Agora / public space

THE PUBLIC PLACE

The public place appears as soon as, apart from myself, someone else appears on a given territory and, thus, there is the possibility not only to look around me, but at the same time to be looked at myself. The spacing of the event of looking and being looked at is the elementary level of the public place.

Such a place, once used for the purpose shown above, must fold back into the vague, pre-formed state of space. This place is to exist only as long as there is the event that invents the necessary space, the aura in which it will take place, in the way that objects invent their own space.

The event is here understood as a system of dynamic relations, in which visibility plays the essential role, which is established at a given moment (and for a given period) between at least two human beings. The event "takes place", therefore it draws with itself, it displaces the space of its happening - the public place.

Public place ► public space

The reason why the phrase public place is used predominantly in this text derives from the way it is defined above: the attribute of being public necessarily implies as a spatial "staging" only an expanse, and not a space of/bounded (by various means of construction, but also by the choice of a fenced-in natural place)[1]. The word place here indicates that there is only a minimal spatial requirement for the establishment, for the occurrence of a public event, a limited area.

The limits of the place are given by the very scope of the event in its unfolding, and not by prior gestures of edification: the event takes that portion of space out of the spatium, and not the walling; the latter, provided it remains minimal and low (precisely so as not to impinge on mutual visibility) can come as a consequence, as a finding of a recurrence of a given event in a given location, and not as a precondition such as to "invoke", to "lubricate" the occurrence of the event.

In the public space, events of the kind of negotiations made possible by this exchange of visibilities (trade, joint decision[2]) or of confrontation (battlefield, space of punishment) can occur simultaneously, coexisting on the same territory. These are actions that take place "openly, in the light of day, in opposition to secret procedures" (Vernant, 1995, 70). Regimes of authority, whose relation to the public place and site will be discussed elsewhere, tend to control this open deplatforming of the event entirely[3], or, as Lyotard puts it, "to keep the event under the authority (of totalitarian bureaucracy)" (Lyotard, 1997, 83).

All that is needed, however, is a glimpse of the virtual character of a natural place and a little arrangement for it to be illuminated by the act of the event, by visibility. In other words, in order for a place to become a public place, it is enough to be illuminated, there is no need for Raum. The Raum can subsequently become edified, although taking temporary possession of it by migrants for the purpose of encampment requires only a summary clearing and tidying up. Some anthropologists, such as Angelo Moretta, or even archaeologists, such as Francois de Polignac, even explain the emergence of settlements by grouping around a site "illuminated" by events, usually sacred events, "la cité cultuelle" as de Polignac calls it), by fortification, interior geometry, building within boundaries. An area of inhabitation, therefore, which, by its very quality of taking place in the vicinity of the other, somehow guarantees the frequency of meetings which, in themselves, barely guarantee the eventful self-sustainability of the original luminarium qua public place.

The conclusion of this minimal amenage needed by the place where the public event is about to take place will, of course, be disappointing for architects, who have long believed that the recipe for public space is a geometrically quantifiable one and that this is a matter of the rigor with which they will have designed "civic" spaces: monuments, edifices, hardened heroism. Quite the contrary: it is often observed that the recipe of the public place is more evanescent than they thought and that it escaped the Romanian architects of the seventh, eighth and ninth decades who built "civic centres" in each county capital following the popularized (and, very importantly, secularized!) formulas of the Roman forum, sacrificing in the process the real (because living) centres of those cities (which became municipalities). There can be an unconstructed public place, where the gaze can wander unhindered, as in the case of the dance floor already mentioned (the place where the Sunday hora is held in the Romanian village, for example), a battlefield or, more frequently, a public square. Habermas even insists that

'public life, bios politikos, takes place in the square, in the agora, without, however, being in any way linked to this particular place. The public sphere is constituted in speech (lexis), which can also take the form of a meeting or a judgment, just as in the case of joint action (praxis), such as the conduct of war or war games" (1998, 47).

Rem Koolhas has frontally criticized this Demirugian obsession with the stable, edified and fully controlled civic spaces that architects wish to establish in cities in his book Conversations with Students (1996). Although he does not formulate it as such, Koolhas's conclusion seems to be that the attribute of being public places does not presuppose prior built intervention and, vice versa, the mere fact that they have arranged a particular space and called it 'civic' or 'public' or 'public' or 'meeting place' does not necessarily mean that they will also be used as such by members of a community.

