Annotated file Buzești - Berzei - Uranus: guest Șerban Sturdza

Adrian Bălteanu: How do you comment on the materials published at the time of the demolitions of the Buzești - Berzei Diametrala?

Șerban Sturdza: For the future, the articles might be welcome because they show how an event is perceived at the moment it occurs, at the same time, they might give an unpleasant taste because, in a climate of democracy, things remain at a level of lamentation, as if we were amputated people. After twenty years, I find that a little too little. If I look at the articles in themselves, I find them interesting, but if I look at them in the context of the situation, I find that they have generated a very weak reaction in society. I expect much more incisive and therefore much more constructive articles. I expect articles on urban sociology and the emergence of investigative journalism. Let's not forget that the register in which we move is the real one and it has to do with our profession and those we directly serve, the inhabitants of Bucharest.

A.B.: What do you think about the project? Is it necessary for Bucharest?

Ș.S.: I was in the Urban Planning Commission when the project was being discussed. It seemed to me then, and I still think so now, that it's natural to be concerned about the issue of a route. To draw a line on a map and say: here we can intervene to rehabilitate a street is a correct statement. But to go from a debate in principle straight to execution, because the project phase has been very easily passed, is questionable. If the question is about the necessity of the project, I can answer 'yes, there is a necessity'. But the problem arises with the way it was put into practice (studies and then execution). There is a clear schizophrenia in the process. There are overlapping, parallel, rather than sequential, project phases that flow from one another in a logical process. So the final solution is not the result of the previous background studies, but unfortunately quite the opposite, sometimes quite the opposite. In fact, you are astonished to find that the project is decided from the outset and not necessarily on professional criteria. The project becomes purely formal and meaningless.

A.B.: What did the project look like in the Planning Commission?

Ș.S.: There was a discussion around the subject, but it had not been finalized. There were many opinions there. Because I'm oriented towards minimal gestures, I've never been in favor of widening and transforming the street gauge. When I talk about rehabilitating a street, I think of livable streets. There was a need for a modernization process by making the fabric more permeable, more livable, even if we have public spaces or spaces for circulation. I would have liked to have seen an intervention in a natural and organic sense, certainly not a major operation with such far-reaching consequences on the sides. Especially since we had also discussed the hypothesis of a transit route for the neighborhood underground. The crux of the matter was to find an acceptable compromise between the flow of transit traffic and at the same time preserving the freedom to cross Buzești Street where the life of the neighborhood requires it. The solution required striking this balance that would bind the community together and develop opportunities for commerce that was as differentiated in content and prosperous as possible.

A.B.: What do you think about the way the project was implemented?

Ș.S.: This is the substance of the matter. The implementation has actually stirred up reactions. I'm sure that in 2006 there was more than normal pressure on the planners, that haste and the deadline were the reason why a whole series of things were not respected. The same reason ultimately led to the risk of non-compliance. I do not believe that it was done maliciously, but because the game was high stakes, the rules were broken.

I am talking about permits, execution times and, ultimately, design time. I feel that, this time, the town plan architect has become a victim of the little time he had and of the probable constraints, direct or otherwise, generated by the temporary hiatus in which, without his involvement, often even bypassed, from what I have heard, the project was translated into reality. The matter as a whole is both explicable and intolerable. The specialist has become a tool used on an ad hoc basis, without being allowed what the spirit of the law demands: full coordination and responsibility for the operation. Here, the administration has respected neither the spirit nor the letter of the law. It has sidestepped, it has slipped, and it has blundered.

I perceived the project to be at the level of a sketch that has not had time to be filtered and to become by refinement a site-conforming endeavor of subtlety. The project became a mere sketch all the more so because it did not take into account the findings of the baseline studies. It is a complicated site that can only be worked on after extensive research. Perhaps time has forced the urban planner to skip the necessary phases and that is why the result is questionable and is part of a reflex gesture of the past: a 40-year experience in which the resources of the historic urban fabric have been disregarded. I digress. We all think about building and that we are in a phase where progress means building. However, if someone were to make a careful analysis of the building stock in Romania, assess its wear and tear and how much longer it can be used, they would draw the conclusion, using the principles of sustainability, that it is not normal to build until the life of the existing building stock has been exhausted. I am not referring to the cultural resource, but strictly to the economic one. Unfortunately we leave our houses early and we are not in the habit of maintaining them. It is a completely uneconomical concept. In Romania, rehabilitation or restoration often means rebuilding the building with as many interventions as possible, often invoking issues related to regulations, stylistic coherence, etc., whereas in a careful society these things are done differently, the areas that can no longer withstand it are intervened in and the rest is used to the end. This is what the sustainability of an old house looks like. More conservation and less restoration is a principle that Anglo-Saxons prefer whenever possible. If you intervene with brutality and destroy the house without asking yourself how much longer you could have used it, then you are getting into a question of irresponsibility and professional ethics, which is passed with a certain ease in our country and which impoverishes Romania. We waste.

