Cartea Caselor

Abstract

“You will travel alongside boyars, rulers, renowned artists, ethnologists, composers, scientists, conductors, and blessed souls, crossing Romania through time and space in order to understand the spirit of past ages and the ways in which different people thought, built, and lived. We will settle and dwell in palaces and dugout houses alike, just like someone setting out to discover the world, to learn, and to marvel at it.

Houses are stories turned solid; if you know how to look at them, they will tell you a great deal through their plaster, decorations, and windows. Their stories reveal themselves through the way people lived within them and shaped them. I know you love stories and, like me, you read or listen to them fascinated, imagining everything you hear!

A wonderful adventure awaits you. Move forward with passion and bring along a dictionary, a magnifying glass, and plenty of curiosity. Hidden within the illustrations are tiny ant-like phrases written in small letters, so that you may enjoy the satisfaction of a treasure hunter. In them you will discover explanations enriching the story, clever words from the book’s travelers, and little crucibles filled with wisdom for those thirsty for knowledge.”

— Alexandra Mihailciuc

The Book of Houses is a collection of meaningful stories about buildings and builders, about living architectures inhabited and crossed by people, and about the many different ways space can be experienced.

The book offers a panoramic view of several universal housing typologies, adapted to the Romanian context, inviting readers to explore historical spaces such as manor houses, fortified cule houses, and palaces. It encourages visits to what remains of old towns, with their mahalale neighborhoods and interwar heritage; to see the world from the perspective of a merchant’s house; and to discover the archaic substance of Romanian villages through memorable forms of dwelling: the dugout house, the porch house, the lake dwelling, and many others. Readers are invited to travel across the country in a covered wagon or within the ephemeral shelter of a tent, to move into an apartment block, a penthouse, or a lighthouse. In short, the book approaches dwelling across space and time in a non-exhaustive way, always treating it as a source of inspiration for the present.

Timeless through the themes it explores, a support for new discoveries and a generator of ideas, the book encourages activism, involvement, and positive building. It invites readers to make unexpected associations, to care about the communities in which they live and the environment around them, and to use less environmentally friendly materials more thoughtfully.

It invites us to rethink our values and to reintegrate the things of yesterday into the flow of contemporary life.

The Book of Houses is the sister volume of The Great Little World: text by Alexandra Mihailciuc, illustrations by Alexandra Culescu, graphic design by Andrei Tache, published by ACS Publishing House, in the Rescue Book Collection.