By analyzing the site and its surroundings, we began by inventorying the existing buildings and selecting those to be preserved based on specific criteria. We then considered the surrounding streets and the city’s needs in order to integrate the new functions. We therefore introduced mixed-use functions, dividing the site into intervention zones. The cultural functions are located around the most significant preserved buildings, while services and housing are oriented towards the periphery. Another important component of the site is the introduction of a research institute and a university space.

Stirbey Palace, located on Calea Victoriei, has a special potential due to its generous back garden. The back border of the plot is adjacent to the loanid High School and the Faculty of Fine Arts. In the proposal for the reuse of the palace and its domain, we thus proposed a space for creation with three work bodies that mirror the bodies of the palace, the bodies of different sizes and heights follow the silhouette of the palace in a deconstructivist way and form a common space, a garden area with exhibition spaces towards the palace that connects them. The palace has undergone many changes, but following a historical analysis we proposed the reinterpretation of some missing spaces, such as the restoration of a court of honor to restore its representative character, by creating a public square at Calea Victoriei, common to the nearby H building, through abolishing the parking spaces jn front and reallocating them on Strada Banului, which we proposed to be pedestrianized, also in the horseshoe area we proposed a public food area, to remind of its existence and importance.

Another very important aspect that we noticed after the historical analysis is that part of the basement was destroyed in 2008. The Stirbe family was known for the production and trade of wine, so we proposed that in the basement area we restore the life of the wineries through a wine bar with a serving area that continues with an exhibition area for the works created in the 3 bodies on the surface. I took over the area in the basement that was lost through an excavated courtyard, which I kept in its original shape and dimensions. We achieved access to it either directly from the palace or from a footbridge that connects the three buildings of the palace. This has a direct connection with the courtyard through another staircase.

This courtyard has various functions, being a space that serves the exhibition, being closed with a metal structure covered in wood and glass, the exhibition being visible from all angles, it can also be used as a projection look from a noble wood, so 1 found a structure with CLT boards that would solve both the problem of large openings and the external appearance. We wanted to have spaces that were as bright as possible, but still intimate, so we proposed in some places to have a window that would provide privacy, but also enoug h naturallight. For the palace we wanted to keep the original fir beams visible, so it was necessary to find a solution with a concrete screed.For the basement, we arranged underground parking spaces in the back, the technical spaces and a Saugh lager under the sculpture workshop, and in the basement of the palace, next to the wine cellars and the extension with a museum function, we also proposed a descent from the square to an area with an exhibit, as signals of the new function, that we propose for the palace.

A corner between a block of flats and a monument house houses a garbage can next to a wagon house that was restored by the new owners without a sense of responsibility because they raised it by one floor and copied the windows from the ground floor, thus they came out some tortured proportions, the windows on the first floor being too wide and dwarfed by the reduced height of the floor compared to the ground floor. Thus, we proposed an urban corner dedicated to art that rises up to the original cornice of the historical monument house,thus it will stay alive.

In the heart of the city, a corner between two buildings, with a few scattered trees and a metal fence hides a fantastic potential, which has not yet been exploited. Being adjacent to a school, I proposed an urban library with state seats in the thickness of the concrete wall. The books are stored in delimited compartments, protected with thin metal wire closures, one of the trees is kept as a landmark and protected by the new created environment, and the cover has small skylights made of colored glass for interesting effects.

In a densely built area, a forgotten corner emerged near a courtyard, nestled between two fences. This space inspired the creation of a small urban retreat: a seating area centered around a minimalist fountain. The project transforms an overlooked fragment of the city into a peaceful oasis, offering a moment of rest and contemplation amid daily urban bustle. A monolithic concrete structure, carved to form integrated seating spaces, defines the site, while the gentle sound of water enhances the calm atmosphere and connects the intervention with its surroundings.

