FAUT at VDW 2017

Excerpt form the exhibition argument

It has been generally believed, in many circles, that Romania is an exporter of poorly educated, under skilled laborers. Recent statistics however paint a different picture. Romania is not a lot different from any other eastern European country currently bleeding its human resources. If the first waves of migration mostly saw the displacement  of under skilled laborers, taking up high intensity low paying jobs, the current ones are made up of the younger, more educated
Gen.X-ers and millennials. There is however a clear generational paradigm shift concerning attitudes towards work placement, entrepreneurship, job mobility and cultural attitudes, between the two. Quick to benefit from the economic boom at the beginning of the new millennium, Gen.X-ers were still able to establish companies, and set the
base for a local free and competitive market. The millennials however were less fortunate as their generation peaked in the middle of the worst economic crisis of the last 100 years. They simply did not have enough options. Or did they? Partly encouraged by the many academic mobility programs that EU membership had made available in their case, partly pushed by these new economic constraints the millennials willingly and courageously choose to seek their fortune elsewhere…and architects were at the forefront of this new trend.
What follows is a collection of testimonies from our alumni and former colleagues describing the particular and personal nature of each of this migrations. The motivations are numerous, from literally following on the footsteps of your personal architectural hero to following your spouse’s work placement, from simply looking for a better job, to trying out entrepreneurial and start-up opportunities.
Beyond the stories, the collection reconnects people that once belonged to the same space-time frame, in an attempt to generate a spark that could be the beginning of a fresh design for our machine – an instrument that, to some point, helped us all in finding the answer to the question ”what is architecture?”.

For the full texts of the exhibition catalogue please click on the pages of  the brochure below.