Summer School ŞIVAiP
Organized by: Oberliht Association in partnership with the Architect’s Association Arhilitic and Laboratory for Architecture MIEZ.
Tutors workshop: Alex Axinte, Cristi Borcan (studioBASAR, Bucharest Romania), David Huarez, Gonzalez Rodriguez Alejandro, (Straddle3 and WWB, members of the network Arquitecturas Collectivas, Barcelona, Spain), Alexandre Cubizoles (Pixel 13, Marseille, France), Diana Culescu (Landscape Architects Association in Romania) Andrei Pripasu (Iaşi, Romania).
Participants: Mihaela Butoi, Nicoleta Cojocaru, Olga Cobuscean, Constanţa Cobuscean, Constantin Druţa, Oana Dulavra, Tudor Elian, Corina Fisticanu, Ferenczy Dora, Ghenadii Tăutul, Marcell Gonzales, Anna Ilchenko, Bogdana Kosmina, Kund Kopacz, Gabriela Nichifor, Nicu Opopol, Aura Pellicioni, Max Popov, Maryna Rozhdestenska, Maria Sava, Georgiana Strat, Mihai Taraşi, Ana-Maria Ţoni, Stanislav Vrednic.
Location: intersection of Iv. Zaikin street with Sf. Andrei street, Chisinau, Republic of Moldova.
Period: 22-31 July 2016
Summer School “Architecture - Installations - Landscape” took place within the project “Chişinău Civic Center: Zaikin Park - a park for community”, a rehabilitation and revitalization project for Zaikin Park initiated by Oberliht Association.
https://parculzaikin.wordpress.com
Starting with 2012, Oberliht Association initiated and coordinated a complex process of rehabilitation of the semi-abandoned square, named Zaikin Park, by starting a dialog among the local administration, inhabitants and private investors. Answering Oberliht Association invitation, studioBASAR participated in coordinating a series of infrastructural intervention, educative workshops and public and community space activations within the area of Zaikin Park, as the Reclaimed Spaces workshop in 2013 and the intervention Roadside stage in 2014. During this process the education was the main component that structured studioBASAR’s actions. Thus, Zaikin Park functioned as a research by action laboratory where applied education was develop as well as a mechanism of exposing and engaging the participating students to the recovery of a jeopardized public and community space, but also as a tool for reactivating the local community.
Following this series, the action from July 2016 was organized as a Summer School with an international participation. The structure and the objectives of the Summer School have been developed within a Workshop of Tactical Urbanism that took place in February 2016, where the majority of the tutors and most of the participants attended. As a result of this workshop, the Summer School aimed to address the collective production of space by an urgent response to the precarious state of the park by building up its public infrastructure. In the same time, some of the School’s activities and actions have been dedicated to the organization of the complex process, mostly neglected in such workshops, of the participant’s collective living. Coming from different academic and cultural contexts, the participants and tutors could learn from each other in a non-formal framework, experimenting different types of management and self-organization that included besides the practical work, also lectures, projections, games, lecture groups and preparing meals.
The School aimed to develop the two scenarios drafted in the ideas workshop that are addressing Park’s rehabilitation of key aspects. The first working scenario, the Conviviality, investigated and developed equipments and as well as developing concrete actions that can support the social interaction. The second scenario, Ambient Improvement, followed the mapping and the maximizing the informal vegetal potential of the park.
For 10 days, the Summer School transformed the Zaikin Park into an open air classroom, where the almost 30 participants have interacted with the inhabitants and engaged in activities of organizing, communication, design, production and activation. Divided in several working groups, the participants realized a series of temporary constructions, like the summer kitchen, the tree house, the sand pit or the sport equipments, that are addressing the diversity of park’s users. Beyond the immediate materiality, one of the groups produced an extended materiality of the park’s vegetation, completed by a series of advice and examples of intervention and management.
As much as the spatial interventions can act as a form of needed fuel for that fanthoms the functional memory of the park as a public and community space, „The Chart of Zaikin Park” was produced as a tool for institutional dialog, availble to the organizers within the implementation of the rehabilitation plan on medium and long term that aims to transform the space into a park for community.