The project proposes an ensemble of seven houses on a central Bucharest site, on Mircea Vulcănescu Street, near Gara de Nord and Calea Victoriei. The urban fabric into which the proposal is integrated is historic, consisting of individual or collective houses on long, narrow plots, with most buildings being ground-floor or ground-floor-plus-one-storey houses. The selected site contains a late-19th-century “casa vagon” (a traditional elongated house), which has been abandoned and must be integrated into our proposal.
The site has a short frontage onto Mircea Vulcănescu Street and extends considerably towards the rear of the plot. We arranged the houses through a movement between the new volumes, creating a variety of courtyards, terraces, and recesses. In this way, each dwelling has its own intimate space in addition to the shared courtyard. This movement takes place on the left side of the site, creating an alley between the historic house and the new buildings.

As a volunteer with Ambulance for Monuments in the village of Șona, I took part in the restoration of the historic "Dormition of the Mother of God" Church, a valuable piece of local heritage. The project focused on the complete reconstruction of the roof structure and the replacement of the traditional clay tile covering.Working alongside skilled craftsmen, I was actively involved in hands-on restoration tasks using traditional construction techniques, with an emphasis on preserving the original character and authenticity of the building. The experience provided a deep understanding of vernacular architecture, structural carpentry, and the cultural significance of heritage conservation in rural Romania.This opportunity strengthened my interest in architectural preservation and sustainable interventions, while also highlighting the importance of collaborative work between architects, communities, and craftsmen in protecting endangered monuments.

As part of a local architectural event in the village of Jugureni, I had the opportunity to exhibit one of the projects developed in my studio. The project focused on the adaptive reuse of an abandoned rural house, located in the heart of the village. Rather than letting the structure decay, the concept aimed to preserve its architectural character while transforming it into a vibrant community hub for children.The design introduced flexible indoor and outdoor spaces where children could engage in educational and recreational activities, such as workshops, storytelling, crafts, and small performances. Special attention was given to using sustainable materials and integrating the building harmoniously into the existing village fabric, respecting both its past and its potential for the future.During the exhibition, I also held a small conference in which I presented the project's background, design challenges, and the social impact it seeks to create. I discussed the importance of investing in rural communities through thoughtful, low-intervention architecture that prioritizes people and place. The event was well received by both locals and professionals, opening meaningful dialogue about the future of similar heritage buildings in Romania’s countryside.

I participated in a team of four architecture students in a competition organized by De-a arhitectura, an architecture practice dedicated to educational workshops for children. The project involved designing a five-hour workshop for children, with activities based on a book, aiming to spark their curiosity about reading.We chose the book The Birch Brothers and the Seven Vampires with Only One Pair of Underpants. Based on this story, we explored the connections between literature and architecture, the conflicts between the characters and how these could be resolved through architecture, as well as the relationship between architecture and community.

Personal premisesA common and almost invisible gesture, the drawing on the edge of the page, becomes in Focus / Escapism not only a research theme but also an instrument of collective introspection. The project proposes an exploration of those moments when thought discreetly escapes from the center of discourse and takes refuge in automatic gestures, in figures sketched without intention, in lines traced on the margin of the page. The drawings are born without intent, sometimes guided by a recognizable inner rhythm, other times appearing arbitrarily, as graphic reflexes of a thought process that generates them, but does not control them.
At the intersection between surrealist automatism, sociological observation and affective archiving, Focus / Escapism explores a form of discontinuous presence, located between conscious involvement and silent withdrawal. It is about those moments when the mind participates, but does not let itself be fully caught, oscillating between sustained attention and reflex gestures, between clear intention and inner wandering.From observation to concept: the marginal gesture under the magnifying glassIt all began with a simple observation: how many times have we looked at a written or drawn page and realized that the edge of the paper, that “peripheral” space, was full of small drawings, lines, shapes or signs made almost unintentionally. They were not part of the main discourse but remnants of a secondary mental activity, fragmented between focus and mental drift. This “marginal thinking” is not less important just because it is unintentional. On the contrary, it reveals profound mechanisms of how the mind works: the way our mind seeks escape in moments of boredom, stress, or simply during the parallel process of learning.
Observing that it is a very common gesture, one that people use either to find refuge for their thoughts or, on the contrary, to better focus on the discourse they are listening to, we began to ask ourselves what these mechanical, apparently banal gestures could convey, without judging them aesthetically, but simply by looking at and analyzing them as presences — both on the paper and in thought.
Focus / Escapism is a visual and conceptual research that questions the classical hierarchies of writing and drawing, inviting a double reading: rational and intuitive, controlled and impulsive, concentration and escape.