If one were to study the losses of all kinds in the Buzești case, one would realize that the operation was wasteful and that the same thing could have been done with losses probably ten times lower if there had been a set of principles to guide you in assessing the house, demolition, recovery of some elements or the options for the other variant: rehabilitation, maintenance, etc. From this point of view, it seems to me to be an extraordinary failure of proportions. It is perhaps the biggest lie, with all the sustainability agreements signed by Romania at one pole and the Buzești site at the other. The situation is unacceptable because you had and could have respected the principles you signed up to. The city is impoverished. It is also impoverished in terms of identity, but we will probably discuss these issues later.

A.B.: How prepared are we for a project of this scale?

Ș.S.: Recent history proves it, starting with the Bucharest 2000 competition and ending with Buzești. We are not ready. I'm not even talking about the administration. We are in a superficial judgment, for the simple reason that nothing happens to anyone at first sight. And at second sight, in this case, the reception of the works and the post-facto analysis of their quality and impact are non-existent. It all starts from the responsibility for the quality of the design part and the fact that the value of houses and property is arbitrary (cultural and identity criteria are missing). A city that aims to produce economically and offer existential quality to its citizens cannot afford interruptions of interest, periods of abandonment in the life of the construction, see the case of the Matache Hall. As long as there is a building owned by the City Hall, as the City Hall, you are obliged to use it until the last day and not to hasten its demise by indirect, cynical and already well-known indirect methods: vandalization controlled by third parties and then self-victimization of your own institution, the City Hall. You can easily ask yourself the question: if Bucharest City Hall cannot manage a house, how can it manage a city?

A.B.: If you allow me to make a small parenthesis, the McDonald's building at the intersection of Polizu and Buzești streets, which, theoretically, according to the urban plans approved in 2006, should be demolished, is still in operation.

Ș.S.: Very good observation. Using it until the last minute is in favor of citizens, merchants and ultimately in favor of the city, which has to produce. When you can leave a building unused for an unmeasured amount of time, it is obvious that damage is done, and when damage is done, it is natural to ask the question, who pays for it? You can say: over 100 buildings have disappeared, but you should also be able to say what this means in energy, in quantities of materials, what the transportation of rubble was, where the rubble was stored and what you do with it. And perhaps even more importantly, how did you proceed and what did you do for the people displaced from their homes, taking one by one and then as a community. What damage in existence have you done to families or what is the value of the loss of art components bulldozed and then trucked to the Glina Pit? That is how much has been spent, an amount to be paid by someone, certainly not by the citizens. During a dictatorship, you could do this because it was a one-man operation and you did not have to justify it. Can you do the same under a democratic regime? Talking of the McDonald's building, which I assume is well run, I would ask a question: could a landlord who is responsible to his customers have afforded to blockade Matache Hall for a year and abandon it for destruction? Or would he have exploited the space with the utmost care for the buyer's convenience. Here's a paradox: during the war (1942) and under difficult conditions, the hall was modernized to the satisfaction of the population, and under peaceful conditions (2011) the hall was abandoned and vandalized under the helpless eyes of the police and the administration.

A.B.: What does Hala Matache represent for you?

Ș.S.: To my way of perceiving the urban fabric, Hala Matache is a stone worth hanging on to. Once you hang on to it, you make sense of everything around you. It is the heart of the neighborhood; it is a popular and useful place par excellence. I am far from alone in supporting this view, as evidenced by the many hundreds of signatures collected from the public to maintain and preserve the Hale Matache in its current location. If it disappears, there will no longer be any landmark on Berzei Street that is sufficiently strong and representative of the Gara de Nord - Berzei - Buzești neighborhood. Landmarks give meaning, when they disappear, it is very serious. The Bărăganul is now a land without landmarks even though they existed. The agriculture of the Bărăgan generated its own landmarks built on the spot, but once they are gone, it is hard to explain the civilization of this area. But how will you really understand the Horezu phenomenon (the scale and sophistication of this ensemble) when the small cemetery churches or the subtle and fragile vernacular production of the area disappear?

