In 1939, in the opening of the _Simetria_ magazine, George Matei Cantacuzino wrote: _We are back on tracks. It is only when a critical overview of the results has been done that experience can be valid. We have succumbed to the most amazing and diverse ideologies whose denominations made their followers think they could do without a programme of their own. Architects have tried out all sorts of approaches, from obtuse nationalism to nameless internationalism; they have skimmed all books and confronted all documents; they have exploited the surface of the past since they have not taken the time to go into the innermost and intimate layers of things._
Surprisingly, his words are still true, and the necessity of the reflective stance he claims is still urgent. After a series of troubled times, of professional uncertainties and political intrusions, when criticism and reflective approaches were not encouraged, even after the free blooming of many architectural publications over the last twenty years, studies in architectural theory and history can hardly find a propitious editorial space. In fact, no publication committed to theoretical approaches to architecture and its connected fields exists in Romania as yet.
In this moment, the “Sanda Voiculescu” Department of History & Theory of Architecture and Heritage Conservation at “Ion Mincu” University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest, while already enjoying the reputation of an established research body, endeavors to claim – through the sITA project – the missing editorial room that was lost when Simetria magazine ceased to be published in 1947.


Foreword

Our decision to inaugurate the _sITA_ journal with an issue focusing on the architectural writings under Communism is a response to a complex reality that unfolds before our eyes.
As the number of researchers and the capacity to research in our university has grown in recent years, so has the interest in topics related to the architecture and urban planning of the Communist period, which became more consistent. The attempts to identify a regional vision or to operate with East European parallel views are hindered by the lack of information on the neighbouring professional cultures. However, in many respects and in parallel moments, countries in Central and Eastern Europe had comparable evolutions ‘at the crossroads’ of cultures; they behaved in accordance to a similar ethos, analogous influences and common constraints. Under these circumstances, we do believe that only in a comparative context can the researcher bring to the fore and do justice to the negotiation between the local and the transnational, which could stimulate a more accurate and richer questioning of the countries’ respective architectural developments.
Most researches on recent architectural history in the former socialist states are based on several kinds of sources, such as: professional publications of the time, political and administrative documents, archived projects and oral accounts of the practising architects. While the debate on the subjectivity of the oral histories is already vivid, the reliability of the publications as true sources should still be investigated.
Whether there was just one professional magazine (as it is the case of Romania) or the information was disseminated through several journals (as in Poland, for instance), a common pattern seems evident in all the former socialist countries: the professional milieu had an official editorial channel which, on the one hand, allowed architects to present buildings, projects, and theoretical approaches; on the other hand, depending on specific political circumstances, they had to publicise the official ideology.
This volume aims at putting such common features into a larger perspective and to bring out the specific nuances of the professional life in these countries. It seems that the theme has sparked the researchers’ interest, since we have received original contributions from several states of the former Eastern Bloc – Albania, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. Most of the authors are scholars involved in studies of recent architectural history in their countries, researchers with a distinctive drive to engage in a larger, comparative and transnational cooperation that we expect to boost through our magazine.
As certain authors had directly participated in the publishing activity of the period under scrutiny, we decided to open the dossier with an interview with our colleague, Professor Nicolae Lascu. His answers embrace the editorial context of those times seen from the double perspective of the _raisonneur_ and the prolific writer of the 1980s. Though Professor Lascu was an exception against the general backdrop of the period, we expect this rather subjective introductory approach to be twofold revealing: it speaks about the young generation’s representation of that period but, also, recounts the efforts made by architects to evade the ideological constraints (from “conditioning” and censorship to self-censorship) in order to keep themselves and their peers academically active and to participate in a thorough cultural construction.
The subsequent peer-reviewed articles which compose this issue’s thematic address the _printed word_ during Communism in a several specific contexts and in a variety of approaches, ranging from broad overviews of the editorial landscape throughout the period to in-depth investigations of precise topics or detailed presentations of publications. The articles are inserted in the dossier following this kind of zooming-in from larger views to more detailed matters.
Thus, the first three articles describe a more general editorial context in Poland, Hungary and Albania.
Professor Piotr Marciniak draws the outline of an unexpectedly rich editorial landscape. His article deals mainly with certain professional magazines, such as Architektura, Miasto (The City) or Kwartalnik Architektury i Urbanistyki (Quarterly of Architecture and Urban Planning), where the reconstruction of Warsaw was a particular professional undertaking, which echoed both in dedicated publications, for instance Stolica (Capital City), but also in daily newspapers and other magazines.
From Hungary, Professor Mariann Simon presents the publications that dealt with the theoretical dilemmas concerning modernism in the Kádár era. Moreover, her article is dually oriented. On the one hand, the author spotlights the prominent personality of the theorist Major Máté, the“father-figure” of socialist architectural theory in Hungary and, on the other hand, she attentively watches the way modern architecture was perceived and commented upon by intellectuals from outside the field of architecture.
A perspective changing account comes from the Albanian doctoral student Dritan Miço. Like many researchers in the Eastern Bloc, the author tries to sketch a reliable portrait of the local professional milieu based on the publications of the time. Certain articles he quotes seem to defy the system’s rules, as they were published in spite of censorship, thus witnessing the individual struggles and theoretical dilemmas of Albanian architects.
The middle section of the volume illustrates a more detailed look into certain architectural topics as they transpire from various published works of the time.
Ioana Popovici, a doctoral student in Plymouth, presents an in-depth study of the Romanian Socialist Realism, as seen through the eyepiece of the main professional periodical, Arhitectura R.P.R. The Soviet concept, politically imposed on the local architectural milieu, was met with no real theoretical and critical reaction. The article questions this unresponsiveness in order to explore the relation between this under-theorised approach and the architectural production over the short span of its existence.
Architecture as a propaganda means is the main theme of Dr. Irina Tulbure’s article. The study draws a parallel between two prominent buildings, both endowed with highly ideological meanings: one that marks the debut of Communism in Romania, Casa Scânteii, and one that epitomizes its end, Casa Poporului. Beyond the meanings of the architectural language, the author investigates their propagandistic force through the non-professional media.
Professor Rixt Hoextra discusses the Bauhaus Colloquia in the context of the theoretical dispute between scholars from the two sides of the Wall around the legacy of the famous school of architecture. In collision with the Eastern side’s official ideology and its successive changes, the legitimacy of the Bauhaus heritage represented a dilemmatic matter and a strong and emotional marker of the GDR’s search of cultural status. The first two colloquia organised in 1976 and 1979 are presented in detail, highlighting unknown aspects of the intellectual history of European modern architecture.
Dr. Alexandru Răuţă attentively follows the theoretical, political and operational dimensions of the concept of _civic centre_ and its outcomes in communist Romania. The extensive urban interventions during Ceauşescu’s regime, affecting both towns and villages, were a fertile ground for the application of the schematic _civic centre_ principles in the absence of real architectural criticism. The article peruses the _Arhitectura_ magazine, highlighting the apparent consensus between a professional practice liable required to fulfil the political expectations and a theoretic heritage with pre-communist origins, which has never been debated openly.
At a different urban scale, the historian Mara Mărginean approaches the subject of housing for workers. The correlation of the architectural layout with the workers’ way of life is best featured in the case of the city of Hunedoara, which is discussed as it appears in the articles published in the Arhitectura magazine. As a post-war industrialisation flagship, the architectural principles applied in Hunedoara were very closely monitored by both politicians and architects.
The final section of the volume features certain particularities of the Romanian context. The three articles deal with the professional information available to Romanian architects during communism. The authors of the first two articles were invited to write in our journal, since they have been directly involved in these topics and investigated them for the first time.
In her article, Professor Gabriela Tabacu, gives an extremely thorough account of the publications that entered during that period in the library of the “Ion Mincu” Institute of Architecture. The author, presently Head-Librarian of our University, meticulously organised her survey on professional bases. From the country of their provenance to the type of publications and the way they were acquired, we find in this much-needed survey many intriguing aspects that the author’s comments upon. Thus, a new light is cast on the professional culture of that time, raising many questions; for instance, the factual availability of this surprisingly rich documentation, especially in certain moments, a matter that remains open to further investigations.
Similarly original is architect Maria Mănescu’s overview of the Technical Information Bulletin (simply known as the BIT), a periodical with “internal circulation” and the bona fide documentation activity dedicated to architects and builders. The author, who was in charge with the Documentation Centre after 1989, focuses on this very particular area of research and publication, the institutional documentation, and outlines the BIT’s short but successful life as a handy, informative tool for the architects working in design institutes.
Professor Ana Maria Zahariade’s article on the Arhitectura magazine closes the dossier. The article describes and interrogates the surface of the sole architectural magazine in communist Romania, trying to spotlight its still hidden editorial life and the active role the periodical played over the period. The evolution of the magazine’s physiognomy is seen as an interface between the political pressures and the professional expectations, thus allowing certain interpretative hypotheses that remain to be further investigated.
The study1 from which this article started, not published until now but elaborated a few years ago in our Department, was in fact the catalyst of our editorial endeavour. The thought that this kind of researches existed but were not published and, if published, were not largely available to international scholars, was all it took for the necessity of this volume to become clear.
Far from pretending to be an exhaustive research, yet for the first time in Romania, this volume collects and connects variegated information on the architectural writings and discourse during that period, and so many points of view, which cast a new light on the specific cultural developments under Communism. We expect thus to enhance the knowledge on the subject and to stimulate further comparative and transnational research cooperation.
The first _sITA_ volume also includes a reviews section, aimed at presenting short critical views on recent publications and events. For this volume the contributions are diverse, approaching recent events such as the _Everything from Plastic: Promise and Utility in the German Democratic Republic_ exhibition of the Documentation Centre of Everyday Culture of the GDR, reviewed by Liam O’Farrell; reviewing book exhibitions and conferences – as did Celia Ghyka – or almost forgotten publications of the communist period, such as _The Journal of Sciences and Travel_, brought back to our attention by Ioana Zacharias Vultur.
Since one of the aims of the _sITA_ was to stimulate the collaboration with other professional groups, from Romania and abroad, we decided to include in each volume a section that replaces the annual research record that we used to publish until 2011. This section that concludes the volume provides brief information on the Department’s scientific activity: individual or collective research projects, publications, professional events, etc.
We thank all contributors for their interest and trust in the potential of this new journal. We are also grateful to our peer-reviewers and to the scientific committee, who by their professional prowess ensure the scientific standard of the journal. This publication would not have been possible without the help of the OAR (Chamber of Architects of Romania), permanently engaged in supporting the professional culture. Last but not least, we thank our colleagues Daniela Calciu, Ilinca Păun Constantinescu, Irina Băncescu and Paul Balogh for their invaluable help.
The editors

1 A.M. Zahariade, “Privire generală asupra evoluţiei revistei ‘Arhitectura’” [An Overview of the Evolution of “Arhitectura” Magazine], in _Istorii reprimate_ [Repressed Histories], A.M. Zahariade (director), Augustin Ioan, Nicolae Lascu, 2001, (CNCSIS research project, not published yet).


Introduction

In the inauspicious ideological climate of 1980s, professor Nicolae Lascu, at the time assistant-professor in our School’s Urban Planning Department, was one of the very few architects of his generation (the classes of the 1970s) who dared address in writing the architectural thinking and culture. Generally speaking, the architectural books of that period (and also those of the previous decades) were authored by acknowledged figures of Romanian architecture and historiography and were dedicated, with very rare exceptions, to architectural history or to the architectural achievements of the moment; theory of architecture was allotted very limited space. Neither the translations from foreign literature (very few[1]), nor the articles published in the architectural magazine _Arhitectura_ were inclined to favour purely theoretical matters or reflective approaches to architecture. Or, Nicolae Lascu’s two annotated anthologies – _Architecture as Art_ (with Monica Mărgineanu-Cârstoiu) and _Function and Form_, – published in the prestigious Art Library collection of the Meridiane Publishing House, brought to the fore the architectural thinking in its universal cultural bearing. Likewise, the earlier _Aesthetic Thinking in Romanian Architecture_ (with Gheorghe Săsărman) was the first critical approach to Romanian theory of architecture, while the monograph _Florea Stănculescu: Contributions to Affirming Romanian Architecture_ was the first real critical study dedicated to this Romanian architect, thinker and editor[2]. It has to be said that the first two titles are still, to this very day, singular in our architectural culture and publishing activity.
After 1989, Nicolae Lascu particularly focused on the local forms of architectural modernisation and on the past and present transformations of the city of Bucharest, which resulted in many research-projects and other volumes: _Horia Creangă Centennial_ (with Ana Maria Zahariade), _Marcel Janco Centennial_ (with Anca Iliescu-Bocăneț and Ana Maria Zahariade) and, especially, the monumental work “Bucharest’s Boulevards before World War I” (Bucharest: Simetria, 2011). The latter is actually a deeper investigation in the research field of his doctoral thesis, _Legislation and urban development. Bucharest, 1831-1952_[3], which is an inescapable key to understanding the city; this work is still unpublished but largely referenced in the research milieus.
All of Nicolae Lascu’s works are seminal, which is why we decided to open the _Printed in Red_ dossier with the interview that he so kindly gave our colleague Monica Sebestyen.

[1] Only 6 of the 11 translations found in the National Library are about architectural theory: Vitruviu’s _De architectura_, 1964, Palladio’s _I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura_, 1957; Vignola’s _Regola delli cinque ordini_; Bruno Zevi’s _Saper vedere l‘architettura_, Le Corbusier’s _Essential Joys_ (short selection of texts), 1971; Argan’s _Gropius and the Bauhaus_, 1976.

[2] _Gândirea estetică_ în _arhitectura românească_, Bucharest: Ed. Meridiane, 1983; _Florea Stănculescu: contribuții la afirmarea arhitecturii românești_, Bucharest: Ed Tehnică, 1987; _Arhitectura ca artă_, Bucharest: Ed. Meridiane, 1987; _Funcțiune_ _și_ _formă_, Bucharest: Ed. Meridiane, 1989.

[3] “Legislație și dezvoltare urbană. București, 1831 –1952” (PhD. diss. UAUIM, 1997)



…the professional culture is also about the numerous books piling on top of one another. Interview with Nicolae Lascu

Despite being very extensive, the literature discussing Polish town planning and architecture, especially that of the post-war years, is fragmentary and incomplete. During the time in question, over a dozen magazines that focused on matters related to town planning and architecture were published. The first architectural magazines in communist Poland were printed already in 1947. Their contribution to the recording of spatial phenomena in the People’s Republic of Poland, as well as to the presentation of theoretical approaches and to architectural education is of undeniable importance.
The Polish periodical press regarding architecture and urban planning was based on several major magazines, for example _Architektura_, _Miasto_ and _Kwartalnik Architektury i Urbanistyki_. There were also a considerable number of trade and university publications in addition to some less important titles. To date many of these constitute an important archival source and bear testimony to the past. The paper presents an outline of Polish periodicals on this subject and their role and significance for further research on architecture in the People’s Republic of Poland and the entire Eastern Europe.




Reading and Writing Architecture. Polish Architectural Magazines (1945-1989)

The conscious, politically driven consolidation of the socialist regime after the failed revolution of 1956 resulted in an optimistic period of the long Kádár-era: the sixties was the decade of thaw, breathing more freely, new chances, more freedom and raising living standard. Architecture was also touched by the reorganisation of the political and economic system. In the first part of the 1950s Hungarian architecture – similarly to the whole socialist camp – was characterised by a state-required traditionalism. Politics used architecture for representing socialist ideology and power, but in return architecture was regarded as an art. Architects celebrated the regaining of modern architecture, but they did not want to give up their position in the world of art, or their role as the doctor of the (socialist) society. To develop the intended image architects turned to the cultural media. The first part of the essay examines how professionals – theoreticians, scholars and leading experts – tried to popularize modern, technology-based architecture, to prove its relevance in socialism and explain its artistic beauty. The second part considers the other party: how did the lay intellectuals who mainly represented the area of humanities expressed their expectations concerning the social role of architecture.
The author of most articles written with the intention to explain contemporary architecture was Major Máté, the father of socialist architectural theory. He stated that only those buildings can be truly beautiful which are good as well, that is industrial building production is not necessarily excluded from attractive architecture. However, he differentiated between beautiful and artistic: artistic architecture is not only beautiful but it also conveys notional content, the notional content of rising socialism. Major refined his demands on socialist architecture over time. The backwardness in materials, details and technologies of Hungarian building industry compared to modern architecture in the West became increasingly visible. Quantitative requirements for building production became the main source of constraints in architectural quality. Major adapted the Marxist architectural theory to the realities: soon he already called for the conscious undertaking of necessities, which may result in a beautiful even in an artistic architecture. By the middle of the decade the capitalist connotations of modern architecture had ceased and the social commitment of classical modern architecture came to the fore. This led to the adoption of modern architecture as a relevant approach in socialism. Scholars tried to explain the artistic value inherent in modern architectural classics, though it was not easy with the reality of socialist modern architecture in the background. However the biggest problem lay in the fact that the architects’ intention was the distribution of – politically, socially or professionally based – ideas. They did not realise that the ideological aspect of architecture decreased during the sixties parallel with the general tendency that ideology had a defensive character in the Kádár-era, which established the basis of the system. Neither were approaches without ideological aspects written to generate discussions, instead the authors intended to explain artistic values of architecture.
While scholars intended to convince intellectuals about architecture’s ideological and aesthetic value, readers of the cultural media were touched by the question: What is the relationship between architecture and society? The first discussion took place in 1960-1961, the topic was launched by a journalist-poet and the majority of the fifteen contributors belonged to the literary world. The first group of contributors agreed with the statement that the way of housing has a defining effect on our way of living, and believed in the educational power of architecture. The second group approached the problem from the concept of home and focused on the user and the society, while the third group tried to find the consent of both parties. The debate was officially closed by the comment of the minister for Building Affairs, which expressed that the practical demand of eliminating the housing shortage got primacy over the imagined socialist way of living as a declared ideology, as well as over a better architectural quality, based either on modern ideals, on recent urban developments or on social research. The second discussion of 1967 already mirrored a change in the situation: the existing socialist modern architecture had several practical shortcomings which overshadowed questions of ideology and artistic quality. This discussion was rather one-sided, because all the reflections came from the profession and all tried to pass responsibility. Not a single comment questioned the description of the keynote study that socialist architecture failed concerning both its functional and artistic aspect: namely it is neither functional nor beautiful. The majority of scholars who explained architecture in the cultural media – with a few exceptions – were convinced that they know better what people and users need, so it is not surprising that when the problems around architecture and town planning began to multiply they were blamed for almost everything. Modern architecture as a socialist doctrine defeated architecture as culture.



“Taste Must Arise from the Doctrine”. Architecture in the Hungarian Cultural Media in the 1960s

According to the Albanian philosopher and sociologist G. Bobi, [1] the Albanians’ current sense of cultural identity is very well portrayed by Minkowski’s patients’ answers to the question “where are you?” One patient said he was “here”, while another one said “I know where I am, but I do not feel I belong here.” The former points to an extremely burdened identity that expresses provincialism and historicism, while the latter, vaguer, envelops a lack of identification to his place of origin: _everywhere and nowhere_. Bobi identifies a socio-cultural degradation, caused by multiple factors such as the loss of security, once ensured by the former regime, the dismantlement of the social structure created by that regime for half a century, and the new regime’s inability to offer the benefits it promised (pluralist democracy, welfare, etc.) The social and cultural upheavals following the fall of the regime have particularly baffled the middle class and those faces considered the “pride of the system.” What used to be excommunicated is now glorified, and vice versa.
Following its isolation from the rest of the world for several decades during the 20th Century, Albania is one of the most understudied East European nations. Although the socialist era represents a milestone in the modern history of Albania, the “socialist architecture” has never been the subject of an analytical English-language monograph. A range of articles that periodically appeared in various newspapers and magazines have been taken into account; they are the only available sources able to reveal the theoretical framework, if it indeed existed. In addition, the last two decades have grown rich in architects’ memoires, as well as in studies on the subject, conducted by both Eastern and Western scholars. All these have found a place in the research presented hereafter.
This study is based on the most relevant so-called _typical_ and _atypical_ publications – however few in number - that best reflect the architectural discourse of the period. The typical publications will help to have a better overview on the official precepts regarding art and culture; meanwhile, the atypical writings will spotlight some sort of civil disobedient subtext, containing rhetoric questions, or even just providing an outline of the myriad of restrictions that architects were facing in their everyday working life, without concealing the rather grim reality. Throughout the years, architects’ yearning call for freedom has been constant, unlike the varying degree of mass media restrictions.
It is important to acknowledge that after more than twenty years since the fall of the Communist dictatorship, there is still some kind of silence, and above all, a strong disdain towards the socialist era, which _have produced widespread scepticism toward collectivist ideals and public institutions altogether._ [2] After two decades, today more than ever, it becomes necessary to understand the _power of the past_ [3] rather than just blaming it for the malfunctions of the present.
The purpose of this paper is to present the preliminary results of an ongoing research project on the socialist Albanian architecture, in close connection to a blend of cultural, social and economic issues. In spite of the descriptive method used, this study also attempts to bring some initial reflections on, and interpretations of the facts it exposes. Focusing on the architectural and political spheres, the main question is how the Socialist Realism imported from the Soviet Union starting with the late 1940s, was understood and applied in the specific Albanian context; the influences of and relations to the periods prior to, and following socialism are also taken into account.
[1] G. Bobi, “Gli attuali percorsi dell'identità culturale degli albanesi,” in _Annali del Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche Filosofiche e Geografiche, Universita degli studi di Lecce_ XI (2009): 609-617_._
[2] S. Hirt, _Gates, Suburbs and Privatization of Space in the Post-socialist City_ (Malden: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2012), 33.
[3] F.E. Ian Hamilton, et al. _Transformation of cities in central and eastern Europe: Towards globalization_ (Tokyo, New York, Paris: United Nation University Press, 2004).


