Maria Daria Oancea

Born in Ploiești/Romania in 1987.

Maria Daria Oancea is a Bucharest-based architect whose design practice focuses on the mutations occurring in public spaces, living conditions, and property, as manifested in the quotidian city. Her works move between public, private and hybrid situations associated with social and spatial vulnerability. She deals with instances of survival and informal aspects of architecture through guerrilla tactics and long-term design strategies applied on different scales.

In 2015, she founded the Atelier Ad Hoc collective with George Marinescu, a dual practice consisting of a design studio and a non-governmental organization (NGO) in Bucharest. Atelier Ad Hoc Architecture explores the familiarity and intimacy of living situations through design. The team’s projects are the product of critical and experimental thinking that addresses the problems of the contemporary city. »Atelier Ad Hoc Community« is an applied research laboratory conceived to support vulnerable or marginalized communities, seeking to develop intervention scenarios and ways of engaging with poverty that remain outside the concerns of or complement those of public administration.

She received the Initiatives / Experiments / Visions Award at BETA Timișoara Architecture Biennial (2020) and the Public Space Architecture Award at the Bucharest Architecture Annual (2019) for the substandardPLUS project. She also won the Visions and Research Award at the Bucharest Architecture Annual for the project Bucharest Dossier – Instances of living on the street (2016) and the special prize Create your Bucharest at the Vienna Art Biennale for her project Homeless practices (2015), which was shown at the Museum for Applied Arts, Vienna/Austria during the exhibition Mapping Bucharest: art, memory and revolution 1916–2016.