Public place

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", thus it draws with itself, it displaces the space of its happening - the public place.

Public place > public space

The reason why the term public place is used 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 to be delimited (by various means of construction, but also by the choice of a natural fenced-in place^)1. The word place here indicates that there is only a minimal spatial requirement for the setting up, for the happening of a public event, a limited area.

The limits of the place are given by the very scale 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 building; the latter, provided it remains minimal and low (precisely so as not to impinge on mutual visibility) can come as a consequence, as a confirmation of the recurrence of a given event in a given location, and not as a precondition that is likely to "invoke", to "lubricate" the occurrence of the event.

In a public place, events of the kind of negotiations made possible by this exchange of visibilities (trade, ^joint decision2 ) or of confrontation (battlefield, space of punishment) can occur at the same time, 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 relationship with place and public places will be discussed elsewhere, tend to control this open deplatings of the event in its ^entirety3 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, all that is needed is the 'clearing', not necessarily the 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 François de Polignac, even explain the emergence of settlements by grouping around a site "illuminated" by events, usually sacre, "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 encounters which, in themselves, barely manage to guarantee the self-sustainability as an event of the initial 'clearing', i.e. the public place.

The conclusion to be drawn from this minimal arrangement of 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 geometrically quantifiable and that this is a matter of the rigor with which they have designed their "civic" spaces: monuments, buildings, hardened heroism.

On the contrary: it is often observed that the recipe for the public place is more evanescent than they thought and that it escaped the Romanian architects of the seventh, eighth and nineteenth 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 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 a common action (praxis), such as the conduct of war or war games" (1998, 47).

Rem Koolhaas has frontally criticized this demiurgic obsession with 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 a prior built intervention and, vice versa, the mere fact that they have arranged a particular space and called it 'civic', or 'public', or 'meeting place' does not necessarily mean that they will be used as such by members of a community.

The public place gives a sense of collective identity

Group identity (collective, local or regional, belonging to an ethnic community, 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 way is a function of time, it is not given and immutable, therefore it is processual in character and also has a particular history of its own becoming.

Changes in land tenure are as influential on the identity related to the use of 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 the embodiment and, above all, by the embedding 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 object, architecture 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 that illustrate this point), 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 within the same territory or between neighboring 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 utilized, 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 Blaga observes by going even further and comparing the ethnic Saxon villages with the ethnic 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 that identity is essentially determined by the way in which the public/communal place is configured and used, by the relations of mutual openness or mutual exclusion of the islands from the private space - but always in relation to this territory of neighboring made visible through presence - which is khoros.

Bucharest yesterday: de-figuration of the Public Place

Leaving Plato's Republic, let's head towards the new civic center of Bucharest. Arrived there, we notice that the entire space around the so-called Public Building of Romania is surrounded by a hideous fence, separating once again, this time not only 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 problems of the city 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, often made by Prof. dr. dr. arh. Alexandru Sandu, must immediately be accompanied by another one, which empirical observation imposes as a self-evident fact and Dana Harhoiu's study has pointed it 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 they public spaces in the sense just mentioned, or are they islands of the intercession of the together-place? First of all, their 'utopian' character, in the sense in which they are constructed, should be noted:

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", which are inspired not so much by the Roman model as by the Fascist-Italian model of the 1930s (Brescia is an eloquent example in this regard), 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 Ceaușescu's appearances at the "great popular assemblies", 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 market as a parade or a gathering of the masses, not as a meeting of equals, a role that the agora, the forum, has. In a dramatic change, illustrative of 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 noble piano level, 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, observing the shortage of public spaces, the failure of existing ones and their taking 'into possession' by citizens and even by institutions which, being public, theoretically 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. Yet the media and social networks, especially Facebook, make up for a growing percentage of these absences or, as in the case of television, camouflage or suppress 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 coexistence 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.

Von Gerkhan's already well-known project for Bucharest 2000 is an example. 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: Union 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. A project for the Cathedral of the Nation (proposed by the late Petre Ciută) took this aspect of Von Gerkhan's design seriously and isolated the proposed cathedral on an "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 Public Place 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 past coexisting.

