Andrei Condoros

Wooden Churches of Banat – An introduction

This presentation describes and briefly analyses a project which has been implemented in the ethnographic Faget area (village Crivina de Sus), Timis county in the past three years. E refer to a process of covering a historical monument (a wooden church) by means of a tense membrane in order to protect it for subsequent and possible restorations.

The action provoked reactions (or/ and non-reactions) from the local community. The project involved on the one hand, a multidisciplinary team of specialists who relate professionally to vernacular heritage and the manner in which it determines / interacts with the cultural landscape; on the other hand, it meant a type of personal community involvement related to the village church and the values surrounding it.

We are dealing not only with different approaches, different perspectives, but also with different values which the specialists or the community confer to the monument. While for the former value Tradition and old, archaic in relation to cultural heritage, the latter value the new, post-modern, contrasting pairings in complete dissonance with this legacy. We aim to offer interpretations and to understand the mechanisms that determine these different approaches and the way in which the re-appropriation of cultural landscape can be reinvested with meaning by a local community.

Honorary Mention of the section Restauration/ Rehabilitation/ Reconversion within the regional competition Projects and Achievements on the Timisoara Architecture Annual (2013) for the project The Otherside World (Wooden Churches). The prize was awarded by the Order of Architects in Romania, Timis Territorial Branch and the architecture magazine.

Ing.dipl. Andrei Condoroș was trained as a landscape architect in Timisoara, Banat University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine. He helds a master degree in Spatial Planning and currently advancing his thesis (PhD) on the ‘Research, Protection and Reinvigorating of the rural cultural landscape from «Făget area», Banat region, Romania both at the Polytechnic University of Timișoara (UPT), Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism.

Currently, along with other colleagues part of an interdisciplinary team, runs the project ‘Wooden Churches of Banat’ a project that tells the story of the oldest wooden Churches in Banat, that stand not only at the crossroads between counties, but at the crossroads between histories, between rise and fall. A prime objective is the restoration of the wooden church in Crivina, the oldest in Banat and ranked as category A monument.

He is one of the founding member and currently the President of the Romanian Landscape Architect’s Association – AsoP, West Territorial Branch, member in the Executive Board of AsoP, Advisory Board Member of CIVILSCAPE and former Vice-President of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA), The European Region (IFLA Europe) – Professional Practice Committee (PPC), with a portfolio covering a diverse range of projects and actions, some of which were – Green Infrastructure and the European Landscape Convention Committees; As Vp and coordinator of the GI working group inside IFLA Europe, he made one of the first steps towards the official collaboration with EC, DG Env’s Revised GI Implementation and Restoration (GIIR) Working Group (alongside other EU bodies), acting as delegate and member for almost two years inside this group, until the end of his mandate.