Tenacious Vajdahunyad was inspired by a trip to Transylvania (the Hungarian region in Romania) in 2005, where I saw Corvin Castle in the town of Hunedoara. What struck me about the castle was not only the layering of architectural styles (Gothic/Renaissance/Baroque), but its location. Despite the structure's beauty and historical significance, Romanian city planners built a huge steel mill around it, choking it with pollution and surrounding it with mining-related machinery (see last image). Nonetheless, the castle, which has been restored, has stood its ground. My aim was to capture the tension between the historic and the modern-industrial (this tension exists all throughout the Romanian countryside), and to use the architecture as a starting point for the creation of a wide vocabulary of forms.