Another interesting example, the winning project, realized by HAX srl, in the competition for the UAR headquarters, involved 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 challenging 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 think about the idea of introverted buildings, at least for the central 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 can 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 wind 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 amploiații. In the center of Bucharest there are a series of 'twin' buildings flanking the entrance to an inner courtyard of the complex; whether their expression is neo-Romanesque, neo-Moorish or modernist, these complexes, 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. Meinhard von Gerkhan's project for the 'new civic center', the result of the Bucharest 2000 international competition (1995-96), sets up such blocks - little used so far in Bucharest's urban texture - in the area around the House of the Republic. It is obvious that, given the nature of the place where they would be located, it is highly unlikely 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.

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 city of the târgoveti - the glazing - with a modern expression. This is how Constantin Joja wanted it and this is how it was used in the BCR Sector 6 headquarters in Bd. Ghencea (arh. Dorin Ștefan, DS Studio).

Renewal should not mean mimicking typologies and technologies that are usually expressively 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, from the infratext, pilots the act of design. 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 there 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 the architect and philosopher of poststructuralist architecture Rem Koolhas - that the idea of the Public Place and, in particular, 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 ^decades5.

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 squares and from television and media to Facebook. But the conclusion I am suggesting is that any discussion of the Public Place must take place only after there is a critical mass of private, single-family housing in the community, of the kind of neighborhoods built on the "guild" criteria until after the war. The public place depends on the existence of the entirely private space in which one's being is grounded and in the protection of which, to paraphrase a Heideggerian saying, man, in living, can face other kinds of space.

2. "Architecture is the arrangement of space for excitement", Philip Johnson in "What I've Learned".

3."The guardian of meaning has no need to feed from the event except to cite it to compare in the process that the doctrine intends for the real. It need only happen what is announced to happen" (Lyotard, 1997, 83).

4. The text is of particular interest to researchers of the problem of identity because, unlike the concept of the stylistic matrix, it seems to accept that identity is always a matter of specific differences within a context, which must therefore be compared, and not an immanent, context-impervious datum of an ethnic group; in this case, certain features of the way Romanian villages are organized can be presented only by comparison with the Saxon villages with which they share the same geography and climate.

5. Moreover, "civic squares" are not a completely new idea of the Romanian communist regime; the fifties and sixties were full of such "civic" experiments in the West, especially in German cities and even in the USA. I commented at length on these "elephantine tendencies" (William J. R. Curtis) in the study dedicated to the problem and included in the New Europe College Yearbook 1995-'96, Bucharest, Humanitas, 1999.

The event is here to be understood as a system of dynamic relations, in which the essential role is played by visibility, which is established at a given moment (and for a determinate period) between at least two human beings. The event "takes place", and thus it extracts, unfolds the space of its occurrence - the public space.

Public place > public space

The reason why this text chiefly makes use of the term public place derives from the way in which this has been defined above: the attribute of being public necessarily presupposes as a spatial "stage" only an expanse, rather than a space that is de-limited (via various means of construction, but also through the choice of a closed off natural space^)1. The word place here points to the fact that there exists only a minimal spatial requirement for the coming into being, for the occurrence of a public event, a limited surface area.

The limits of the place are provided by the breadth of the event itself, in its unfolding, rather than by prior acts of building; it is the event extracts that portion of space from spatium rather than the building of it; the latter, on the condition that it should remain minimal and low level (precisely in order not to impede reciprocal visibility), can come as a consequence, as an ascertainment of the recurrence of a certain event within a given localization, rather than a precondition capable of "invoking", of "lubricating" the emergence of the event.

In the public place it is possible for events to take place simultaneously, to coexist within the same territory, events such as the negotiations that this exchange of visibility makes possible (trade, shared ^{decision-making2}) or confrontations (the battlefield, the space of punishment). These are actions that take place "openly, in the light of day, as opposed to secret procedures" (Vernant, 1995: 70). Authoritarian regimes, whose relationship with place and public places will be discussed later, have a tendency to exert integral ^control3 over this unfolding in the open of the event or, as Lyotard puts it, "to keep the event under the authority (of totalitarian bureaucracy)" - (Lyotard, 1997: 83).

