The first and most important question behind our approach is why are we motivated by a factory tour, by discovering how some of our most important goods are made, by a helicopter ride, a submarine dive, by trying ourselves a race car or by a railway steam locomotive’s magnitude and a vintage limousine’s elegance? Why are we impressed by a certain city, bridge, building or work of art? And last but not least, what are we bringing special with our approach?
Since I can’t talk for others, or just expose some theories, I’d better tell my own stories. I was born in Resita the oldest and most important industrial town of Romania and my parents were both engineers. My mother taught in a technical college, my father designed hydraulic turbines and later he became chief engineer in a mechanic enterprise, so I took “factory tours” from my very early childhood.
The Grebla Power Station (in Resita, 1904, the oldest in Romania)
I remember I was only 5 in 1968 when my father bought his first car, a small Renault Gordini. I was totally disappointed by its round, old-fashioned shape, because at that time the movies on TV were full of huge, rectangular, American cars. I asked my father about such a car, but he explained that we couldn’t buy cars from America, and, even if we could, we were not able to afford them. In my child’s disappointment, I decided to build one. I began with my playground friends to pick up from the neighborhood all sort of tin, iron pieces, steering, bicycle wheels, car chairs, screws, nuts and bolts. At that moment, my father told me that it doesn’t work so, that I must have “a project, a plan” and know a lot of things about cars and their parts. At that time I learned to draw a bolt and a nut and I learned what they serve for: these were my first “words” in the technical language.
My Renault Gordini saved from degrading by a mosaic layer applied 40 years later
Learning to listen Mozart or to admire Picasso, then to create is similar.
Picasso’s Crying Woman