A FAMILIAR SCENE
The project documents and proposes urban
alternatives for post-communist architecture. Specifically, it argues that the
massive construction that characterized the “golden age” of Communism constitutes
a rich historical and creative departure point for contemporary design.
Situated at the juncture between the factual, the ludic, and the nostalgic—the
project reinvents representational methods and design attitudes for the
architecture of the former Eastern European Block.
Context
In Romania conflicting stylistic influences are complicated by the ongoing encounters between high architecture and everyday use, between ongoing global, economic development and local spatial practices. The proliferation and translation of styles, the restrictions of government regulated urbanism, and the current ubiquity of capital are the framework for the play of an urban life of improvisation and invention. Modelled after the French capital whose inventive architecture had a large influence in the East, Bucharest—once called “Little Paris”—later became the epicenter of the Communist Architectural Regime. As such, unexpected associations are ubiquitous in the city.
Mara Marcu — Rooms with A View
Remnants of the country’s once rural
society are not fully urbanized; the vegetable garden and the personal pig farm
find themselves in industrialized mass housing projects. This programmatic
anomaly has made possible a new typology–the block of flats with a semi-shared
vegetable garden. Likewise, the parking lots of courtyard apartment complexes,
given the scarcity of the automobile, are turned to new uses as arenas for
soccer, handball, and ice hockey. The courtyard might be flooded in winter, or
the snow harvested to turn it into ice. A rope might be strung across to make a
tennis court. Through human resourcefulness, the former concrete parking lot turned playground successfully replaced other
formal, yet un-programmed recreational areas. This level of invention was a
feature of the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2018. Similarly,
secular and religious remnants of the former village are still present in the
current urban fabric. In the spirit of bricolage (see “Everyday Urbanism” by
Margaret Crawford), projects like the Village Museum are carefully woven in the
city’s fabric. Through misuse and appropriation, the city has found its own unruly, surreptitious, and unyielding urbanity. Its sudden beauty takes you by surprise. Highly imperfect, far from ideal, not idyllic, never particularly romantic, yet completely bewildering, the architecture of Romania is perpetually in search for something else. As such, this land constitutes the ideal playground for the work of the architect. This body of work does not focus on documentation alone, but also on articulating a contemporary architecture of newfound dimensions, strategies, and tactics.
MMXIII 2020 — Cincinnati, USA