Kommentar von Horia Marinescu
Kommentar von Horia Marinescu
I have lived as an architect in Vienna since 1992. My personal past in Bucharest was for me a completed chapter of my life and this, I believed, was how it had to be. But my last visit to my native city disabused me of this fact. Questions that I no longer wanted to ask myself surfaced once again. What is Bucharest? What has happened to the city since the monstrous 1980s? A tale of the memory of a lost generation.
Bucharest does not have a real "old town" in the same sense as Vienna, no "Ringstrasse" and no former royal palace. It is more comparable with Berlin, a patchwork of structures that have grown together, a collage of historical fragments that apparently forms a centrifugal unity. Its specific local quality is not a style of its own but, in anticipation of post-modern eclecticism, its function as a kind of Jules Verne machine that, since 1850, has absorbed western tendencies and blended them in its own unmistakeable manner. Since 1880 this city has often been seen as a place of poetic contrasts, of the cheerful and lively coexistence of town and country, of European cafés and timeless romantic allotment gardens, but in fact this great piece of "poetry" called Bucharest conceals a suppressed reality.
Bucharest, 1981.Through a site fence I look into an enormous, surreal pit, that is so deep that the trucks transporting the excavated earth across countless ramps look like tiny toy cars and briefly confuse one about what is really going on here. This image is anchored as deep in my memory as the pit I saw then. Three years later my family home had also to make way for the "House of the People" and was demolished, like the houses of 30,000 other families. In April 1984 I visited the district again. Everyone had moved out. The houses stood half demolished and plundered, like corpses, and in a literal sense I could feel the crimes of an entire epoch (would that they had only been cultural!).
Bucharest, 2005. For the first time I go behind the fence around the "Houses of the People" and see details that I knew only from a distance and that remind me immediately of a time I thought I had left behind me long ago. An eerie spirit seems to inhabit the classical ornament of the building with its stone garlands. Our home had to make way for the aloof emptiness that still exists around this palace that Ceausescu never inhabited. The wastelands in the middle of the city are a last sign of the price paid by a lost generation.
A backward glance: in the 1980s the regime under Nicolae Ceausescu underwent a progressive "Koreanisation". The dictator's returned from visits he made to China and Korea at the start of the 1970s filled with radical ideas and a megalomania that he wanted to manifest architecturally in the city. In 1981 a definitive start was made with the construction of the "House of the Peoeple" that was intended as the dictator's palace and the seat of the government, as well as with the construction of a great boulevard that offered nothing other than a Palladian stage-set and a postcard backdrop for the palace. This palace, at the time the largest building in Europe, now represents one of the most absurd "socialist post-modern" ensembles in the world. It also relates to a local spirit of eccentric and rampant forms. To add a new chapter to the strange history of this palace, after the political change the parliament of democratic Romania occupied the building. The Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), also opened there in 2004, represented a first attempt to dispel the building's complete lack of humour and to give it a new content..
When Cezar Lazarescu, the head architect of the city, asked Ceausescu to give him some indications of his stylistic preferences, the dictator referred to well-known historic buildings that, like the buildings on the Ringstrasse in Vienna, were created by a bourgeois society. The team of architects (around 700 persons led by Anca Petrescu) arrived at the idea of combining Ceausescu's desire for an impressive building with their own dream of a great building. They proposed a project in the highly topical style of the time - post-modernism. Their aspiration was, using a practically unlimited budget, to create a work in the style of the European avant-garde architecture of the time. In this trick the irony of postmodernism was replaced by a different one: socialism used the very symbols that it had attacked for years as "bourgeois decadence". With the erection of the boulevard the dictatorship created its own universe that turned away from the real city and history and denied their existence through the "wall of housing blocks" erected in front of them, as a symbol of a backward-looking socialist utopia. Although the Ceausescu axis was radically planned as the "Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism" it also represented the exalted idea of the post-modern façade, the stage-set that pretends to be something it is not.
After 1990 organic growth clearly grew in influence at the cost of the planned city. The "Victory of Socialism" was quickly transformed by the new branches of foreign banks into a "Victory of Capitalism". On the other hand new office towers, like the headquarters of the Bancorex Bank (that has already gone bankrupt) in the historic centre of Bucharest, or the tower block at Charles de Gaulle Square that opened only this year exhibit the same kind of nonchalance with which Bucharest architects are prepared to justify, both theoretically and formally, absurd locations for high rise buildings, just for the sake of building. Like in the interwar period there is no agreement in cultural circles in this city about a tradition that must be respected, not to mention the complete lack of continuity in the building regulations or zoning legislation! To use a quotation originally coined with regard to Berlin: Bucharest seems "never to be but always about to be something". In the best of cases Bucharest is a narrative with many strands. It exists only through a constant materialisation of complicated fractal formulas. Paris would have remained like this had it not been reshaped into a symbol of the modern world by Baron Haussmann. Bucharest narrates. It narrates like Gregor von Rezzori's Maghrebinische Geschichten. These stories branch out, starting from the stem of an outline plot, into countless side narratives. Indeed they consist largely of such side stories. Hardly have two sentences of a dialogue been spoken before it is interrupted by "this reminds me of the story about …" and there follows a long parable. This has hardly been ended before a new one starts. The narrative framework never ends. Bucharest is much the same: as you walk along one of the main streets, a side street opens up with shady gardens and a fin-de-siècle-flair or with decaying houses and hordes of poor children playing and a South American favela flair. But you have hardly entered this street before you encounter a new urban experience, a further narrative starts off, as meaningless as it is sensual.
Over the course of time attempts were repeatedly made to channel this never-ending narrative of the city into a uniform major idea, to stylise and interpret it. Thus the original completely organic urban structure based on a network of small churches was sliced by axes and "systemised". Around 1880 a system that was dominated by a north-south and an east-west axis gave the city the first trait of a petit Paris. But the implementation of these incisions was accompanied by typically Bucharest (which here means Balkan) circumstances. This allowed the typical image of Bucharest modernism to develop: formal boulevards in Haussmann's style were cut through an organic urban structure, but the fronts everywhere were left open and perforated, never forming closed, tunnel-like streets. The old lanes are visually connected with the axes, the transitions are emphasized by newly built corner buildings and the boulevard itself becomes a lively mixture of grand gesture and rampant ornament. Even modernism, which was more dominant in this city from 1920 onwards than in any other and which hated ornament, is in Bucharest only an additional reason for ornament. In fact everything in Bucharest is ornament. People complain about forms without a background (forme fara fond) but how can forms have a content in a city that takes such a sick delight in narrating, like a figure from Gregor von Rezzori? A mixture of individualism and casualness lends the city a paradoxical existence between this narrative structure and the suppressed reality.
This suppressed reality is clearly visible – at least to the foreigners who visit this city – but invisible to all those who like Bucharest even a little and are therefore willing to listen to the great and often false story. My friends have long ago become allergic to subjects such as children who live on the streets, stray dogs or prostitution. But there are many other problems that nobody wants to see anymore and that no one is prepared to solve. The economy is booming, socially weaker groups get left behind, are ignored, not helped. And this is not just a tiny fraction of society but the majority. The city administration busies itself with superficial problems (how to free the city from booths) but has little interest in solving the structural problems. The theme of the "surface" seems, ever since the creation of Ceausescu's axis, to have found a place in the way of thinking. But the city's dynamism has something optimistic about it. That which is repressed never has a tragic weightiness about it – even where perhaps it should.