Architectural and More: Contemporary Transformations of Labor

Former gigantesque industrial sites of the socialist era, now abandoned, are subject to many attitudes: the former workers’ nostalgia which further interests anthropologists and historians, the architecture professionals and sustainability-oriented activists’ attention, whose interest is to study and preserve, the real estate developers’ interest in potential and profitability, the politicians’ embarrassment with a difficult reconciliation between all of the above, and so on. But within these graveyards of industrial production, a smaller scale phenomenon attests to the evolution of labor itself.

Looking at industrial platforms of Cluj-Napoca or Iași such as CUG (Combinatul de Utilaj Greu [Heavy Machinery Factory]), one can see, among the unused buildings, some that have been occupied by small scale enterprises. These have divided the larger space into small units and used it as a resource for new types of production. Almost comparable to the shrinking of medieval towns inside the relics of Roman architectural colossi, this phenomenon is proposed for study in the present paper from several perspectives. The transformation of labor is, on one hand, an exercise of reinventing space and validating the typology of the industrial grand hall within a Rossian understanding of the stability of type. On the other hand, these small enterprises, with their almost manufactural character, are an invitation to reflect on the return of pre-modern manifestations within these halls, quintessential expressions of modernization and modernity – perhaps a condition of the contemporary, of its ambiguous relation with rationality, progress, and utopia. The paper thus invites reflection on how architectural realities may illuminate the understanding of the present, whether as a crisis or as part of a (common) historical cycle.