Remind Me of Remeţi – Archiprix 2025 Honourable Mention

Can you (briefly) explain your choice of subject?
When starting the graduation studio, I was somehow frustrated with the generic brief and randomly chosen project site presented to the group. I kind of arrogantly appealed to my professors – who, surprisingly, supported and trusted my ability to tailor a project that embodied a more personal background. I proposed to develop the thesis around the narrative of my newly minted cousin Alen, who I became best man to at his wedding in Romania that previous summer.
Talking to him and his peers about their lives, each working in the construction industry somewhere in the European Union, transformed the rural town of Remeţi, in the Transylvanian countryside, into one of the most cosmopolitan places I had ever experienced. Each of them leaves their home to make money elsewhere, to eventually build a house in their town of origin, all while physically constructing the built environment of Western Europe.
Uncovering that unlikely state of affairs, the disciplines of architecture and urbanism began to converge in a constellation of sociology, politics, economy, and philosophy, sparking the initial idea of developing this thesis.

What or who have been your sources of inspiration for your project, and can you explain this (briefly)?
A major source of inspiration was definitely the vernacular of self-built structures around the Transylvanian countryside. Each (unfinished) structure expressing a sort of bravado and an endless ambition to ‘do well’ for oneself; a signalling to other community members on the same pursuit, or a kind of competition. In that ambition, the structures often have to wait years to get their final layer of stucco, or never get it at all.

This attitude informed the development of a formal language for both the House Away from Home in Romania and the Home away from House in Paris. Since many of these structures are incrementally ‘finished’ through phased investments, a major question in the thesis became: what would this kind of architecture look like? The project became a speculative, fictional conversation between me – an architect, and my cousin Alen – a builder and migrant worker, through which I pursued a formal language of ‘sensibility’: constructing only what is necessary, avoiding unnecessary gestures and architectural arrogance, while still ensuring quality in typology, floorplan, materiality, and tectonic logic.

This approach naturally led to rely on an aesthetic of an economy of means; using familiar material palettes rooted in DIY-construction culture, echoing the same ambition and pragmatism found in the self-built structures that inspired the project in the first place, but in a recorchestrated way.
To sharpen this design attitude, I wrote an essay titled On Unfinishedness, investigating the issue of unfinished facades that await a layer of stucco once the money is there. I looked at precedents like Sigurd Lewerentz’s restroom pavilion opposite the Chapel of Resurrection, and De Vylder Vinck Taillieu’s pavilion at Horst Festival: “that it does not look good, makes that it looks good.” Both projects boldly embraced the tectonics and expression of unfinishedness – messily stacked hollow-core clay bricks refusing plaster – and are still beautiful in a strange way.

State and (briefly) describe the key moment in your graduation project.
At some point halfway through, I got so stuck in my head that I fell into a bit of a rut, probably familiar to any architect or student out there. I’d been too focused on figuring everything out neatly and perfectly, trying to make sense of the thesis. I perceived a dichotomy where I somehow thought I needed to finish the research part first, in order to know what I was dealing with in terms of a design proposal.

My supervisor Jacob Voorthuis asked me: “Are you Tolstoy or are you Dostoevsky?” My knowledge of Russian literature was insufficient to immediately understand what he meant. He rephrased: do you work best with structure and meticulous planning figuring things out before starting, or with spontaneity and intuition figuring things out along the way? I’m the latter. So he sent me down to the model workshop.

I started building models of both sites and embraced a design methodology of making – somehow a similar attitude to the subjects I was describing in the thesis. Once I started doing that, things gradually began to fall into place and make sense. Research wasn’t something to be finished. The actual design and figuring out what kind of architectural programs and scenarios made sense in the speculative narrative I was laying out turned out to be a convergence of both research and design trough making.

Can you (briefly) explain what design(ing) means to you?
That’s something I’m still figuring out – and hope to never find a conclusive answer to.

What could your project mean for practice? (brief reflection)
I hope the project shows that architecture can exist without the capital “A”; to motivate the exploration of peripheries, social, geographical, and architectural alike, and to engage with the surprising stories they’ll tell. To look at the overlooked.

What do you hope or want to achieve as a designer in the near or distant future?
I’d love to be able to engage with the themes of the thesis – or more broadly, to work on an architecture that has a political or socio-economic mandate. Maybe that’s a young designer’s naivety, but I’m eager to explore how far I can push the boundaries of both the profession and industry to be able to do so.

Project text
Remind Me of Remeţi explores the architecture of migrant work. Centered on the unlikely relationship between rural Romania and metropolitan Paris, the project interrogates the fluid notion of home amidst the complex realities of migrant labor.

In the context of labor migration, the concept of home becomes multifaceted and fraught with challenges. These include not only the physical and economic struggles inherent in labor migration but also the psychological and emotional turmoil associated with leaving one’s homeland and attempting to establish a new sense of belonging in a foreign environment.

This project attempts to lay bare the conditions and challenges of migrant work, and articulates it through two speculative architectural scenarios: a House in Romania, and a Home in Paris. These interventions serve as critical inquiries into how architecture would – or could – respond to the condition of the migrant worker in his ambiguous pursuit of home.

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Name
Vincent van Spaendonk
email
linkedin

Graduation
September 2023 – July 2023

Education
Technische Universiteit Eindhoven