Aldea Silviu

1. ELECTRIC CASTLE – Romanian Building Award finalist
Electric Castle music festival in Bonțida, Romania, set itself apart from the usual staging of a music festival. Combining striking visual elements, mass entertainment and a Gothic setting – the ruin of 15th century
Banffy Castle – the event turned more into a complex sensorial and spatial experience, a celebration of contemporary art in its different forms: from music, to architecture, design and installation.
The main challenge of such sort of intervention is to create easy-to-build, affordable and low-tech structures adapted to the large scale of the site. They convert the empty property of the Castle for a matter of 4 days into a realm of sound, white geometries, passageways and visual safaris.
The whole setting is an invitation to exploration, several paths and different ways of perception of the old Banffy estate. All interventions stand apart from the historical material, keeping in parallel and not in competition with it. In this sense, the festival does not consume its site, rather activates it by a temporary (re)set into light.

2. SKYLIGHT HOUSE – Wood reinvented, Kronospan competition nominee
The project is developed on a reflection about the characteristics of contemporary living that has its roots in traditional functional criteria, but offers beyond that a particular physical, psychological and visual experience.
The predominant visual interplay between one volume and another, from one space to another, allow a complete and global reading of the volume from the inside while respecting the spatial subdivision between «public space» and «intimate space» necessary for the family. The unifying element that will allow the comprehension of the space as a whole corresponds to the core of circulation, which develops over the whole height of the house. It stands out as main traffic and serving core. It acquires a polarity «North/South» which is defined between «public/private». Nevertheless, this nucleus is not a fixed and non-immutable architectural construction, its limits are porous and facilitate fluid circulation on the ground floor. The visual perception is enhanced from the entrance towards the garden and proposes a poetic continuity between the exterior and the interior, and a privileged relation with the surrounding landscape, connection between natural and artificial.
The interior circulation is designed to generate a dynamic path with the possibility of integrating areas of alternative use, like relaxation or study. There is a perpetual upward elevation. The continuity of the ascension corresponds to the idea that a house without a site must be able to refer to an ever present physical element, the sky as a natural entity forming part of this material construction.

Silviu Aldea was born in 1980 in Piatra Neamţ. He has started his studies in Architecture at UTCN and graduated from Ecole d’Architecture Paris La Villette, France. He’s earned his PhD at UTCN Faculty of Architecture where he is currently teaching. He is one of the 4 founding members of Atelier MASS,a very active young architecture office, with two international exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, collaborations with the main cultural events in Cluj, TIFF and ELECTRIC CASTLE, as well as urban activism with SOMEȘ DELIVERY, along side private projects. Their projects were awarded in a number of occasions for their take on transient architecture, installations and bold interior design.

AWARDS OF THE OFFICE :
▪ 2017, 3rd Prize in the international architecture contest ‘RETHINKING SOMES’, Cluj
▪ 2016, INTERIM – 3rd Prize in the national contest for the Romanian National Pavilion at the 15th edition of the International Architecture Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia
▪ 2015, HOUSE K – award for best project in the section ‘Architecture in Rural Environment’ at the 2015 Transylvania Architecture Biennale, Cluj
▪ 2015, BUTUCUIB -award for best project in the section ‘Object Design’ at the Transylvania Architecture Biennale 2015
▪ 2014, wining design at the Instalart/ Obiect / 002 contest, Bucharest
▪ 2013, ELECTRIC CASTLE – first prize in the section ‘Microarchitecture – Temporary Architecture and Object Design’ at the 2013 Transylvania Architecture Biennale, Cluj
▪ 2012, SCENOGRAPHY FOR CULTURAL PALACE BLAJ – wining project in the ‘Architecture of Interior Space, Product Design and Scenography’ section of the 2012 National Architecture Biennale, Bucharest
2012, HEAD UP! – wining project in the national contest for the Romanian Institute National Pavilion at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale