Locus Silentii

Graduated FAUT (Timișoara Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism) in 2021. While working as a full time architect I'm also engaged in an academic career, as a teaching assistant at FAUT, since 2023, where my contribution is made for both theoretical and practical courses.

This showroom constructs its identity not through spectacle but through the careful orchestration of silence, reflection, and ritual. Conceived as an environment for perfume, the project situates scent within a spatial narrative that resists the conventions of retail, instead positioning the experience as contemplative and almost liturgical.The organization recalls the typology of the Circus Maximus: a single, monumental spine dominates the space, reinterpreted here as a display monolith around which circulation unfolds. This linear device establishes a ceremonial axis, compelling visitors to move slowly along its perimeter, transforming the act of browsing into a ritualized procession.Encircling this core, a continuous curtain of metallic, mirror-like fabric defines the boundary. Its surface does not conceal but destabilizes, multiplying reflections and producing an illusion of infinite depth. The perimeter becomes less an enclosure than a shimmering threshold, in which visitors are implicated as both subjects and spectators, their images endlessly refracted in a choreography of self-perception.At ground level, the space is muted by a carpeted floor. Its softness absorbs the sound of footsteps, collapsing the acoustic register of the room into an uncanny stillness. This silence amplifies the volatility of perfume itself, positioning scent as the only immaterial presence that disrupts the atmosphere. The effect is one of heightened awareness, where every gesture, every inhalation, feels suspended in time.The reference to David Lynch persists in formal terms: the heavy drapery, the lounge ensemble of armchairs and lampshades, the suggestion of an ambiguous elsewhere. Yet these cues resist direct narrative interpretation. They function instead as atmospheric signals, aligning the space with the dreamlike ambiguity of Lynch’s cinematic language without prescribing a storyline.The monumental display table anchors the room in a different register of memory. Its dark stone mass and sand inlays recall Aldo Rossi’s Modena Cemetery, where architecture is stripped to essential forms and charged with a funerary gravity.