“I’m not a person who sees the world in color. I only see colours where they are appropriate. Otherwise, it’s either black or white – metaphorically speaking, even shades of grey have to be at the extremes.”
I learned about Parasite Studio (PS2) architecture and the projects realized in this office five years ago, in a meeting with architects from Cluj, at the Architecture Biennale. Interest and curiosity have been piqued ever since, all the more so since the PS2 architects’ office was in Timișoara. A year later, I met architect Attila Wenczel, who founded Parasite Studio in 2003, together with his colleagues Claudiu Toma and Maja Baldea. The first conversations with Attila Wenczel took place in the office in Nicolae Bălcescu Square in Timișoara, and those dialogues were the starting point for the series of questions that today have been answered.
Since the beginning of his career, the architect has participated with projects in national and international architectural competitions, which shows a courageous creative energy. His architecture is featured in national and international magazines. And now PS2 projects can be found in Romania (Timisoara, Bucharest, Constanta), Austria and Hungary.
Interview with Attila Wenczel (43 years old), about the first architectural manifestations, about passions, beginnings, creativity and inspiration. About those simple curiosities that try to outline some particular features of a discreet architect.
Could we start talking about your childhood buildings and your perception of their architecture?
As a child, you rarely have a conscious perception of architecture or buildings in general. You identify them by their functions, see their colours and like or dislike the details, based purely on personal emotions and feelings. You recognise places, feel the texture, see the size and marvel at their relationship to the space you walk through. You can’t make an objective analysis because you don’t have the necessary training. As I mentioned earlier, in high school I was fascinated by secession but, again based on personal perception, as I went through them, because of the size, color, texture. I was fascinated by the brick calcs, the high spaces, the light filtering through the window. But I still didn’t feel what all this had to do with architecture.
What was the influence of your parents on your decision to choose architecture as a profession? Who encouraged you?
I have always loved drawing, being attracted to more technical representation and perspective representation. The secession buildings present in the city fascinated me during my high school years and I often chose to describe them through different essays or poetry, things that fascinated me at the time. Initially I didn’t know that architecture would be my professional field, even though my father was an architectural technician. But weighing the real versus the creative profile, I chose quite easily.
What are the little things you find joy in? Favourite colour? What kind of music do you usually listen to? What do you like to read?
I’ve always been passionate about movies. I’ve read many books about directors, or about films – from personal descriptions to technical presentations. It’s not a particular hobby, but I usually pay a lot of attention to the production, set design, or subtle details. Among my favourite directors I can mention Hitchcock – who in North by Nothwest makes a mature film and a very good representation of contemporary architecture through still frames. I would also mention Scorsese, Soderbergh, Cuarón, Iñárritu, Greenaway, Ridley Scott, along with many others, including even Joon-ho Bong for Snowpiercer and especially Parasite. I see colour only where it’s appropriate. Otherwise, it’s either black or white – metaphorically speaking, even shades of grey have to be at the extremes. I listen to non-commercial music, mostly electronic (which I also practiced for a short time during college), but I’m also a jazz lover. As for literature, I have less and less time, so reading is replaced, by scholarly books and independent press articles.
Which international architects inspire you?
There are many architects from whom we have, and have to learn. I’m not saying it inspires me but, there are currently different approaches of which some are essential to acquire new knowledge in this field. I won’t go into details about classical or modernist architects, but one name that has made an impression on me is Mies van der Rohe. Rem Koolhaas is a visionary. One of his disciples, Bjarke Ingels, the lead architect at BIG liked me. But in addition to the star architects there are a number of architects and architectural offices in Austria that I liked from the beginning, such as Delugan&Meisl, Alles Wird Gut, Feld 72, Caramel, Smartvoll Architects etc. I am now also interested in the work of David Chipperfield and David Adjaie, architects whose projects have interested me less so far.
You founded the PS2 office in 2003. Do you remember the first projects? How do they seem now?
Together with Claudiu Toma and Maja Baldea (who is no longer part of PS02) – we founded the office in 2003, during my university days – but we only started working together in 2005. During this two-year period we were still trainees in the offices of architect Cristian Boltres, and my colleagues in the offices of Andreescu and Gaivoronschi. We participated in many competitions in the beginning to test how we can work together. Some of them have won national and even international awards. But our first projects had nothing to do with the deeply conceptual side we practiced in the competitions. We started with small projects, from newsagents, conversions and interiors of small apartments, and house projects, but we always made sure that the projects were carried out as proposed, that we had control of the project until the end.
How does a project, a PS2 architecture concept come into being? How much is creativity and in what proportion is the beneficiary’s desire?
We try to deliver quality in every project. Beneficiaries are now looking to us for work similar to what they have seen in our portfolio and know what to expect. The impetus they give and the constraints created by the field are usually the best impulses with which to start a project. The best work was born out of constraints. Working as a team, we often debate the concepts, architecture and details of each other’s projects. We always aim to have a guiding concept behind any project, which also helps the client to understand and move through the design and construction stages more easily.
Pictured: arch. Norbert Ianko, arh. Attila Wenczel, arh. Claudiu Toma, arh. Attila Domokos
Let’s talk a bit about your team members…
Apart from Claudiu and myself, we have two other architects in the team: Norbert Ianko, Attila Domokos, as well as a number of collaborators on larger projects and during the internship. Over the years, however, we have had several architects on our team. I fondly remember Alex Cozma who now works in Scotland after a period in which he was part of the architecture office BIG, Marius Dumitrașcu who is also now in Scotland and who worked in Bucharest at ADNBA and in London at Norman Foster, Vlad Benec who after an internship in China at MAD settled in Germany, Zeno Ardelean who now has his own office in Timisoara, with a promising portfolio of projects, etc. The current team members are a great support for the realization of our projects – I can say that Norbert is a talent for negotiating with authorities, an experienced and talented architect – demonstrated by awards and personal achievements. Attila Domokos is dedicated to the details and polemic confrontations of our architectural solutions. Claudiu is a partner in the office with me, as well as a teacher at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism in Timisoara.