Leaving aside the possibility of moving the Hala Matache, the question of whether it is authentic or not, whether it has architectural value or not, it is an extraordinary landmark in terms of its economic and historical everyday life. On the other hand, discussing its displacement is fundamentally wrong.... When you lose your sense of direction, when you don't know what to do, the first thing you do is start moving things around. I suggest we move Romania or, for a start, why not small fragments of it. There is no glory in the experience of moving churches, even if there is a lot of technical science behind it. If all that's left after the removals are people willing to keep moving, then nothing has been saved by those removals...

I think this is the most natural gesture, as long as it is a public building and was built in the public interest.

A.B.: What do you think are the effects of the northern section of the Diametrale on the neighboring fabric?

Ș.S.: Excessive destruction will generate a process of dissolution of the traditional city, the disappearance of the built-up area according to the current regulations and land-plotting. This progressive erosion of the edges of the intervention zones is detrimental to the city, perceived as an urban space with a historical identity, and unfortunately proves the lack of a real project, rather than its existence. The phenomenon is known from past experiences of Bucharest and in no way conveys a sense of confidence. The northern section is mediocre as an urban sequence and insignificant as a public space, despite some seductive fragments of contemporary architecture. It is a typical operation in which City Hall has abandoned its regulatory role and has probably turned into a real estate agent with minimal scruples. For clarification I recommend a visit to the site at its boundary with the neighboring parcel deep in the urban fabric.

A.B.: How do you comment on the second phase of the boulevard, the Uranus section?

Ș.S.: The northern section, up to the Dâmbovița, is built above ground by widening the street (losses and harmful influences in the fabric), the southern section, behind the Parliament, is built underground, with a strictly transit traffic, so we have a speed section. The latter will also draw more transit to the northern section. It is the wrong strategy, which compromises the project. Perhaps, in the part up to the spillway, there should have been either one stream or two wires going underground, so as to give the historic fabric a chance to exist.

The PUZ solution is totally undemocratic. Crossing the Buzești district is being done above ground, quickly and brutally, with extensive expropriation and demolition operations. It also has dangerous collateral effects (loss of identity, attack on the neighborhood's community life, loss of cultural landmarks, separation of the Gara de Nord - Buzești neighborhood from the central area to the east of the city). On the other hand, the southern section, after crossing the Dâmbovița river, is made underground, through a tunnel, silent and discreet, with high costs, but without generating public space, in a way that invites you to perceive the area Parlament - Patriarchal Cathedral rather as a "Forbidden City" than as anything else.

A.B.: What is good in the relationship between the intervention and the built heritage.

Ș.S.: What has emerged from what happened is that built heritage has been completely neglected. If a university had taken students to this site to analyze the sustainability part, the cultural value part, etc., I would say that would have been a good thing. However, that did not happen. So from a heritage point of view, there is nothing good.

I tried to recover a few things, through the demolition companies, I tried to talk to the teams of those who were recovering materials. In other countries there are shops or warehouses of salvaged building materials and elements that are put back into the curcuit and used for decades in an honorable way. Iron awnings, stair railings, carpentry, stoves, stucco moldings and more can be salvaged. Those who appear on the site spontaneously and salvage have a much healthier attitude than the state, because they capitalize on what others throw away. From this point of view, leaving aside the fact that the action itself is theft, they are acting ethically and correctly. They, unfortunately, recover only for scrap and not for other more appropriate purposes.

At the same time, in other countries, such as Ireland, which are by no means very wealthy countries, dozens of guides are published for people living in culturally valuable buildings, explaining how to maintain them, how to improve comfort, etc. A normality of prophylactic action that we do not apply and do not live.

A.B.: What are the good consequences for architects and urban planners?

