Bar-club, Tårgu-Mureş

Transylvanian manga

TÂRGU-MUREŞ (RO) - It is a banal starting point: the conversion of the brick-vaulted basement of an old house in Transylvania into a cool bar space. Attila Kim rejected the conventional solution of exposed brick walls; instead, he proposed a space that oscillates between real and virtual. The architect sees the 21st-century Avi-Cola club as 'an interior space that is no longer tied to its place, but becomes a port to connect to the global world of entertainment'. Virtual reality and 'manga' cartoons are acknowledged sources of inspiration, yet their use goes beyond mere quotation.

Manga cartoons work with realistic (sometimes hyper-realistic) shapes that, through a series of twists and just a few alien elements, introduce a sort of reality that has nothing to do with the everyday one. The architectural rendering of this idea is achieved here through an obsessive subversion of spatial data. Prismatic elements assume the vault shape, though on a different scale from the bricks behind them. The powerfully structured surface defines an ambiguous boundary that includes the furniture (sofas and chairs), thus alternating the perception of separate objects with that of a skin. Pseudo-Japanese ideograms belong to a non-existent language. Images that look like photographs are actually engrafted on a support and follow the same logic of false reality and subversion. Finally, this illusion extends to tactile perception: hard and edgy wall slabs and furniture are in fact soft pillows covered in glossy artificial leather.