Turnul de Arta - Art Tower

Water Tower Art Gallery

By their nature, water towers are obsolete, they belong to other times, of rapid industrialization. Today they are abandoned, sometimes useful for animals as shelter in bad weather, or as hiding places for lovers, like the bunkers in Albania. They become uncomfortable for new entrepreneurial plans, and are detonated more recently, sometimes very clumsy and dangerous (as happened at Geromed Mediaș), but always spectacular. There are also several centenary towers in Romania, with impressive architecture, essential for the memory and identity of the place, then when I think of the times when they supplied water to more than half the inhabitants of a city, half the grandparents of the present inhabitants, if you think about it that way. As is the case with the Water Tower in the Public Garden of Brăila (1910), whose appearance was detached avant la lettre from the Space Odyssey (1968, directed by Stanley Kubrick).

The Water Tower, rehabilitated by the Make a Point Cultural Association, is not part of the above category. It’s a bit of a factory tower and looks like many others of its generation (60s). But its fate was not tragic, it is one of the very few water towers still in operation, so it will be part of the urban landscape for a long time to come.

On New Year’s Eve, 2012-13, the Water Tower opened to the residents of the city in its new form, as an Art Tower, with its new visual identity (“The Green Curtain” designed by the Romanian-Lebanese artist Daniel Georges and voted as a favorite by Bucharest residents in October).

The party for the inauguration of the tower gathered around him several hundred people who ate, drank, danced and counted the seconds until the unveiling of the painting on the tower. Also on New Year’s Eve, the Art Tower Gallery was opened with the exhibition of half of the more than 40 works that competed to be painted on the tower, displayed high up, on cylinders, in the generous space. Just the first in a series of exhibitions and events suited to the vertical space that will bring the tower closer to the residents of the neighborhood.

In the first half of 2013, the spiral staircase that will allow access to the top of the tower will be ready and will reward the finalist who climbs the 162 steps with a view of the city.

The need for this staircase around the tower, finished with a panoramic platform, became clear only when we climbed the Pantelimon Tower (for the moment on the only and arduous vertical staircase inside). The overview of the city, seen from Pantelimon, is illustrative to understand the Eastern European city, and the bedroom district. It is perhaps essential to internalize a city like Bucharest, which is difficult to discover, and in order to be understood and loved, it must also be conquered from its edges, not just from the center. The curatorial approach around the staircase proposes just such a route to discovery.

by Madalina Rosca

Text published in Igloo magazine, no. 134, February 2013

Water Tower – New Year 2013
Art Tower – Art proposals for the water tower exhibition