The Loom, Bucharest

“The loom” is the winning proposal of the design competition for Mesteshukar Butiq. MBQ is a Bucharest based, non-profit social enterprise that promotes traditional Roma and Romanian craftsmanship.
The project started with a glimpse of memory:

“I remembered the years I have spent with my grandparents. I wouldn’t say they were craftsmen, but my grandmother was baking bread, spinning the wool in order to be knitted into our socks and sweaters, or she was weaving baskets for her own use. When I think of her, I don’t remember the way the basket looked in the end, nor the bread or the socks, but I can still feel in my fingers the point of the spindle and the low sound of the wool while becoming a thread. I can feel so clearly passing my fingers through the vertical twigs of the basket, I remember some of them being soft and flexible, and others breaking, I can feel the flour on her hands and the ferm movements through the bread dough.
I remember with my hands.
To recollect the experience of certain crafts means remembering the process. The body reacts when it sees the tools, or the materials.
A place that aims to keep the crafts alive should be able to trigger memories, to have the tools and the materia available, to invite you to take a seat and let your fingers move along with them. To be a workshop, more than a shop.
To be a tactile house of past and future memories.”

What makes this project one-of-a-kind?
The project aims to create the atmosphere of a workshop, an interior that brings you in the state of crafting. In the middle we have envisioned a long, central table, where one could either see and touch objects, or even make ones while being guided through a workshop, or just read about people and their crafts while drinking a coffee. Experiencing this place should make you feel like being in a loom.
A tool-space.
For the exhibition of the final products, we proposed a flexible structure, able to be reformulated for different types of objects, different proportions or scenarios, giving the shop the freedom to change in time the selections and the focus of its curricula. It is a simple pine structure made of flute-columns waiting for their beams that can support either shelves or hooks.