The invisible laboratory behind the page
Behind the final piece there was a meticulous and laborious process, in which each stage was carried out with almost obsessive attention. It all began after we collected the pages and laid them on the floor to see them in their entirety, to arrange and select the ones that seemed most suitable for the project. After scanning, the analysis became careful and detailed, where each page was treated individually, and the areas occupied by drawing and text were marked with colored spots — red for drawing, as a symbolic color for errors, and blue for writing — so that we could calculate the areas and organize them systematically in Excel. The markings served to render exact proportions but at the same time remained symbolic, offering interpretive flexibility that allowed us to explore not only the quantity but also the quality and relationship between drawing and text. Later, we created a version with black spots dedicated to drawing, to track visual progression and to highlight how space was occupied, from the least to the most drawn pages.
Each page was numbered, archived meticulously in dedicated folders, and organized so that we could build the final boards and panels. These illustrated the transition from pages predominantly filled with text to those mostly covered in drawing, respecting a visual progression, and allowing the observation of the evolution of occupied space. However, the project is not only about the physical pages or the final object; it represented the entire archive created, the analytical process, and the discoveries that emerged along the way. The final overlay, visible on the central panel, was the natural conclusion of this work, but also a way of emphasizing the areas with the least drawing, where empty space becomes a sign of marginal thinking. The physical sheets, framed with the center left empty, became a visual gesture symbolizing the gaze turned toward the margins, the attention shifting beyond the main area, exploring the peripheral spaces of thought and imagination.
The entire process was long and demanding, but full of joy, curiosity, and intellectual satisfaction. At night, on the terrace, we worked continuously, discussing every detail, arguing decisions, and generating new ideas that appeared spontaneously while scanning, measuring, coloring, numbering, and arranging the pages. We experimented, iterated, adjusted, and constantly improved each stage, so that the project became more than an exhibited object — it was a journey of discovery, a reflection on the material and on the people who created it. We observed different interests, unexpected correlations between text and drawing, contrasts between spontaneity and intention — all revealing subtleties we could only grasp through this meticulous work.
The final result — the panels, the colored and black spots, the progressive order of the pages — represents not only visual aesthetics but the crystallization of intense effort, dedication, and satisfaction born from a creative process. This process, so systematic and rational, requiring great mental effort and concentration, is almost ironic in relation to the subject studied; thus, it also represents a satire of classical art — not to deny its relevance, but to highlight another kind of art born from such an insignificant gesture.

