Dear Architect,



Fifty years ago, on May 6th, 1961, a great Romanian poet died: Lucian Blaga.

He is not very well known, although there are now some translations from his work.

He was proposed for the Nobel prize in poetry, but this proposal came from people outside of Romania, and at an unfortunate time... the communist government sabotaged this proposal, for political reasons, so the Nobel prize went to the Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez.

But Blaga remains a quintessential force that militates for spirit, in a world and at a time when spirit is moribund.

You can read below a famous poem by Blaga, one that unites his cosmology with his poetical credo.

Besides this, we would like to invite you, rather ad hoc, since this idea came to us on the inspiration of the moment, to an unusual architectural competition.

Blaga asked for his tomb to be placed nearby the church in his native village: Lancram.

This did happen, but years later, after the revolution that brought down Communism, the village built a large gymnasium in very close proximity.

The church itself is without great architectural merit, at least in its refurbished form.

So we are posed with this problem: how to unite a church, a gymnasium and a famous grave into a coherent architectural statement that would reflect, somehow, Blaga's spirituality and poetry...?

The little cemetery, the church and even the village itself are famous now because of Lucian Blaga, so it is only normal, we think, to consider that the nexus of the project would be his tomb.

But the challenge is to unite the sacred with the profane, the church with the gymnasium, via the poet's tomb.

As such, we think it might be a great occasion to realize, in built / buildable form what Bernard Tschumi proposed theoretically: cross-programming, trans-programming, dis-programming.

Thus, an Architecture of Contamination and Inclusion, as opposed to an architecture of segregation and exclusion.

We invite all who are interested in this project to write to us for registration and to receive the necessary detailed drawings and additional photographs.

Also, please be kind and read below this important poem by Lucian Blaga.

Thank you,


ICARCH Gallery

I DO NOT CRUSH THE WORLD'S COROLLA OF WONDERS


I do not crush the world’s corolla of wonders

and I do not kill

with my own mind
the mysteries I meet
on my own path
in flowers, eyes, on lips or tombs.
The light of others
strangles the spell of what is hidden
in depths of darkness,
but I,
I with my light increase the secret of the world –
and as the moon with her white rays
does not diminish, but shimmering
intensifies the mysteries of night,
I too enrich the dark horizon
with shivers, great shivers of sainted secret,
and what is not comprehended
becomes even more incomprehensible
under my own watching –
because I equally love
the flowers and the eyes, the lips and tombs.