How difficult is it to do quality architecture? What are the obstacles you face and how do you overcome them?
Perhaps paradoxically, I have found that most of the time, a quality project is not done when you have a client who gives you a free hand. Architecture and architectural criticism are learned along the way. It takes time, a lot of research trips, the will to say no when you have to. The quality of the architectural design must be constantly considered. Any project, no matter how small, can have quality, both formal and functional. Of course, there are clients who ask for projects that go against our principles from the outset and we have to refuse. From the beginning we chose not to get involved in any project, even if we suffered financially. We have chosen the projects we want to get involved in.
Is documentary travel important in the work of an architect? If so, why?
It is important to know the built space, not only from examples presented in magazines or architecture websites, but especially through personal experience. We have organized study trips with the office: Barcelona, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Amsterdam, Berlin, Venice, etc., but besides that it is a habit for each of us to have a side dedicated to architecture. It’s good to always find examples that make you learn and keep doing what you’re doing.
What are the projects you are proud of, glad to have accomplished?
Each of the projects we have completed makes us proud. We also appreciate a job well done, with reduced financial resources, but which was done correctly. Each project addresses the needs of one beneficiary. If we believe in it and the beneficiary trusts us, the end product is a joy for all. But we also have works that set us apart and have really become known. If for a while we had projects in the Timisoara or Banat area, now we have works in progress in Austria, Hungary and also in cities such as Bucharest or Constanta. These are projects that seem to be going well and become outstanding examples once completed.
Which projects are you least proud of and why?
We don’t have any projects we’re not proud of. We choose from the outset not to get involved in projects we don’t believe in. But sometimes it happens that we don’t have the same chemistry with the beneficiaries, or simply for other reasons, our project is not completed as it should be. These are indeed issues that bother us.
What do you enjoy most at the end of a project?
The end of a project for us is when the work (construction) is completed.
We are used to documenting well the process of completing a project, we prepare photos, materials describing the project, possibly a short video andwe “display iton the shelf ” – in our case on the website, social media, architecture websites. But this is not the final stage. It is important that after a while, when we review the project, we see that it is lived in as we imagined and has become a place as desired by each beneficiary.
Frank Gehry said “The arts inspire each other, they were my kind of early support system while I was doing my early work.” As for you and your early architectural projects, what was and perhaps still is your “early support system”?
This is not an easy question to answer. Thinking back to my college days, I can say that I experienced periods of frustration because I seemed to be a bit of a parallel to architecture, with my early projects being rather under-appreciated, and perhaps rightly so – looking at them now.
The first performances were three short projects – one-day projects, in which I was inspired by abstract painting, which creates compositions through relationships of form, colour or line. Then I understood that in order to better master this craft, I need to understand it from the ground up, i.e. understand the fundamental relationships first. That’s how I started designing, deconstructing all the basics in a minimalist way. During and after university, I visited many architectural sights in different countries, appreciating contemporary Austrian architecture. I saw in their approach what fascinates me too: a coherent relationship of heritage and contemporaneity. We have a rich architectural heritage, inherited from them – with which we grew up – and I think it is important to preserve it and to intervene prudently on it, having a correct and coherent language.
Last, very last question. If you could decide one more time which direction you wanted to go, would you still choose architecture?
That’s a good question. As I’ve mentioned before, I have a big soft spot for movies and yes, I did think at one point, what it would have been like to have done cinematography. There is much in common between architecture and cinema. The director creates the scenes, proposes the best examples of how to navigate a space and the temporal sequences for each character, similar to an architectural project, in which the character is now the inhabitant who is navigating the space and projecting himself in time.
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Attila Wenczel was born in Timisoara on 15 November 1977. He attended the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the Politehnica University of Timișoara, and started to practice the profession of architect since his student days. He works in the PS2 office, founded in 2003 together with its co-founder architect Claudiu Toma and the two members of the team arh. Norbert Ianko and arh. Attila Domokos.
Among the most important architectural awards obtained by PS2 office we mention: the BIG SEE ARCHITECTURE AWARD 2020, East Centric Architecture, Bucharest Triennale – installation section for -Timișoara 2021 – “Memories of the Fortress”, awards and nominations at the Annual of Timisoara Architecture, award and nomination at BETA, nomination at the National Biennial of Architecture 2008 with the work “White Apartment”, awards and mentions at OAR competitions, as well as other local, national and international awards.
We also find Parasite Studio’s work published in national and international journals including Philip Jodidio’s “White Houses” (Thames & Hudson), Octogon (Hungary), ANDREAS K. VETTER, Raumideen (Callwey , Germany) but also on specialized websites archdaily.com and designboom.com.
Designs by Parasite Studio:
Project C HOUSE / Author: Attila Wenczel
Project Team: PARASITE STUDIO
Location: Timișoara, RO
Photo: Attila Wenczel
Credits: best house A_TA 2014
EXHIBITION: A_TA 2014, BNA 2016
Project BLACK ON WHITE / Author: Attila Wenczel
Project Team: PARASITE STUDIO
Location: Dumbravița / Timișoara, RO
Photo: Attila Wenczel
CREDITS: best house A_TA 2012, Rigips Trophy 2013 Romania