When “Words Fall on Deaf Ears”. An Outline of Albania’s Socialist Architecture

This article examines the portrayal of Soviet Socialist Realism in _Arhitectura_ _R.P.R.,_ and its effects on the development of Socialist Realist architecture in Romania. During the first three years of post-war publication, the numerous articles on the subject featured in _Arhitectura_ amounted to a theoretical guide to the method of Socialist Realism (illustrated with recurring Soviet architecture models), meant to facilitate translation into local architectural language. But this call for the creative discursive exchanges needed to attune Socialist Realist principles and local cultural context elicited less critical engagement than expected, as suggested by the period’s theoretical works and architectural production. The portrayal of Socialist Realism in _Arhitectura_ contributed to this outcome.
In theory, Socialist Realism remained entrenched in ideology and political jargon, operating with terms relevant in a Russian cultural context (radiance, clarity, optimism), perpetuated in Romanian interpretations of key theoretical texts as conceptual abstractions with little formal implication. Practice, however, was ruled by economic and technical constraints, and hinged on deference to the Soviet architecture canon, despite _Arhitectura_’s promotion of Socialist Realism as method calling for conceptual and formal flexibility. This contrast (and distance) between theoretical permissiveness and the rigid framework of practice further destabilized the discourse of Socialist Realism in Romania.
Romanian Socialist architecture was one of modest construction volume, inconsistent quality and bipolar expression (mass vs. unique programs) - a quick response to external demand, rather than an adaptation sprung from critical engagement with the actual method. A contributing factor was the miscommunication of Socialist Realism’s potential for architectural versatility, as demonstrated in Catherine Cooke’s study “Beauty as a Route to ‘the Radiant Future’: Responses of Soviet Architecture”. _Arhitectura_’s promotional campaign reveals a partial, theoretically cryptic and culturally un-filtered transmission of the original message, highlighting the distance between the method’s pre-war conceptual flexibility and the limited scope of its local application during Stalinism. Architecture theory was under-represented, steeped in political jargon, and overshadowed by concrete examples from Soviet practice. The predominant perspective was Romanian, but one lacking enough information to unearth the conceptual core behind the jargon, and attempt a translation of the spatial implications carried by concepts which were self-explanatory in a Soviet cultural context. Crucial ideas like flexibility in manipulating space, contextuality, distinctiveness, appealing to the collective imaginary through creative use of local spatial precedent, became secondary to the accurate transmission of propagandistic messages, which focused the argument on formal representation.
Socialist Realism was a total vision of irradiating power and order at an urban level. In architecture, the initial method also carried a realistic, humanistic dimension – in the sense of an appropriateness and adaptability of scale and image to place, program, user, and an honest expression derived from addressing complex functions in a clear, classical language. Through the dynamic, uplifting movement of representative building silhouettes, and polychrome exterior decoration (halfway between idealized depiction of life under socialism and the vivacity of popular art), the built environment was also liable to positively influence the psychology of inhabitants. Ideally, Socialist Realism was to be culturally tailored to each new environment – and this was the profile emerging from the pages of _Arhitectura_. In Eastern Europe, however, it was introduced not only at a time when, in the USSR, the discourse had entered an authoritative stage (architectural language played decoration to ideology), but also as an instrument of sovietization, used against local spatial traditions.
In _Arhitectura_, this confusing contradiction came across quite strongly: a utopian vision of unprecedented scale, whose Muscovite iconography substituted itself to the permissive theory frustratingly alluded to, but inaccessible for a critical adaptation to the Romanian context. The use of ‘national forms’ reclaimed from progressive traditional architecture was inadequate compensation. Symbolically nullified by excessive, decorative use, they did little for the cultural contextuality of Socialist architecture. Until 1952, Romania’s wide-scale heavy industrialization and modern infrastructure development barred Socialist Realism from architectural exclusivity. Ill-suited to the technical requirements of industrial, transport or health architecture, it gravitated towards grand-scale, representative urban programs and mass housing. This helped maintain a duality of architectural discourses, transferring the modernist aesthetic across the Stalinist period.
The space of creative maneuverability afforded architects in the original method – and promised to Romanian architects in _Arhitectura_ - was lost in (mis)translation, precluding within-the-rules architectural experiment and critical discussion – limited though they may have been due to political intervention in architecture practice during the delicate stage of socialist regime consolidation. Socialist Realism as promoted in _Arhitectura_ had two destabilizing traits, affecting the emergence of a Romanian Socialist architecture: a grandiose vision of fast-paced, total transformation of the built environment (practically unfeasible at the time, and perceived by the professional milieu as a distant utopia), and a mandatory deference to a Soviet architecture model (built on Russian cultural and architectural precedent), which worked against a possible local adaptation of the method.


Star-topped Spires and Cardboard Heroes. Soviet Socialist Realism in Arhitectura R.P.R.

Totalitarian regimes have often made use of architecture as a means of propaganda. Conceived largely through the reiteration of classical principles, the buildings that bear testimony to this era can be easily placed in a distinct architectural niche. In most cases, totalitarian architecture does not represent or speak of itself, but is rather a bearer of messages, an intermediary of the political regime.
_Casa Scânteii_ and _Casa Republicii_ are the two buildings that mark the official beginning and the final moment of the communist regime in Romania. Despite the apparent similarity of their architectural style and despite the fact that they are both symbols of the communist power, the two palaces embody distinct political stages, entirely independent of the inner evolutional process of architecture. The message sent, at an interval of forty years, can be deciphered not through an architectural code but by means of a complex system of Soviet-rooted propaganda.
Rewriting of the past and of recorded history, along with the invention of a politicized version of it, is one of the methods used by communist regimes. This process had as its final goal the creation of a mythology of communism, consolidated through celebrations and ceremonies, pinned down in a _red calendar_ of history. Each _present_ action was justified through _the_ _past_, as if _the_ _past_ was indisputable evidence, but in reality _the past_ was continuously changing: party history in the fifties was by far different from the version it would flaunt in the eighties. Each celebration of a key moment marked in the _red calendar_ was an opportunity for the public display of regime achievements, with architecture as incontrovertible material proof. _The new man_, the one responsible for these achievements, was one of the most disputed roles on the stage of communist construction.
Although designing _Casa Scânteii_ was decided upon in 1948, the building truly became the star of the year 1952, as the first genuinely _Socialist Realist_ building in Romania, as one of the first exemplary socialist projects. The design and the official approval of the project was an ostentatious process, heavily publicized and gradually unfolded in the mass press. _Casa Scânteii_, the headquarters of the main party newspaper and the main publishing house, embodied one of the promises which the party had made to the masses. Equivalent with indoctrination, _the enlightenment of the masses_ was certainly a project that concerned everybody and with which everyone was expected to identify. The construction of _Casa Scânteii_ was an achievement of the architects and engineers, of the workers and technicians, but also of the students, children, Stakhanovite miners, railway workers, in fact all the different faces of the _new man_ who obviously understood that he would have been unable to complete the _great construction_ without the direct and thorough guidance of the Soviet Union.
Forty years later, the building site of _Casa Republicii_ embodied political independence, a _communist project,_ designed as _the_ representational façade of a national party. At the same time, _Casa Republicii_ was nothing more than the background of a scene where the main actor was the president of the country, playing a role that encompassed all aspects of the _new_ _man_. Less present in the mass media and almost ignored by the only architectural magazine, the construction of _Casa Republicii_ was meant to mark not so much the achievements of communism, but of what was claimed to be the most important moment in communist history. Although ostensibly emerging from a similar context to _Casa Scânteii_, _Casa Republicii_ was merely another reflection of the leader’s personality cult. The only one to whom credit was due for the conception, the design and the inauguration of the building site itself was the president of the country.
After the earthquake of 1977, the exemplary project for the _systematization_ of Bucharest city center (including _Casa Republicii_) was meant to become the only model worth emulating for the redevelopment of all Romanian localities. This approach was in reality a reevaluation of the decisions of 1952 regarding the _socialist reconstruction_ of Bucharest and of the towns of Romania. Yet the official representations in the press of the eighties avoided any reference to the projects of the fifties and omitted the link with their own history.


From Casa Scânteii to Casa Poporului and Back. Architecture as Icon of a Totalitarian Regime

This article deals with the history of the Bauhaus Colloquium held every three years at the Bauhaus University of Weimar. Specifically, it discusses the context of the first two Colloquia of 1976 and 1979. Today, The International Bauhaus Colloquium held at the Bauhaus University of Weimar is the most renowned conference on the theory and history of architecture in the German-speaking realm. In the past decades the Colloquium has gained a reputation as a place where hot topics are discussed, such as the place of architecture in a world of global and diffused power (2009) or the close relationship between architecture and media (2007). Freedom of expression and critical exchange seems a natural given in such a context. However, the origins of the Colloquium are to be found in quite a different setting. The first Colloquium was organised in 1976, during the years of the GDR regime in Eastern Germany. It was an outcome of the debate by the side of scholars, architects and the Socialist Unity Party, what to do with the Bauhaus heritage. In this way, the history of the Bauhaus colloquia reflects the larger history of GDR cultural politics. It also reflects the intellectual history of architectural modernism in Communist countries as a theme about which we have limited knowledge today. Finally, as the colloquia were meeting points for the European Left involved in architectural modernist studies, it also exemplifies the history of left wing scholars in confrontation with the Left on the other side of the Wall.


Thinking about the Bauhaus from the Other Side: the History of the Bauhaus Kolloquium in Communist Germany

The present research investigates one particular formula of constituting public space in communist Romania. Since the 1920s, civic centers, understood as central squares defined by new public buildings, were perceived, by various professionals, as essential components of restructuring processes conducted at level of built fabrics, in view of modernization. Especially under Nicolae Ceaușescu (1965-1989), because of a more prosperous first decade and, probably, because of extreme centralization, the civic center principle gained a (quasi-)normative dimension and arrived at being applied in numerous cases.
This article is focused on two policies promoted under Nicolae Ceaușescu, which relied on the civic center concept. The first policy aimed at urbanizing a large number of villages. For about a decade, this officially assumed goal was however mainly debated, while applied only to a very limited extent. During this decade of debates, the civic center principle occupied a visible place in publications specialized in architecture. Often, the most important dimension of this principle was the instrumental one. Civic centers were perceived as devices for guiding communities in their transition from a rural to an urban condition. True enough, some authors proved more reluctant than others about such potential, but they still constructed their arguments starting from a technocratic premise.
The second policy concerns the restructuring of urban fabrics from county capitals through civic centers. Admittedly, there are some difficulties in approaching this process as a policy, since there are only indirect indications of a programmatic attitude toward constituting civic centers in county capitals. Nevertheless, its systematic application, for 16-17 cases out of 40 possible, allows speaking of consistent and continuous expectations of high-ranked politicians in this respect. In addition, the professional heritage of some pre-war elite architects and city planners, who had favored this approach, is recognizable under the communist regime in some language and design choices. This apparent consensus between an architectural practice sensitive to political expectations and a pre-communist professional heritage is not, however, the result of public debate. As such, for these county capitals, professional publications are able to serve only as indicators of trends, not as witnesses for a rational exchange of opinions or of status negotiations.
What is also missing from professional publications is a clearly articulated and widely accepted theory on how to relate civic centers from county capitals to those of urbanized villages. Indirectly, from the idea of restructuring the whole Romanian network of settlements into systems of local hierarchies and interdependencies, it is possible to deduce that the former was often expected to represent at least a qualitative leap from the latter. There are signs indicating that architects wanted also more than just civic centers for central areas of county capitals. Yet, an enduring perception on Romanian cities, especially the extra-Carpathian ones, was that they present predominantly rural features. As such, unavoidably, there was only a short step to limiting architectural practice within some common programmatic aspects between civic centers for large cities and those for future agro-industrial towns. These opposite forces however, did not generate enough momentum in professional reflections to kindle consistent debates. In this sense, the editorial team from the professional review _Arhitectura_ restrained its role to a mere neutral support, with its liberty limited to presenting or not presenting the discourses of others. Trapped by a double layer of insulation, that of the Soviet communist encampment and that of Ceaușescu’s autarchic ambitions, the architectural profession in Romania ultimately limited itself in this case at reworking an increasingly obsolete programmatic concept.


Civic Centers under Ceaușescu’s Rule. The Failure to Articulate a Professional Discourse

This article investigates how the housing projects constructed in the newly developed Romanian industrial sites during the 1950s were analysed by the review _Arhitectura RPR_. I pay a particular attention to aspects related to comfort, function and aesthetics, all of which carrying a significant value in deconstructing the official understanding of workers’ everyday life. In order to do so, this article will dwell upon the case of Hunedoara, a steel production center located in the southern part of Transylvania, which had became an icon of the massive industrialization in Romania during the 1950s. Accordingly, the socio-economic measures adopted by the Romanian state immediately after Stalin’s death favored a re-evaluation of the mass housing projects already finalized. Placing a particular weight on how the worker of the steel industry experienced that living space, the official printed discourse came up with a number of suggestions regarding the appearance and function of such dwellings. However, by 1957 when the Romanian authorities re-engaged with massive industrialization and pushed consumption goods industry on the second place, many of these concepts had been re-evaluated as well, most of the time by lowering the initial comfort standards. Nevertheless, this article will show that the local authorities in Hunedoara made use of the initial official understanding of comfort in their attempt to adjust projects elaborated by the central leadership. In this way, I argue that although the official discourse on workers’ housing was articulated by political priorities and ideological constraints varying from one moment to another, it also became a component in the negotiated relations between central and local institutional structures.


From Printed Word to Bureaucratic Negotiation. Housing Projects for Workers during the 1950s in Romania

Attempting to accomplish a list of the mentioned periodicals structured by years and categories and to interpret this „diagram”, the paper aims to put into light the forms and quality of the architectural information professionals had access to in the studied epoch in Romania.
The research starts by laying on two undercurrent premises:
- It deems that the periodicals of the time were the main vector in transmitting the most up-to-date information in any domain
- It looks upon the “Ion Mincu” Library – the biggest library of architecture, affiliated to the unique institute of specialized studies in Romania – as the most operable channel of information dissemination in the field.
On this basis the study analyzes the provenance countries for the periodicals and magazines, the variants of obtaining them (by subscription, current or sporadic acquisition, donation etc.), the continuity of the acquired titles, the variation of the number of titles and its reasons, their main themes, the means based upon which readers could find them etc. These elements are some of those considered essential in order to build a more clarified image of the ways of access at the domains’ peculiar data in the given conditions of the Romanian communist system.
The efficiency this corpus of information was used and effectively put into life by the architects may constitute a new step in scrutinizing the mechanics of the totalitarian system and in clarifying the specific cultural configuration of the period it covered.


On what and how. Architectural Magazines in the School Library (1945-1989)

The evolution of architecture and urbanism during the Communist era was clearly marked by the political milieu, whose orientations are visible even today in manifest cultural influences at the level of buildings and town planning operations of its different phases.
The compelled Socialist Realism of the 1950s, gradually aligned in the years of cultural relaxation coming after the death of Stalin (the 1960s) with the functionalist and rationalist architectural and town planning patterns of the European modernism (concepts of the Athens Charter, the CIAMs), then, after 1971, the dramatic restriction of the professional freedom by the return to the drastic and anachronistic Stalinist pattern, the „Post-Stalinist Stalinism” of the 1970-1980 decade, emphasized by resuming on a juridical level all the Stalinist themes – all these are stages reflected not only in architecture and town planning, but also in the contemporary professional specialty publications.
However, the substantial achievements in architecture and town planning during the Communist era are due to the unique element of continuity: the architects formed and trained in the interwar period in the spirit of modern architecture, who had the ability to transpose and apply its principles within a hostile milieu.
During the short period of general liberalization of life, cultural relaxation and cultural openness towards the Western culture, of effervescence and professional emulation of the 1960s-1970s, many buildings were completed, of which some are notable. Design and town planning institutions were created in the 1960s and their building effort could not be possible without professional documentation and information services provided by a specialized documentation center.
This paper brings into discussion those outstanding moments of documentation in construction, architecture and urbanism, during the two first post-Stalinist decades (1954-1974), made possible by the funding of the Documentation Center for Construction, Architecture and Systematisation and of its library in 1954. The Technical Information Bulletin, elaborated between 1957 and 1974 by the Center, in collaboration with a large team of professionals, unequivocally reflects the evolution of architecture and town planning through changes in structure, content, documentation sources’ provenance area and amount of information. The end of publishing in 1974 marks the decline of documentation in construction, architecture and town planning. The publication of B.I.T. would start again in 1995, but this was nothing but a pale memory of the initial one because of a totally different historical context: despite the editorial staff reduced to one, the continuous cuts of the purchase funds and the lack of financial support of the state, the Bulletin of Technical Information resisted heroically until 2003, trying to fulfil as much as possible its mission as a provider of professional documentation and information.
The continuous decline of interest for documentation in general gradually undermined not only the existence of this publication but that of the Centre too, which was dissolved in 2009. In Romania, the decay of the Golden Era of specialized documentation in construction, architecture and town planning at the end of the 1970s paradoxically proclaimed the beginning of another Golden Era, that of Communism.


The Bulletin of Technical Information. A Tale from the Golden Age

On the effervescent but unsteady scene of architectural publications before the Second World War, the 36 issues of the _Arhitectura_ magazine of the Society of Architects were, from 1906 until 1944, a benchmark of stability and consistency, in spite of the many interruptions and delays.
Its follower, ARHITECTURA RPR (renamed ARHITECTURA) is (re)born in 1952, after the communist regime was installed, by governmental decree, as "organ" of the Union of Architects. From 1953 until December 1989, issued without interruption, it would be the only architectural periodical extensively spread, due to its state funding.
Dedicated to architectural design, edited by the Union of Architects and written especially by architects, the new series has minutely and ceaselessly recorded the achievements of the period and the life of the profession. As such, it constitutes the main documentary source for deciphering the professional history during Communism; it has been widely used in recent researches. Yet, being the only publicly spread and easily accessible architectural periodical of communist Romania, ARHITECTURA was more than a passive witness, a mirror of history; we can presume that it was, in its own way, a "creator of history", an active participant in the professional history. This hypothesis brings into discussion the editorial policy of the magazine, its internal life, of which we know very little, still. Even though the magazine was financially supported by the state, the editors had to face rather unusual conditions, where professional and political missions met. While the archives of the Union of Architects are still closed and the editorial staff is no longer alive, the only resource on this matter is the magazine itself.
The article surveys the “surface” of the magazine, hypothesizing that this epidermal layer was a sensitive interface between the “voice” of the profession on one hand and the eye of censorship, on the other. The dynamics of this interface was modeled specifically by absorbing the never won but never lost game between the political authority – on which the mere existence of the magazine depended – and the architects’ expectations – to which the magazine responded with its professional identity. In the given circumstances, always politically determined, their meeting was initially conducted on the readily visible field that precedes the written discourse, before going in the deeper substance of the texts. This is why the article avoids discussing the content of the articles, except for the editorials; the same reason goes for the authors present in the issues.
The article describes the dynamic of the review’s physiognomy following chronologically:
(1) the periodicity and the dimensions of the issues;
(2) the turning points in the evolution of the magazine, identified through the consequent changes in title, patronizing institutions and editors, on the one hand, and the evolution of the graphic design (size, cover, first page, font, text formatting and illustrations, paper quality, etc.) on the other hand;
(3) the thematic structure as it may be deduced at this surface level from the editorials, the tables of contents and the yearly summaries, permanent rubrics and themed-issues.
As it is hardly believable that, in a society so deeply articulated under political control, the changes in form and thematic content could have been innocent, all these changes taken individually and as a whole, suggest a specific dynamics of the interplay between professional desire and political will: episodes of apparent slavery and lively episodes of probable editorial deliberation, paradoxical spaces of relative independence, which seem to follow the common thread of a professional idea opposing the ideological fluctuations; all these features are not necessarily typical for a professional magazine, but they are characteristic for publications under dictatorship. On these surface levels we find clues as to the editorial life of the magazine, still hidden and probably more agitated than we could intuit from the continuity of the publication, inflexion moments whose substance need to be thoroughly investigated. Until further data is available, we can only conjecture on the aspirations of the successive editorial boards. This is rather a possible history proposed as research hypothesis, which has conferred the magazine its particular meaning; this article tries to unveil this presumed meaning.


