Cluj / Argument on topic: Towards a cool Cluj

After 2008, the money dried up and the mood cooled. Paradoxically, architecture and the city are starting to look better. So: a chauvinistic freeze, a real estate boom and now the chill of depression... is architecture in Cluj ready for a cool phase?

Cool

In a volume of essays on the 'state of architecture in the early 21st century', Sylvia Lavin observes how topical the quality of being 'cool'¹ has become^. For Lavin, cool can be applied to architecture even in the slang sense, a slippery, subjective but positive sense. Architecture, she observes, has "an arsenal of historic proportions" with which to resist the temptation of cool, yet despite the best efforts of opposition, the most interesting aspects of contemporary architecture, she says, are those that have capitulated and become cool.

But cool has no guaranteed mode or meaning. Cool is a provisional effect and it is also undermined by individual, ever-changing deviations. It is not something achieved through sustained effort. But neither is it chance or something innate. Cool is a matter of design. But there are no ways to be cool. Cool is a special effect, and special effects are experimental and conjectural. You can't rely on cool. But cool effects can be truly formidable.

Not everyone admits they want to be cool, and some even show contempt for such a shallow and labile category. Still, let's face it, most of us wouldn't want to be forever and forever considered uncool. But unfortunately, Lavin also notes, not everything can be cool. In fact, there are even things that are hopelessly and definitely uncool^.2

This article aims to search for cool moments in Cluj in recent years. But the nature of the instrument also determines the content of the study: I will venture a subjective and partial sketch of architects and attitudes, rather than a neutral analysis of architectural and urban design products.

Urbanism

The most important transformations in Cluj's recent urbanism have been for the better: the introduction of coherent control over urban development and the facelift of the historical center. The city centre has finally been able, through pedestrianization and urban planning operations, to compete successfully with the two shopping malls that have been undermining it since 2007. The suburbs are still left with all the problems that the real estate era has produced. On the whole, the opposition between the center and the periphery has intensified.

Cluj's recent urbanism is marked by the city's most successful firm, Cluj's alpha firm: Planwerk. Planwerk started very cool, as a group of young people determined to make a difference. Making its mark on the urban planning market, not architecture - urban planning reinvented itself much more radically than architecture in the 1990s - and bringing a totally new style of urban design, Planwerk had virtually no competition, and still does today. The firm's German name has always been a capital in itself and resonates in our Romanian environment as a guarantee of seriousness and a job well done, which they have never denied. Planwerk still retains some of its cool aura, particularly among students. But urbanism is still a big man's job. Very quickly, the group itself became heterogeneous, and the quality of the projects went hand in hand with skillful relationship management. Planwerk is now a privileged partner of the City Hall. Planwerk won through competition all the projects for the pedestrianization of the historical center and the PUG of Cluj. Planwerk has members in the City Hall's Urban Planning Commission and Monuments Commission, and associate architects who access public architectural commissions without competition. In the same firm, the responsibilities of public administration decision making, the public urban planning project, and the function of private architectural firm overlap. Cluj is a small city and the networks of power quickly close in a circle. In Cluj, Planwerk is the establishment. No establishment is cool.

Architecture in the ledger: two projects without competition

Faced with the problematic relationship between architecture and the city, architects are not cool. They will sacrifice anything to avoid missing out on major commissions. More importantly, they would readily sacrifice the city (and therefore the quality of life of others). In Cluj, the two most important public architectural commissions in recent years - the Philharmonic and the Stadium - have demonstrated, with different situations and different results, exactly this fact.

The Philharmonic, originally designed (2008) in the Central Park (the city's most important park, classified as a historical monument), was stopped in extremis only by the opposition of civil society. The cool reality was that cyclists and pensioners saved the Park from the architects. The official body of architects took a stand only post factum, when it was already clear who was winning, smilingly joining in the final group photo. But the case of the Philharmonic in the Park was interesting not because it showed once again how uncool and perverted architecture's arsenal is, but because it also revealed a huge resource of cool: architectural resistance.

