Introduction

Architecture is strongly related to the social fabric of the world and can’t make a break from reality becoming self-referring. Researching social factors and their mate-rial world representations has always been a hobby and later a key element in archi-tectural design. This and the constant struggle to reconnect the past with the present can be seen as general directions in all my work and study, architectural or not. In Ro-mania, where I’ have been studying for the last four years ,this lack of dialogure repre-sents the main cause for our chaotic architecture and city life.

On a recent debate entitled “Architectural Innovation in Bucharest” we were asked to study what makes Bucharest and Romanian architecture unique and what are the factors causing this regional specificity. As I see it, Romania suffers from a strong “Island syndrome”. Even though we are not an island, we are rather far from the main cultural access routes, the key archi-tectural events, and the sources of inspiration and the production hubs of current mo-dernity. This syndrome is visible in the hysteria of the suburb, the frenzy to turn the apartment in a communist block into a showroom of minimalist furniture or painting the façade around one’s window etc. We are experts in living and producing islands, either mental or physical. Our cul-tural insularity gives us the chance to be original and spontaneous while keeping the personal innocence and charisma. With the lack of top-bottom organization our cities developed a strong DIY ex-pression of public space. These spontaneous transformations tend to supply elements of urban life lacking in the existing operations, creating a matrix of individual interventi-ons that lack cohesion with one another – juxtaposed territories, floating in a no man’s land. The transformations unguided by any planning, range from the come-back of the old commercial street to front-gardens providing identity to specific entrances or to purely functional spaces like garages. This attitude regarding public space can be easily seen in the wild and multifunc-tional commercial centers all over town. They exhibit a huge variety of functions in a rather limited space and a constant dynamic of change and growth. Absolute sponta-neity of operations turn this mix of buildings, otherwise grotesque , into a real urban hub and a perfect expression of adjusting a homogenous and rigid structure to the needs and the potential of transition. Despite its horrific ugliness, the buzzing complex reminds us of current attempts in the architecture of buildings and public spaces: complexity, collisions, overlaps, hybridization and the ambiguity between the space and the object.

If our current innovations in architecture come from individual adaptations to immediate needs and les by style and aesthetic manners ,the best attitude is to follow this patch and collect the energy and inventiveness left from the public conflict and the freshness of instant solutions and create an architecture “made in Romania”.

1.

Residential planning

Collective housing Victoria Square - Bucharest3rd year, semester 2 final project - individual projectProf. Emil Barbu Popescu

AA forest of blocks straggle just like tumors into the ‘old city’ – no other former Eastern European capital city experienced the huge totalitarian operations Bucharest underwent in the 1970s and 1980s. During earlier decades only few smallish Staliniststyle ensembles, functionalist neighborhoods, and city centre in-fills were built. The radicalisation of Ceaușescu’s regime went hand in hand with the ‘modernisation’ of the historic centre, indeed a project aimed at completely replacing it with a new, collectivist, and homogeneous city, itself a vehicle as much as the expression of the new society that was being forged.forged. To complete this new stage setting at the fast pace required by the dictator, demolitions followed a linear trajectory along major axes (either in place or new) making space for the building of unbroken slabs with standardised fronts. Fortuna-tely, the next step of in-depth demolitions and new constructions behind these lines was not carried out. As a result today concrete curtains along boulevards screen out irregular spaces (demolished and turned into terrain vague)

12.

AS SEEN FROM A REAR WINDOW

ThereThere is the big city filled with concrete blocks. People call them boxes, very often matchboxes. There are boxes for 2 million dwellers. Most of these blocks of flats present now more than ever an identity problem: you have to ask yo-urself if they are or not really a part of the city, if people perceive them as urban or not. Looking very much like a background for a white and black, mute movie, Bucharest’s communist streets and blocks are humorous and nostal-gic, which results from contrasts, raw ugliness and the decayed buildings jumbled with vernacular operations specific ratherrather to a village than a city, mixing serial and industrialized architectures with personal décor and accessories, posh cars along with derelict ones, and finally showing the same social mixture that has not changed for forty years.

At a sharp glance, you could extract that thing that is almost invisible, something that you might overlook as well – that frenzy and vigor dwelling inside and outside this boxes – magic blocks, something quite close to both normalcy and disaster. On the one hand, there is the social dynamics, that diversity, mixture, density ensuring its march forward, while on the other hands, there is this Babel of communication of problems, of lack of rules.