Graphic Design (Cluj)

Cluj Napoca, Romania. Signage

Old Eastern European logos have a special flair and sensitivity in the shaping. Most of them have disappeared, since 1989.

Some poster examples. Cluj is an important center for music and theater.

Some street wayfinding.

Mascots for "Orange Pre Pay" 

Tombstone Typography

Ethnographic Village Emissary (Cluj)

Cluj Napoca, Romania. The Parcul Etnografic Romulus Vuia is on the edge of town, associated with the Muzeul Etnografica al Transilvaniei in the city center. Visitors can hike between homes, churches, and other examples of regional, traditional Romanian architecture. On this visit I was lucky to have a personal emissary, my new local friend, who helped me "break through" to a real experience here. Where there is sparse and dry signage, the power of a personal exchange with people can not be overestimated. 

The only other visitors we saw were on a photo shoot. 

A general rule: When museum staff see a local escorting a foreigner, they want to join in. Thanks to my new friend's contagious enthusiasm, a staff woman took us "under her wing", leading us to some of the best sights, literally unlocking doors for us using an ancient wooden key. Like this church, where the ceilings were so low she encouraged me to lay on the dirt floor to take a photo. 

Studying this garden, we exchanged memories of our grandmother's cooking, and Romanian recipes.

The inside of the homes all have that eerie air of missing people. My friend made it come alive with her own perspective. Proof that a museum visit can be a vehicle for people to socialize. Being the same age, we were interested to share and compare life stories, before and after the revolution.

These tiny thatched houses were under reconstruction by Romanians from the Carpathian mountains. Because my informal emissary could translate, they were excited to describe their elaborate and sustainable building techniques, still a "living" art thanks to the museum.

Later, another man appeared out of nowhere, and offered to open the central church for us, still actively used for services.

Mediated tours would be the best offering at a museum like this. Human contact is the critical glue. But an informal personal emissary is even better! Spontaneous chats with staff are fundamentally different than organized tours. There's a natural generosity that comes from this connection. Spontaneous humor and honesty. And after we left the museum, my emissary took me for a hike in the haunted forest....

Museum Amusement (Cluj)

Turda, Romania. Not far from Cluj Napoca is the salt mine museum, Salina Turda. At a mining museum, I expected rusty equipment and piles of rocks and stairways stringed with bare lightbulbs....

So it didn't surprise me to see topiary typography at the entry.

But I couldn't anticipate a more surprising and surreal museum space. Imagine a huge deep chasm with glistening, rippling porpoise skin rock walls, modernist lights, and futuristic wooden pavilions.

It's hard to learn about how the salt mines worked. Some interpretation is there, but it's a bit hard to find. Meanwhile you can do other things, like play ping pong, ferris wheel, put put golf....This is a museum space turned amusement park.

You can even go boating, one level deeper, on the underground lake.

The few interpretation galleries are closer to the surface, and empty, for the most part.

Some visitors investigating the salt

Welcome graphics near the entry call it "A Gate to Transylvania's Heart".

Revolving translucent images on the door.

Muzeul Etnografica (Cluj)

Cluj Napoca, Romania. A visit to the Muzeul Etnografica al Transilvaniei begins at the dismal entry. It doesn't make sense, but a museum's entry is often the most unappealing part of the experience. Why go in at all?

Inside, things get better. The displays are designed with tasteful wood framing and platforms, an aesthetic that could have been introduced sooner in the entry.

Most of the dark objects are placed against white in a thoughtful, artful manner. The approach is simple and reverent.

Black & white photos are tucked nicely into the old architecture. If adjusting the historical photos is allowed(?) a similar value and contrast would unify these side by side photos.

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A display backing on a hallway uses a translucent panel to catch the shadows.

A hands-on touch counter along this corridor includes toys and bells you can ring. Strange use drawings are wall-mounted at an angle impossible to view. Later I was dismayed to see these staff women eating their brought lunches inside the restroom, on a narrow little window sill.

Upstairs is a room crowded with costumed manequins. A special offering at ethnographic museums is historical style as an expression of culture, and lost fashion is fascinating. Here they manage to avoid being creepy. The wall mirror is meant to reveal the back of the clothing, but the figures are too close, to the mirror and to each other. The visitor has to step up and lean in between the figures to see. So the main effect of the mirror is to make the room feel even more crowded.

In this situation it doesn't help that the cabinets across the room are also mirror backed.

The back of 2 badly placed landscape panels ruins the drama of figures facing each other across the balconies.

Dropped in the middle, is the exhibition "Brave New World" designed by Xaver Victor Schneider. Like many European exhibition designers, Schneider is a stage designer (as well as architect). His goal is to make challenging themes accessible on an artistic level. At first glance, the exhibition seems jarring. But getting into it, the juxtaposition adds to the power of the content. This is a complex photo documentary around the central theme of symbolic "proud houses" built by Romanian migrant workers.

Schneider's design concept is to represent the house as an icon, not a shelter. It is uninhabitable, like a chainmail dress or parade armour, hiding a vulnerable identity from the public. Like chainmail, it is constructed of pre-assembled plates held together by shiny metal rings and transparent threads. It can be built anywhere, with no foundation or grounding. Like the houses themselves, it is like a foreign spaceship that pierces the landscape, and the whole social fabric of Romania.

The concept for the exhibition is "three worlds in one space". The idyllic landscape, the realized dream of a house in the homeland, and daily life in a foreign land. The house is in the center, and the idyllic landscape surrounds it, with daily life in a foreign land on the outside. Aspects of the social fabric of Romania permeate the whole exhibition. Historical photos are mixed with current photos by various photographers. The lead documentary photographer is Petrut Calinescu.

Themes include rituals and visits to the homeland, parallel worlds of old and new, architecture and the changing landscape, fatherless and split families, difficulties of life and work abroad, western fashion and consumerism, icons of success. Ironically, these over-sized houses are often truly unlived in, too big to heat and constantly under construction.

Windows and doorways cut into the house are open, or filled with building materials or small objects.

The photography is superb.

The arrangement is generally dense and mixed, reflecting complex thinking. It's powerful and sometimes difficult to digest. This particular inner wall stands out, with it's simpler, more obvious order. A bit refreshing, but it doesn't seem to fit in.

Pharmacy Museum (Cluj)

Cluj Napoca, Romania. The Hinz House is the home of the Muzeul Farmaciei, where the oldest pharmacy in Cluj opened in 1573. Behind the entry desk is a copper collage of Transylvanian locations, dates, and medicinal sources, including unicorn.

The museum is small, organized naturally by the original functions of the rooms. Store room, Officina, Library, and the Laboratory in the basement. The atmosphere is old and magical. What seems amazing (at my first pharmacy museum ever), is the mix in this profession of ancient mystery and scientific research.

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A surprise moment of playfulness when the guard waved at me. On the counter, below these scales is an interactive to identify 6 (well known) substances by smell.

The last room shifts to a display of more recent hospital equipment. The various lighting fixtures seem to have a (harsh) medical quality. I wonder if this suggestion of examination lights is intentional.

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This bigger room also serves as the museum office and bookshop

Lonely Storybook Village (Timisoara)

Timisoara, Romania. The Museul Satului Banatean is a 17 hectare park, sprinkled with traditional houses and other structures, moved from diverse rural regions all over Banat and reconstructed on site. When I entered through the big wooden gate, the attendant literally woke up, surprised to see me. I was the lone visitor that afternoon.

Ignoring the numbered standing map, I wandered right at the forked pedestrian path. The only signage is a series of bi-lingual pedestals in front of many of the houses. The storybook design is a loaded choice. It suggests a narrative beginning with "Once upon a time..." but instead the text is very clinical architectural speak. Soul-killing for most of us, and as is, probably not even interesting to Architects. 

There are no stories, about the people, their cultural groups, or how they lived in these houses. Not even a toe hold, really, for any sort for exploration. Why do traditional Ethnographic museums sometimes feel a bit creepy? They seem more unsettling than archeological sites. Perhaps because the history is more recent? I felt lonely, like an uneasy voyeur in an village that had been abandoned for some reason more mysterious than just the passing of history. 

I felt compelled to enter every house, in case I might miss something important or surprising. This is the curse of the diligent visitor (and why I admire them so much)!

Some houses were locked. One had a guestbook and a jug of water.

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There is a pond and an apparently active church on site, the oldest in Timisoara. What is active or not is another interesting question for a visitor. I came across a horse, and here and there an active vegetable garden. But no people.

Later I was surprised to find a modern outdoor theater and a building that looked like an exhibition space. It was locked up with no schedule on the door.

When I let myself back out the gate, I felt not only lonely, but stupid, for not knowing what's up with this place. Visitors, like all users, blame themselves for their precieved failures.

Communist Consumer Museum (Timisoara)

Timisoara, Romania. The Museul Consumatorului Comunist is in the basement of the Scart Bar. The museum is free, but having a drink is protocol for the visit, before descending the stairs. The cluttered funky bar sets the tone.

There's a small sign at the top of the stairs. This "consumer" museum represents a typical Romanian apartment, jammed with everything that Romanian's could buy during the Soviet era, before 1989. 

It's cold, dark, musty, narrow and cluttered.

A museum is traditionally a place of preservation and storytelling. However selective or subjective that might be, museums provide some "closure" that way. But like an intentionally avoided "back shed", this basement could be called an anti-museum. Stuff is disintegrating for real, in every way. Without context, or information, stories are left to your own imagination, and your own gut.

If this is an anti-museum, then it's full of free-floating associations and unresolved thoughts. For older Romanians, it must stir up confusing memories. Add to that an air of campy humor, and genuine revulsion, as if we secretly want it all to just disappear for real.

But the piggy's plea for donations suggests that there is a sense of responsibility towards this collection...

An optional second drink completes the visit.

You are Here (Timisoara)

Timisoara, Romania. The city has quite a few city models, some for current navigation

The only hint of where you are is the worn spot. Like any map without that reference, "you are here" because that's where other people think they are, and touch it.

Models are used for historical aspects of the city, as well as paving color and plaques to indicate buried foundations. Unfortunately they use the same rust red color for decorative paving patterns, around the city.

TPTM (Timisoara)

Timisoara, Romania. "Typopassage Timisoara" is a graphic design group that is active in exhibition, workshops, street paper art, annual publication, online museum and more. TPTM describes themselves as "Micro museum with and about lettering". I found out about them accidentally, because our favorite tiny neighborhood cafe, Mokum, is one of their "Typocafe" sites. There was barely enough room on the cafe wall for 5 SVA posters.

Some graphic designers to look up, in connection with TPTM are Sorina Vasilescu, Ian Anderson, Alin Adnan Vasile, Nelu Wolfensohn, Hi Visuel Gestaltung, Ovidiu Hrin, and Alexe Popescu. I found an interesting and hefty design magazine in Mokum called "The Institute" that comes from the CSR design agency in Bucharest.

Public Art (Timisoara)

Timisoara, Romania. I saw an excellent photography exhibition, "World Press" at the Muzeul de Arta. It is located on the grand Piata Unirii, a pedestrian plaza surrounded by beautiful old buildings. Only one thing stands out. A piece of modern public art. They say that's what it is, but really it's a rusted monolithic cabinet for the power switches on the plaza, disguised as art.

It does stand out, compared to the rest of Timisoara's public art, which is all in this vein.