Testing the Physiognomy of the Arhitectura Magazine (1952-1989)

“The Journal of Sciences and Travel”. A review of the 1947-1949 editions

Everything from Plastic: Promise and Utility in the German Democratic Republic

Around a Fortunate Series of Publications and Events

In the wake of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, the second issue of our journal has assumed the mission of extending the reflections on the subject of “Absorbing modernity” by emphasizing the importance held by individuals in defining and catalyzing this process. By restoring the merit of these characters in the (not always smooth) play of modernization, we aimed at overcoming the reductive approximations often encountered in contemporary historiography, such as, the schematic reading of architectural changes as having been determined by global factors and conditions, thus eluding local nuances, or the equally simplifying hypotheses of a path towards uniformity and erasure of specific differences. Our theme aims to challenge these interpretive threads, both distinctly shown in the Biennale discourse, by spotlighting local histories behind the apparent isomorphism of the “big picture”.
The volume glosses on the Biennale and explores this theme by means of two types of texts, equally meaningful: on the one hand, the original scientific research gathered in the _Dossier_; on the other hand, the reviews of recent cultural events and publications, which are given a greater role in the economy of this volume than the secondary status they usually enjoy in academic journals. These parallel readings are, in fact, complementary perspectives recomposing an image, equally three-dimensional and fragmentary, of an extremely complex and heterogeneous phenomenon. Yet they are essential in decoding the various contemporary representations of modernity. In this respect, the Biennale itself is seen from different angles in the reviews and presentations authored by Cristina Sucală, Andrei Feraru and TRACE.
As it has been stated in the call for papers, we are especially attentive to peripheral areas, where the modernizing message coming from a “central source” was cast over different cultural environments, not necessarily prepared to receive it. We assumed that in these “receiver areas” modernity was adopted and locally adapted through the decisive work of individuals, either belonging to the local elite or coming from other cultures. It was them that shaped the local or regional faces of this phenomenon.
As expected, the Romanian case is the most substantially presented in the _Dossier_. It appears in various temporal and theoretical hypostases matching the amplitude and typology of the characters under focus. Seemingly obscure figures or “founding fathers”, lonely heroes or collective characters, these “carriers” of architectural modernity range in a gallery that mirrors the transformations of Romanian society during the last two centuries. Ahead of their time, sometimes of their space too, these “aliens” act their part in the play of modernization, being more or less understood by their contemporaries.
The peculiarity of this position is verified against completely different geographies and historical contexts, in relation to the cases of two overseas “indigenous aliens”, thus offering a very fertile parallel reading. The first is the Australian architect Robin Boyd, brought to the fore by Emma Jones’ reflection on the local form and substance of a kind of architecture claiming universality. Her paper is an inquiry into a perennial and pervasive dilemma: in what way, and to what extent is the transfer of models from one cultural and physical context to another able to produce valid forms? The second is the figure of Paul Rudolph, portrayed by Anna Dempsey, Ben Youtz and Kelly Haigh. By looking into his work in the United States and abroad, in Southeast Asia, the authors emphasize the way architecture is not only a carrier of formal models, but also an agent for negotiating a localized modernism, and demonstrates the subtle adaptability and flexibility of Brutalist architecture, so often criticized as uniform and rigid.
Another parallel reading is to be found in Ana Šverko’s review of the Harvard University research seminar, From Riverbed to Seashore. Art on the Move in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean in the Early Modern Period. The project enlarges the chronological limits of modernisation and looks at its channels of transmission in the peripheral but dynamic territories of Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean Dalmatian Coast and the Black Sea, territories where the dialogue among cultures, the relationships of centre and periphery, of East and West, are highly formative and intricate as well.
The heroes of modernization in Romanian architecture appear in various hypostases, corresponding to a multi-layered typology. They stand out against the specific background of sudden modernization, alongside national construction. Politically and ideologically driven, the new condition stirred up the “old order” – medieval, latent and deeply rooted. The architectural forms taken by the Romanian absorption of modernity were (at least in the beginning) rather a question of individual option and interpretation, often in decisive manners. The process consisted mainly in (zealously) importing “visual models”; the theoretical motivations came later, conflictingly overlapping a cultural tradition unprepared to receive them, thus acquiring specific dimensions. They are mostly partial (with obvious _parti pris_ towards the stylistic debates) and often conflicting to the point of neurosis (between the national spirit and the cosmopolitan character of the modernist internationalism). In this framework, modern architectural culture is a mostly discontinuous construction, supported, shaped and driven by the force of specific individuals.
Initially, modernity is imported together with its vectors. “Aliens” both by formation and professional practice, these “carriers” are essential pieces in absorbing specific forms of modernity, having a hard time fitting in a culture still deeply rooted in traditional practices. Horia Moldovan brings to the fore such a collective character from the 19th century – the architects hired by public authorities in order to fill in the lack of local trained personnel and to emulate Western administrative “best practices”. A similar “alien” is also present in Horia Moldovan’s book, _Johann Schlatter. Western Culture and Romanian Architecture (1831-1866)_, reviewed here by Monica Sebestyen. Schlatter is one of those architects engaged in public practice (projects for buildings, public works, and restoration of churches) who contribute to the diffusion, in the Romanian space, of stylistic and tactical models proper to a modern culture.
Another type of an agent, iconic for a subsequent stage of modernization, is the native specialist educated abroad and returning to “play his part” in changing the cultural model. Bringing home not only forms, but also a specific content, such professionals are founding fathers of their own disciplines. They are, at the same time, natives and aliens, claiming themselves to belonging both to local and universal culture. The paper by Andreea Udrea and Irina Calotă presents Cincinat Sfințescu, the founder of modern Romanian urbanism. Their essay dwells upon his foreign connections and upon the reflection on the local urban planning of his ongoing efforts to be up to date with the international scientific doctrine of his time.
The interwar period is marked by the emergence of a problematic relation, simultaneously antagonistic and synergetic, between “traditionalism” and “modernism”. Although various forms of this relation can be traced back to the first half of the 19th century, it is only after World War I that it is consistently theorized and thus serves as basis for professional stances. With the risk of oversimplifying, it may be inferred that, over the past two centuries, the general attitude towards modernity has taken two shapes: one of conflict, when it is seen as a foreign (alien) body, contradicting the local cultural pattern, and one of awe, when its manifestations are idealized and copied. These hypostases do not exclude each other. On the contrary, they sometimes overlap and coexist ambiguously within the same mindset or even person.
Between these two extremes are the “mediators” (_raisonneurs_ or critical carriers of a modernizing message), whose role is often essential in shaping local discourse and practices in relation to modernity. The professional destinies of two such characters are shown in Gabriela Tabacu’s paper and Ruxandra Grigoraș’s review. The first one, architect Florea Stănculescu, tries to absorb the international _Zeitgeist _of modernity into a traditional _genius loci_, in order to mitigate the aforementioned contradiction. The second one, architect George M. Cantacuzino, directly tackles this opposition, trying to overcome it by theoretical elaboration. These examples illustrate two possible attitudes towards articulating a local kind of modernity. The review by Kázmér Kovács, presenting the volume _On the Very Edge. Modernism and Modernity in the Arts and Architecture of Interwar Serbia (1918-1941)_, acts as a useful complement to the two papers mentioned above. The parallel reading of the Romanian case and of a potentially similar one is a good occasion for testing the initial hypotheses regarding the cultural transfer between center and periphery.
The part played by these “mediators” of modernity, which is very important up until World War II, is drastically diminished with the change of political regime. Although the communist period bears a hard message of modernization, although functionalist modernism becomes (at a certain point) the “official style”, architecture no longer expresses itself freely, but is almost exclusively articulated by political ideology. If judged through the sheer number of buildings, the communist period would seem to have been generous for Romanian architecture. But it surely has not been generous for the architectural profession. In today’s terms, the practice of that time would hardly fit into the definition of architecture. Architects were expected to comply with political demands, and critical reflection was, in fact, the last thing expected from them.
Against this setting, those who did not want to “fit in”, those who tried to break the ideological and behavioral blockade and who attempted to be different, become even more important figures. At least for a while, they acted as polarizing magnets, carriers of a free option towards modernity, even if this freedom was not granted to them. This volume discusses three such cases (architects Ascanio Damian, Mircea Alifanti and Șerban Sturdza), each of them embodying a different stance; every case is set against the background of a frozen cultural context, whose immobility was completely opposed to the spirit of modernity.
Damian and Alifanti also had a teaching career, and they both worked exclusively during Communism, but their professional destinies and dramas were quite different. This year marks the 100th anniversary of their birth, and these papers can also be seen as sITA’s tribute to them.
Architect Ascanio Damian, presented in the paper by Miruna Stroe, is an example of commitment to mainstream modernism, to the extent it could be manifest in the conditions of the period. A very strong and visible presence in the professional establishment, up to a certain moment, he remained anchored throughout his life both in the modernist dogma – even when it was called into doubt, in Romania too, and in the idealistic political leftist vision – including his taking a public stand against the excess of the regime in the 1980s.
Quite the opposite was Mircea Alifanti’s case, discussed by Ana Maria Zahariade and Radu Ponta. He was a concealed personality, a complicated, reflective, dilemmatic human being, who was professionally acknowledged but less visible. His stance on architecture is based on his “notebooks” between 1950 and 1980, documents now researched for the first time. Unlike Damian, Alifanti (a left-winger too) takes a rather “subversive” stand against the modernist mainstream (through his own way to design and theorize architecture) and the political arena (through his refuse to design under destructive orders), which he experiences deeply and with a sense of defeat.
The interview with architect Șerban Sturdza brings to the fore another type of “alien”, a misfit of the generation raised and educated under Communism. His resistance to the regime is exemplary, as is his resistance to the current commodification of architecture.
These two papers (on Mircea Alifanti and Șerban Sturdza) sketch out two cases of critical interpretation of modernity, a rare facet of Romanian architecture. They were not the only ones, but they both represent two solid self-built postures: Sturdza, by following a phenomenological path of authenticity and _local-modern_ relation, which grounds his options; Alifanti, by following the path of rationalism with claim to objectivity, theorized as an almost impossible synthesis of classical and modern principles of composition.
Ioana Popovici describes another type of affinity towards the international tendencies of the same period. Her article is an interpretation of the constant presence of Japanese architecture in the only professional periodical in Romania at that time, and of the impact of architect Kisho Kurokawa’s visit in Bucharest. Given the quasi-total lack of real possibilities to connect to the international circulation of ideas, and the increasingly unbreathable professional atmosphere, the common tendency was to adopt (visual) models originating from exotic areas and apparently stripped of political ideologies. In this context, the influence (even unintended) which “aliens” like Kurokawa have had on the architectural imagery and representations in communist Romania is not so surprising.
Finally, two consistent reviews document a very special case of transfer of urban, architectural and behavioral models: the seaside. A “heterotopic” space, of freedom or, at least, of the illusion of freedom, the seaside of socialist countries (as it appears in the exhibition _Enchanting views_, commented by Michael Zinganel, as well as in the book _Holidays After the Fall. Seaside Architecture and Urbanism in Bulgaria and Croatia_, reviewed by Irina Băncescu) allows for manifestations of an exuberant and bright modernism, but a modernism still under political tutelage. In a way, it is a kind of absorption of modernity whose future was cut off by excessive modernization.
Ironically, the fall of Communism did not automatically lead to regaining the freedom of thought, and even less to critical thinking. Due to its inertia after Communism, the profession is much too vulnerable to the commercial appeal. If the Venice Biennale is right in claiming that modernity, itself, pushes towards a uniformity driven by profit and information, then the role of the “un-enrolled”, or “aliens”, is still decisive in building up interesting differences.


Introduction. Behind the Big Picture

Despite the inherent difficulties associated with the beginning of the institutionalisation of architectural practice in Romanian Principalities, the first forms of a controlled organisation of construction activities took shape after the adoption of Organic Regulations (1831-1832). The “state architect” and “town architect” positions, the modernisation will of the elites and particularly the large number of foreign architects (mostly not recorded by the specialised historiography), brought a decisive contribution to the progress towards Romanian architectural modernity.
With administrative duties, being mostly in charge with the bureaucracy and the control of constructions, by taking over public orders or by free practice, some of these foreign architects had a consistent contribution to the aesthetic modernisation of architecture and its associated practice. The activity of “state architects” and “town architects” in the period following the implementation of the Organic Regulations in the two Principalities is a subject still insufficiently studied. This paper attempts to outline an overall picture based on the research of a small share of the rich documentary materials from archives and other secondary bibliographic sources; however the subject matter remains of course open to further detailing and refining.


An Alien Practice. “Town Architects” in 19th Century Romania

The international congresses supported by the _International Federation of Housing and Town Planning_ (IF) and by the _Union Internationale des Villes_ (UIV), held between 1925 and 1939, were the most important urban planning events of the interwar period. They attracted all the famous and remarkable urban planners and a great mass of specialists involved in planning. This article discusses the perspective provided by one conscious representative of this great mass of specialists, a professional that maintained a tight relationship with the proceedings of these congresses and whose career was strongly influenced by his consistent participation. The specialist was the Romanian engineer Cincinat Sfințescu. In that respect, we argue that the international lively activity associated with the Congresses was not just a short-lived excitement, but a continuous source of energy for the development of urban planning throughout the world. Romania was caught in that whirlpool as well. Seen from the Romanian perspective, the Congresses, more than other kinds of political or professional connections with IF or UIV, strongly influenced the path of the urban planning discipline.
Cincinat Sfințescu was an agent fulfilling the greatest mission set by those congresses - the inception and development of urban planning in new areas. Considering the architect’s career from the local perspective, we argue that it was shaped by his constant and consistent participation on the international scene. His research skills were sharpened by the country reports that he religiously delivered to almost each of the congresses, reports that were also extremely useful in his work. His activity was strongly animated by his admiration for the founding father figures of international urban planning (Henri Sellier, Emile Vinck, Raymond Unwin) and he himself gradually became that kind of a founding father for Romanian urban planning.


Getting Global, Staying Local. The Turmoil of the First Steps towards Scientific Urban Planning – the Case of Cincinat Sfințescu

The connections between the Romanian cultural space and the spirit of modernism that animates the first part of the 20th century have been varied, heterogenous and sometimes even hard to distinguish, engendered very different ideas and methods of approach. Following the same pattern somehow lacking internal support, the local architects seek to unravel the sense of modernity in very particular manners and their achievments shed light onto a stylistic landscape that shows great richness and creativity.
In this context the architect Florea Stănculescu, an articulated personality known for his seriousness and profoundness, proves to be a very active and vocal supporter of the new ideas animating the professional field after the First World War. Both through his theoretical discourse and his tectonic approach, he suggests ways to push the local stylistic (already outdated at the beginning of the 20th century) towards new horizons of modernism. Unlike his contemporaries (of which most are silent, some are revolting against the new and a few are raging against the old), Florea Stănculescu understands the imminence of change and the need for progress. He does this, however, with caution and delicacy, but also unrelentlessly. His achievements are solid and thorough. The present research is aimed at uncovering the way an architect profoundly attached to the values of the traditional Romanian village, succeeded to be at the same time an authentic and effective supporter of modernism (even if only of a particular type of modernism, adapted to the historical and cultural moment of the area he was addressing).


Architect Florea Stănculescu or On Modernism in the Romanian Interwar Architecture as Negotiation Between Genius Loci and Zeitgeist

The article is dedicated to Ascanio Damian, architect and professor, seen as an “indigenous alien” figure both in Romanian architecture and political realm. A true modernist, he expressed himself in a paradoxical milieu: international exhibition design. In this narrow niche he could keep being a modernist even during the socialist realist episode, though his designs were means of disseminating socialist propaganda. The greatest occasion for face-to-face comparison of pavilion design must have been the universal exhibition in Brussels, 1958, which is still regarded as a modernist architectural event. Though initially Romania intended to participate, it pulled back and one question shall remain unanswered, whether Damian would have been the chosen architect to design the Romanian pavilion.
Apart from his architectural career, he was a prominent educator, Rector of “Ion Mincu” Institute of Architecture for a decade (1959-1969). He is remembered as the protector of a rather bohemian atmosphere in the institute, sheltered from the pervasive political intrusions. His strong political convictions transformed Ascanio Damian into a dissident, who decided to publicly renounce his communist party membership in 1987, in a unique gesture among Romanian architects.
The article contextualizes his personality and oeuvre with the purpose of reclaiming Ascanio Damian’s visibility as an important Romanian modernist.


Ascanio Damian, Trade Fair Designer Extraordinaire

Some fifty years after the international publication of architect Robin Boyd’s pithy, searing attack on Australia’s landscapes of Modernity The Australian Ugliness, this article will attempt to come to terms with the standpoint of Boyd’s treatise in the wider context of Australia’s absorption of ‘mass-modern’ architecture in the 1950s. The illustrated book was more than a penetrating critique of what made Australia modern; it was also a portrait of a peripheral country deeply ambivalent about its own claims to culture, as well as its reliance on the imported modernisms of Europe and the US. Boyd rejected outright the pervasive signs of a commercial kitsch architectural currency he labelled “Featurism”, and it was characterised by veneers of all sorts: brick veneer construction in the suburbs, brightly coloured plastic veneers in the home, veneers of advertising in the streets, veneers of “Australian character” on an international Western culture. Against this imported Featurism worn as a prettifying mask, Boyd argued for a truly Australian Modern beyond mere cosmetic effects, which he sought through his own architectural projects. For Boyd’s text must be set against his own ambivalent and nuanced take on architecture, which was both cannibalistic (he studied in America, Europe and Japan), and deeply site-specific. For Boyd, the twin activities of writing and practice were a means of teasing out that problem characterised not only as eternally Australian, but also implicit in the very contingency of the modern experience: Can it ever be possible to give valid form to a displaced culture within a usurped, alien landscape?


Rediscovering “The Australian Ugliness”. Robin Boyd and the Search for the Australian Modern

In May 1985, Kisho Kurokawa alighted in Bucharest for the opening of his eponymous exhibition of architecture and design. Comparable only to Kenzo Tange in terms of media representation and professional appeal, Kurokawa’s visit was the pinnacle of nearly 15 years of constantly rising fascination with Japanese architecture. Published in Arhitectura somewhat regularly since 1972, the projects, completed works and excerpts from the theoretical writings of prominent Japanese architects - Kenzo Tange, Arata Isozaki, Kisho Kurokawa - had enthralled the Romanian professional audience.
Here was an architectural culture of undeniable otherness, but an otherness perceived as kindred in spirit and desiderata. This alien discourse was incontrovertibly modern, though based on a reinvention of the traditional vernacular which conferred it an aura of cultural specificity. It deployed advanced technology to drive urban planning and architecture to unprecedented feats of conception and construction - cities on the sea, arboreal towns for millions of dwellers - yet worked metabolically, and prized symbolism and humanity above all else. It was, in a word, inspirational.
This paper traces the dissemination of Japanese architectural discourse in the context of Romanian modernism, facilitated by Arhitectura magazine, focusing on lyrical functionalism (late 1960s and early 1970s), and the post-modern aesthetics of the 1980s.


“…the city as a part of nature and concrete as a kind of earth”. Japanese Architecture Meets 1960s–1980s Romanian Modernism

In a recent _New York Times_ article (April 7, 2012), Theodore Dalrymple described late modern expressionist (“brutalist”) buildings as “as absolutely hideous, like scouring pads on the retina.” Paul Rudolph, Walter Gropius’ pupil and the U.S. architect most closely associated with this muscular style, has often been the recipient of such harsh criticism. Although his well-known design for Yale’s Art and Architecture Building (1963) was initially celebrated, by the 1970s Rudolph had vanished from the American “architectural scene.” While he continued to work on select projects such as the Southeastern Massachusetts Technological Institute (which has been largely ignored until Timothy M. Rohan’s 2014 monograph), Rudolph received many of his prominent commissions from Southeast Asian clients. These include the Bond Center in Hong Kong (1984) and the Dharmala Headquarters in Jakarta, Indonesia (1982). One could argue that his Southeast Asian designs represent the “progressive erasure of local and national characteristics” and should be dismissed as first-world incursions into the non-Western landscape.
Such conclusions represent not only a fundamental misunderstanding of modernism as a singular, Euro/North American style, but also of Rudolph’s design philosophy. As this paper will argue, the architect’s designs for SMTI and the Dharmala Headquarters share Rudolph’s sensitivity to social context and urban setting. Rather than erasing local identities, he practised a kind of negotiated modernism—one that reflected his commitment to urbanism and to the local setting. Moreover, as the authors argue in the second half of this paper, Rudolph’s Brutalist works readily lend themselves to reinterpretation. They conclude that designLAB’s recent renovation and transformation of SMTI/University of Massachusetts Dartmouth library serves as a model for other brutalist structures in the U.S. and Asia.


Re-viewing and Reimagining Paul Rudolph’s Brutalist Architecture in the USA and Southeast Asia

We have the unique opportunity of looking into several unpublished, hard to classify documents: forty notebooks witnessing the life story of Professor Mircea Alifanti (1914-1999), one of the most remarkable architects and, paradoxically, one of the most inconspicuous professionals of the communist era. We knew about them. They were almost a legend... We are grateful to the Florian family, the professor’s heirs, for making them available to us with such gracious generosity.
On the occasion of Professor Mircea Alifanti’s Centennial, the article tries to delineate the architect within his epoch and place, by means of his forty notebooks – novel documents that the professor’s heirs had the gracious generosity to make available to us. He was one of the most remarkable architects of the communist era, he understood, theorised and taught architecture and the architectural project in a unique way, in times when local modernity was dictated by the party ideology, when the professional discourse was almost absent.
We shall illustrate his stance with two moments: the design for the Baia Mare Prefecture and his withdrawal from the professional scene.
More is known about the former: it was published, it was the object of study trips, of his colleagues’ amazement, since the building represented, an unusually critical design, for which the notebooks provide new information. Little is known of the final moment of his professional career; those who know about it are reluctant to talk, since his unusual withdrawal spotlights the embarrassing issue of a collective guilt. Yet, these moments are essential to describe him; both speak of an unusual understanding of the profession; both are exemplary within the Romanian professional milieu of the time and, we dare say, in the modern European context as well.



Professor Alifanti’s Notebooks

Fifteen years ago, Sorin Alexandrescu published an article called “Overlapping Culture” where he separated Europe into centers (spaces of the avant-garde, generators of cultural models and original theories, carriers of waves…) and peripheries (spaces that synthesize several other spaces, receivers of cast waves often having little interest for theorizing received models). If we refer, in this context, to the emergence and coagulation of artistic and architectural modernism, past century Romania’s “provincial” position resembles a culture of overlapping and synthesis which tame outside influences while continuing local tradition; a young modern culture as creative as the models it refers to. Key characters of this Modernist-bearing synthesis are interwar architects like Horia Creangă, Marcel Janco and G.M. Cantacuzino or Henrietta Delavrancea-Gibory and Octav Doicescu, who continued their activity after the war, too, when the way to filter modernism became more obtuse and encoded. However, as the architecture of newer generations became more compelled to obey political impositions within a planned system, the independent movement of overlapping and models seems to disappear as a general formative characteristic. When it does exist, it is more likely a matter of individual opinion, foreign to the tide it stands against. A critical stand difficult to discern in the “adjusted” mass, yet one that, nonetheless, leaves traces.
Born in 1947, architect, urban planner, product designer, active in the fight for saving national heritage and just as active in the consolidation of the profession (president of major professional associations in Romania), Șerban Sturdza is, perhaps, the best example of an architect who, starting from the 1970s, has worked undeterred, first in Timișoara and then in Bucharest looking for a certain local synthesis. His projects are the result of a long and refined process of cultural assimilation and experience which manifests itself as inventiveness, fantasy and play, and equally as experiment and bricolage.
We will follow his relationship with modernity, modernism and artistic and local cultural architecture as they emerge from his designs.


From Monumental Modernism to Local Bricolage. An interview with Șerban Sturdza

A Biennale of Knowledge

On Fundamentals

Lifting The Curtain. Central European Architectural Networks

Reviewing George Matei Cantacuzino

Horia Moldovan, Johann Schlatter. Western Culture and Romanian Architecture (1831-1866)

On Architecture, Tourism and Politics on the Seaside

Walking a fine line

Enchanting Views – Romanian Black Sea Tourism Planning and Architecture of the 1960s and ‘70s

Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean World in the Early Modern Period: Pathways of Art between East and West

We know of a lost work called _De urbanitate_ by an Augustan poet Domitius Marsus, a work that, according to modern reconstructions, may have played a significant role in establishing the Roman epigram as a distinct literary form. Quintilian describes it as an attempt to define that elusive quality of _urbana dicta_ by using _urbanitas_ as an instrument for literary analysis of what was particular to Rome, and still discernible in refinement, in language, or in humor. Concerned with the orator’s education and with retrieving the rhetoric style and methods of past centuries, Quintilian himself attempts to decipher the conditions and to define the rules of _urbanitas_ as a key factor of that lost “good taste of the city” and of that “flavor of erudition derived from conversing with the learned.”
After a long and syncopated history, _urbanity_ entered the discourse on city building together with the lexical and semantic whirl produced in recent decades around the “urban” and its cognates, agents and victims alike of the criticism and (over)theorizing of architecture and urbanism. Urban planners and architects have been using the term as a catchword, as a fashionable way to acknowledge and explain the connection between people and places, as a critique to functionalist urbanism, and as a new concern with restoring use in urban spaces. It is still being employed in vague, inconsistent, and abstract manners, which limit its possibilities and often render it as nothing but a linguistic ornament in approaching the urban physical space.
The intention of this volume was never to set the meaning of urbanity. We rather tried to gauge the current interest in the topic, to probe into its relevancy, and to identify its instrumental role in understanding the city in various cultures, times, and places. The variety of tales we selected puts forward the resilience of the concept and its plurality, as well as its thought-provoking potential for opening up different layers of meaning and different contexts, and for understanding the circular relation between forms of subjectivity, ways of life, and the formation of urban fabrics and artifacts. Ultimately, all contributors capture ways of conceiving urbanity as a relation between space and culture, between theoretical constructions and people, between professional ideals and everyday life… today or ever. The conceptual path of “urbanity” is a tale with many facets, pertaining to rhetoric, to the art of conversation or to the studies of propriety, but also easily transferable into the field of urban design. In all of its appearances, the term encloses some mythical attributes of a former “glorious age” of the city, pure, vibrant and refined, opposing the coarse, dispiriting, and disaggregated present.
This is why the volume actually has a dual opening, with two keynote writings. From the field of architecture and urban design, **Thomas Sieverts** guides us through the topicality of the concept, within the active present of emerging new forms of social and spatial occupation of the urbanized land. From the field of philology, **Pierre Maréchaux** takes us back to the sources of the term, highlighting its meanings and its ambiguous relation to the city and city building.
Maréchaux shows how the _urbanitas_ theorized by Cicero towards the end of the Roman Republic acted as a means of resistance against the overwhelming foreign influences brought by the growing urbanization that disintegrated the city and the spiritual existence “within one’s kind.” The article unfolds the struggle to retrieve the unity in the play of differences in the early stages of the Empire, in the spirit as well as in the grammar of the city. It shows how this unifying aesthetic value of _urbanitas_ helped nurture the plurality of styles in elocution, via the work of Quintilian, and lays the foundations for further analysis of how Vitruvius endeavored to translate these principles into the art of building.
Sieverts’s interview sets the scene for the contemporary tales of urbanity as an agent of social and political enfranchising, respectively of the assertion of urban space as the stage of this emancipation. By distancing himself from the nostalgic views of a small-scale urbanity, inherent to the European city of the Enlightenment, the author of _Zwischenstadt_ invites us to cherish the casual, and to search for a new urbanity in the ruins of the industrial and the functionalist urbanism, in the informal, alternative, non-conventional territories of the sprawl. By refusing the catastrophic views of the dispirited present, he points to the mobilizing forces of this myth of a former “glorious age” of the city as resource for new models of urban planning and design. His hope resides in the revival of solidarity, and in the opportunity of the recent refugee crisis to give way to renegotiation of the commons and of the coexistence of plurality in nowadays Germany.
Thus, Maréchaux explains the genealogy of the concept of “urbanity” and gives the gist of its initial uses, while Sieverts brings up the contemporary construction of the term as a fundamental theory of urban design, which informs and gives meaning to the procedural theories of this field. The two texts set the initial premises of our volume. First, they lay the grounds of the contradiction between urbanity and urbanization, a contradiction that is very present in the contemporary urban condition, and which also prompted the theme of our current issue. Second, they illustrate how this contradiction is actually a cyclical crisis that fuels the renegotiation between parts, and their abilities to accommodate each other’s differences.
A virtual, wide-ranging and open-ended dialogue takes shape between the epochs and the fields of knowledge and action presented by the two prologues. Inside this dialogue, the volume ventures into the spacing of this dialogue, where the contributors spotlight different instance of the concept of urbanity, around three central questions: what experience of the city is stimulated by this concept? What forms of subjectivity and, respectively, of community, become articulate in relation to modern urban spaces? Which is the functional role of the concept of urbanity within urban design, and which are the cultural practices in which this role is rooted?
These questions permeate all contributions in various measures, interspersing and cross-fertilizing one another, revealing glimpses of urbanity, partial answers and new questions. Their thematic assemblage is difficult and inevitably imprecise, but several threads can be followed along the texts. The first one is the thread of urbanity as an alternative way to articulate knowledge about the city and its history.
**Monique Webber** illustrates it by means of her narrative on the role that the (mis)identification of Ara Pacis played in creating a subjective, yet potent, urban experience and practice. She presents a new insight into the power of the historical lens to foster the understanding and the creation of the early modern city (of Rome). History becomes thus not only an active contributor to contemporary learnedness but also to contemporary construction of the self and of the city. **Hanna Derer** presents another case of misreading the past of a city. She takes us to Bucharest, in a voyage through the eruptive modernization at the turn of the 20th century, when the traditional morphological features of the city were being rejected as non-urban, but did, however, turn out to be more valuable and stronger than the prevailing state of mind of the epoch was prepared to accept. This is a tale about a wavering negotiation between planning, prejudices and changes, granting the city its urban identity and hinting that the visual dimensions of urbanity elude preconceived constructions. **Alioscia Mozzato** also discusses this distance between the grammar of the city and the unseen forces that shape and reshape its appearance, through the parallel reading two significant authors, Banham and Rossi, at an important turning point of the theory of the city. This essay exposes urbanity as a loose-fitting construct engrained in the tradition of the European city, but which can also find home in cities like Los Angeles.
A second thread discerns urbanity as loyalty to a place, from the superposition of attitudes and layered histories that are sheltered in that place, be it in Savannah, Kiev, or Macau.
**Udo Greinacher**’s story of downtown Savannah illustrates the power of a few open “disobedient” minds to change perception and turn a slum into a “diamond in the rough,” thus mobilizing forces to “reinstate the atmosphere of urbanity and exuberance in the American downtowns,” as Jane Jacobs put it. This tale of self-preservation is followed by the storyboard of self-transformation of the Maidan in Kiev. Thus, **Olena Oliynik** takes us through the numerous reinterpretations of this epicenter of all protests in Ukraine, seeking to spotlight the difficult role of the architect to (re)shape symbolic public spaces of the capital city of a new democracy, so as to strengthen their democratic character, besides fulfilling significant emancipatory functions. **Philippe Forêt** adds an account of spatial and temporal configurations of otherness that subvert the constrained environment of a neighborhood in downtown Macau. He enquires into the representations of urbanity and alterity at the street level, in a multilingual setting, and sets forth the negotiated construction of heterotopia by means of alien practices legitimated through the use of a language on the verge of extinction.
Almost all articles reveal that there is always a form of conflict, more or less manifest, which catalyzes the renegotiation between parties, and underlies the articulation of new spaces and behaviors. The conflict is often diffuse, vague, undefined, but can also become urgent and can find powerful expressions, often subversive, sometimes anarchical. From these collisions arise new forms of urbanity, that presentness articulates as underground ferments around difference and otherness, which become keystones of alternative scenarios and actions that breach the mainstream, eventually subjecting themselves to criticism.
Such is the story of the hardcore punk scene in New York, as depicted by **Alan Parkes**. The gap between the initial intentions to create an egalitarian, inclusive space, as an alternative to social affliction and urban decline in Lower East Side, and the overpowering context that reduced it to a subculture of hyper-masculinity, show the possibilities and also the limitations of such actions in relation to the governing forces at play. By looking at a recent case of Romanian Roma immigration in Berlin, **Theodora Müller-Balauru** underlines the situation of the other as litmus test for urban stakeholders. The research goes beyond the mere examples of alternative uses of urban space, to prove that the presence of the other can make visible the emergence of new types of spaces, as manifestations of various scales of conflict. The four sites analyzed (a park, a squat, a church and a refugee camp) are seen as other spaces (in line with Foucault’s heterotopia) irrevocably transformed by the interaction with the group of Roma, not only in their physical traits, but in their socio-political relevance. After Berlin,** Celia Ghyka** brings us back to the landscape of conflicts in Bucharest, this time between the savage neoliberalism unimpeded by a corrupt and dysfunctional state apparatus, on the one side, and a rising civil unrest of a new generation with a strong urban conscience and willing to fight for their right to the city (as theorized by Lefebvre and Harvey), on the other side.
This article echoes Greinacher’s account of the “civil disobedience” which prompted a new regard and understanding of the built heritage in the Savannah of the 1950s, but also some of Sieverts’ observations regarding the role of new media and virtual space in enticing and sustaining new modes of solidarity, of loyalty to the city, and of occupation of its spaces. At the same time, this article opens towards the remaining four contributions to the volume, which delineate urbanity as a source of theoretical positions that underpin professional strategies and guide the professions involved in urban development and design. This final thread of the volume navigates the cities of Zurich, Skopje, Bucharest, and Cluj.
Starting from the same conflictive scene of our present, **Ileana Apostol** proposes to look at the consequences of the social unrest of 1968, to better grasp the social movements today and their potential for renegotiating the commons. She contextualizes Lefebvre’s work in the aftermath of 1968, and illustrates its long-term effects on the new imagery of communal life, through her own professional experiences with three housing cooperatives in Zürich. The interest in building professional attitudes transpires also from the text co-authored by** Jasna Mariotti and Divna Pencic**, who are trying to discern and understand fragments of urbanity between the blocks of flats epitomizing the socialist city, and the detached single family house proliferating in the market economy. Concerned with a similar post-Communist context, **Tudor Elian** gathers some of the new attitudes and tactics of the informal into a typology that reaffirms the significance of conflict and of its negotiations as a possible source of learning for planners and for the future edification of the city.
Nowadays urbanity seeks its pattern in a maze engendered by a new actuality: social restlessness, discontent, dynamics of otherness…. It also confronts the conceptual conflicts that consume the professions of urban planning and design, the doctrines challenged by the reality of the city, the clashes between the institutional context and our need to conceive and negotiate the future of the city. It is not only by chance that the two Romanian cities presented in the volume, Bucharest and Cluj, although approached in different manners, are seen under the sign of _learning_, against a political and professional backdrop for which the city is mainly a quantitative matter indifferent to urbanity. As a matter of fact, Hanna Derer’s zoom in on the evolution of two streets represents the lesson the architectural historian wants us to absorb in order to preserve Bucharest’s urban character that seems threatened again under the pressure of imminent planning interventions. In his turn, **Șerban Țigănaș** is an active architect in Cluj, directly involved in planning, and whose criticism concerns his profession’s mission, since _decisions, projects, their completion or distortion are continuously contributing to urbanity_. We chose to close the volume with his contribution explicitly focused on learning as it underscores the delays between ideas, theory and practice in shaping our city. It also sets forth an inspiring conclusion regarding our need to constantly learn. In a way, it takes us back to Sieverts’ comments that the urban designer can become relevant to the new urbanity to the extent that he is able to keenly observe trials, errors, emerging conflicts, shifting contradictions, and people.
This overview is highly approximate if compared to the various ways in which ideas can be connected into cross-dialogues between articles. In fact, the articles fit together not by the static rules of a puzzle, but rather by the unexpected and vivid rules of a kaleidoscope. The theme of urbanity crystallizes, first and foremost, as an experience of the mind, as an intellectual exercise that drives us towards other themes, concepts, and questions through which we seek new orders for the city. All the different uses and meanings of urbanity as resulted from the contributions in this volume seem to make sense in their own right. They offer rich and productive readings of different spatial and cultural constellations, and this in itself justifies the continuing use of the term – slippery and ambiguous as it may be.


Introduction. Avatars of an Elusive Concept

Urbanity (_Urbanität_) has played a significant role in the definition of urban design over the past few decades, in Germany as well as in Western Europe, in general. Triggered by Edgar Salin’s analysis of the “cities without urbanity” at the eleventh annual meeting of the Association of German Cities (_Deutscher Städtetag_) in Augsburg in 1960, the concept has accompanied the postmodern renaissance of the traditional city as the setting of the contract for a new life and its corresponding culture. After being employed as the catchword of the failed attempt to plan “urbanity through density” in the newly built ensembles, the word became part of politics, and part of the competition between cities, based on the image of the crowded street, packed with activities, of the 19th century. The 1990s were still governed by these attempts to revive the traditional urbanity, albeit more and more criticized as devoid festivism. However, the industrial decline and the complex changes prompted by the 1989 revolutions turned the attention towards the social and spatial issues outside the historical centers, leading the way to two core ideas that have influenced the urban theories of the new millennium: (1) that the representation of urbanity as a purified image of the pre-industrial times is actually the trap of a nostalgia which has very little to do with the current urban phenomena; and (2) that the new urbanity has to be searched in the ruins of the industrial and the functionalist urbanism, in the informal, alternative, non-conventional territories of the sprawl.
One of the landmarks of this interpretative and operative turn within urban design is undoubtedly Thomas Sieverts’ book _Zwischenstadt_, literally _the city in-between_, written in 1995- 1996 and published for the first time in 1997.1 This anti-conservative approach to urbanity seeks to demonstrate that the _in-betweenness _(between the historical centers and the unlimited land, between the inhabited places and the non-places of mobility, or between the temporality of local economy and the dependency of the global market) is not the source of all evil, but rather the celebration of the possible, uncertain and inciting. Based on his experience as one of the directors of the International Building Exhibition IBA Emscher Park between 1989 and 1994, Sieverts argues against the perpetuation of traditional images of sociability and of spatiality, built upon dualities such as city-territory, nature-culture, etc. The _Zwischenstadt _does not exist in opposition to another form of _ecumene_, but it emerges from its own spacing and temporizations, from the variance of its comprising elements. Thus, his examination of the _Zwischenstadt _begins with the reexamination of some core concepts like urbanity, centrality, density, diversity, and ecology.
Translated into French, English (one in the UK and another one in the US), Japanese, and recently into Spanish, the book is still highly relevant today, inviting us to cherish the casual, and teaching us how to see and make sense of the new urban dynamics. Moreover, Sieverts’ capacity to capture the spirit of change has been highly valuable to the latest editions of _Europan Europe_, of which he was president until recently. Just as the _Zwischenstadt _helped mark a cultural and professional turn two decades ago, _Europan 13 _seems to be really marking a new inflection, not only in the way that we conceive of architectural and urban projects, but also in the methods that we use to make them happen.
In the light of the topic of our current issue, Thomas Sieverts granted me the immense privilege of an interview that tells a little bit about who he is, how the concept and the theme of urbanity have informed his practice as an architect and urban planner, and how he regards it now. At the same time, I was interested in his oppinion on how the professions of architecture and urban design have changed over the past few decades, and how he experienced all those moments of change in his career.


… this is something we could dwell on, and create something new, perhaps even more stable in terms of urbanity. An interview with the German architect and urban planner Thomas Sieverts

There is nothing more polysemic than the word _urbanitas_, which refers to urban life before characterizing the manners and language in their spiritual dimensions. From Cicero to Quintilian, the _Vrbs_ structures an entire _episteme _and a body of knowledge about the city, which expands in the ethics as well as in the esthetics. However, when we inquire into the Roman architecture, it is easy to notice that it also reminds us of rhetoric, and that a stone building is always the conjugated fruit of invention, of disposition, and ornamentation. In other words, these notions find inspiration in one another, thus generating an implicit path between the City and language, only to arrive, via the architectural treatises, back to the City. This crisscross is the study object of the article. By taking a special interest in the Roman urbanity, this text aims to establish a working hypothesis: if the Ciceronian _urbanitas_ was hostile to urbanism, Vitruvius is nonetheless the architect of their reconciliation.


Urbanitas against Urbanism: a Latin Paradox

The ancient was palpable in early modern Rome. Recreated in visual and literary culture, the city of the emperors was traversed alongside that of the present. In an era of antique revival and cultural tourism, affinity with the city’s past became integral to the identity of Rome’s citizens and visitors. Yet in an environment where the artistic and literary evidence of monuments was more readily accessible than the physical, mistakes in identification were not uncommon. Using as a case study the Augustan era Ara Pacis Augustae, this article demonstrates that such inaccuracies were not unimportant. Disjunction of the intellectual record with a largely unknown site engineered a false memory of the monument. This created a subjective, yet potent, urban experience and practice. Disseminated in popular texts, inaccurate intellectual formation of urban artefacts impacted not only upon the ghosted ancient Rome, but also the early modern landscape. This article presents a new insight into the power of the historical lens to inform understanding and creation of the early modern city.


Created Memories: (Mis)identification of Monuments in Early Modern Rome

The way Bucharest has been seen by Central and Western Europeans has always been important for the modern development of the city, especially since its character has for a long time been considered as having less of a town and more of a village. Likely, this peculiar opinion (together with other material conditions) has been at the basis of the apparent unconditional adoption of models and features specific to the Western standard, starting with the second half of the 19th century. The same opinion has also been shared by the inhabitants.
This paper describes the evolution of two old streets in Bucharest, thus offering samples of the specific transformation undergone by the whole city from a spontaneous to a regulated type of development; it is a testimony to a nuanced process where partial adjustments simultaneously modernized the city without changing it completely and succeeded in shaping its own, genuine personality. The two case studies are based on larger researches meant to substantiate future interventions in the protected areas of the city; they approach the issue of the urban tissue as a feature of urbanity (the urban tissue being seen as the physical form taken by local urban culture). The case studies focus on the changes in urban fabric at the advent of modern planning, and on the manner these changes are mirrored in the urban image. This option is motivated not only by the fact that, usually, most of the judgments on a town are defined simply by the way in which it is seen, but also by the imminence of the moment, as Bucharest is once again about to change its looks, primarily on the account of real estate speculations tending to dramatically increase building density.


Building Urbanity in Bucharest

_Los Angeles. The Architecture of Four Ecologies_ was published in 1971. Reyner Banham's reflections are not the only considerations that describe the change in thinking about architecture and the city in the years that marked a turning point between modernism and postmodernism. In 1966, Aldo Rossi published _L'architettura della città_, outlining a further possible critical reading of the “urban.”
Reyner Banham traced the lines of a Pop aesthetic that finds its applications and its theoretical foundations in art, outlining, albeit through critical naivety or ideological adherence to capitalist consumerism, a Zeitgeist of the “Pop age.” Aldo Rossi structured theoretical assumptions attributable to the reflections made by Ernesto N. Roger, Giuseppe Samonà and the Scuola di Venezia, with the aim to establish “continuity” between modernity and post-modernity through an indissoluble relationship between “history” and “form.”
Considering the urban as a “work of art” comprised of different artistic manifestations, the two texts can be interpreted as two analytical and operating paradigms which formalize concepts and principles of two different cultural milieu of the “Second Machine Age.”


Reyner Banham and Aldo Rossi. Two Possible Urban Images of the “Second Machine Age”

The epicenter of all large-scale radical protests in modern Ukraine has been Kiev’s central square, called Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square). Ten years ago, during the Orange Revolution of 2004, the Ukrainians stood their ground on the Maidan after a rigged election. The more recent events, which rallied the nation even more, have made Maidan a generic name synonymous with freedom and dignity.
The architectural history of the place has played an important role in the formation of the Ukrainian national identity.
National identity is the key component of any state’s national idea and the state itself. In architecture, features of identity manifest themselves in the formation of the main public spaces and the appearance of built-up areas. Urban spaces embody society’s values. This means that in the process of its development, it is essential to ensure the conservation of the city’s identity.
This is why the main objective of Ukrainian society at the moment is to assert its own identity and create its own imagery. Therefore, public zones of the capital of a democratic country should be transformed to emphasize its democratic character and perform other socially important functions.
The visual image of the Independence Square and the Maidan as a catchword have become a symbol of the just struggles of a nation and its self-identification process. Now it is up to architects to underscore its meaning with architectural means.



The Architectural Image of Kiev’s Central Square as a Symbol of National Identity

For over a century, many American cities have turned their downtowns into derelict environments. These areas contain unique architectural features and have made huge investments in infrastructure that would be costly to recreate elsewhere. As a result, many organizations, individuals, and communities have tried to return historic downtowns to profitability by restoring their centers and preserving their city's heritage.
This essay analyzes the different strategies and practices used to preserve the historical center of Savannah, Georgia. It is a colorful history that begins with the civil disobedience of seven feisty elderly women in the 1950s. Several years later, the city's core received designation as a National Historic Landmark. Eventually, Hollywood producers gave it a starring role in John Berendt's _Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil_. Each of these attempts to marry heritage with urban revitalization eventually lost its effectiveness and led to calls for further action. Savannah's most recent attempt to transform itself into a college town has been the most successful solution thus far. This article introduces each strategy as well as the people and motivations behind it, traces the impact of each strategy's application on the physical and social fabric of the city, evaluates the relative success of each strategy, and discusses their applicability for the rejuvenation of other cities.


From Good Looks to Substance: Savannah’s Numerous Attempts at Self-preservation

This paper would contribute to a definition of urbanity as a negotiated construction of heterotopia — an in-between space where place, community and language meet. In comparing narratives on spatial memory through the perspective of a language on the verge of extinction, my purpose is to highlight the link that native speakers may create between cityscape and community. I examine the media representations of urbanity and spatial alterity at the street level, in a multilingual setting, and in a physical environment that is severely constrained. I have gathered a coherent corpus of information on trans-linguistic urbanity, and selected a number of scenes on Macau’s heterotopia from Hollywood movies, public ads from colonial Hong Kong, Cantopop songs, and video clips in or on Patuá. Within this limited corpus, I have focused on instances of transition, and the mechanisms of parallelism and parody. This has led me to conclude that urbanity is a key element to understanding the significance of place in the relationship between dominant and subaltern languages and cultures.


Rua de Macau 澳門街 – Heterotopic Urbanity in the Celebration of Place, Memory and Identity

Cities have been shaped throughout the history by policies and behaviours that have developed from the relation with _the other: _the migrant, the beggar, the poor, the one different through skin colour, language, religious beliefs or everyday practices.
This article will investigate in what way urban spatial transformation is related to the presence of _the other_. It advances the hypothesis that _the other spaces_ (heterotopias in the line of definition that Foucault established in 1967, and which De Cauter and Dehaene have sharpened in 2008) have an established even historical function in the city which is that of mediating habitual conflicts between _oikos_ – the private and _agora_ – the public. But when those with ambiguous status, the other _others_ – such as the Romanian Roma migrating to Berlin – use them for the negotiation of their condition and claims, these urban sites cave in under the complexity of the contradictions. We are witnessing the emergence of new types of spaces that function as loopholes, fragmented borders, exposed enclosures.
Apart from posing a serious intellectual and functional challenge to both planners and users of the city, these spaces are an important indicator: they are the urban spatial manifestation of various scales of socio-political and economical conflicts. They can become new instruments to enquire and articulate knowledge about the city, while their ambiguous and conflictual nature could be explored for potential urban renewal.


Of Other Spaces in Berlin: On Urban Transformation and Romanian Roma

On October 30, 1975, in response to president Gerald Ford’s refusal to bail out New York City, the _New York Daily News _covered its front page with the now infamous headline, “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” Reprivatizing the economy thus became the official answer to New York City’s fiscal disorder. However, the official answer did not stimulate contentment among New Yorkers who watched as their neighborhoods deteriorated and crime rates surged. Some of these New Yorkers sought reprieve in hardcore punk, a powerful new sound and style that began spreading across the U.S. in the late 1970s. Thus, while the city dropped dead, hardcore punk began rising from New York’s squats and attempted to construct a space detached from the influence of ineffectual city officials and inner-city violence. Through images, lyrics, fanzines, and local media, the author examines the intersection of hardcore punk and New York City. During the 1980s, New York City’s economic failure, subsequent decline in infrastructure, and increase in crime and drug abuse directly influenced a burgeoning hardcore scene. Hardcore sought to create an inclusive alternative to New York’s deteriorating streets and the dangers they presented. However, as a reaction to the streets it attempted to subvert, hardcore necessitated recognition of the city's structural challenges and thus fell prey to hypermasculine norms akin to those typified by the affliction of New York’s streets.


Don’t Forget the Streets: New York City Hardcore Punk and the Struggle for Inclusive Space

The strong links (or even synonymy) between the concepts of “civil society” and “urbanity” have accompanied the history of the European city ever since Early Modernity; yet during the last decades of the 20th century the shift of focus from civil society to questions of governance have come to the forefront of public attention.
My paper explores the relations between the Romanian post-socialist civil society and the gradual acknowledgement of an urban conscience, in relation to the controversial recent projects developed by the municipality of Bucharest. Timidly starting in the early 2000, this conscience has acquired more and more self-awareness since 2010. I look at the context defined by radical urban changes combined with the growth of an educated, western-oriented, middle-class in search of identity. The rise of this new urban generation_ _has triggered a new attitude towards the destiny of the city, as well as an unprecedented series of street movements dedicated to urban issues (2011 -2013). The paper examines the extent, intensity and character of these processes, trying to map the associations between the social and political origins of these movements and the urban issues at stake.


Urbanity and Civil Society. The Rise of a New Urban Generation in Bucharest during the 2000s

After _The Urban Revolution_ (1970), the following book written by Henri Lefebvre and published at Gallimard was _The Differentialist Manifesto_. He wrote this Manifesto with the conviction that the world of difference is another manner of thinking, acting and living, and later on he elaborated on the right to difference as a condition to provide the right to centrality in the city. To build an understanding of Lefebvre's dialectical thinking requires, nevertheless, explorations of his writings across their continuum. Thus I bridge in this essay the insights of these two crucial works, which form the basis of my argument for affirming differences without exclusion within an ideal of civil urbanity.
This theoretical journey was inspired by the ongoing political processes regarding the conception and implementation of collective forms of housing, workspace and living in Zurich, Switzerland. As they hint at the social role of spatial designers as citizen-activists, I suggest further that their civic presence and their role as communication vessels have the potential to revive the relevance of the spatial design professions.


Urbanity and the Right to Difference

The post-socialist urban restructuring of Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, has been characterized by substantial changes in the city’s built tissue, which in the housing sector were manifested through the marginalization of the neighborhood structure, segregation of the housing stock and intensification of building activities in the city’s periphery. As a result, the uneven transformation of the city was followed with changing perspectives of urbanity that are still present at city level.
This research deals with the transformation of the built fabric in the city of Skopje, which will be studied at a neighborhood level. Specifically, we will provide a comparative overview of two neighborhoods in Skopje, which were built during and following the socialist period. We will analyze patterns of residential divergence due to different organizational systems of the state and explore the dissimilarities in urban experiences, practices and forms of spatiality.
We will finally argue that the housing neighborhoods in Skopje built both throughout the period of socialism and after do not only bring significant changes in the way we understand the city, but they also constitute a clear evidence of the transformed meaning of space and place, a theme of critical importance in urban studies.


Changing Perspectives of Urbanity during Socialism and after: the Case of Two Neighborhoods in Skopje

The urban design practices of the past few decades have relied almost entirely on generic desires, projects and tools. With the globalization of urban visions and behaviours, it seems that authentically local specificities persist and thrive sometimes more in those cities which still rely in one way or another on unplanned processes. Such is the case of most Bucharest city.
Both the concept of urbanity and the behaviour it infers towards the other, the collective and the city itself seem to compete with the type of local spontaneous urban practices specific to informal urbanism. Born from the need to cope with the (post)communist condition, these improvised, diverse and very lively practices seem to denote a divergent culture.
But are these spontaneous behaviours the only ways of coping with both the past and the present in the here and now? Or are they also the emerging signs of a new vernacular, of a new tradition that is, of a culture that shifts over time to result eventually in more coherent behaviours? Is the _bricoleur_ – the main actor of this spontaneous city – introducing a local blend of urbanity and should this alternative path be repressed, ignored or included in the way we think of our cities today and in the future?


The City as Collaborative Field. Tackling Informal Spatial Practices in Bucharest

Claiming the need for constant and critical account of the gestures that shape the urban space, the article puts forth a series of Romanian contemporary urbanity realities and general precepts. This permanent questioning is described as a pedagogical learning method, a _sine qua non_ condition for honest comprehension and progress. While “learning from others” means choosing, adjusting and applying foreign models, “learning from ourselves” is an in-house much more intricate trial and error practice, as it deals with the acceptance of failure. Throughout the text, several local urban practices are compared to the _Baukultur_, a type of necessary planning instrument, that combines design standards with holistic social, environmental, economic visions; through this lens and using several examples, problems of regulations (as not flexible and open ended), participation, decision making (a process lead by politicians with a facultative input by professionals) and finally development are disclosed. Rounding off that urban development is nothing but a continuous learning process, a list of possible matters we can learn from ourselves is provided in the end.


Learning from Ourselves

Toader Popescu. The Romanian Railway Project (1842-1916)

Grigor Doytchinov, Alexandra Ðukić, Cătălina Ioniță (eds.). Planning Capital Cities: Belgrade, Bucharest, Sofia

The initial idea was hardly a new one. Taking a closer look at fundamental matters concerning human habitat by phenomena that, while being specific, fall outside any major development has been tackled for quite a while.1 There are two main reasons for bringing up marginality nonetheless: due to the incommensurable diversity of non-mainstream architectural and urban manifestations, the theme is inexhaustible. Moreover, defining a margin is inherent to every architectural project. Hence, assembling in our journal papers dealing with both conceptual and territorial marginality retains a major interest as a promising approach, as well as an inciting challenge.
Contributors to the present issue of the _sITA _identified, analysed, compared or reformulated different aspects of architectural marginality in so many ways that in the attempt to deal with the task of organising our subject matter further distinctions had to be operated. This is a first benefit brought by the rich material assembled: it is obvious that there is still more to it and that, in order to get the talk about margins in any order, once again, a limit had to be traced. Thus, the fourth issue of the journal will be composed with the “most marginal” part of the paper harvest, while leaving the contributions dealing with the theme of the city itself for the next volume.
The article opening the series is by **Simina Anamaria Purcaru**. In her “Marginalia on the topic of all sorts of margins. Restoring poiēsis in architectur e” she puts her finger on the semantic crisis of the art of building – going back already some two and a half centuries2 –, thus coming to meet the main concern of our profession in this “Age of Divided Representation” 3 and setting the pace for the following papers. By exploring the links, extended over a time span of five and a half centuries, between the architectural theories of Antonio Filarete and Christopher Alexander, the author argues that the fundamental parts of the process of inventing a place, “_poiēsis_, _mimesis _and _praxis_” – the creative progression that continuously shapes the inhabited environment – have changed very little along the way. Restoring poiēsis in architecture would then be equivalent to recovering awareness of the meaning of built spaces, and of the importance of architectural making.
In very much the same line, **Valeria Federighi** is dealing with architecture as exhibition matter. When talking about ways of “Making the brain of the system mad. Or not. Critical encounters between marginal practices and their narrated self”, she chooses to examine architectural meaning by elaborating on the paradoxical status of architectural exhibitions. With rare exceptions,4exhibited architecture is in most cases destined to be reduced to mere second grade representations: drawings, photographs or documentaries. Through such mediation, the encounter between the work of art and its spectators does not take place. Surely, the exhibition fulfils its duty of giving public access to information. Yet the aesthetic experience thus mediated is not essentially architectural, being instead translated in the realm of other genres of visual art.
In Federighi’s interpretation, we find an expression of the marginality of architectural exhibitions _par rapport à _architecture properly speaking. “Mad”-ness comes from moving truly marginal architecture into the mainstream of architectural thinking and practice, like in her two showpieces: the early, Peter and Alison Smithson experiment and the contemporary Torre David phenomenon are discussed and compared to explain the mechanism of this semantic shift. Mixing margin and centre provides to the exhibition space the potential of becoming the very milieu where a new meaning can emerge. It is approaching marginal architecture from within – learning thus more about the relationship between practice and research – that can bring some light to the troublesome semantic blur architecture has been struggling with for so long.
The examples brought in to sustain her argument– the architectural event related to participation, producing an “empowerment of the user” – are inspiringly convincing. They also create a natural threshold towards the next paper in the series: “Informal Structures, an eulogy to making” by **Luísa Alpalhão**. By comparing two kinds of participatory architecture, she successfully illuminates the fundamental distinctions between them, establishing a fertile ground for further debate on this kind of practices. Her paper advocates the importance of a reunion between the making and the inhabiting of a place. Far away from any “arts and crafts” revivalism, Alpalhão’s discourse asks instead for a reinvention of more human – or humane – relationship between dwelling and dweller, as well as between architect and customer.
The connection to the following paper, a case study undertaken by **Ivana Vlaić and Ana Šverko** might seem somewhat awkward: the two authors of the “Analogous urbanism as discourse: Robert Adam and urban space in contemporary Split” are contemplating the fate over millennia of the imperial palace of Diocletian, as seen through the analysis delivered by a third researcher. Departing from reflections on imagining the place (“the space before method”) their essay is formulated on purpose to rhyme with the kind of story telling as practised by Borges or Eco. The multiplicity of mirrored images, associations brought about by the continuous inhabiting by marginal generations of squatters of a built ensemble initially meant to be highly representative (although situated in a small provincial city of the empire, as well as on the seashore) are in many aspects intimately close to the idea of spontaneous participatory architecture discussed in the previous article. Moreover, while the palace has remained in the same place, borders, peoples, mores have never ceased moving over and around, putting it an ever changing prospect.
This sort of comparative history, establishing conceptual, symbolic, but also trivial, everyday links between margins distant both in time and space, is also related to the morphologically different, but anthropologically quite sympathetic case study proposed by **Cristina Purcar**, when examining the “Liminal Perspectives between Art and Urban History. Paul Delvaux’s Pictorial Poetic of the Railway Periphery”. The painter’s idiosyncratic – even obsessive – rendering of this peculiar urban realm, equally emphasising strangeness and universality, through the intrusive presence of the railway areas inside every traditional cityscape, could hardly be surpassed when it comes to articulate the impact of the industrial revolution on the urban habitat.
Another way of talking about marginality at the same time symbolic, conventional and geographical, and of reconnecting to the idea of centre placed on the borderline is the article of **Irina Băncescu**, “Reclaiming a land of overlapping frontiers: the Romanian seaside landscape until the beginning of the 20th century”. It is a nuanced, carefully woven analysis of many different disciplinary strata: the evolution of seaside landscape in Western imagery brings into discussion the eternal ambiguity of the seashore, at the same time a borderline and a linking medium, a bond between remote parts of the inhabited world. In the particular case of the recently acquired Romanian Black Sea province of Dobruja, the simultaneity of the emergence of modern historical mythology and the new, culturally enhanced interest for the seaside gives a unique flavour to these explorations. The story is set in the broader European context, irreversibly altered by the industrial revolution. Thus, margins, borders, limits of all sorts, as well as a whole tradition of spatial _Gestalt _are in fact being questioned.
Uncertain borderlines and seashore are also the departure point for the next article, dealing with a somewhat mythical episode of early twentieth century history. For a short interval, the Cadrilater has been the southernmost province of Romania. In his paper: “On the Nation’s Margins. Territorial and Urban Policies during the Romanian Administration of Southern Dobruja (1913-1940)”, **Toader Popescu** explores the architectural and urban marks left behind by the short-lived Romanian sovereignty here. While doing so, he achieves a subtle analysis of the intricate interconnections between geographical and historical context, political decision, individual caprice and artistic skill that together shape the face of the inhabited world. The Cadrilater appears as a marginal province handled marginally, a marginal historical episode of Romania, a country playing a marginal part in the epoch. Yet, the case study can stand for every case of colonisation as seen through the spatial effects left behind.
The advent of Greater Romania, in the aftermath of the Great War, meant of course the tracing of new borders. It also brought about the necessity of administrative reforms unprecedented both in terms of scale and pace. **Diana Mihnea**’s “The Cities of Transylvania and the 1921 Agrarian Reform. Negotiations and Decisions Halfway Between Administrative Autonomy and Centralization” naturally follows Popescu’s account on the Cadrilater experience, by extending its geographical margins, as well as by discussing the aspects that made the case of Transylvania different in so many regards. The author’s analysis of the Agrarian Reform provides original interpretations of its effects on the physical reality of the province. Perhaps the major interest of the article is its way of understanding the mechanisms, through which the encounter between political project, local traditions and individual decisions shapes the world we live in.
Social, cultural and artistic interferences are at the core of **Alice Isabella Sullivan**’s contribution, “Architectural Pluralism at the Edges: The Visual Eclecticism of Medieval Monastic Churches in Eastern Europe”. By comparing morphological similarities and dissimilarities between ecclesiastical buildings in the wider region of South-eastern Europe, the author discovers and convincingly presents the vivid intensity of cultural exchange in a territory situated at the intersection of multiple influences. Her paper brings a fresh and telling account of an epoch and a place unconscious of their own marginality, thus reigniting the fertile debate about the relativity of cultural reference systems we are accustomed to.
Down Under has lost its unpleasant undertone a long time ago. It comes to mind inevitably, when placing **Monique Webber**’s contribution: “Monumental marginalia: Borders of space and authority in contemporary Melbourne” in the context of the present issue. Proud of their remoteness in relation to Europe, Australia is the very embodiment of the relativity of the centre-margins relation. Expressed through a particular case study – the sculpture Webber concentrates her attention on – the connections between urban milieu and artistic significance gain, quite unexpectedly, universal meaning, revealing at the same time the fragile contingency of a given place and time and the resilience of the “immaterial” components any human habitat.
When tackling “The Liberation of Identity. The Margin Redraws the Museum – a preliminary study” **Catrìona Macdonald** is perhaps extending the idea of the museum beyond its customary margins. She certainly reformulates it. While admitting that we are essentially dealing with a modern phenomenon, the author also makes an inspiring attempt to argue in favour of the reinvention of the institution as an important (although marginal) component of our post-industrial identities.
Related naturally to the previous text, few architectural phenomena appear more remote from the centre than the barely emerging heritage conservation practices in Romania, towards the end of the century before the last. Hence, **Cosmin Minea**’s case study of “The Monastery of Curtea de Argeş and Romanian Architectural Heritage in the Late 19th Century” is quite well fitting as the next chapter of the story on marginality. Even the idea of the museum was relatively new in this part of the continent, gaining speed in its belated modernisation. While being an ancient and important religious centre, Curtea de Argeş became the object of a rather questionable restoration undertaken by a pupil of Viollet-le-Duc, who has ended up practising his metier at the margins of both the conservationist culture and of monument restoration.
In her contribution **Dana Vais** praises “The productive role of margins. Architectural discourse in the late 1960s Romania”. Surprisingly, perhaps, Romania during the Merry Sixties was less different from the rest of the world than is usually considered – when looking from the “centre”. Sneaking in through the meshes of the totalitarian regime, the architectural discourse – at the margins of the official political doctrine of those times – the author is framing the discussion between its two extremes, which are participatory architecture and “ordered” architecture. Margins mingled with coerced centralism offers the fascinating prospect of improbable freedom of thought and creativity thriving within the strictest of political and ideological arrangements.
Maverick to some extent, **Giacomo Pala**’s contribution brings in the recurrent topic of utopia. His argument goes along the borderline between the utopian project and actual building practices, especially as illustrated by the oeuvre – and often theories – of contemporary _starchitects_. Extended between the reality of what Karl Popper calls the “abstract cultural world”, and the reality of a built environment often looking oblivious of its context, Pala’s argument arrives to determine the margin as architectural-ness, with recourse to a plethora of authors and a discourse as labyrinthine as marginality. It is a fitting attempt to theoretically situate a theme interesting precisely for being so evasive.
Related to the previous scenery by its inherently utopian background, no other topic could better have closed the series of contributions to the present issue of the journal than a story on West Berlin. **Laura Bowie**‘s paper: “Protest and marginalized urban space. 1968 in West Berlin” is an inquiry conducted at the margins of the issue of marginality, dealing masterfully with both fundamental theoretical issues and the concrete physical example of a surrealistic, yet real case study. However, if it closes the volume, the article does not close the circle. This would be misleading, because the theme is an open one by its nature. Being a successful piece of historical and theoretical hybrid, Bowie’s “tale of two cities” is well suited to work as a springboard towards the next issue of _sITA_, which is already destined to be dealing with the physical, specifically urban sense of the idea of the boundary and its neighbourhoods.
The journal will next articulate its approach on margins in the context of the _Urbs-and-civitas_, an eternal and inevitable couple, of which architects and urban planners of today are much too often oblivious. It will perhaps succeed in widening the discussion, by moving it away from the exclusive sphere of academia and specialists in the public realm. It will with no doubt be necessary to involve the fertile corroboration of different disciplines in imagining the theoretical grounds for practical urban planning.
Nevertheless, even when bringing closer the margins of the subject matter, one should expect the unexpected: “In getting my books,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in 1844, “I have always been solicitous of an ample margin; this is not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of pencilling in suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.” 5
Indeed, what seemed at the beginning to be the reiteration of a useful exercise proved in the end to have been a rather good idea. The articles, besides their individual contribution – each valuable on its own – turned into a well articulated series reaching far beyond their mere sum. The resulting narrative puts on show the very process of theory making – with spectacular forms a meta-narrative, the shadow accompanying the main story, thus exceeding all expectations. So much so that, by generously opening towards a whole new range of approaches to the idea of marginality, this issue of the journal provides a starting point for the next one, where the focus shall be placed on particular cases of marginality in and around cities.
There can be no going back to some revolutionary enthusiasm, like the one that (almost half a century ago!) put in motion the profound societal changes incensed by the _Soixante-huitards_. The new social dimension of architecture and her professionals has meanwhile become an everyday business, even if it is still being kept in a marginal position, perhaps for its own benefit and success. Reflecting about margin as the edge – the physical periphery as materialisation of the psychological one –can reorient the inquiries from the edge as the point of no return towards the edge as inflection point.
Further discussing marginality can provide a good argument against any “either-or” approach, bringing about positions in favour of the sort of creative compromise achieved in more auspicious times of European architectural history. Successful architecture and urban planning can occur even when “great” history has proven to be a great failure6. This remains an ironic observation, considering the fact that in relation to great history, architecture, both in theory and practice, must always play a much lesser part – definitely a marginal one.
NOTES
1 As a matter of fact, one could easily think about organising the centennial celebrations It will be enough to point at the exemplary new directions invented by and descendant from the scholarly oeuvre of Fernand Braudel.
2 One could put forward a historically conventional beginning of the semantic crisis coinciding with the advent of architects like Jean-François Blondel, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux or Étienne-Louis Boullée. See also Joseph Rykwert, _The Judicious Eye; Architecture Against the Other Arts_, Reaction Books, London, 2008.
3 Title of a seminal work by Dalibor Veselý, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2004.
4 As I noted elsewhere: “Natura genului”, in _BOLT_, exhibition diary number 02, Bucharest, 2009. The Romanian pavilion at the 2008 edition of the Venice Biennial made a notable exception to the rule, putting on show a hybrid installation, in which artistic architectural photography, ephemeral architectural space and usable architectural pieces of furniture (namely, chairs) were combined to result in an exhibit that _was _architecture.
5 Quoted by Mark O’Connell, “The Marginal Obsession with Marginalia” in _The New Yorker_, January 26, 2012.
6 The example of Gustavo Giovannoni’s theory and practice of urban _arredamento_, contemporary with the oeuvre of architects working during the Italian fascism is a good illustration of both the relative autonomy of architecture and of the productive, although improbable accommodation of difficult partnerships.


Introduction. Inquiries on the Idea of Margins in the Theory of Architecture and Urban Planning

The paper attempts to explore the margins in architecture in terms of theory, not as a theorization of the concept, but as an approach to a marginal theory - marginal, because, although meaningful to architecture in our times, it is still away from the mainstream: the poetics of architecture. There’s no lyric utopianism in it; as a matter of fact, it calls upon the Greek _poiēsis _as creative process. In this key, the text follows possible contemporary echoes in a critical inquiry of two peculiar architectural writings, arising from different times – the Renaissance and the present – but having a common feature – reinforcing the value of “making”: Filarete’s _Trattato di Architettura _(around 1464) and Christopher Alexander’s _Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth _(2012). Both writings – “construction diaries” of an ideal citadel and a college campus – address _poiēsis_, _mimesis _and _praxis_, as creative process, creative interpretation and practical life in the attempt of building living environments. Restoring _poiēsis _in architecture lies within the act of creation itself, questioning the idea of wholeness and the condition of the architect in relation to partners, beneficiaries and towards profession itself.


Marginal Theory. Restoring Poiēsis in Architecture

Practices of architecture, which are by their very ambition marginal to the discipline – such as declaredly transgressive practices and practices that tackle the informal dimension of the built environment – are occasionally (though strategically) appropriated by the grand narrative of mainstream architectural discourse. The effect of this transition is twofold: on the one hand, it produces a consistent increase in the impact of these practices by virtue of their enhanced visibility; on the other, the contradictory side to challenging the discipline from within its boundaries is evident, as the paradox of dissidence is that its success is “secured by the annihilation of itself”. The paper will analyze two such instances of appropriation - the _Patio and Pavilion _installation at Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956, and the _Torre David/Gran Horizonte _at the Venice Biennale in 2012, and unpack its effects both on the practices themselves and on the disciplinary discourse.


Making the Brain of the System Mad. Or Not. Critical Encounters between Marginal Practices and Their Narrated Self

With the proliferation of participatory architectural interventions over the past decades (Blundell Jones, 2005) an emergence of constructions with a DIY aesthetics has converted an otherwise marginal style into a familiar and accepted form of alternative beauty (see the works of _raumlabor_, Marjetica Potrč, _atelier d’architecture autogerée_, amongst others). The use of reclaimed everyday materials, re-invented in unexpectedly creative ways triggered a new design language that reflects the current period of uncertainty and scarcity of resources.
This paper will look into the analogy between, on the one hand, contemporary vernacular constructions that emerge from need and result in inventive, pragmatic constructions of unique beauty, responsive to specific geographical and social contexts (Coxito, 2014) and faithful to the available materials and skills of those who make them, as illustrated in Álvaro Domingues’ documentation of marginal constructions across Portugal, and on the other hand, contested constructed spaces of resilience that embed the everyday life practices (de Certeau 1984) of those who co-produce them along with architects and artists. The paper will investigate both the formal and material qualities of these two types of constructions (intuitive or premeditated) and their social role in nurturing creative environments by re-restoring the desire to work with one’s own hands (Sennett, 2008; Ingold, 2013).


Informal Structures. An Eulogy to Making

Through an analysis of the consonances between the architecture and urban design of the Late Antique Diocletian’s Palace in Split, and the architecture that drew upon it in neoclassical London (including the Adelphi Terrace of Robert Adam and Somerset House of Sir William Chambers), the Croatian urban planner Ivana Šverko developed a considered account of the role of urban space in underdeveloped and peripheral areas of contemporary Split. Šverko’s collected ideas are characteristically original, and distinct from the kind of research usually based in an analysis of architectural and urban planning typology. In this paper we follow, and endeavour to develop further, her distinctive approach.
Robert Adam (1728-1792) appropriated the architectural philosophy of Diocletian’s Palace that he had explored on the ‘peripheral’ shores of the Adriatic, and transposed many of its qualities into his British designs. In this paper, we apply his interpretation of this hybrid, adaptable building to urban landscapes on the periphery of Split. By pursuing Adam’s interpretation of the Palace, an architectural reading that stemmed from his five-week stay in Split during his European Grand Tour (1754-1758) and was published in the _Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia _(London, 1764), we identify an archetype of urban design that can be used in reflections upon the urban space of contemporary Split. This archetype will be elucidated in two specific environments on the edge of town, both of which were created during the second half of the twentieth century. One of these spaces was illegally built, unplanned, and self-organised; the other was built according to established principles of urban plan and design, but without any proper articulation of urban space in relation to its physical and functional urban contexts.
In this paper we test out our experience of the marginalised urban space within contemporary Split through two methodological approaches: the historical and the empirical. Our objective is to indicate opportunities for the identification and foregrounding of the hidden qualities of urban spaces created by runaway development (that is, spaces formulated without the benefit of architects or town planners) but as a result of the immediate needs of the inhabitants.


Analogous Urbanism as Discourse. Robert Adam and Urban Space in Contemporary Split

This article investigates the construction of marginal railway cityscapes in the painting of the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux (1897-1994). Marginal sources like art and literary history may provide unexpected insights into architectural and urban history. Likewise, a marginal, urban-historical reading of Delvaux’s oeuvre might cross-fertilize art-historical interpretations. It might highlight how his artistic vision critically evaluated urban reality by distilling strong iconographic statements, painterly parti pris, which may, at their turn, influence individual or collective cultural perceptions of architecture and the city. We argue that Delvaux’s work both contributes towards and expresses the emergence of a taste for the industrial and the minor urban heritage, just like the eighteenth-century capricci painters, such as Pannini, Piranesi, Hubert or Guardi famously contributed to the dissemination of a taste for Antiquity.
It is during the late 1950s and the 1960s that Delvaux creates a particular body of railway-inspired work, rendering the railway periphery poetically, as a place of revelation and enchantment. Delvaux’s paintings anticipate, inspire and profoundly resonate with the interest of the post-war literary avant-gardes in the poetry of banality. The contrast between the major railway works going on in central Brussels and Delvaux’s contemporary painting is read as an intentional reaction to the dialectics between (urban) history and historicity. By sublimating the railway landscape of the periphery into dream-like, poetic images, Delvaux foretells, and subtly resonates with, the emergence in the 1960s - 1970s of the post-war urban conservation movement, wherein Belgium and Brussels played a key role.


“A Fabulous Painting in which I Would Live” Paul Delvaux’s Pictorial Poetic of the Railway Periphery between Art and Urban History

This research focuses on the marginal condition of the north-west Black Sea coast, until the beginning of the 20th century. Remote and uncertain, this piece of land was located at the extremities of dominant empires and frequently at the centre of political disputes. Bordering a stormy sea that could bring both friends and enemies into its poorly defended harbours, completely isolated from the mainland by the Danube and by the hostile and deserted Dobrudja steppe, this strip of coast struggled to confront its inherent luminal condition. All these overlapping frontiers and social textures slowly determined a hybrid cultural identity, giving it layered meanings, among which its marine condition stood out as a defining feature.
What was the role of the sea in shaping the symbolic identity of Constanţa? Does its imaginary have any consequences on the urban fabric? Even if, as Charles King says, the images and their mental associations might not be that obvious, they do exist and this article tries to highlight the importance of the sea as a defining agent of local history, synthetically exposing the story of the becoming of the coastal landscape. By framing a cultural perspective on this borderland, the study retraces the gradual processes of discovery, construction and identification with the seascape, highlighting social, cultural, economic and politic effects. By alternating objective analysis with subjective views such as testimonials from travellers and locals with various professional backgrounds, the text proposes a concise critical reading of both the physical context of the seaside and the cultural imaginary that impregnated it, from distant contemplation to the pragmatic invention of beach practices.
A series of economic and political events during the second half of the 19th century turned the Romanians’ face towards the sea: Dobrudja and the Black Sea officially attracted the attention of authorities, elites and the entire society. The text focuses on this temporal interval when significant changes took place on the Black Sea shore, and follows its transformation until the beginning of World War I. The case study is Constanţa, as it successfully embodied all the contrasts and changes taking place during this period.


Reclaiming a Land of Overlapping Frontiers. The Romanian Seaside until the 20th Century

Southern Dobrudja (the “Cadrilater”) was granted to Romania in 1913, after the Second Balkan War. During the almost three decades of Romanian administration, the authorities embarked on an ambitious colonization and nation-building process.
In just twenty-seven years, the share of Romanian population soared from only 2.3% in 1913 to 29.1% in 1940. The paper looks into this dramatic demographic shift and into its territorial aspects. It investigates the instrumental role played by territorial and urban policies in the Romanian project of integrating (both symbolically and functionally) this marginal province within the narratives and the structures of the Romanian nation.
Our conclusion is that, even though this enterprise started on good premises, and although the central authorities in Bucharest did extensively use territorial and urban policies as nation-building tools, a combination of internal and external factors (among which marginality – both geographic and imaginary – was crucial) led to the ultimate failure of the project.


On the Nation’s Margins. Territorial and Urban Policies during the Romanian Administration of Southern Dobrudja (1913-1940)

During the interwar period, the agrarian reform had a major impact on the cities of Transylvania, leading not only to drastic reductions of the communal estates, but also, in some cases, to massive expansions of the urban areas. The decisions that generated these changes were taken by specially constituted bodies; in many cases, that happened without any regard to the cities’ development plans, and without the municipalities’ approval. Thus, the first interwar decade was characterized by great turmoil, as the authorities of at least 23 cities challenged these decisions in court. Since the agrarian legislation of Transylvania was issued shortly after the Union, during a transitional phase, when the region was semi-autonomous, the authorities in Bucharest had not been aware of the situation until 1925. The gap between local and central administrative institutions during the first years after the _Great Union _and a series of deficiencies of the agrarian legislation allowed for the advancement of a decision-making process that had profound implications on Transylvanian cities, and for which there were no legal control mechanisms. The cities of Transylvania found themselves in a marginal, ambiguous position: no longer autonomous and not fully adopted by the administrative system of Romania.


Cities of Transylvania and the 1921 Agrarian Reform. Negotiations and Decisions Halfway Between Administrative Autonomy and Centralization

Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, the regions around the Carpathian Mountains and the northern parts of the Balkan Peninsula stood at the margins of both the Western and Eastern Roman Empires. While at the crux of various cultural and spiritual realms— Western European, Byzantine, Slavic, and even Islamic—select elements from distinct artistic traditions shaped the architectural vocabularies of local monuments to surprising results. This is especially evident in the monastic churches (or katholika) of the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries from regions such as Serbia, Bulgaria, and the Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. This article considers the compound visual and architectural vocabularies of select katholika built under princely patronage in Eastern European zones of generative creativity during the medieval period that reflect contemporary dynamics of cultural contacts in certain regions, and also demonstrate the delicate dialogue between the visual and the political dimensions of princely patronage in the ecclesiastical sphere at key historical moments. The analysis relies on the formal features of the monastic churches and their spatial articulations, as it seeks to demonstrate that stylistic pluralism persisted, to various degrees, in the architecture of Eastern European churches, and katholika in particular, well into the sixteenth century.


Architectural Pluralism at the Edges. The Visual Eclecticism of Medieval Monastic Churches in Eastern Europe

In the early 1980s the Australian city of Melbourne asserted its cultural authority with a redesigned city square. To complete the new urban architecture, Ron Robertson-Swann created _Vault_. With its vaulted steel structure, the sculpture’s blurring of art and architecture epitomised the cultural optimism of its space. Its role as architectural complement was, however, short-lived. Following an unprecedented public outcry at its challenging form, _Vault _was removed from the city centre and repeatedly relocated at its fringe. An object initially designed to ornament architecture, the sculpture came to define its original and subsequent spaces. As liminal spaces acquired an object that was not designed for them, their identities were altered by its presence. Disconnected from its original architectural context, _Vault _in turn strayed from its intended function as a sculpture to assume a marginal history as a monument. As the debate over _Vault_’s relationship with space deepened, this ‘monumental marginalia’ entered Melbourne’s cultural dynamics. The sculpture/architecture, exiled to the urban periphery, became a device for exploration of place and identity. Through the history of _Vault _and its architectural and artistic reception, this article inquires into who defines the boundaries of urban architectural discipline, authority, and identity.


Monumental Marginalia. Borders of Space and Authority in Contemporary Australia

With the Palestinian Museum opening in May this year and the recently successful fundraising campaign for Faheem Majeed and Jeremiah Hulsebros-Spofford’s Floating Museum in Chicago, it would be tempting to suggest that we are entering a new praxis of the marginal in the museum. A hallowed place once reserved for the cultural élite, the concept of the museum has a history embedded in imperialist gains and repressed losses. Often intimidating, the problems of access, interpretation and representation in museums trouble architects, curators and exhibition designers alike. To what extent must the typology of a museum building both reflect and enable the marginal artefacts contained within? How can you design a functioning museum without producing something that enhances its ideologies? Is it possible to design a museum of the margins or is the term “museum” too loaded? Can the concept of “museum” be more flexible in order to keep up with the cultural world as it is now? Perhaps we need to move beyond the museum; perhaps the museum itself is dead.


The Liberation of Identity. The Margin Redraws the Museum – a Preliminary Study

The first attempts at defining what was perceived in the 19th century as a “Romanian” architectural style and at creating a national architectural heritage had at the forefront the 16th century monastery of Curtea de Argeș. Its 19th century discovery in the first modern architectural studies, its display in world exhibitions and finally its restoration illustrate how old monuments in Romania came to be used as proof and visual illustration of the country’s national history and thus as symbols of the new state. The paper aims to show that architecture gradually came to prominence in the process of nation-building through the example of Curtea de Argeș and, at the same time aims, to draw a new light on the way in which national ideologies are constructed. The example of the architectural heritage reveals a dual impetus from both local and foreign actors, events or publications, proving how national histories and ideologies are constructed at the borderline between foreign ideas and actors, on the one hand, and local decision-makers, on the other. The paper looks at Curtea de Argeș monastery as the central subject to a number of events and publications from mid to late 19th century. It starts with the first art history study on an artwork from Romania, the volume on Curtea de Argeș by the Habsburg scholar Ludwig Reissenberger. Reissenberger’s work raised awareness of the architectural heritage, stirred debates and responses from the Romanian intellectuals like, for instance, the writings on architecture of Dimitrie Berindei and Alexandru Odobescu. All these three works have only been briefly mentioned in the literature and are for the first time considered at length. The next part culminates with the display of Curtea de Argeș at the 1867 Paris Universal Exhibition where for the first time the monument stood as a symbol of the new Romanian state. In the final chapter the paper looks at the long but lavish restoration of Curtea de Argeș. Carried out between 1875-1886 by the French architect Andre Lecomte du Noüy, it marked the moment when the monastery became the landmark of the new Romanian state. The paper concludes at the end of the 19th century when the Romanian architectural heritage began to take shape and fulfil its role as support for the national narrative and basis for the future National Style in architecture. Overall, the architectural heritage emergences at the crossroads of foreign and local inputs, involving writings, exhibitions, restorations and research, all focused around Curtea de Argeș Monastery.