The stadium (2009-2011) also met fierce opposition, but this time the fight was waged by the architects themselves. The danger here was less visible to the man in the street because the project sacrificed the future rather than the past. The stadium would regularly concentrate tens of thousands of people in close proximity to the Central Park. The stadium is urban infrastructure before it is architecture; it is in the category of urban mega-collectors, like shopping malls. And just like shopping malls, it would have been natural to dump its huge flows of people and cars somewhere in a suburban beltway. (It also has a bonus Multi-Purpose Hall, which will bring its thousands of people there too, as if too much wasn't enough.) The cool quality of the architectural resistance here, however, proved highly volatile, especially when it staked its bet precisely on the Philharmonic's precedent: for if the destruction of Central Park was really a crime, introducing dysfunction into the urban infrastructure is just a serious error; there is, however, a difference between a crime and stupidity. The stadium won. It's even a successful object-image, although the slogan "big is beautiful", which applies to it perfectly, is already too worn out to retain any of the cool. But the object is at least trying to assert an image of architectural modernity that the small and provincial Cluj badly needs.

Two competitions without projects

If the large public architectural projects awarded without competition in Cluj were un-cool, perhaps then competitions should have offered an institutional way of producing cool: for the competition project, in which you literally look for the remarkable and the novel, offers precisely the chance for experimentation.

But the idea of the competition has been put to the test these years in Cluj. The one for the BCU extension (2010) had an enthusiastic participation and plenty of cool proposals. But the incongruity between the draft ideas on the one hand and the beneficiary's requirement for immediate feasibility on the other, as well as the indecision and incoherence of the jury, have produced a project that looks like anything but the result of an architectural competition.

The competition for the Philharmonic in the Transylvania Cultural Center (2011), on the other hand, was organized more correctly, in two stages. The second, however, followed too little time and too much suspicion after the first had named its (predictably local) winners. As a result, the projects were few and unremarkable (there was only one cool project, and that out-of-competition - DSBA's), and the jury could barely choose. Cool, it seems, is by no means caught and determined.

The minor register in conclusion

I've definitely been looking in the wrong place. Cool is not at all a matter of methodically planned success, but precisely success against the 'arsenal'. Lavin also notes that it is "always contemporary"^3. We could therefore look for it in a new generation, necessarily a post-managerial generation, or perhaps even better, a post-management generation: architects who do not hesitate to experiment with commercially losing ideas and to practice architectural resistance. Strictly speaking, you can't make a living out of it, but that's the only way to reach that moment of grace when anything is still possible. The future of architecture in Cluj lies mainly in unpredictable experiments, made in small firms, which risk their beginnings because they have nothing to lose.

It's no big deal to make objects; it's a big deal to make them out of nothing. What Alex Fleșeriu does with his lamps twisted from the power cord itself is quintessentially cool. The recession is tough, architectural commissions scarce, so plenty of interior designers have time to outdo each other in ingenuity. The coolest of them all is definitely the Atelier-café (by a trio of students, Bucur, Goția & Paul), with cardboard chairs and (originally) tables made of doors pulled out of their heads and placed on goats. Cool is a short-lived little miracle that can't be repeated. And the 'parametric' student 'parametric' pavilion at the 2011 Architecture Days was pretty much made from scratch - because parametric design isn't studied in school; and in the end the sophisticated structure needed props to stand on. Cool is always a risk taken.

True, as Lavin wrote, cool is a surface effect. But it's by no means unreliable. Actions blipsz! (Benedek, Pásztor & Szénási) and its various associations (Area3, Coop_Cluj), in which volunteers walk cardboard people on the sidewalks and stick elephant stickers on cars parked in the street are not at all derisory, because they succeed in raising the minor means to serious urban stakes. With the "Superbia" project, MASS (Moga, Aldea & 2xSisak) takes on the impossible and very serious mission of bringing public space to the periphery, where the real estate age has produced the exclusively private city.