It is sufficient, however, to glimpse the virtual character of a natural place and that there be a small amount of arrangement in order for it to be illuminated through the act of the event, through visibility. In other words, in order for a place to become a public place, a "forest clearing" is sufficient; there is not necessarily any need for Raum. The Raum can subsequently become built built space, although when nomads temporarily take possession of it to build their camp all that is required is cursory clearance and arrangement. Some anthropologists, such as Angelo Moretta, and even archaeologists, such as François de Polignac, go so far as to explain the appearance of settlements through the grouping around a site "illumined" by typically sacred events, "la cité cultuelle" (as de Polignac calls it), through fortification, inner geometry, building within limits. It is therefore a domain of dwelling, which, precisely because of its quality of taking place in the vicinity of the other, somehow guarantees the frequency of encounters which themselves barely manage to guarantee self-perpetuation as an event of the original "forest clearing", Q.E.D. public place.

The conclusion of this minimal arrangement required by the place in which the public event is about to occur will obviously be disappointing for architects, who have long believed that the recipe for the public space is geometrically quantifiable and that it depends upon the rigor with which they will have designed "civic" spaces: monuments, edifices, heroism set in stone. But on the contrary, it is often observed that the recipe for the public space is more evanescent than they thought and that it eluded, for example, the Romanian architects of the 70s, 80s and 90s, who built "civic centres" in each county administrative seat according to the vulgarized (and, significantly, laicized) formulas of the Roman forum, in the process sacrificing the real centres of the towns in question (which were turned into municipalities). Perhaps there is a non-built Public Place, which the gaze can scan at will, such as the dance ring (the place where the Sunday ring dance took place in the Romanian village, for example), the battlefield, or, more commonly, the public marketplace. Habermas emphasizes the fact that "the public life, bios politikos, unfolds in the marketplace, the agora, but without it being bound in any way to this particular place. The public sphere is constructed within the framework of speech (lexis), which likewise can take the form of a debate or a trial, as well as a joint action (praxis), such as the waging of war or war games" (1998, 47).

In Conversations with Students (1996), Rem Koolhaas severely criticized this demiurgic obsession with the fixed, built and wholly controlled civic spaces that architects wish to establish in cities. Although he does not formulate it as such, Koolhaas' conclusion seems to be that the attribute of being a public space does not presuppose a prior built intervention and, contrariwise, the mere fact that a certain space has been fitted out and titled "civic", "public" or "meeting place" does not necessarily mean that it will be used as such by the members of a community.

The public place brings collective identity to awareness

The identity of a (collective, local, regional, ethnic) group is eloquently expressed by the way in which the Public Space is made visible, administered and utilised and, above all, by the relationship between Public Space and Private Space. This mode is a function of time, rather than being given and unchangeable, and therefore it has a processual character and likewise a particular history of its own becoming.

Changes in land ownership have just as much influence on identity in relation to the use of the common space as cultural or psychological shifts, or socio-political changes (for example, whether the emphasis is on the individual or the collective). Identity, as it presents itself when it inserts itself into space and, above all, when it embeds the relationship within a building, becomes enlightening only when it is expressed not in absolute terms, but in degrees of comparison. Identity is an attribute of the local, of vicinity, and it is a matter of degree, rather than a difference of rank. Christian Norberg Schulz accepts the differences of character (including the degrees of ordering) that can exist between an object, architecture, and the place to which it belongs, or between place, locality and overall area, in terms of topology.

If we are talking about the rural architecture of a territory inhabited by different ethnic groups (Transylvania and Dobrudja are two enlightening examples in this respect), we shall be able to establish local, molecular differences as soon as the climatic and relief factors have been simplified; what is left over is therefore cultural differen-ce. It is only in such "units of vicinity", in comparable islands of proximity, that it is possible to carry on a relevant discussion about the identity expressed through architecture. Other types of distant comparison, for example between the vernacular architecture of some Romanian regions and the islands of Japan - a practice specific to the 70s and 80s in Romania, when it seemed that the Japanese example of unbroken evolution from tradition to modernity could be reconciled with Romanian national-communist rhetoric - become completely irrelevant and are probably due more to similarities of climate, relief, and geographic isolation.

An approach within the local and regional framework, from the perspective of the various aspects of management of a similar geography, is therefore the path to be followed in the discussion about identity. Identity is established through processes of assimilation and rejection of competing models from the same territory or neighboring territories.