The Monastery of Curtea de Argeș and Romanian Architectural Heritage in the Late 19th Century

This paper has two aims. The first is to investigate the notion of _margins _and its relevance to architectural discourse. The second is to cast a new perspective on the 1960s Romanian architecture by using the same concept. Margins are considered as both an instrument and an object of study.
Margins are a versatile notion. They send to _marginality_, the way post-modern cultural theory addressed the concept, but they can also have meanings such as _margins of quest_,_margins of error_, or _edges_. The paper re-reads the architectural discourse in 1960s Romania through the lens of this variable notion. In spite of the relative freedom that characterized the period, this discourse evolved in the margin of the political power’s discourse. By comparatively analysing two architects, Nicolae Porumbescu and Mircea Alifanti and the different use they made of their marginal condition – strong and weak, respectively –, the paper investigates how _margins _can give a critical potential to discourses that are _not _ones of opposition.


The Productive Role of Margins. Architectural Discourse in the Late 1960s Romania

In this paper an attempt is made to define “margin” from a disciplinary standpoint. First, “generic” design is identified as the characteristic of cities where real estate proliferates freely. Therefore, the essay pinpoints historical attempts of using the notion of the margin as a tool enabling the development of a radical alternative to the generic. Consequently, a number of artistic and architectural projects are discussed (Superstudio’s “Continuous Monument” and Rem Koolhaas’ “Exodus”). In these projects architecture is itself a margin, a boundary: a mega-shape that functions as a limit between reality and utopia. Still, these projects may seem to escape from reality, being daydreams. This leads the paper to investigate the possibility of Architecture to be a margin that negotiates utopia with reality. Such a possibility is spotted in projects such as the Barbican Centre in London: complex structures that use the margin as a tool for negotiating the utopia of an ideal world and the capitalist generic city. Several specific studies (among which Banham, Jencks, Aureli and Šklovskij) are introduced in order to propose a theory for architecture as margin. Finally, a number of questions are introduced in relation to the possibility of architecture understood as margin.


Architecture as a Margin within the Negotiation between Reality and Utopia

This paper will explore the dynamic interface between politics, urban planning, architecture and culture, during the 1968 student protests in walled West Berlin. As a city that lost its function as a capital and its place at the forefront of global politics, the marginalised city, surrounded by the communist East, became place where new ideas about Germany’s identity were trialled and contested. In 1968, students held an exhibition that condemned current construction activities as being anti-social and reflective of greater issues within German society. In brief, the students condemned the zoning of the city, the denial of the past, the displacement of tenants into satellite settlements, and the destruction of nineteenth century tenements. The students campaign caused the remote Märkisches Viertel estate to become a ‘symbolic battleground for a struggle over the values of the modern city’. Thus the reflective connection between society at large and the urban environment was forged. This paper will bring into focus the dynamic and symbiotic relationship between protest and urban space, and demonstrate how the heated issues inherent in West Berlin at the time were both played out and mapped onto the marginalised spaces of the walled city.


Protest and Marginalized Urban Space. 1968 in West Berlin

Hubert Damisch. Noah’s Ark. Essays on Architecture

Elisabeth Axmann. Wege, Städte – Erinnerungen

Ilinca Păun Constantinescu, curator. Shrinking Cities în România. Between Reality and realities – an exhibition

Introduction. Opening Limits

Architecture and the City: the Space of Participation

Urban walls constitute the main element in the relations of a town with its surrounding environment; a relationship that changes over time, determining not just specific economic and social characteristics, but aesthetic and visual factors as well; in other words, elements pertinent to the memory of a given place. Walls mark the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of a territory, the boundary beyond which change occurs.
This contribution aims to compare, by examining the distinctive elements that set them apart, the two urban realities of Cascia and Norcia, two towns situated in the Province of Perugia, in the eastern part of the Umbria region called ‘Valnerina’ (or the Nera River Valley), an area where the risk of earthquakes is high. In both towns, the work done over the centuries on their perimeter walls (full-fledged urban monuments) has played a critical role in the history of the urban settings and the surrounding territory. The wall that surrounds Norcia still exists materially, and retains its figurative significance, with the exception of the portions that collapsed recently; the wall of Cascia, on the other hand, has almost totally disappeared, having collapsed or having been demolished at various points in time, with the result that only a few historic entry gates and ruins still stand. It follows that any approach to preserving and interpreting their formal and aesthetic features must necessarily start from a critical analysis of the two perimeter walls. 


Urban Walls: Examination and Possible Restoration. Two Case Studies

The current urban condition of Lima, Peru is dominated by tension between the preservation of natural and cultural heritage and the housing and economic needs of the people. The need for marginal land by informal settlements threatens the hundreds of urban archaeological sites that are deemed “intangible heritage” and perceived as black holes in the urban fabric. The lack of an effective planning framework and heritage preservation policy, and the loss of meaning of cultural heritage sites and their relationship to the territory, have resulted in the rapid encroachment of the urban fabric over Lima’s inherited natural and cultural landscape. How can these heritage sites be redefined in the collective imagination of the city and more meaningfully integrated into the urban fabric as significant collective spaces?
The _urban boundary _is a powerful protective tool for natural and cultural heritage preservation and an effective structuring device for urban development. By redesigning and strengthening the boundaries of natural and cultural heritage landscapes as connective, productive, and educational collective spaces of exchange rather than separation, the open spaces within can recover their meaning and value, and be collectively protected as cherished cultural assets. 


Reframing Urban Boundaries: Lima’s Urban Black Holes

The paper explores the fate of urban margins using the case of the major housing area built in the city of Skopje after the earthquake of 1963. It was conceived as a housing area through the masterplan of 1965, and through the studies by Doxiadis Associates. It was shaped through an invitation-based competition, which highlighted the vibrant planning scene in the country and the different approaches to housing in the city.
However, the housing development was never completed as envisaged. Almost immediately after the beginning of its construction, at the other end of the planned area an informal settlement appeared. These two areas of planned and unplanned development started approaching each other and halted leaving a large margin area between them.
Rather than using the margin as a possible transition between the two distinctive housing areas, it succumbed to the emerging neo-liberal attitude, which puts emphasis solely on market forces and private ownership, resulting in new spatial inequities, thus producing new margins.
The case shows the inability of the planning profession to react to wider societal changes that leave their distinctive marks in space, often in the shape of margins, unable to sense the potential of these areas and to convert them into creative spaces of transition. 


The Encounter at the Margins of City and Society: the Case of the Aerodrom Housing Area in Skopje

This paper looks at margins as physical as well as social interfaces. While starting from urban and architectural morphology, it tries to link urban space and social practice from a diachronic perspective. The object of the research is Bucharest and the ways in which territorial and architectural limits define its historical development and its current character. My aim is to show that, from the large scale of the city to the one of the urban fabric, Bucharest has been shaped by soft limits, collisions, superposition of unfinished projects, resulting in a particular form of virtual transparency. By contrast, a recent and brutal history and today’s anarchic overall development result in disarticulation, closed places and non-public space. Individual projects and bottom-up initiatives soften hard limits, reinvent transparency and common ground and point to a possible alternative development.


Porosity and Collisions. About Bucharest and its Limits

Arising from the intensive urban development of mid-twentieth century Hong Kong, the composite building, defined as one with domestic and non-domestic functions, embodies the historical tensions between city and home, public and private, producer and consumer, colonial and Chinese, real and ideal, masculine and feminine realms. Between 1959 and 1979, over 1,500 composite buildings above fifteen stories were built throughout the city. Intended to accommodate the emerging industrialized middle class population, the largest composite buildings housed over ten thousand inhabitants within an agglomeration of shops, factories, temples, clinics, crèches, dormitories, hostels, flats, and other spaces. Their architecture and planning demonstrate how developers, planners, architects and builders projected the notions of a consumerist society.
Yet a closer analysis of the multifarious programs, spatial adaptations and contestations within, reveals the human caprice that drives and defines the city. How did these tensions and everyday acts of resistance shape the spaces in the composite buildings and in turn, define and redefine the city? In examining the brief social history of a commonplace building in Hong Kong, this paper unpacks the tropes of the modern Asian metropolis to seek an alternative framework to understand the precarious limits between the urban and the domestic.


The City in a Building: a Brief Social History of Urban Hong Kong

The Quito Papers (2016) formulate in form of a manifesto a vision for the future development of cities. Proclaimed in parallel to the UN-Habitat’s New Urban Agenda by Sennett, Sassen, Clos and Burdett, the Quito Papers advocate for porous, complex and incomplete cities. This is a call for an open system for the city. Within this theoretical framework, the interface between exterior and interior (built) spaces becomes an important aspect. The edge condition between open and enclosed spaces renders as an area of exchange and potential. The work focuses on the public venue through the lens of interior urbanism. What are the benefits of bringing the outside in? What are adequate architectural means – morphological and typological – for creating the necessary synapses between the built environment and its surrounding urban fabric? In more concrete terms, the work questions the capability of privately owned public spaces (POPS) to blur and finally dilute the boundary between the built structure and the adjacent public realm. It investigates paradigmatic instances of interior public spaces within the normative framework of POPS in order to distillate the potentials of this urban tool in the search for an open city strategy.


Interior Public Spaces. Addressing the Inside-Outside Interface

The theme and historiography of Jewish communities in Romania is a topic which has been widely researched, beginning with the 19th century and is still an ongoing inquest. Usually depicted by historians, the subject, however, lacks an architectural and urban overview of the phenomenon in terms of analyzing the relationship between Jewish constructed spaces and their developing urban context — the city. These touristically attractive urban sites, although lacking the proportion of former living communities once encompassed, display, in the majority of cases, an ample built heritage (housing, synagogues, shuls, cemeteries etc.) and spatial remains of Jewish living.
Seen as a constantly marginalized group throughout history, the living patterns of Jewish communities were the result of overlapping between the religious rules within the community and the outside civil laws, local or state. The paper attempts to explore historically accepted notions of Jewish habitation in Diaspora (the _Jewish ghetto_, the _Jewish quarter_, _shtetl_) and a few manifestations in 19th century Moldavian cities. The importance of the _eruv _within the Jewish community, as well as urban local legislation and tendencies of segregation, become key elements in understanding Jewish living space. 


Constructed Jewish Spaces. Exploring Traces in 19th Century Moldavia

This paper examines the role of stylized architectonic elements within civic architecture as a response to new configurations of territory and political administration. The recent regeneration of a major part of Skopje’s center, completed under the title of Skopje 2014, has inspired this analysis of architectural and urban types which are formed by relations between the fragment and the edifice, to speak simultaneously of a bound provision of territory and the fluctuating limits of its margins. While Skopje 2014 has been criticized by both architects and popular news sources, the syncretic assemblage of iconography to reposition the city within new territorial relations is not without precedent.
This research investigates three case studies taken from different periods in time, all within the territories of former Yugoslavia. An analysis of Sarajevo’s town hall designed in 1896, and of Jože Plečnik’s unbuilt proposals for the Slovenian Parliament designed in 1947, focuses on a coalescence in the politico-geographic construction of national identity, and on the fabrication of an architectural representation. These investigations establish the architectural mechanism of reconfiguring foreign tectonics as a trope, and provide a framework for the analysis of Skopje 2014’s representation of national identity. 


The Architecture of Margins: an Exploration of Civic Architecture and its Representation of Political Administration in Sarajevo, Ljubljana, and Skopje

This paper attempts to explain how the concepts of boundary and border (advanced by Sennett in his article “The Open City”) have evolved in American cities as a way to superficially project an idea of social, economic and racial equality, masquerading a tacit intention of neutralizing the critical sense of the populace. The disappearance of the boundaries (as limit between clearly different fields) is tied to the very origin of the American urban life. The Main Street, the urban seed of most of the American cities, was created through a weak organizational system of loose geometries and untied fabrics where the landscape is continuously filtered in the urban perspectives. In this way, the city refused intentionally to be recognized as the boundary of Nature. On the other hand, the Jeffersonian Grid took command of the outside giving the opposite idea that any piece of Nature could be trespassed at any moment by the artificiality of the Cartesian geometry. The unrecognized boundaries between Urban and Nature resulted in a phenomenon where both entities are blended in a characterless space: the suburban sprawl. When the population is dispersed, the spaces for interaction, the borders, lack the critical mass able to activate them. In this deterritorialized assemblage, social activity disappears from the everyday life and is secluded to very specific buildings, mainly the Mall and the Church. In these spaces, the interaction between people has been neutralized by the organized gathering as part of a scripted ritual with very specific routines. The sacralization of both spaces (either by religious or capitalist doctrines) avoids a free interaction or friction between people as a way to mitigate the neutralization of their critical thinking. This is an invisible way in which the _status quo _closes itself into a frictionless fake sociality, providing the idea of a fictional equality, thus hiding a deeper disenfranchisement that renders the city fragile. 


The Fiction of the Equal: Boundary Disappearance and Border Neutralization in the American City

The transformations that our society witnessed during the last century led to a dissolution of limits both in the urban and in the architectural realms. Thus, the old walls and fences became obsolete, only to be replaced by new boundaries. The aim of this article is to identify these new borders, “the fences we build”, and see how and why they have emerged in the contemporary built environment.
The first part of the study is a short review of the evolution of the traditional built limits until their near dissolution in the twentieth century. The context in which the new borders emerged is considered in the second part through the changes occurring in economy and society, as they have determined counteractions and tendencies to construct “refuges” from an ever-changing world.
Some of the narratives through which escapism constructs “ego-systems” – self-sufficient environments cut out from both urban and social contexts – are presented in the third part. The self-sufficiency exhibited by most of the architectural production is analyzed both for the concept-based “theoretical practice” and for the commercial practice which builds on a popular theme to deliver controlled environments, as in the case of the shopping malls or gated communities.


The Fences We Build

Dietmar Steiner. Steiner’s Diary. About Architecture Since 1959

Vassilis Sgoutas. A Journey with the Architects of the World

Re-opening the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. Notes on Non-alignment and the Canonical

Teodor Octavian Gheorghiu. Small Towns / Large Villages in Southwestern Romania. Urban Monographs

Anca Brătuleanu. Interwar Timişoara. Urbanism and Architecture

Irina Tulbure. Architecture and Urbanism in Romania, 1944-1960: Constraint and Experiment

Miruna Stroe. Housing, between Design and Political Decision-making. Romania, 1954-66

The prevalent answer to the rhetorical question of the invitation to this year’s issue of sITA — Politics. Too much or not enough? — seems to suggest that architecture has relinquished its participation in any critical appraisal of the _polis_, and instead indulges itself in designing ever more buildings that contribute to the proliferation of today’s urban environment.
In parallel, the social and political responsibility of building is being examined and tested, as alternative practices and unconventional topics have gained considerable ground in recent years. Participatory architectural practices, crowdfunding and “crowd-building” of the commons, housing for the very poor, temporary shelters for the refugees of natural or human catastrophes, ecological experiments, etc. have all yielded results, other than what may be considered the mainstream architectural production. Either assumed by singular architectural practices or taken up by non-governmental organizations, these stances have been catalyzed by the public debate and the new media, and even consecrated by established institutions of the profession, such as the Pritzker Prize or the Venice Architectural Biennale.
Architects have always been responsive to politics, polities and policies, liberal or authoritarian, by either complying or criticizing, opposing and reacting against them. Over the centuries, the buildings that have participated to the construction of the professional canon have almost always been associated with power structures — either spiritual or temporal. It is only in the more recent history that the relationship between architecture and politics was tensed by a vector that claims architecture’s right and duty in the decision-making process. It is on account of this professional prerogative that architecture has been accused of being weak with respect to politics, either on the grounds of architects’ subservience, or simply because of what is believed to be the inherent weakness of architecture. All these refer to architecture as an active political actor. What seems to fall between the lines of these assertions — the first criticizing architecture’s lack of agency on contemporary politics, and the second focusing on architecture’s socially and politically relevant positions — is an underlying faith in the definitive role that architecture should/must/ought to play in contemporary societies.
This belief is mainly grounded in a disciplinary history that reluctantly acknowledges having significantly influenced the shaping of the built environment throughout the twentieth century. Impersonating the modern artist — a seismograph of society’s deeper concerns and a visionary that shows the path to be followed — this heroic role of the architect and the subsequent importance of architecture itself may very well be attributed to the fantasy of professionals working in the beginning of the twentieth century and to the ingenuity of modern architectural theory and history. This narrative is rooted in the daring statements of the historical avant-gardes; it is confirmed by the endorsement of modernist theories in the post-war years, inflamed by the critical and utopian practices of the 1960s and 1970s, and finally fed by the postmodern alliance with the consumer society. But what if the better half of the twentieth century has only been an exceptional chance encounter between the larger political orientations of society and the architectural culture? What if architecture, as regarded from politics, has always been only a means to an end characterized by a power play, rather than by the “play of masses” that incidentally constitutes our daily living environment? In the end, if choosing between “architecture and revolution” was as urgent as Le Corbusier suggested in 1923, it took more than twenty years and the destructions of a devastating world war to decide in favor of the former. The attunement of the professional area of interest with the political imperatives and/or society’s urgencies is a seminal topic which will, unfortunately, have to wait for further explorations in the future. Yet the articles assembled in the current can also benefit from this preliminary interpretation in as much as it crudely discerns between exploring how political influence was exerted on architecture and, conversely, investigating architecture as a critical agent within society. However valuable this distinction could be for a methodical, systematic approach to the subject, it does not do justice to most of the contributions. Moreover, it does not seem to allow a sufficiently nuanced understanding of the relationship between architecture and politics.
What makes matters complicated is that the word “politics” may refer to an activity, a profession, a position, an opinion, a social science and also a complex of relations developed within a group. The two principal meanings of interest in this instance are (1) the one regarding the exercise of power, comprising the practice of politics (the activity of governing, administration, law/rule-making, policy making, etc.), the people invested in this and the institutional framework; and (2) the meaning referring to the wider set of relations between individuals in society and the ordering of that society, thus including the organizational forms it engenders. There is a third understanding of “politics” of topical importance, namely the political science. This meaning is also relevant in as much as ideas and concepts stemming from this field have permeated architectural culture (as it happened with the adoptions from other disciplinary fields). As such, this third meaning goes to how architecture perceives, criticizes and challenges itself and reminds us of the potential fallacy of concentrating only on architecture and politics.
What becomes evident is that architecture itself requires clarification when put in relation with the different meanings of “politics,” because the word in itself can point concomitantly to either a discipline with a debatable autonomy, a profession exercised in different historical conditions (political, economic, social, etc.), or a built work. The intersections between all these different understandings of the two terms of the binomial “architecture and politics” make any endeavor of looking for a comprehensive diagram of possible interactions idealistic, if not naïve. However, if instead of a complete chart one tries to highlight some of the more “travelled routes” between the two, the following preliminary topics stand out from the contributions to the current volume.
Architectural profession invested for the common good
This direction comprises contributions that tackle the role of architects and architecture in society, and those that concentrate on specific instances where professional practice has put forward new living environments specifically addressed for the betterment of existing conditions.
In the first category, “The socio-pol-ethical confluence of the architect: The Idiot, the Activist and the Dreamer,” Paco Mejias Villatoro and Tanzil Shafique’s article, unfolds, with certain irony, the different avatars of the architect as a political agent and elaborates on the respective social, political and ethical questions raised by the complex contradictory roles that this actor-architect plays. The three personas of the contemporary, politically invested architect that the authors recommend — the Idiot, the Activist and the Dreamer — each follow different, but complementary “scripts” relating respectively to political resistance, political engagement and political detachment. While all three instances oppose the architect’s effacement from the public arena, the contribution argues for a balance of role-playing that would allow the architectural profession to reclaim its agency on the contemporary built environment. Finichiu and Schoenmaeckers’s article, entitled “Architecture and Politics: the Ideology of Consensus Versus the Reality of Dissensus,” references contemporary relevant discourses of political science to point to the split political role of architecture within society: that of endorsing an established order, that the authors name “architecture as politics” vs. that of creatively introducing areas of dissension that challenge the hierarchies in place, called “political architecture.” Mirroring the engagement called for in the previous contribution, the authors continue by enquiring into architecture’s withdrawal from the political arena, thus acknowledging only one of its potential roles. The article goes on to argue that the pervasive condition of the current post-political, post-democratic era succeeds in confiscating the supposed dissident instances of architecture and disarms them through institutionalization, thereby exhausting architecture of any political agency.
The second category approaches two specific situations in the modernist period where design innovations significantly impacted on the built environment, through housing as a predilect program. Andreea Cel Mare’s contribution, “Henri Coandă's Prefabricated Dwellings between France and Romania,” retrieves valuable archival information that place Coandă between the professional and political national histories of France and Romania. The article focuses on an instance of the modernist revolutionary impetus that aimed to provide affordable dwellings for all through technological innovations, thus allowing the author to compare the French and Romanian milieus of the 1920s from the perspectives of mass housing public policies and of professional ideologies, as well. Semprebon, Ma and Fabris’ article, “The Shape of Social Policies. Architectural Experiences in London between 1964 and 1979,” tackles the conditions of the late 1960s and 1970s in London, a period that has witnessed the providential encounter of social policy and architectural production. This resulted in stimulating experiments on the built environment, where the collective aspirations fused with the themes of architectural modernism to generate a new shape for the city, played out at the level of the interface between the public and private realms. Both articles are based on the assumption that social housing — in the first case approached through technological novelty, and in the second, through typological innovation and aesthetic originality — is one of the fundamental ways in which architectural design has contributed to the social and political agenda. Nevertheless, both articles spotlight other aspects of architecture in relation with politics. For instance, Coandă’s case speaks of the resistance to innovation of a social and political elite absorbed by issues of national identity and, at the same time, points to the communist bias that erased Coandă’s contribution from the historical narrative of prefabrication after the second World War, simply for political reasons. In the second contribution, London’s public policies during the heydays of the welfare state are shadowed by the current issues regarding the appreciation of this heritage.
Governance’ influence on architectural works
While the different contributions that may be grouped under this heading refer to the impact of either political people, institutions of power or rules and norms, they each carry the subject further, thus opening up new perspectives linked to the very different circumstances under study.
Miloš Stanković considers the historical saga of the unbuilt orthodox church in Cetinje. His article, “1870-2018. Russia and the Balkans. The Case of the (Un)Built Design of the Orthodox Church in Cetinje, Montenegro,” recounts the way in which the successive political changes have rerouted both the design and the erection of this building during the last 150 years. Throughout that period, the symbolic character of the church has legitimated it as an important political stake at the local, national level of Montenegro, and representative for the larger European powerplay that links the Balkans to Russian influence.
Also departing from a situation of cultural colonialism, with Iran and Pakistan competing for the American support starting from the late 1950s, Niloofar Amini, in her article entitled “Modern Architecture as an Agency of Political Competition,” elaborates on the complex circumstances of the modernization processes of the Middle East, and its particular outcomes. As such, the article discusses the opposition between the official projects, politically significant, and smaller projects representing instances of “non-Western modernity,” professionally meaningful. Works of a generation of local architects trained in the West, these latter projects react to both the imposition of Western economic and political ideas upon a different cultural background, and to the exertion of top-down approaches, oblivious to the specifics of local communities. If these architects have defined their positions in an ambivalent relationship with the larger cultural trends of the late 1970s, using some ideas while refuting others, the built works also testify to the conceptual freedom that the architects could enjoy from the more general political directions, which allowed them to introduce their own agendas on social reform and to give shape to their own visions.
In the different political context, Liliana Iuga’s discussion of “Politics, professionals, and architectural debates in socialist Romania” brings to the fore the same issue of the architects’ agency on the urban political decisions of a centralized authority. Bringing important nuances to the main historical narrative of this not-so-distant past, Iuga’s contribution focuses on certain Romanian cities remote from the nucleus of power. The study focuses on two instances where projects decided upon at the center encountered significant reactions at the local level. Albeit with different final results, these particular situations point to fractures within what may otherwise be considered a single, omnipotent apparatus of power exertion, as well as to possibilities of resistance mounted either from individual architects, or from the local community. At the same time, the article acknowledges the methodological importance of oral and micro-history and emphasizes that the reconstruction of these narratives prompts a distinctive rewriting of previously considered “power constellations.”
The article is relevantly complemented by Celia Ghyka and Călin Dan’s contribution “Reverse-Engineering Political Architecture. The House of the People and Its Hidden Social Effects.” The immense ensemble showcases the disparity between the sheer size of the architectural object of the political demand, on the one hand, and the available resources (the short time span, the lack of competent workers and tools, the lack of management skills and operational abilities, the absence of a project etc.), on the other. This engendered similar fractures in the interior of an apparently monolithic power apparatus. These conditions resulted in bewildering landscapes of individual and smaller groups’ agency, that allow for the consideration of “a collective author” of the work, with all the moral implication thereof and the long-term effects on the development of both the Romanian society and its architectural body.
While upholding the geometry suggested for the whole volume, one should stress the fact that the majority of the contributions gathered under this heading rather point to the reactions against political influence and investigate the degrees of freedom that architects/architecture could maintain.
Professional knowledge reflecting on the _polis_
The topic of the city, either in its historical instances or in its contemporary multifarious forms, links across time two contributions of a different nature and scope. The first, Alioscia Mozzato’s “Colin Rowe and Aldo Rossi. Utopia as Metaphor of a New City Analogous to the Existing One,” stems from an in-depth analysis of both seminal architectural writings and theoretical projects. The article looks to the pivotal concept of “utopia” — more accurately understood through Rowe and Koetter’s text as a “possible social metaphor” — and relates it to Rossi’s “Analogous City,” in order to infer a potential synthesis of the two theoretical approaches. This synthesis promises a continuity with the common urban values as expressed in the built substance of the city, rather than expressly articulated in the ideological discourse. As such, it understands existant architecture not only for its cultural values, but also for its political ones, thus linking each of them with the other and both with history.
To the contrary, the authors of the second article placed under this heading, “What Light Can a School Project Shed on Politics?”, Andrei Feraru and Roberta Borghi use the vantage perspective conferred by the frame of a school project that immerses the students in the complex condition of a cross-border area between Bulgaria and Romania. This exercise offers the opportunity to question the local, the governmental and the European policies, along with the contemporary urban condition (either the existing or the envisioned one). The conceptual freedom of the school projects and the inherent provisional answers they offer are then confronted with contemporary discourses on politics and channeled to challenge our current understanding of these notions. In this way the article reinforces both the perennial political claim of the “right to the city” and incites to a continuous questioning of the role that architectural knowledge may play in supporting it.
It seemed appropriate to conclude this reflection contained in the volume with an article that brings to the fore the importance of the self-referential discourse for the disciplinary construct of architecture. Alexandru Sabău’s article, “Politics of Self-reference. Self-sufficient Discourses in 1980s Architecture,” explicitly investigates architecture’s “political dimension” and it does so by following three case studies that mirror one of the inaugural issues of this introduction — the possibility that the political condition of architecture is better framed by considering the crossroads between how the discipline of architecture defines itself from within and the apparently external discourses of political science. The author studies the late-postmodern discourses, from a period that expanded the contours of architectural culture by retrieving and incorporating its more distant historical instances. The article argues that architecture, understood as “creation of worlds,” extends to utopian drawings, “dis/continuous genealogies” and built manifestoes, thus emphasizing both the limitless resources of architectural renewal and the importance of the resulting discourse as an agent of a larger change.