It's hard and cool to make a house bigger on the inside than on the outside, or to reduce the physical presence of architecture to almost nothing. Dragoș Ciorobâtcă recently inserted a small musical instrument shop on one of the smallest and most opaque streets downtown, creating a remarkable spatial effect. QUAD Studio (R. Roșca) buried a very special university building, the iCube pavilion, in a sloping green area between monumental villas, literally making it disappear. The post-industrial generation is much more attentive to context in the most immediate sense.

Cool is doing something well under uncertain conditions. Raum (H. Răcășan) stubbornly and romantically fights a hopeless battle, that of reconsidering the rural as rural, making demonstrations of quality in green grass and reeds. Tektum (Tóthfalusi & Tulogdy) are fighting the already lost battle of regionalism - too lukewarm to be cool - but they also manage flashes of hard-edged detail in their cozy homes. Regionalism and neo-modernism, here are the two longest-lived certainties in contemporary architecture in Cluj - all the harder to overcome as all new architecture now boils down to tiny houses, with which they have perfectly matched. MCUB (Bozac & Munteanu) - with a portfolio of some of the most consistent and quality house-design - is already breathing a cool air of liberation into the V-house. Last but not least, a firm with a recognized success and a track record of serious professional awards - SKBD (Kim, Bucșa & Diaconu) - is working on houses such as the Meda house, in a minor register, as if accepting that a margin of uncontrollability must always be kept from the start. Because cool is by no means the eventual revenge of failure, but, on the contrary, the only true success: success without the use of arsenal.

¹ Sylvia Lavin, 'How Architecture Stopped Being the 97-Pound Weakling and Became Cool', in: Bernard Tschumi, Irene Cheng (eds.), The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century, The Monacelli Press, New York, 2004, pp. 46-47

² ibid, p. 47

³ ibid.

Since 2008, the money has dwindled and the atmosphere cooled. But paradoxically, architecture and the city are beginning to look better. So, after a chauvinist freeze, real-estate heat and now the chill of a depression, is Cluj architecture ready for a cool phase?

Cool

In a collection of essays about the state of architecture at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Sylvia Lavin points out that being "cool"¹ has become very topical. For Lavin, cool can apply to architecture in its present-day slang sense, a slippery, subjective, but positive sense. Architecture, she says, has an arsenal of historical symmetries which hold out against the temptation of the cool, but despite its efforts to resist, the most interesting aspects of contemporary architecture are those that have capitulated and become cool.

But the cool does not have any guaranteed mode or meaning. The cool is a provisional effect and, moreover, it is also undermined by individual and always different deviations. It is not something obtained by means of a sustained effort. But nor is it accidental or innate. The cool is a matter of design. But there are no methods of being cool. The cool has a special effect, and special effects are experimental and circumstantial. You cannot rely on the cool. But cool effects can be truly awesome.

Not just anybody admits that he wants to be cool, and some people even display scorn for such a superficial and fickle category. Nevertheless, let us admit, the majority of us would not wish to be regarded as permanently and irrevocably un-cool. Unfortunately, as Lavin concludes, not everybody can be cool. As a matter of fact, there are some things that are hopelessly ^un-cool2

The present article aims to seek out the cool moments in the Cluj of recent years. But the nature of the instrument also determines the content of the article: I am going to venture a subjective and partial sketch of architects and attitudes rather than neutrally analyze products of architecture and urbanism.

Urbanism

The most significant recent transformations in the urbanism of Cluj have been for the better: the introduction of coherent control of urban development and the transfiguration of the historic center. Following pedestrianization and rehabilitation of urban spaces, the city centre can finally compete with the two malls that have undermined it since 2007. The peripheries are still stuck with all the problems that the real-estate period inflicted, however. On the whole, the center/periphery binary has been aggravated.

