The architecture project started 13 years ago in a historic house – the Petre P. Carp manor, seized in 1949 and returned in ruins. The revival of this property has implied finding ways of creative recycling, a change of use from residential to traditional crafts and architecture study center. It is thus that the “We strike the iron at the manor!” project started, a name under which an ongoing free-of-charge blacksmith’s apprenticeship for the inhabitants of Țibănești (Iași), a series of traditional crafts and experimental techniques workshops related to the Carp Manor and an art collection of objects crafted on the premises.
How can a derelict historic house be used? How can it be reintegrated into community life? What supports life there? How the proximities problem can be solved? What are the heritage policies that can be drawn from this case study and be used elsewhere? How can stable economic circuits be created? How are new generations trained into the issue of heritage? When, how and what do we rescue? Why and for what purpose? Under which form? How do we communicate about crafts, how do we retell their stories for the new generations? These are but a few of the questions that the regeneration project led by architects Șerban Sturdza and Alexandra Mihailciuc attempts to answer.