Introduction. Waver / Waiver

A pleasant summer afternoon in London, some six years ago. Coffee with Mr Sherban Cantacuzino, the Romanian-born British architecture historian and critic, at Pâtisserie Valérie in Marylebone Highstreet. He liked the French touch of the place, and was himself born in Paris in 1928. “Matila Ghyka used to invite me here,” he said. Ghyka (1881-1965), a Romanian diplomat and prolific aesthetician during the two world wars (his writings inspired Le Corbusier to conceive his _Modulor_), was a distant uncle and mentor to Cantacuzino – as he had been to Sherban’s own father George Cantacuzino (1899-1960), the doyen of the moderate Romanian Modernism.
Together with his mother Sanda, Sherban Cantacuzino settled in Britain in 1939, his sister Marie-Lyse following suit in 1940. They were meant to return to their father in Romania after the war. Alas, due to Fascism and Communism they never did.
Educated first at Winchester College, and then at Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge, Sherban Cantacuzino practised as an architect, wrote on architecture, and lectured at the University of Canterbury before becoming Executive Editor of the _Architectural Review _(1973-1979) and Secretary of the Royal Fine Art Commission (RFAC), London (1979-1994).
In 1976, Gordon Graham, then RIBA president elect, dubbed him the “very best critic and one of the country’s finest speakers about architecture.” Some twenty years later “Richard MacCormac pointed out that it was under Cantacuzino’s secretaryship that the RFAC won its reputation for integrity and strength.” Lasting testimony to the latter is Cantacuzino’s publication _What makes a good building? An inquiry by the Royal Fine Art Commission_ (London, 1994). In 2018, Peter Murray, chairman of New London Architecture, recommended this very book as first title of the reading list in his essay addressed to young architects: “The book _What makes a good building?_ by former RFAC secretary Sherban Cantacuzino has not been bettered since in answering the question posed by its title. It avoids subjective judgment: to say that a building is good is not the same as saying ‘I like it’.”
Cantacuzino was elected a member of the _Comité International des Critiques d´Architecture_ (CICA) and, for a couple of years, member of the RIBA advisory board for the election of the Royal Gold Medallist, the greatest British honor in architecture – alongside Ada Louise Huxtable and Kenneth Frampton. His professional network included other colleagues and friends, especially from Britain and Romania, such as Alexandru Beldiman, Peter Blundell Jones, Kenneth Browne, Mariana Celac, Charles Correa, Peter Derer, Philip Dowson, Louisa Hutton, Matei Lykiardopol, Sir Richard MacCormack, Virgil Onofrei, Radu Patrulius, Joseph Rykwert, Dennis Sharp, Gavin Stamp, Sir James Stirling, Şerban Sturdza, and Ana Maria Zahariade.
Cantacuzino was a true scholar, radiating a natural authority based on solid and thorough knowledge and critical reflection, yet modest and easy accessible – the very opposite of today´s fashionable star-like attitude of some critics and theorists. His private architecture library is impressive not only by its sheer size, but also by the variety of topics and periods covered, historic and contemporary – and by the books in different languages: English, Romanian, French, German, Italian, and Latin.
His own writings include _Modern Houses of the World_ (London / New York, 1964); _Great Modern Architecture_ (London / New York, 1966); _European Domestic Architecture: Its development since early times_ (London / New York, 1969); _Canterbury_ (London, 1970); _Isfahan_ (with Kenneth Browne, a special issue of _Architectural Review_, London, 1976); _Wells Coates_ (London, 1978); _Charles Correa_ (Singapore, 1984); _Architecture in continuity. Building in the Islamic world today. The Aga Khan Award for Architecture_ (New York, 1985). Of his numerous articles, book introductions and speeches, his address at the opening of the 1974 RIBA exhibition on Carlo Scarpa is one of the most prominent: _Carlo Scarpa, architetto poeta_. What is more, Cantacuzino was one of the first critics to have written on the reuse of old buildings: _Architectural Conservation in Europe_ (London, 1975); _New Uses for Old Buildings_ (London, 1975); _Saving Old Buildings_ (with Susan Brandt, London, 1980); _Re/Architecture. Old Buildings/New Uses_ (London, 1989).
He was a member of prestigious award juries and panels such as the Aga Khan Foundation, UNESCO, ICOMOS and ICOMOS-UK (of which he was President-Emeritus). As rapporteur general of UNESCO he was, for instance, instrumental in accepting two projects on the UNESCO World Heritage List: the reconstruction of the city of Le Havre by French architect Auguste Perret, and the restoring of eight vernacular wooden churches in North-Western Romania (Maramureş). For after the fall of Communism he devoted the best part of his professional energies to saving heritage of Central and Eastern European countries, especially in Croatia and Romania. Cantacuzino was trustee of the International Trust for Croatian Monuments since its initiation in 1991. To Romania he first returned briefly in 1971, but after 1989 he regularly visited the country of his origin. He was then elected Honorary Member of the Union of Romanian Architects and of the Commission for Historic Monuments and Sites, and Honorary Professor of the University of Architecture and Urbanism “Ion Mincu” in Bucharest. Finally, he was co-founder and the first President of Pro Patrimonio, The National Trust of Romania.
In honor of his architectural and cultural commitment he received CBE (Commander of the British Empire) from Queen Elizabeth II in 1988, and, for his contribution to saving the heritage of Romania, the European Heritage Award in 2008.
A true gentleman, his character was an impressive fusion of what one might call British reservedness and Romanian warm-heartedness, imbued with astuteness, intellectual integrity, method and wit. Here Derek Patmore’s account of his 1939 meeting with Armand Călinescu, then Romanian Minister for the Interior, comes into one’s mind: “His brain is one of the most subtle and brilliant that I have ever encountered. Byzantine in its complexity and swiftness of thinking, it must baffle many a […] diplomat […]. And yet […] [he] is orderly and systematic in his thinking.” Conversations with Sherban Cantacuzino were precious moments, delightful and enlightening – and an acoustic pleasure too, thanks to his “elegant David Nivenesque swift style,” as Kersten Rattenbury put it in his review of Cantacuzino’s talk at the opening of the exhibition _Romania in the 1930s: Architecture and Modernity_ at the RIBA Architecture gallery in 1997. That exhibition included works by his father, known primarily by few Romanian scholars and architects, and Sherban Cantacuzino always took a vivid interest in reassessing him. So back in 2005, when I started my PhD thesis on George Cantacuzino’s body of work, we met and became friends.
Like his father, Sherban Cantacuzino had a strong sense of history and continuity, especially with respect to quality – or, in the words of Saint Paul: “Omnia autem probate! Quod bonum est, tenete!” From this attitude he certainly drew a sense of responsibility. Based in London, he became one of the finest, uncontested and most influential inofficial cultural ambassadors of Romanian culture during the last three decades. Again like his father George, he was both a cosmopolitan and a patriot: a true and lasting model.
**Dr. Dan Teodorovici** (\*1972) is an architect, architectural historian and senior researcher at the Institute of Urban Planning at the University of Stuttgart, where he was awarded _summa cum laude_ for his 2010 PhD thesis on the work of George Cantacuzino (1899-1960). Based on this study, he conceived a travelling exhibition and monograph, _George Matei Cantacuzino – a hybrid modernist_ (Wasmuth, 2014). Sherban Cantacuzino´s addresses at the exhibition openings in Stuttgart (2012), Munich (2012), Karlsruhe (2013), London (2014), Berlin (2015), and Weimar (2016) were outstanding. He also contributed the foreword to the Romanian edition of the monograph (Bucharest, 2016).


Sherban Cantacuzino. (Paris 1928 – London 2018)

The political indetermination of architecture, prevalent today, is perhaps related to our incapacity to differentiate clearly between the diverse aspects that converge in architectural thinking. The architect’s role intrinsically involves different actions, each guided by different principles and, hence, often substantially contradictory. As Daniel Bell explained in the 1970s, society cannot be easily explained due to the contradictory forces coming from the techno-economic, the political and the cultural spheres.
Following this logic of contradiction and in attempts to avoid it, the discipline of architecture became inconsistent in its statements and weak in its positions since the 1970s. The social agenda driving the paper architecture of the 1960s gave way to architects becoming tools of neoliberal capitalist production. We trace the depoliticization of architecture and then, against this impasse, where the political role of the architect is forsaken, we wish to bring forth three characters — the _Idiot_, the _Activist_ and the _Dreamer — _to reconstitute the confluence and to state that the political can never be too much. We claim that by playing these three roles with a dramaturgical consciousness — that is to say, judiciously switching between each of these roles — can the architect reclaim his _socio-pol-ethical_ stance.
We seek to replace Vitruvius's triad of what architecture entails with a triad of how architects should _act_. As an ‘Idiot’, the architect_ resists_ the social _status quo_ posing naive unanswerable questions. The architect acting as an ‘Activist’ _reclaims_ his political agency and his competence for acting on behalf of the community. Finally, the architect _speculates_ as a ‘Dreamer’, assuming his ethical role of engaging the imagination and desires of a community to act towards a common future. The architect’s role becomes more than producing form or image for the highest bidder, it becomes a multiplicity, not of what capital/society wants, but of what society needs.


The Socio-pol-ethical Confluence of the Architect: The Idiot, the Activist and the Dreamer

This article argues that architecture, by its essence – designing the spaces where life can take place – has always thought in political terms, while political theory always thought in spatial terms. But what means thinking in political and spatial terms?
The political strategies of architects have always been diverse, although how the architecture that results is political is a separate question. Those who entered the workplace after 2008 have found themselves in an era of austerity, and without very much opportunity for agency. This can explain the popularity of “the local,” “the participatory design” or “community” architecture, which takes as its subject the politics of the small group. At the other end of the spectrum, there is a completely different dynamic to projects like Grand Paris or Brussels 2040, which we could also call an engagement with the political.
This distinction, between _politics_ (non-institutional engagement) and _the political_ (the democratic attempt at consensus), is central in political theory (Arendt, Freund, Rancière, Mouffe, Laclau, Žižek, Badiou) and will be the main argument for the paradox of politics in architecture, that we would like to point out: as a a profession, with its division of labor, and with its own presentation in the public sphere, architecture is a tool for the expression of hegemonic orders (that is, authority structures) – the ideology of consensus – as a praxis – action oriented towards changing society – architecture can disrupts a predefined order and make visible that which is not perceivable – the reality of dissensus.


Architecture and Politics: The Ideology of Consensus Versus the Reality of Dissensus

This article is part of a wider on-going research that tries to reconstitute the trajectory of prefabricated housing in Romania, off the beaten track of the Communist rhetoric. The paper spotlights a forgotten chapter of the architectural and civil engineering history, the housing experiments of Romanian engineer Henri Coandă, carried out in two political milieus, in France and Romania, in the 1920s.
Decades before the post-war, Soviet-imposed industrialization, Henri Coandă sought to apply mass-production techniques to the construction of dwellings in France and Romania. The first proposal, dating from 1921, operated with a system of precast reinforced concrete elements, while the second one, originated in 1927, was based on an unprecedented use of folded sheet metal. Both construction methods aimed to produce low-cost housing, with efficient use of materials, reduced manpower and shortened construction time. The innovative construction methods were widely exploited in France, but failed to convince in Romania, where Coandă’s other building innovations were successfully applied, specifically the ones hidden under a traditional appearance.
This paper tries to highlight some reasons behind the different assimilation in the two countries. Coandă's prefabricated dwellings, a singular and surprising moment of Romanian Modernism, obliterated by the official history of the Communist regime, came to reaffirm the role of engineers in the debate for the low-cost housing and to illustrate the subtle and nuanced relations between architectural thinking, politics and political ideology.


Henri Coandă’s Prefabricated Dwellings Between France and Romania

This paper focuses on the connections between politics and the design culture in London during the postwar era. In the period between the end of World War II and the defeat of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, a significant part of the architectural production in London can be attributed to the social policies of the central government. On one side, the state-driven approach fuelled the development of the Welfare State promoting the most important facilities and services, including housing. On the other side, a deep interest by local architects in the exploration of both innovative settlement patterns and formal systems nourished by political ideology, social aspirations, cultural fervour, and technological progress turned this period into a significant moment of reinterpretation of the tenets of modernism.
The authors focus on the ambiguity of public and private realms to explain the connections between policies and architecture. The experimentation of innovative settlement patterns, hybridization of traditional ones, and the reinterpretation of principles of modernism were applied to re-shape society.


The Shape of Social Policies. Architectural Experiences in London Between 1964 and 1979

The architect in totalitarian regimes has often been portrayed as being subordinated to the will of the great leader; an obedient executor of plans imagined by the political power, often unable to impose professional standards or generate meaningful debates. Recent literature has emphasized, however, that in socialist countries architects played an important role in imagining and building the material basis of the new society. Modern technology was used to provide cheaper solutions for designing and constructing a variety of architectural programs, among which industrial sites and mass housing figured prominently.
Based on archival and oral history sources, this article aims to question the simplified understanding of the architects’ lack of agency during state socialism and bring evidence regarding their participation in decision-making processes in the late 1960s and the 1970s. It argues that, more than mere executors of orders coming from the top political hierarchy, architects were able to shape space not only through their designs, but also as active participants in debates regarding the transformation of urban spaces. My interest is connected mostly to what I call “local architects” (i.e., working in provincial cities and towns), and the interplay between various layers of decision-making at local and central level. Two case studies will be used to illustrate the proposed topic: the criticism of densification (_îndesire_, in Romanian) in late 1960s Iaşi, and a preservationist debate regarding the area around the Endless Column in Târgu-Jiu (1975). The article aims to draw attention on debates, as opposed to top-down decision making, as well as the agency of architects, among other actors.


“Don’t Tell Me It Cannot Be Done; We Must Reach an Acceptable Solution!” Politics, Professionals, and Architectural Debates in Socialist Romania

Economically, from the late fifties Pakistan and Iran aligned themselves with America to vied for its support. Increasing the oil revenue from the seventies, however, changed the circumstance for Iran. Among the different strategies of control, it was the time for the Pahlavi regime to reveal its control over the region, politically and architecturally. However, those creative interventions rooted in previous decades, both in local and in international levels of competition with Pakistan.
While Iran was pioneer in the political transformation, Pakistan replicated all the same policies architecturally, via American support and architects, like Louis Kahn. In fact, what happened in region was a part of the U.S. plan for the Middle East for maintaining the stability of traditional regimes through encouraging them toward moderate reforms.
However, these architectures were symptom of a larger cultural condition, caused by the rapid introduction of modern institutions into traditional societies. Inevitably, not only modern Western architecture had been imported, but also the forms and formalities of modern Western democratic institutions. As a consequence, such pseudo-democratic ideology and practice effected on local architects to act as an antidote to both regimes.
This paper studies Pakistan – Iran relations, politically and architecturally, in regard to these policies.


Landscape as Horizon

2024

Architectures of Labor

2025