An eloquent example of this comparativist molecular molecular vision of identity is paradoxically provided by Lucian Blaga, but not in his concept of the "matrix". Rather, it is to be found in an article marginal to his main work, published in Cuvântul 2 (274)/4 October 1925. Blaga's text suggests that identity is essentially given by the mode in which the Public Space is configured and utilised, and by the islands of the Private Space's relationships of reciprocal openness or exclusion - albeit always in relation to the Public Space, that territory of vicinity that has been made visible. We know how different is the character of the Saxon towns of Transylvania from that of many of the ethnic Romanian villages around them, quite apart from the obvious difference between urban and rural. When there are similarities, they obviously arise from the influence of the urban order on the territory (this is what happens, for example, with wooden ecclesiastical architecture), with the city remaining impervious to any potential influence from the vernacular.

Blaga observes this dissonance even further when he compares ethnic Saxon with ethnic Romanian villages in Transylvania. Thus, the Saxon villages "have studied (...) deeply the place where they were to be built (...) they are aligned according to geometric exigencies, they give the impression of calculation. Romanian villages are situated more randomly in the landscapes that surround them."⁴ Blaga's text suggests that identity is essentially given by the mode in which the public/communal place is configured and utilised, by the relationships of reciprocal openness or exclusion existing among the islands of private space, but always in relation to the territory of vicinity made visible through presence that is the khoros.

The Bucharest of yesterday:the disfigurement of the Public Space

Let us leave behind Plato's Republic and head towards Bucharest's new civic center. Having arrived there, we observe that the entire space around the supposed Public Edifice of Romania is surrounded by a hideous fence, which separates yet again, not merely symbolically or in terms of scale, the building proper from the city in which it is situated. The public space, the civic island at whose center the problems of the city ought to have been submitted for resolution, has been snatched away and transformed into a rural-style "private" space, a space that belongs to whomever is strong enough to seize it violently. A public place guarded by guns? The public island - the raison d'être of the civic center - is violated and disappears.

Bucharest is not a city with plazas, in the sense of public spaces for debate, negotiation and exchange, as the CNS defines them in Habiter. This sad observation, which has also often been made by Professor Alexandru Sandu, must straightaway be joined with another, one that is empirically obvious and which Dana Harhoiu's study has pointed to as being characteristic of the city: the omnipresence of the maidan (vacant lot, patch of waste ground). What is with these civic plazas, imitations of the Roman forum, albeit without a temple, built by the communist regime in parallel with the onslaught of the reinvention of the counties and, above all, the "municipalities"? Are they public spaces in the sense given above? What must first be noted is their "utopian" character, in the sense that they are constructed:

a) as a replacement for the built historic centers of the "municipalities" in question (Ploiești, Pitești); or

b) ex-centrically in relation to these centers (Satu Mare, Tulcea, Sibiu, Bucharest).

In the second place, these "civic centers", which are inspired not so much by the Roman model as much as by the Italian fascist model of the 1930s (Brescia being a good example), are not situated en meso, but are in fact subordinated to the seat of power, and have as their vanishing point the balcony/podium intended for Ceaușescu's appearances at "grand people's assemblies", in the same way as Terragni's proposal for the Palace of the Fasces took the plan of a converging mirror at whose focus was placed the leader's podium. Illustrative in this respect is the imposing role of the podium in Satu Mare (designed by the late Nicolae Porumbescu), which is detached from the rest of the building and floats above the "plaza".

In the third place, following on from the foregoing statement, such plazas are essentially designed for parades and mass gatherings, rather than for meetings of equals, which was the role of the agora or forum. In a dramatic shift, which illustrates that which has taken place in the nature of power, the political and administrative edifices of that century - after the experience of the Winter Palace - evict the piano nobile level, the public place of equals, onto the street, transforming it into a subordinated plaza where the leader shows himself to the crowd within a completely controlled environment. We may note that the public spaces described above fulfilled their role as forums only once, in 1989, when they genuinely became forums for public and collective decision. Judging by their emptiness before and, above all, after the Revolution, we may conclude that they have been a total failure: isolated from preferred routes for walking and shopping, they have remained as signs of a power abandoned by the solidarity of the community to the solitude of the civic plazas.

The question that necessarily arises from what has been said up to this point is whether, having observed the deficit of public spaces, the failure of those that exist, and their taking "into possession" by private citizens and even institutions which, being public at least in theory, ought to preserve their public character at least in the surrounding space, we ought to insist upon inventing public spaces in Romanian cities.

