Eight industrial sites that shaped twentieth-century Iași — C.E.T. Iași 1962, the Milling Complex 1967, the Ciurea Brick Factory 1891, Unirea Oil, the Textile Mill, Chemical Plant no. 2 (Antibiotice), the Nicolina Mechanical Plant, C.E.T. Electrica. “Industrial” emerged from a competition to integrate local identity into Amazon’s new Iași offices, and started from a direct question: what does the memory of an industrial city look like?
These buildings have different architectural biographies. Some — like the Ciurea Brick Factory or the Nicolina Plant — were built with genuine craft, their exposed brick and proportions speaking of a taste and skill rarely seen today. Others carry the austere aesthetic of communist industrialization, an architecture blind to ornament but imposing through sheer scale. What unites them is not an absence of aesthetics, but an absence from public consciousness — buildings that exist at the periphery of the gaze, worn down by daily use and time.
The chosen support was OSB — the raw material of construction sites, of the unfinished, of the provisional. A material that resists fine detail and demands negotiation. Acrylic marker, tested first, produced a line too clean, too indifferent to the fragmented texture of the wood. A custom acrylic mix was developed to grip the surface differently, allowing a vibrated line — one with rhythm, with life — while holding its consistency against the demands of working on a vertical surface, without sacrificing the visual quality of the line. Lettering remained in marker, the only zone of deliberate precision, marking a clear distinction between information and expression.
The project operated within a second logic as well — that of interior design. The drawings did not exist in isolation on a gallery wall; they were part of a larger design concept, conceived to work in harmony with it rather than against it. At the same time, the people who work in these spaces spend a significant part of their lives there. A work that visually dominates or creates discomfort through graphic aggression would have turned the work environment into a tense one. The balance between presence and discretion was a conscious decision — the vibrated line on OSB carries enough force to be seen, but enough warmth to be set aside when work demands focus.
The ambition of the drawing was the regeneration of these buildings through line. Not a faithful reconstruction, but a speculation of character — amplifying the features that give them identity, extracting what stays in memory after the eye has moved on. They exist in the subconscious of those who grew up and live in Iași, as invisible landmarks of an internalized urban landscape. Transposed to mural scale, these structures acquire a visible dignity, publicly acknowledged for the first time.
It is the same impulse as the engravings on old postcards: preserving not the monument, but its presence in collective consciousness. A modest or imposing building, drawn at oversized scale with a line that vibrates across the raw texture of OSB, becomes an object of study, becomes visible memory. The line does not save the building — it saves what the building left behind.
