The shop windows in Liberty Square, Gheorgheni.

Moments

In 1607
the inhabitants of the town of Gheorgheni have the right to organize two major fairs
in a year. By the end of the 17th century the town becomes the most significant
logistic base of the Armenian merchants of Transilvania. The fair in the centre of the
town is the busiest area of the town.

In 1907
the settlement becomes a town again. However the fair does not have the same
importance as in the past because the Armenian merchants leave the town due to
the customs conflicts between the Romanian Kingdom and the Austro-Hungarian
Monarchy in the period between 1880 and 1890. The old fair is replaced by an urban
market and the commercial activity moves to the shops located on the ground-floor
of the buildings and these shops have transparent shop windows.

Thus, according to a photograph taken in 1941,

the shop windows form a continuous front on the ground-floor of the buildings in
Liberty Square

After 1977
the line of the shop windows is destroyed, in our days we have only two original shop
windows

In 2010
we have the perspective of the restoration of the shop windows.

The buildings aimed by the intervention are on the list of historic monuments as
elements of the building block HR-II-a-B 1285 Urban building block, Liberty
Square II dwelling-houses with shops on the ground floor, Liberty Square,
numbers 1 to 30.

The K.M. dwelling-house

This is the adaptation of an existing house from the countryside to the demands of an
urban lifestyle.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the neighbouring houses belonged to a single
big family and the neighbouring five houses were practically built in the period
between 1928 and 1946, following the usual pattern of the peasant houses of
Gheorgheni. This project is aimed at a building which was inserted between these
houses at the end of the 1960s. Since the 1970s the neighbouring houses have
been transformed, rebuilt or modified. Only one of the houses remained untouched
and its owner was planning to demolish this witness when the project started. The
beneficiary of the project was a small child at the beginning of the 1970s and he is
emotionally attached to the old image of the area, so the project is an attempt to find
the lost ages and the lost memories.
As it is an existing house, we did not manage to create a passive house, but the
area is considered to be the coldest in Romania and, in this context, in February there
was a day when the building did not have to be heated so its heating was stopped on
the 5th of March.

The restoration of the church tower of Joseni

It is a good example of co-operation between the architect, archaeologist, art

historian, wall restorer, dendrochronologist etc. As the beneficiary was interested in
the past, a multidisciplinary research on the building, including a research with
georadar, could be carried out.
The interventions from 1930 hid the baroque elements of the tower, but the research
carried out inside the tower and the exterior survey clearly show that the tower has
two medieval stages and a baroque stage. The aim of the restoration project is to
bring those stages to light. Due to the concern to harmonise the details, we got to a
solution which made the whole building still look uniform despite the differences of
the component parts. The supplementary data which appeared once we started the
work enriched the proposed scenario, thus the restored tower became a living history
book.