Travel notes. The American experience

We've settled up with America. New York has faded out of sight, entering the borderless world of memories. It is the fifth day since I have inhabited this boat gliding on a discolored sea, under a gloomy sky, in a rectilinear and monotonous silence. No wind, no waves. Only, now and then, a quickly pierced curtain of fog. Next night the first beacons of Europe will be seen twinkling in the distance. I look forward with eager anticipation to the old continent. One thing I know now: I feel hopelessly European. Nowhere have I felt more foreign than in America. Accustomed as I had always been to travel to the wellsprings of European culture, to the mountains of Persia and the Arabian deserts, I suddenly felt myself there, in New York, in the midst of a civilization opposed to our own, which, turning its back resolutely on the past, was trying, under the banner of freedom, to carve a new face for civilization and human ideals.

Before, however, attempting to define the points with which I have been confronted, and the reasons for my bias, I hasten to say that a world in the making like that of the United States cannot be judged in its entirety by a hasty traveler. That traveler may feel the symptoms of a crisis, explain some perplexities, and leave to others, who will come later and have deepened the problem, the burden of conclusions. And perhaps I would not have written a single line if I had been only a tourist come to admire the skyscrapers of New York, the comfort of Pullman trains and the luxury of the roads that criss-cross that continent from ocean to ocean. But in New York I lived and worked at my ^job2. And to work, to have responsibilities, to take risks, immediately gives life a more real value. It's like a house you know and judge from the inside.

If my first image of New-York is purely architectural, falling within the harsh lines of a ruthless grandeur, the memory I keep, after almost 3 months of daily life in the frontier island of Manhattan, is only human. The architectures with their luxuriance of materials and fantastical proportions fall almost into the realm of the careless. If I retain a warm memory of that American experience, if that experience has been valid for me, if I believe in the future of this huge fledgling nation, if I have a deep esteem for their successful experiences or not, it is because of the human quality I encountered there. And I am not speaking of an elite, but of the average American man (for it is they we are talking about.) In Europe, I have always heard of the rudeness and coarseness of Americans, as if Europe were an academy of high ethics and good manners. (For the moment, in all the countries I have visited, I have not yet found the equivalent of our national mythocan.) The appearance of the American is monotonous, as is his social level almost always the same, as are his tastes and his way of life standardized by the economic system. The same faces, the same gestures, the same cordiality. Behind his glasses, almost always a blue, questioning look. The American is an Anglo-Saxon without a superiority complex. He is quick to talk about the shortcomings of his life, his social worries. His dominant quality is kindness. He is a man of humanity, serious and comradely. Civil servant, engineer, architect, doctor, laborer or porter, his attire is much the same. Only their hands differ. Some ask more questions, some few, some none. But they all live the same way, they are all slaves to the civilization they have built and the women they love. Woman and civilization have joined together to exploit and wear man to death. Woman and American civilization have so arranged things to keep everything in eternal instability. Divorce is a method and the family doesn't exist. Status and woman take from man all the money he earns. To an American man, woman is a paradise forever to be redeemed. Faced with this destiny, men instinctively live among themselves. Their clubs are citadels in the bosom of which they find, thanks to camaraderie, a little happiness. All this gives life in New York a sadness that you don't feel at first, but which, with time, surrounds you, growing ever darker (at least for a European). (...) (...)

Read the full text in issue 1/2012 of Arhitectura.

¹ Article published in "Revista delle Fundazioni Regale", year VI, September 1, 1939, no. 9, pp. 582-588,

² In 1939, G.M. Cantacuzino realized the Romanian Pavilion at the World's Fair in New York, in collaboration with the architect Octav Doicescu - Mirela Duculescu, "George Matei Cantacuzino (1899-1960) Arhitectura ca temă a gândirii", Simetria Publishing House, 2010, Bucharest, p. 146