Tara / Camposaz – 【Architectural CAD Drawings】

Architects: Camposaz
Location: Tarcu Mountains, Southern Carpathian, Armenis, Romania
Lead Architects: Giovanni Wegher, Paul Schrijen, Tatiana Levitskaya
Area: 40.0 m2
Project Year: 2017
Photographs: Sebastian Apostol

Collaborator: Gabriel Langhel (carpenter)
Participants: Alessandro Chojwa, Cecilia Rendina, Cezar Cernea, Davide Tagliabue, Enrico Tommasini, Magda Vieriu, Maria Luisa Miotto, Marianna Landi, Massimiliano Piffer, Oti Hrebenciuc, Paul Pestisan, Pintea Dan, Paul Rusu, Sebastian Apostol, Tommaso Benassi, Tommaso Lorenzetti, Veronica Sereda, Ioan Moldovan, Krisztina Bokos, Ioana Covali, Roxana Bara, Andrei Tache
Wwf: Oana Mondoc, Mara Cazacu, Bogdan Comanescu, Duncan Heirmeier, Eleonora, Astarte, Georg Messerer, Danu, Matei, Adi Hagatis, Mariana Tantarean
Clients: WWF, REWILDING EUROPE

Text description provided by the architects. Tara explores the sensory perception of the environment and communicates with the symbolic and natural language of the elements. It is like a filter which frames light and reality and gives them form and space, in the pursuit of finding a balance between empty and full spaces, vibrant and harmonious compositions which reveal imperceptible fluxes between lightness and gravity, a balance which expresses itself through the wood, a natural, living material ready to accept a slow but inevitable biological erosion.

The structure is set on the border between a forest and an incredibly fascinating open space in the Southern Carpathian of the Tarcu Mountains, in Romania. The structure designed and built in ten days, with a team of 32 people coming from different foreign countries, represents both an experiment in the field of wood and the realization of a small infrastructure for a sensitive and caring form of tourism in terms of nature and environment. The initiative is supported by WWF Rumania and Camposaz, the latter being an Italian organization which promotes the collaboration among young architects and designers coming from all over the world to design and build structures which exploit the anthropized environment or, like in this case, a wild landscape.

A typical characteristic of the way Camposaz works is the human scale of designing and building of a full-scale model integrated into a specific environmental context. The human body and manual labour are thus to be considered as tools of expression and measurement. The whole process is organized and realized symbiotically and develops step by step. The aim of the initiative is to concentrate on one experience both the process of designing and the one of putting into practice the work itself, giving value to the whole creative process.

The workshop was possible thanks to the LIFE-Bison project and the European Union program LIFE, which allowed WWF Romania and Rewilding Europe to reintroduce the wild bison in these areas since 2013, after 200 years of extinction. Visitors and dwellers will be able to enjoy this naturalistic observatory, stop there and appreciate the view in their walks in this extraordinary and uncontaminated vastness.