Since 2008, Școala de la Bunești has envisioned itself as a Vivarium Novum - a nursery of skills and knowledge, a school hand-built by students, grounded in three millennia of Euro-Mediterranean educational tradition and dedicated to preserving a model of autonomous humanity in the face of the overwhelming rise of digital education.
Unhurried and free of machinery, Școala de la Bunești have built several prototypes using exclusively natural materials, historical references and local inspiration: an adobe student dormitory, a Byzantine masonry trapeza, a hempcrete professor's house, a timber-frame summer kitchen, a recycled glass-bottle sanitary pavilion and an earthbag underground technical room. Yet above all, their experience has emphasized the value of knowing and working with wood as a construction material. They discovered that the oldest stratum of Romanian civilization—the timber civilization—has been abandoned and even despised as a sign of cultural inferiority, replaced and left to decay.
The speaker will present the School and its underlying Values, and will introduce to you the various traditional building techniques and materials they used for building the pavilions from the School’s Campus. This presentation is also an open invitation to join them in this building adventure, learning in a series of ‘hands-on’ workshop, the ancient building technique of ductile masonry (combining timber and stone masonry ), while erecting together the Professor's House, a three-storey construction, the biggest pavilion on the site.
Ana Maria Goilav is a practicing architect and researcher, associate professor at the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urban Planning. Together with Petre Guran, PhD in the History of Civilizations from EHESS Paris, she co-founded Școala de la Bunești 18 years ago— a college of architecture and liberal arts where they apply principles of green architecture and sustainable development, aligned with the rural cultural landscape. The project was awarded the 2024 Philippe Rotthier Grand Prize for Vernacular Architecture.
Ana Maria has published scientific articles in both national and international journals and co-authored the book Acasă. Școala de la Bunești. Oameni, cărți, case (Home. The School of Bunești. People, Books, Houses), published in 2017 by UAUIM.
She holds a PhD in Church Architecture (2011, UAUIM) and is an alumna of New Europe College and the Accademia di Romania in Rome.
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Free for members, £5 plus booking fee for non-members.