It should be said that there are surrogates to which we architects in particular pay too little attention, fascinated as we are by the millennial association between the idea of the public place and the historically established urban form of the plaza. The media and social networks, Facebook in particular, are increasingly compensating for such absences or, as in the case of television, camouflaging or suppressing the need for the Public Space.

Bucharest: reshaping the Public Space as a postmodern fact

One way of judging the city and architecture from the postmodern perspective is in terms of the coexistence of all the strata and interventions within a site, even if they will have to be co-present in a new building. The procedure of co-presence has been used by Peter Eisenman in at least two projects: the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, and the La Villete intervention in Paris, designed together with Jacques Derrida. In the first case, the armoury that formerly existed on the site is evoked in the architecture of the new building. In the second case, all the previous states of the site are presented simultaneously and coexist with the "new" state just as intensely.

One example is Von Gerkhan's by now famous project for Bucharest 2000. From the outset it should be said that in the absence of any economic basis, we can only discuss this project as a pleasing formal exercise, without any real foundation: unfortunately, it did not exist - as financial logic would have demanded - even when the competition took place, and exists even less so now. In the situation in which for almost three years the city hall has been dragging its feet when it comes to getting the Bucharest 2000 Agency up and running, and the investment climate has deteriorated due to incompetence and lack of vision on the part of the political and administrative class, such a financial montage is further away than ever.

Of course, the project also has its rather strange aspects: Unirii Plaza would have been turned into a lake, but if we take into account that the metro beneath it is flooded anyway, perhaps this would have been one of the best options. A design for the Cathedral of the Nation (proposed by the late Petre Ciută) took this aspect of von Gerkhan's project seriously and isolated the proposed cathedral on an islet in the middle of the lake, occupying a large part of the square and with access along just two narrow walkways. Ciută's exercise draws our attention to the otherworldliness of the sacred space. As far as Gerkhan and his partners are concerned, I don't think the flooding of the plaza would have been as elegantly achieved and nor can the Public Space be imagined in such an embodiment.

The blocks (in the western sense of an urban unit delimited by three or four streets) are superimposed upon a site where a different street grid and architectural system existed. This is why the flesh of these blocks is incised by the courses of the old streets in the form of passageways illuminated from overhead. The pre-existing structure is thus celebrated by the new architecture, with the present and the precedent coexisting. Another interesting example, the winning project for the Union of Romanian Architects headquarters, designed by HAX S.R.L., presupposes the co-presence of the old building - partly destroyed during the Revolution, but with a political/symbolic significance: the ruin of the former Department 5 of the Securitate. In a higher form, the theme of co-presence has been achieved in Dan Marin and Zeno Bogdănescu's building, which I personally regard as one of the most provocative to have been constructed in Romania since 1989, a true memorial to the events of the Revolution.

How can the succeeding strata of a site's history be presented simultaneously in the flesh of a new building? This is a question we seriously need to ask ourselves if we want to put a stop to the invasion of kitsch sub-production by architects unconcerned with the immanent features of a site, as the phenomenologists recommend, or its history, as the deconstructionists propose. Likewise, a key question is whether we wish to confer an identity upon the city, other than the identity of a city systematically destroyed and built all over again. Instead of pouring concrete over the remains of Bucharest's old inns, we probably ought to meditate on the idea of introverted buildings, at least in the city center, buildings with inner courtyards/atriums, towards which the whole life of the building is oriented, even if morphologically we will couple this with western-type expression. The essential condition, however, is that such an atrium would be a public space, at least at street level and probably also at the level of the mezzanine. This could be laid down as a condition for anyone who wishes to design buildings in the city center and should be stipulated in the theme of the public competitions for such buildings.

