is not the site for iconic architecture. Instead, it is well suited for a building intended to become home to a prestigious educational institution. Accordingly, the building itself offers a restrained and permanent aesthetic value as a new urban repository of arts boasting rich and long-standing tradition.