The recent urbanism of Cluj has been marked by the city's most successful firm, its alpha firm: Planwerk. Planwerk had very cool beginnings, as a group of young people determined to make a difference. Making an impact on the urbanism rather the architecture market - urbanism reinvented itself much more radically than architecture in the 1990s - and bringing a completely new style to urban design, Planwerk, in effect, had no competitors and still doesn't. The firm's German name has always been an advantage in itself. In Romania it resonates as a guarantee of seriousness and a job well done, which the firm has not gainsaid. Even today, Planwerk still partially preserves its cool aura, especially among students. But urbanism is adult work. Very rapidly, the group in itself became heterogeneous, and the quality of the designs went hand in hand with skilled relations management. Planwerk is now a privileged partner of the City Hall. Planwerk won the tenders for all the projects to pedestrianize the historic centre, as well as the General Urbanism Plan for Cluj. Within the same firm, public administration decision-making responsibilities, tenders for public urbanism projects, and private architectural commissions overlap. Cluj is a small city and power networks quickly close to form a circle. In Cluj, Planwerk is the establishment. And the establishment is never cool.

Architecture in the major register: two designs without competitions

With regard to the problematic relationship between architecture and the city, architects are not cool. They would sacrifice everything in order not to miss out on an important commission. Above all, they would sacrifice the city (and thus other people's quality of life) without a second thought. In Cluj, the two most important public architectural commissions of recent years - the Philharmonic and the Stadium - have demonstrated, with differing situations and results, exactly this.

The Philharmonic, initially intended (in 2008) to stand in Central Park (Cluj's most distinguished park, a listed historic monument, was halted at the last moment only thanks to opposition on the part of civil society. As an official body, the architects formulated their stand only after the fact, when it was already clear who was going to win, and smilingly edged their way into the final group photograph. But the case of the Philharmonic in the Park was interesting not because it proved yet again how un-cool and corrupted is architecture's arsenal, but because it also revealed an immense source of cool: resistance against architecture.

The Stadium (2009-2011) was also greeted with determined opposition, but this time the battle was waged by architects themselves. The danger was less visible to laymen, because the project would have sacrificed the future rather than the past. The Stadium would have periodically concentrated tens of thousands of people in the immediate vicinity of the Central Park. The Stadium is urban infrastructure before it is architecture; it falls in the category of urban mega-sinks, like the malls. And exactly like the malls, it would have been normal for it to pour out its huge tides of people and cars somewhere by an outer ring road. (It also throws in a Multi-purpose Auditorium, which will also attract thousands of people, as if too many were not enough.) But the coolness of resistance against architecture proved to be very volatile in this case, especially given that it wagered on the precedent of the Philharmonic: for, while the destruction of the Central Park would have been a crime, the insertion of dysfunctions into the urban infrastructure is merely a serious error; after all, there is a difference between a crime and an act of stupidity. The Stadium won. It is a genuinely successful object-image, although the slogan "big is beautiful", which fits it perfectly, is by now too out-of-date to preserve any cool note. But the object at least tries to assert an image of architectural modernity, which small and provincial Cluj sorely lacks.

Two competitions without designs

If the major public architectural projects awarded without tender in Cluj were un-cool, then perhaps the tenders ought to have offered an institutional way of creating cool: the competition design, in which what you are looking for is literally the remarkable and the unusual, provides an opportunity for experiment.

But the idea of the tender has been sorely put to the test in Cluj in the last few years. The competition for the BCU extension (2010) garnered enthusiasm and plenty of cool proposals. But the mismatch between the design ideas, on the one hand, and the beneficiaries demand for immediate feasibility, on the other, as well as indecision and incoherence on the part of the jury, brought to the fore a design that looks like anything but the winner of an architectural competition.