The exhibition space: a journey through two rooms
Our project culminated in an exhibition hosted by the Union of Architects of Romania, Bucharest branch, which opened on June 24th, 2025. The exhibition is structured into two complementary rooms, each offering a different perspective on the relationship between writing, drawing, and the viewer. The first room explores the separation of these two forms of expression to highlight the tension between them, while the second room reconstructs a map of these gestures through percentages, placements, and patterns, offering a collective reading of how attention is distributed on the page.The first room
Anatomy of a Page: Decomposition in Space, Composition in Form
Where the two once coexisted on the same page, they were separated. Only through this separation does the tension between focus and escape, between intention and automatic gesture, become visible. These fragments are not deliberate compositions, but traces of an inner process, remnants of a suspended moment of attention. The margin becomes structure. Drawings and texts are distributed in two distinct registers, one of ordered thought and one of spontaneous gesture. Their juxtaposition proposes a double reading of the mental mechanism — between rigor and evasion, between control and impulse.
On the main wall, 120 sheets form a composition. We chose this number as a direct reference to the number of pages in the most widely used notebook in the world, the Moleskine Classic Notebook — an object that has become a symbol of daily thought, note-taking, and spontaneous drawing — and the void created by their arrangement hosts the concept of the exhibition. What was once marginal now becomes the frame, and the void becomes the point of focus, contained by gestures, traces, rhythms. The exhibition builds around this inversion: the margin gains structural strength, and what was peripheral becomes essential. In the center of the space, a final composition reunites the positions of all collected drawings, mapping common tendencies — a palimpsest of automatic gestures, traced on the margins, repeated unconsciously, yet collectively. The palimpsest, in this context, functions as a layering of traces, where each layer remains visible, outlining a shared graphic memory. Chairs arranged in a classroom-like configuration surround the main piece. On each of them lies a blank sheet — a silent invitation to enter the same scenario in which most of the presented drawings were created: moments of concentration, listening, routine. This arrangement transforms the exhibition space into a familiar and personal setting, where the visual gesture connects to everyone’s experience.
Under the central piece, on a wooden table, are placed other white sheets, scattered among them blank notebooks, and already drawn pages recovered from our archive. They continue the exhibition’s story and suggest the idea of an open process, in which the visitor becomes both witness and part of a continuously transforming archive.The second room
Cartographies of the Margin: Analysis and Patterns
Two series of works propose different ways of indexing the gestures on the page’s edge.
The exhibited works explore the variations between the spaces dedicated to writing and those occupied by drawing, organized into two distinct directions of analysis. The first series groups pages according to the percentage difference between the surface occupied by writing and that occupied by drawing, in a sequence that moves from text predominance to graphic dominance. These visual maps use a color palette to highlight the imbalance between the two registers, suggesting recurring patterns in how people occupy the page.
The second series reconstructs the presence of the drawings through a set of black spots, ordered from the least to the most densely drawn. Each spot indicates the exact place where a marginal drawing appeared, offering an abstract yet faithful image of the distribution of spontaneous gestures. Together, the two types of representations create a form of mental cartography, in which quantitative analysis blends with gestural imprint, generating a visual map of how attention fragments, deviates, and reconfigures itself across the page.

The aesthetics of the involuntaryThe marginal drawing is a discreet but persistent presence, which accompanies thought without disturbing it. It stands beside it like a shadow of the mind, like a drawn reflection of an inner activity that does not express itself in words but in gestures. To the inattentive eye, these traces may seem insignificant. Trembling contours, imperfect geometries, lines that fade into nothing. But for those who look carefully, after hours of scanning, ordering, measuring and observing, they become a map of an invisible world, built not with intention, but with the overflow of suspended moments.
People who do not know each other, who live in different contexts, use the same forms to express absence or, more precisely, to mark a particular kind of presence. Spirals, grids, flowers, faces, squares, symbols, oblique lines, contours without beginning or end repeat themselves with an insistence that reveals a shared inner logic, a collective way of escaping. It is a language without words, yet full of meaning. In these drawings there is no style, but there is memory, emotion, restrained gestures hidden in the fullness of a lecture page or in the emptiness of a meeting note.
The margin of the page becomes a space of refuge. It is a permissive limit, a buffer zone between what is required and what appears. The center of the page is dedicated to discourse, obligation, rationality. The margin, on the other hand, is where control dissolves and the hand is allowed to move freely. Many begin to draw exactly where the hand can easily fall — bottom right, the outer corner, the spaces between paragraphs or the lower edge of the page. That is where the gesture happens, without constraint, without plan. It is an open mental space, almost topological, where the interior expresses itself on a limit. What may seem peripheral is, in fact, profoundly central to understanding the mind’s mechanisms of adaptation.
As we analyzed more closely, we realized that these drawings do not appear randomly. They are signs of tension. The mind is engaged in a process of listening, writing or concentrating, but it needs a release. The gesture comes as a bodily response, a form of sensory balance. In some pages, the drawings seem pressed, drawn with force, perhaps in moments of frustration or fatigue. In others, they are fluid, continuous, a kind of graphic meditation that flows quietly in parallel with the notes.
Some drawings repeat obsessively. Squares within squares, concentric circles, grids drawn with rigor. They speak about the need for order, for controlling time that seems to slip away. Others are chaotic, impulsive, seemingly drawn in a moment of inner revolt. They are the signs of a silent dialogue between the individual and the situation they are in. A page completely covered in drawing but without a written word can say more about an hour of class than any note. In that verbal void, the drawing takes on the weight of testimony. And in every drawing, each time, we felt a palpable human presence. After a while, we began to recognize them. Without knowing the names of those who drew them, we sometimes knew who was restless, who was bored, who was dreaming. We saw the hand of a child troubled by linearity, we saw the demand for symmetry of a mathematical mind, we saw hesitations, repetitions, blockages. All at the margin. All invisible at first sight, but revealing once you learn to read them.
These drawings do not speak only of escape, but of another kind of presence. A diffuse, imperfect, deeply human presence that refuses to be caught in lines and writes itself instead, on the edge of things.

