At some point - Roundabout architecture

Authors’ Comment

The book sums up a series of essays, chronicles, comments on architecture and urbanism, place and territories as well as about history, art and literature. It also concerns main, episodic or imaginary persons and characters traveling together with the author over seas, countries or time.
The texts are the written result of a practicing architect making a whole tour around the facts of architecture, trying to grasp the object of architecture. It also deals with its refinement of shades and half tones under the conditions of “the dry world of global spiritual emptiness” (Grigore Grigurcu). Suggestion is made that the architectural scenery does not exist by itself but that it is built to get significance reacting to stimuli apparently surprisingly remote from the independent field of the architectural works.
It is a book “with” and “about” architecture, but also, as the subtitle states – roundabout architecture – it deals with “why” and “how” the happenings cross the larger perimeter (geographical, historical, cultural, political, etc.) circumscribing and influencing the domain of architectural creation.
Many texts referring to not only architectural “facts” and “happenings” contradict what is considered (at a given moment!) as “accepted ideas” or rather a “politically correct” attitude. Others enlighten some ambiguous or unpleasant situations implying the architects. The author builds up a discourse avoiding, as much as possible, a “niche”, specific language with the intention to be well understood by the architecture outsider reader too. The notes and illustrations as well as the index, along with their explanatory role, are also an open window towards perspectives that might seem too remote or apparently too difficult to guess. The perspectives may suggest useful and contextual debates on architecture as a phenomenon. The author refers to nowadays architectural experiences – the last thirty, forty years – framing them within a larger historical context, critically analyzing the concrete materialization of the work.
The book is written in Romanian containing a selection of texts translated into French an English and 108 black and white illustration. The book is structured in five chapters – I. Generalities, II. Houses/Persons/Characters, III. Thresholds, IV. Just words – a strictly subjective anthology, V. Addenda
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…a book written with often sarcastic, humorous intelligence, an intelligence that connects many aspects of architecture as the epitomization of the whole society, of a whole time ... in a single sentence the author manages to encapsulate two thousand years ... it is a cultural journey... it's a book written by a stoic architect, it's a breath of fresh, healthy air that clears your mind and helps you position yourself in the world you live in...
(Lorin Niculae, speaking at the launch at Cărturești Modul, May 30, 2023)
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[…] Mihai Pienescu is also a thinker, bringing many reflections on architecture and the role of the architect nowadays. […] These tablets, very original, are often written with pamphleteering verve […] Mihai Pienescu sketches, along these articles, a picture of the way the “architectural spectacle” unfolds – real, objective […] Literature , philosophy, various artistic studies are brought together to account for the issues discussed. The numerous references, from Romanian fairy tales and Zen stories to Anton Cehov, Constantin Brâncusi, Guy Debord, Amin Maalouf, Jean-Luc Godard, Johan Wirfalt, etc., are invoked in a kind of spiritual approach to support the author's words. […] And last but not least, there is a great flavor of story in many of these tablets. The book is a pleasure to read and is open to a wide audience, not just specialists.
(Doina Ioanid, "Architecture, with pleasure" in Observator Cultural, No. 1162 - 15.06.2023)