The Heritage Kit and Caravan – Houses and Communities Working Together

For a year and a half, from the beginning of 2024 until June 2025, the Heritage Education program has been enriched with more workstations and offers 125 children from rural areas and beyond the opportunity to learn directly through experimentation and creativity about the heritage of architecture, local memory and identity, nature, buildings, relationships between people and cultural values.

The project entitled “Heritage Kit and Caravan – Houses and Communities Working Together” has two components that have proven over years to be very important: remote interventions through heritage kits and on-site interventions through workshops, camps and community days within the heritage caravan.

25 children from 5 communities in different counties (Botoșani, Brașov, Argeș, Vâlcea and Olt) will form mixed working groups with a local coordinator, they will meet  twice a month for six months to work together on the stories of six emblematic heritage buildings in Romania (with at least one example from their own neighborhood). The stories received in the pack will be complemented by numerous practical challenges that question and challenge the groups of children to rethink life in the community, the nearby natural setting and the individual spaces they use in relation to examples of good practice received and then constructed by themselves.

The first six examples of kits tell the stories of: the Enescu House in Mihăileni, Botoșani county; Viscri 18 peasant house, Viscri, Brasov county; the Golescu Villa, town of Câmpulung Muscel, Argeș county; Neamțu Manor, Olari village, Olt county; Urși Church, Vâlcea county and a surprise house.

Each kit pack dedicated to one of the six places contains: an interactive exploration booklet of the house, a slice of the large map puzzle of Romania, a pop-up construction and the house itself that lights up.

The caravan is designed for direct interaction. It brings together project coordinators and trained trainers for two successive camp sessions and community days in all five Pro Patrimonio communities. Workshops, cultural, sporting and culinary competitions, exhibitions and film evenings will invite both children involved in the program and curious and eager family members to participate.

The kits, camps and community days aim to be an engaging cultural product, demonstrating that the collaborative heritage stories of architects, designers, historians and environmental specialists can work together in an understandable educational package and generate ideas and solutions for creative development and the enhancement of quality life for individuals and groups, using existing cultural resources in innovative ways.

The camps and community days at the end of the project give us the opportunity to generate a sense of belonging to a community and instill the idea that the power to change lies in one’s own hands.

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Over the last ten years, through its trans-annual and interdisciplinary “Education for Heritage” program, the Pro Patrimonio Foundation has been promoting education of and for heritage wherever the Foundation physically intervenes.

The over 40 workshops initiated by Pro Patrimonio in these years are mainly aimed at children aged 7-14 years old, in vulnerable situations in the communities where the foundation carries out projects for the rescue, conservation and rehabilitation of architectural heritage (Golescu Villa in Câmpulung, Neamțu Manor in Olari, Perticari-Davila Manor in Argeș, George Enescu House in Mihăileni, etc.).

The activities are organized annually in the form of practical workshops and aim to educate and teach directly, through experimentation and creativity, about architectural heritage, local memory and identity, nature, buildings, relationships between people and cultural values. Projects such as “3 Doors, 3 Countries Festival” (2018), “The Heritage Caravan” (2019), “Enescu House Days” (2020), “School of Landscape, Art and Sound” (2021), “My Village Story” (2022), the “Heritage in a Package “ kit series and numerous one-off actions in the sites where we work, have shaped and consolidated over time a functional working strategy.

“Heritage Kit and Caravan – Houses and Communities Working Together” is a project realized by Pro Patrimonio Foundation, supported by the Romanian Order of Architects Stamp Tax and co-financed by AFCN.