The inns of Bucharest, which the advance of French eclecticism stifled, might thereby gain a new lease of life, in the form of covered shopping galleries, of passageways crisscrossing a revitalized historic centre, of atriums in individual buildings and deep courtyards, of the kind which we find in the inter-war buildings on Calea Victoriei. Here can be found those semi-private spaces sheltered from the bustle of the street, through which you must pass before entering the lobby of the building proper. In his design proposals for the Monopolies Department building, architect Duiliu Marcu praised precisely such an inner courtyard for the use of employees. In central Bucharest there is a series of "twin" buildings, flanking the entrance to inner courtyards. Regardless of whether they are Neo-Romanian, Neo-Moorish, or modernist in design, these ensembles articulated around a semi-private space share the same perspective on the relationship between public and private, which should not be viewed in mutually exclusive terms, but rather in the sense of a gradual, less traumatic transition. Such wisdom probably ought not to be lost, despite the oriental air of the typology (or, if we recall the kvartaly, despite their association with Stalinism). In this respect, we need to examine the capacity of the western block (an urban unit made up of buildings arranged around a courtyard and delimited by four streets) to put forward a similar type of semi-public space within itself. Meinhard von Gerkhan's design for the "new civic center", the result of the international Bucharest 2000 competition (1995-'96), establishes such blocks - hitherto underused in the urban fabric of Bucharest - around the House of the Republic. It is obvious that, given the nature of the place where they would have been situated, it would have been extremely unlikely that the privacy of the dwelling spaces would have been guaranteed in the same way as on a site "neutral" from the point of view of public life.

The vaulted cellars of central Bucharest can be rediscovered as a typology and used for restaurants, bars and clubs. Natural materials (stone, wood) can enter into a dialog and create fertile contrasts with high-tech materials (metal, glass), as is the case in works by major architects such as Aalto, Siza, Wright, Ando, H. Fathi, Herzog and De Meuron.

Glass, which is so common in contemporary architecture, can also be used in the way proposed by the Bucharest of merchant times, in the form of an updated geamlâc (corridor or veranda closed off by a wall consisting of small panes of glass joined together in a grid). This was what Constantin Joja proposed and it has been put to use in the branch of the Romanian Commercial Bank on Ghencea Boulevard (architect Dorin Ștefan, DS Studio).

Innovation does not have to mean the mimetic adoption of typologies and technologies that have exhausted their potential for expression in the West. We do not necessarily have to repeat the errors of orthodox modernist architecture, as Robert Venturi called it, but rather we can discover the foundations for an architecture specific to our capital, in which the contemporary would find its echo in the past embodiments of the place, and the place would guide the act of design from the infra-text. The new methods of investigating architecture and urbanism provide this alternative opening towards the opportunity to be contemporary without banishing in the process the features that particularize the city, however few or many of these there might be.

I shall conclude my brief notes on the island-spaces of dwelling together with the observation - taken from a more extensive commentary by architect and philosopher of postmodern architecture Rem Koolhaas - that the idea of the Public Space and, above all, the obsession with the need for its presence in the city are two of the totems of architects who are gradually ceasing to be of importance in the urbanist theories of recent ^decades5.

Of course, the situation is completely different in the specific case of Romania, where the knack of (inter-)community dialog ought to be fostered and to combine with the emergence of the expression of these civic spaces - from the transparency and reinforcement of the public attributes of institutions to plazas, and from television and the media to Facebook. But the conclusion I suggest is that any discussion about the Public Space ought to unfold only after a critical mass of private space, of one-family homes of the type found in the districts built according to "guild" criteria up until the Second World War, exists in the community. The Public Space depends on the existence of the wholly private space, in which being is rooted and from whose sheltering protection, to paraphrase Heigegger, man may, by dwelling, confront other types of spaces.

2. "Architecture is the arrangement of space for excitement", Philip Johnson in "What I've Learned".

3. "The guardian of the meaning does not need to be nurtured by the event except to quote it in order to compare it in the trial that the doctrine brings against the real. Only what has been announced will happen, must happen" (Lyotard, 1997, 83).

4. The text is of particular interest to researchers into the problem of identity, because in contrast to the concept of the stylistic matrix it seems to accept that identity is always a matter of specific differences within a context, which therefore need to be compared, rather than an immanent given, impervious to context, of an ethnic group; in this particular case, certain features of the way in which Romanian villages are organized can be presented only via comparison with the Saxon villages with which they share the same geography and climate.

5. In any case, not even the "civic plazas" are a wholly new idea of the Romanian communist regime; in the West in the 1950s and 60s there were numerous such "civic" experiments, particularly in West Germany, but also even in the USA. I have written about these "elephantine tendencies" (William J. R. Curtis) at greater length in a study included in the New Europe College Yearbook, 1995-'96 (Bucharest, Humanitas, 1999).