The competition for the Philharmonic of the Transylvania Cultural Centre (2011), on the other hand, was organized more rigorously, in two stages. The second stage followed at too short an interval after the first, however, and created suspicion given the predictably local winners. It seems that the cool is elusive.

The minor register, by way of conclusion

I have obviously been looking in the wrong places. The cool is not at all a question of methodically planned success, but rather a success against the "arsenal". Lavin also observes that the cool is always contemporary.3 Therefore, we might seek it in a new, necessarily post-real-estate generation, or even better, a post-management generation: architects who have no qualms about experimenting with commercially hopeless ideas or practising resistance against architecture. True, you can't make a living out of it, but it is the only way you can achieve the moment of grace in which everything is still possible. The future of architecture in Cluj resides above all in unpredictable experiments by small firms, which can risk new beginnings because they have nothing to lose.

It's no big deal to make objects; it is a big deal to make them from nothing. What Alex Fleșeriu does with his lamps made out of their own twisted cables is the quintessence of cool. The crisis is harsh, architectural commissions are scarce, and so a multitude of interior fittings have the time to outdo each other in their ingeniousness. The coolest of all is categorically the Atelier-café (by a trio of students: Bucur, Goția & Paul), with its cardboard chairs and (initially) tables made from doors taken off their hinges and laid on trestles. The cool is a minor miracle that lasts only a short while and can never be repeated. Likewise, the "parametric" student pavilion at Architecture Days 2011 was made out of almost nothing, given that parametric design isn't studied in architecture school; and in the end the sophisticated structure needed props to keep it up. The cool is always an assumed risk.

It is true that the cool, as Lavin also writes, is superficial in its effect. But it's not at all lacking in seriousness. The actions of blipsz! (Benedek, Pásztor & Szénási) and various partnerships (Area3, Coop_Cluj), in which volunteers walk cardboard people down the street and plaster elephant stickers on cars boorishly parked on the pavement are not at all derisory, as they manage to elevate minor means to the level of serious urban issues. Via the "Superbia" project, MASS (Moga, Aldea & 2xSisak) take on the impossible and highly serious mission of bringing the public space to the periphery, where the real-estate era has created an exclusively private city.

It's hard to be cool and make a house that is larger on the inside than the outside or to reduce architecture's physical presence to almost zero. Dragoș Ciorobâtcă recently inserted a small musical instruments shop into one of the smallest and most opaque streets in the city center, creating a remarkable effect of space. QUAD Studio (R. Roșca) buried a very special university building, the iCube pavilion, in a sloping green space between historical villas, causing it literally to vanish. The post-real-estate generation is much more attentive to context in its most immediate sense.

Raum (H. Răcășan) stubbornly and romantically wages a hopeless battle to reconceptualize the rural as rural, producing quality demonstrations in green grass and thatch. Tektum (Tóthfalusi & Tulogdy) fight the already lost battle of regionalism - too warm to be cool - but also manages flashes of hard detail in their comfortable homes. Regionalism and neo-modernism are the longest-lived certainties in the contemporary architecture of Cluj, all the harder to shed given that the new architecture has now been reduced to small homes, to which they are perfectly suited. MCUB (Bozac & Munteanu), with a portfolio of designer homes that are among the most consistent and the best quality, already exhale in the V home a cool air of liberation. Last, but not least, SKBD (Kim, Bucșa & Diaconu), a firm whose success has been acknowledged with a long list of important professional prizes, nevertheless designs buildings like the Meda house, in a consciously minor register, as if accepting that a margin of the uncontrollable has to be preserved from the outset. For, the cool is in no case revenge for a lack of success, but on the contrary, it is the only true success: success without resorting to the arsenal.

Notes:

¹ Sylvia Lavin, 'How Architecture Stopped Being the 97-Pound Weakling and Became Cool', in Bernard Tschumi, Irene Cheng (eds.), The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century, The Monacelli Press, New York, 2004, pp. 46-47

² ibid, p. 47

³ ibid.