Claret-Cup is the brainchild of Bojána Bányász and Donatella Cusmá. Although from different corners of Europe, our paths crossed in Los Angeles, a city that we both fell in love with at different times for different reasons. Our collaboration in Claret-Cup is strongly defined by this connection to the city. is a question that – if asked earnestly – most of us are dying to answer. The cliché of an
architect is a multi-talented cameleon: at once a bespectacled nerd in front of a computer, a white-haired professional sketching designs on a paper-napkin, a suit with a hard-hat knit-picking a detail at a construction site, and a wine-glass holding fashionista at a dinner party chatting with celebrities. But an architect, simply put, is someone who cannot help seeing how things could be, and half-way knows how to make those things happen. The other half depends on communication and collaboration. As architects and project managers on a variety of building projects for over a decade in Los Angeles, and in collaboration on community-based and teaching projects since 2008, we take on and conceive of projects with a potential to create or affect a physical, experiential environment. Expanding the bounds of what might be called an architectural practice, we seek zones of experimentation where architecture is personal, emotional and appropriate. Claret-Cup is an attempt at finding opportunities for design by considering alternatives to the usual job description of the architect as simply a procurer of fine edifices. PENCIL is our most traditionally architectural persona. We apply our 10+ years of design, permitting and construction experience in distilling the dream of a permanent structure, be it residential, commercial or … impossible to categorize. SCREEN is dedicated to our work as paper-urbanists. Through an on-going series of postcard-mailing events, we attempt to reveal, connect and celebrate Los Angeles as a living city and unique urban form. The postcards are designed and hand-printed by us using the silk-screening technique for a specific event in the city’s history, then mailed spontaneously by participants from the event. FORK pokes at the claim that architecture has to be permanent. Projects built around the ritual of eating use food as a building material, as well as an excuse to create an experiential, sensory environment that is shared by participants and is only as permanent as it is memorable. FABRIC acts as a connective tissue between the various projects we work on. Affordable and ephemeral in comparison to buildings, it is a testing ground for new ideas, yet tangible, real. Current pieces play a supporting role to our paper urbanism projects.