The creative process: how we worked with everyday pagesTo bring this concept to life, we launched an open call to students, artists, architects, as well as to the general public, friends, and family, for the collection of real sheets of paper — pages of notes, class materials, notebooks, or torn sheets from daily agendas — all bearing authentic traces of trembling handwriting, automatic drawings, coffee stains, or folded margins. We collected over 200 sheets in total, each carrying a unique combination of text and marginal drawing. Then the real work began: we started by selecting the pages that seemed most suitable for our project, without judging them stylistically — on the contrary, we were not interested in their artistic quality but in the authenticity of the gestures. This beginning was not a simple organizational act, but an essential step in analyzing and understanding the tension between focus and drift, between articulated intention and reflex gesture. But the most challenging stage was the in-depth analysis: the hyperanalysis. We began by scanning the pages to create the digital archive, so that later we could extract and separate the writing from the drawing. Then we used visual mapping methods, measuring the percentage of each page occupied by text and by drawing. We built a visual archive where black spots represented each marginal drawing, while blue and red colors indicated the differences in occupation between writing and drawing. As a final step, we overlaid all the drawings to observe and understand which areas were the most and least drawn. All steps were necessary to assemble the main piece, made of the real sheets, with which we wanted to create a margin.
This stage was essential to understand not only the existence of marginal gestures but also the recurring patterns and their connection to the mental processes that occur “in parallel.” We discovered that what seemed chaotic actually had a structure — a collective map of our mental escapes.

The opening: a moment of dialogue and reflection
The exhibition Focus / Escapism, opened on June 24th, 2025, at the headquarters of the Union of Architects of Romania, enjoyed a warm reception, with almost 80 participants present on the opening evening. Visitors explored the installations at their own pace, in a space that did not dictate a route but allowed it to be built by gaze, step, and personal memory. The works evoked recognition, smiles, and questions. The marginal drawings, seemingly banal, became triggers of introspection — many recognized themselves in the repetitive gestures, the scribbled corners, the moments of escape they had never verbalized before.
The exhibition remained open for several weeks, and the way it was received by the public surprised and delighted us. On the tables inside the first room, blank sheets were left, without instructions — just as a silent presence. Without being asked explicitly, visitors began to fill them: small sketches, marks, notes, or flourishes began to appear, organically extending our initial archive. Each trace continued the story of marginal thoughts, proving that the gesture repeats, transmits, and regenerates itself, without need for justification. The exhibition thus became not only an archive but a living process, where observation turns into participation, and participation becomes documentation.
The team behind the project
We are a team of architecture students, and this exhibition was for us both collective and personal research. We wanted to observe and highlight those traces that appear in the absence of intention and on the margins of convention. To treat them with seriousness, empathy, and critical curiosity. Without “turning” them into art, without embellishing or correcting them. Simply to show them.
Focus / Escapism is, in the end, a form of visual listening to the inner rhythm, to our everyday escapes, to the small but revealing gestures that live on the margins of attention.