Ș.S.: There can be good consequences provided that the process that has led to what we see today on the ground is discussed, understood, and well understood. Then the paradigm is changed. Not in the future, but now and not elsewhere, but here. This is why I think that all magazines should comment on what has happened, and not only architecture and urbanism magazines, but also financial, sociology, literature, etc. I think the biggest mistake would be to turn your back and not try to contribute to an improvement of the situation, saying that all is lost, that there were the dump sites. We are only just at the beginning and even if the beginning is impressive in terms of destruction, it could become much worse, especially as there is the obvious possibility of a repeat elsewhere. Unfortunately the reaction is very slow and there is an unjustified fatalism. I believe that this operation could have been stopped and can be stopped easily:

- Canceling the approval in principle given by the Ministry of Culture, an approval that foresees moving the hall by dismantling it as long as the City Hall and the chief architect of Bucharest have publicly declared, along with the Ministry of Regional Development and Tourism, that the hall will be able to remain in place;

- the launch of a public competition for the urban regeneration of the neighborhood, based on a clear theme in favor of an urban operation in the historic area, which has been publicly promised by the same institutions mentioned above.

The operation needs to be analyzed so that the solutions can be improved in order to comply with the founding studies and urban regeneration principles that Romania has accepted as an EU member. If this is not done, errors will spread. If the full version of the supporting studies by Mr. lect. drd. arh. L. Ianăși and prof. dr. dr. arh. H. Derer together with the project and a commentary on the relationship between the background studies and the project, on how the project evolved and how it got into the approval and execution machinery would be very useful for professionals and also for the public administration and the citizens of Bucharest. Otherwise, Hans Christian Andersen's story of the emperor's clothes will continue to be lived in Bucharest, in their now obvious capacity as patients.

A.B.: What would discussing the project bring to the profession?

Ș.S.: Between June and November 2011, weekly discussions were held at the City Hall, at the Center for Press Monitoring, at the Ministry of Development, with the Platform for Bucharest, representatives of the City Hall, the Ministry of Development, Pro Patrimonio and the OAR. The discussions moderated by Mr. Cristian Pârvulescu, Pro Democratia, promised to restore trust between the above-mentioned institutions and to find the necessary compromise to save this project. Unfortunately, the conclusions so far are deplorable: "In Romania, the profession is not ready to trigger a process of urban regeneration"; "We do not want alternative projects to prepare a competition"; "It is too expensive to build a citizens' information center in a 60 square meter portion of the Matache Hall"; "We have no money set aside for emergency interventions"; "The Court of Auditors is on us".

I think a professional discussion would be useful because the project would be hard to sustain if it were discussed in detail. When you talk about the architecture, the habitat, the public space, you realize that what has been proposed in the PUZ is little studied and does not propose an alternative for improvement. I do not think that the proposed habitat will be better in all parameters than the previous habitat. I don't think that by saying "we are going to build modern houses with more light and water" we have solved the area architecturally. Sometimes it is difficult for the architect not to see himself as a demiurge and to put himself in the position of the user. I think that nowadays architects are overly subservient to the real estate business and that they very easily dismiss the social dimension of any project. From a social point of view, a lot is destroyed unnecessarily. Some might say that many buildings had to be demolished anyway because they were unacceptable. I might agree, but instead of butchering the urban fabric, I prefer the technique of homeopathy and, only where necessary, reparative plastic surgery. When you displace populations, whether the goal is deportation or colonization, you do it with a design. In this case, Buzești-Berzei, you are probably displacing the population in a kind of "Ferentari", increasing conflict and destroying stabilized social structures. Usually, when a large urbanization operation is done, part of the population is preferable to stay in place in order to rebuild the social life of the area more quickly and for many other reasons. In this operation we have a racist component, uncomfortable to discuss. When they talk about Buzești and Griviței they say: 'Sir! Let's put an end to that gypsy!". The level of discussion is too low and not at all balanced if we take a little distance and reflect on the history of the area after the bombings of the Second World War and up to now. The social problems will remain and get harder and harder to solve. The "gypsyism" issue is partly the fault of the administration, the town planners, the architects, because together they ignore the social component.

That is why I think the architect's arguments are partial. The intervention, as it is being done and as it continues to be done, on the sly, is a sign of alienation and is not a laudable gesture of administration, architecture or urbanism, it is, rather, a sign of confusion for the transformation of Bucharest. An operation through successive simplifications (we remove the social part, we remove the heritage protection part, we remove the economic part), and what remains we see has been impoverished. When urban projects take on an exaggerated propagandistic and electoral overtones, they are certainly harmful in the medium and long term.

Interview conducted in November 2011

* arch. Șerban Sturdza, member of the Technical Commission for Spatial Planning and Urbanism of the PMB at the time of the approval of the PUZ "North-South Diametric Doubling. Buzești-Berzei-Vasile Pârvan section"