The public place is about collective identity

The group identity (collective, local or regional, of an ethnic group, etc.) is eloquently expressed by the way in which the Public Place is made visible, managed and used, and especially by the Public Place-Private Space relationship. This mode is a function of time, it is not given and immutable, it is processual and has a history of its own becoming.

Changes in land tenure are as influential on the identity related to the use of the common space as cultural or psychological changes (which, for example, are analyzed by proxemics) or social-political changes (i.e. depending on the emphasis on the individual or the collectivity, for example).

Identity, as it is presented by Dnspatiation and, especially, by the entrenchment of the relationship, only becomes enlightening when it is expressed not in absolute terms, but in degrees of comparison. Identity is an attribute of locality, of neighborhood, and is a matter of degree, not a difference in rank. Christian Norberg Schulz accepts the differences in character (including degrees of ordination) that can exist between an architectural object and the place to which it belongs, or between place and locality or area as a whole in terms of topology. If we discuss the rural architecture of the same territory populated by different ethnic groups (Transylvania or Dobrogea are two examples in this respect), we will be able to establish local, molecular differences as soon as the climatic and relief factors are simplified; what remains is therefore cultural difference. Only in such "neighborhood units", in comparable islands of proximity, can a relevant discussion about identity expressed through architecture be held. Other types of distant comparisons, for example those made between the vernacular architecture of some Romanian areas and some Japanese islands - a gesture typical of the seventies and eighties, when it seemed that the Japanese example of becoming unbroken from tradition to modernity could be reconciled with Romanian national-communist rhetoric - become completely irrelevant and are probably much indebted to similarities of climate, relief, isolation. An approach within local and regional frameworks, from the perspective of different aspects of managing a similar geography, is therefore the way forward in the discussion of identity. Identity is established through processes of assimilation and rejection of competing models on the same territory, or between adjacent territories.

An eloquent example of this molecular comparativist view of identity is, paradoxically, given by Blaga, but not through the concept of "matrix"; on the contrary, through a marginal article in his work in Cuvântul 2(274)- October 4, 1925. Blaga's text suggests to us that identity is essentially given by the way in which the Public Place is configured and used, by the relations of mutual openness or mutual exclusion of the islands of private Space - always, however, in relation to the Public Place - this territory of neighboring made visible. We know how different is the character of the Transylvanian Saxon towns from that of many of the surrounding ethnic Romanian villages, beyond the obvious urban/rural difference. When there are similarities, they are an obvious influence of the urban order on the territory (as is the case, for example, with sacred wooden architecture), the city, on the contrary, being practically autistic to the possible influences of the vernacular.

This dissonance is observed by Blaga going even further and comparing the ethnically Saxon villages with the ethnically Romanian ones in Transylvania. Thus, the Saxon villages "studied (...) very much the place where they were to be built (...) they are aligned according to geometrical exigencies, the impression of calculation is detached. Romanian villages are placed much more randomly in the landscapes that frame them (...)"[4]. Blaga's text suggests to us that identity is essentially given by the way in which the public/communal place is configured and used, by the relations of mutual openness or exclusion of the islands of private private private space - always, however, in relation to this territory of neighboring made visible through presence - which is khoros.

Bucharest yesterday: the de-figuration of the Public Place

Leaving Plato's Republic, let's head for the new civic center of Bucharest. Arrived there, we notice that the entire space around the alleged Public Building of Romania is surrounded by a hideous fence, separating once again, this time not just symbolically or in scale, the building itself from the city in which it was located. The public place, the island of civility at the center of which the city's problems should have been deposited in order to be resolved, has been kidnapped and transformed into a rural "private" space of the rural "private" space of those strong enough to violently appropriate it. Public space guarded with a gun? The public island - the raison d'être of the civic center - is violated and disappears.

Bucharest is a city without squares, in the sense of public spaces for debate, negotiation and exchange, as defined by CNS in Habiter. This sad observation, which Prof. Alexandru Sandu has often made, must immediately be accompanied by another, which empirical observation imposes as a matter of course and which Dana Harhoiu's study has pointed out as a characteristic of the city: the omnipresence of the slum.

And what about those civic squares, imitations of the Roman forum - but without a temple - built by the communist regime in parallel with the offensive to reinvent counties and, above all, "municipalities"? Are these public spaces in the sense just mentioned, or are they islands of the intercession of the together-placing? First of all, their "utopian" character should be noted, in the sense that they are built a) to replace the historically constituted centers of the respective "municipalities" (Ploiești, Pitești); or b) ex-centric in relation to them (Satu Mare, Tulcea, Sibiu, Bucharest).

