PRACTICE

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MANOPERA is an architecture and structural engineering office established in Cluj-Napoca committed to a research-based approach. The office opened in 2017 and started off with the participation to the 16th Venice Biennale of Architecture, by curating and designing the Romanian Pavilion. Our main focus is to rethink and rephrase the brief for each commission and to understand the cultural, social and built context followed by an intensive search for questions. The interest for immersion in the holistic exploration becomes a tool for reflection, so the journey leads to sensitive answers that matter. We challenge the concept of a project by interrogating the binomial architecture - structure, initiating an interesting dialogue between harmony and contrast, encouraging us to experiment. The process is a mixture of ingredients that includes the reconsideration of the ordinary and the pragmatic approach close to the worksite reality as it seeks to have a concern for simplicity, rational use of resources, structural logic, honest materiality, optimized technology, expressiveness and emotion that architecture is capable of transmitting. The goal is to create meaningful architecture that improves the built environment and offers added value to its users engaging the social factor.