Secondly, these 'civic centers', inspired not so much by the Roman model as by the Italian fascist model of the 1930s (Brescia is an eloquent example in this respect), are not located en meso, but are in fact subordinate to the seat of power, having as their vanishing point the balcony/tribune intended for appearances at Ceaușescu's "great popular gatherings", in the same way that Terragni's proposal for the Palace of the Fascisti was, in plan, a converging mirror, in the focal point of which was the leader's tribune. The imposing role of the Satu-Mare tribune (of the late Nicolae Porumbescu), which is detached from the rest of the building and hovers above the "square", is illustrative in this respect.

Thirdly, deriving from the previous statement, the character of the square is that of a parade or a gathering of the masses, not a meeting of equals, a role that the agora, the forum, plays. In a dramatic change, which illustrates the change in the nature of power, the political or administrative edifices of this century - after the experience of the Winter Palace - are taking the piano nobile, the public place of equals, out into the streets, transforming it into a subordinate market place where the leader shows himself to the crowd in a completely controlled environment. We will thus observe that the public spaces described above have fulfilled their role as forums only once - in 1989 - when, indeed, they were forums for public and collective decision-making. Judging by their emptiness before and, especially, after the revolution, one can conclude their total failure: isolated from the favorite promenade and commercial routes, they remained signs of a power abandoned by the solidarity of communities in the solitude of civic squares.

The question that necessarily arises from what has been said so far is whether, noting the shortage of public spaces, the failure of existing ones and their taking "into possession" by citizens and even by institutions which, being public in theory, should preserve this character at least for the space around them, we should insist on the invention of public spaces in Romanian cities?

It should be said that there are surrogates that we, architects in particular, who are fascinated by the millenary association between the idea of the public place and the historically constituted urban market form, take too little account of. However, the media and social networks, especially Facebook, are making up for a growing percentage of these absences, or, as in the case of television, camouflaging or suppressing the need for the Public Place.

Bucharest: remodeling the Public Place as a postmodern fact

One way of judging the city and architecture from a postmodern perspective is that of the co-existence of all layers and interventions on a site, even if they would have to be co-present in a new house. This process of co-presence has been pioneered by Peter Eisenman in at least two projects: the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, and the intervention in La Villete, Paris, designed with Derrida. In the first case, the armory that once existed on the site is evoked in the architecture of the new house. In the second case, all the previous states of the site are present at the same time and coexist - with the same intensity - with the 'new' state.

An example of this is von Gerkhan's well-known project for Bucharest 2000. From the outset, however, it has to be said that, having no economic basis whatsoever, this project can only be discussed as a pleasant formal exercise without any real basis: unfortunately, it did not exist - as financial logic would have dictated - even when the competition was held, and even less so now. At a time when for almost three years the City Hall has been delaying the opening of the Bucharest 2000 Agency and the investment climate has deteriorated due to the incompetence and lack of vision of the political and administrative class, such a financial set-up is all the more remote.

Of course, the project has its odd sides: the Unirii square should have been turned into a lake, but judging by the fact that the underground underneath is flooded anyway, it might not be the best of the options. One project for the Cathedral of the Nation (the late Petre Ciută) took this aspect of von Gerkhan's design seriously and isolated the proposed cathedral on an isolated "ostrov" in the center of a lake occupying much of the square and to which only a few thin paths would lead. Mr. Ciută's exercise draws our attention to the other realm character of sacred space. As far as Mr. Gerkhan and his partners are concerned, the flooding of the square cannot, I think, be as elegantly argued, nor, I think, can such a hypostasis of the Lp be imagined.

The blocks (in their western sense, of an urban unit bounded by three or four streets) are platted on a site on which another system of streets and another architecture existed; so it is that in the flesh of these blocks are cut into the flesh of the old street routes in the guise of zenithally lit passageways. The pre-existing structure is thus celebrated by the new architecture, present and precedent coexisting. Another interesting example, the winning project, realized by HAX srl, in the competition for the UAR headquarters, implied the co-presence of the old house - ruined in the revolution, but with political/symbolic significance - in the very foundation of the UAR headquarters, the winning project in the competition organized for this purpose by the UAR (in Senate Square, on the ruins of the former Fifth Directorate of Security). In a superior form, this theme of co-presence was realized by Dan Marin and Zeno Bogdănescu in the building that was erected and which I personally consider the most provocative building constructed in Romania after 1989 and the true memorial of the events of that time.

How can the successive layers of history of a site be present simultaneously in the flesh of the new house? We must ask ourselves this question seriously if we do not want to be further invaded by the kitsch by-products of architects who are not attentive either to the immanent features of the site, as the phenomenologists recommend, or to its history, as the deconstructionists propose. It is also a key question if we wish to confer an identity on the city other than that of a city systematically destroyed and taken from scratch. Perhaps, instead of pouring concrete over the vestiges of the old inns of Bucharest, we should meditate on the idea of introverted buildings, at least for the center area, with full-height interior courtyards/atriums, towards which the whole life of the house should be oriented, even if morphologically we would relate the latter to the western type of expressiveness. The essential condition, however, would be that the atrium be a public space at least at street level and, perhaps, at mezzanine level. This could be imposed as a condition for anyone wishing to design in the central area and should be stipulated in the public competition theme for such buildings.

Bucharest's inns, which the advance of French eclecticism suppressed, can thus be given a new lease of life in the form of covered shopping arcades, passageways through the revitalized historic centre, atriums in individual buildings and courtyards in the depths of buildings, of the kind found in the inter-war buildings on Calea Victoriei. Here, there are these semi-private spaces, saved from the hustle and bustle of the street, through which you pass with necessity before entering the lobby of the building proper. At Duiliu Marcu's Regia Monopolurilor, Duiliu Marcu praised in his 1940 design book exactly such an inner courtyard for the use of the large-scale workers. In the center of Bucharest there are a series of 'twin' buildings flanking the entrance to an inner courtyard of the ensemble in question; whether their expression is neo-Romanesque, neo-Moorish or modernist, these ensembles articulated around a semi-private space share the same perspective on the public-private relationship, which should not be seen in terms of mutual exclusion but, on the contrary, in terms of a gradual, less traumatic path. Perhaps this wisdom should not be lost, with all the oriental air of the typology (or, if we remember the quartets, against their association with Stalinism). In this respect, it is worth examining the ability of the western block (an urban unit made up of buildings arranged around a courtyard on the perimeter of four streets) to propose a similar type of semi-public space within itself. P Meinhard von Gerkhan's project for the 'new civic center', the result of the Bucharest 2000 international competition (1995-6), sets up such blocks - little used so far in the urban texture of Bucharest - in the area around the House of the Republic. It is obvious that, given the nature of where they would be located, it is highly implausible that the privacy of some living spaces can be ensured in the same way that it could be installed in a 'neutral' location in terms of public life.

The vaulted basements in the center can be found as a typology and used for restaurants, bars, clubs. Natural materials - stone, wood - can enter into fertile dialogues and contrasts with high-tech materials (metal and glass), as in the works of great architects (Aalto, Siza, Wright, Ando, H.Fathi, Herzog&De Meuron, etc.) Glass, so present in contemporary architecture, can also be used in the way proposed by the city of the târgoveti - the glazing - with a modern expression. This is how Constantin Joja wanted it and this is how he used it for the BCR sector 6 headquarters in Ghencea Boulevard (arch. Dorin Ștefan, DS Studio).

Renewal should not mean the mimetic taking over of typologies and technologies usually exhausted in the West. We do not necessarily have to repeat the errors of orthodox modernist architecture, as Robert Venturi called it (no connection with the eponymous religion), but we can find foundations for an architecture specific to the capital, in which the present echoes the past hypostases of the place, and the latter pilots the act of design from the infratext. The new methods of investigating architecture and urbanism offer this alternative opening to the chance to be contemporary without banishing in the process the features - many, few as they are - that characterize this city.

I conclude my brief notes on the island-spaces of living together with the remark - taken from a broader commentary by Rem Koolhas, architect and philosopher of post-structuralist architecture - that the idea of the Public Place and, above all, the obsession with the necessity of its presence in the city are two of the hallmarks of architects who are slowly, slowly, ceasing to have the importance of the urban theories of past decades[5].

Of course, the situation is completely different in the specific case of Romania, where the learning of (inter) community dialog has to be coupled with the emergence of the expression of these civic spaces - from transparency and the strengthening of the public attributes of institutions to markets and from television and media to Facebook. But the conclusion I am suggesting is that any discussion of public place should take place only after there is a critical mass of private space in the community, of single-family housing of the sort of neighborhoods built on the "guild" criteria until after the war. Lp depends on the existence of entirely private space, in which being is grounded and from the protection of which, to paraphrase a Heideggerian saying, man, in inhabiting it, can confront other kinds of space.

NOTES