Unloved Bucharest, landscape... or not... (?)

People often talk about unloved Bucharest (most Romanian cities are unloved, but I'll talk about Bucharest because I live in it and, above all, I love it). However, I know many other people who love Bucharest. Passionately! It is perfectly true that many of them are either not Romanian or do not live in Romania. Is it the distance necessary for clear perception that Kant referred to when he spoke of landscapes? Do we need distance to be able to see and, above all, to understand?

My international friends (Germany, Canada, Estonia, Portugal, the Netherlands, UK, France, Austria, Belgium...) find Bucharest a charming city. Southerners find themselves in its relaxed atmosphere, northerners yearn for its smell of lime and honeysuckle. They are all moved (sometimes to tears!!!!) by its patriarchal atmosphere, reminding them of their more or less distant childhoods or its stories. On the other hand, everyone is tired of Bucharest. They all describe it as a paradise when they look up at the crowns of trees and bourgeois houses, but they also describe it as an obstacle course when they look down at the kiosks, bollards and cars in their way or at the potholes in the latter. Many say that Bucharest has taught them what it means to be environmentally conscious, i.e. to stay with all your senses awake as you never know what will hit you or where you will fall. On the other hand, the smells and noises of the city also wake them up. And this too is somewhere between patriarchal (the aromatic vegetation and its rustle, the clattering plates clattering heartily in the courtyards, the roosters still waking up the old slums, the children still squealing in the streets) and aggressive (the muddy traffic, the wandering rubbish, the dripping puddles).

In the meantime, we, the people of Bucharest, and our elected mayors, prove to be fanatical supporters of all sources of discomfort while we fight fiercely to destroy everything that overwhelms (positive experience) and excites others, the travelers in search of beauty or those who never stop to swing between two homes.

I can't help wondering if Kant was right. We are incapable of perceiving beauty/landscape when it is 'jammed' by utility. We don't mind the chaos in the streets because we generate it out of... need (?). We park on the sidewalks, with the bar firmly planted in the fence because there's no room (?), but still Bucharest has streets infinitely wider than any city we admire on vacation. We litter by the bins because they are full (?) while we sigh for the cleanliness of other metropolises [is it true (?)]. Or is it a blindness to the city's patriarchal bourgeoisie, or a kind of Greek blindness to the green? Growing up among gardens we end up ignoring them and subsequently destroying them without even knowing/understanding?

Or is it another dimension of the landscape that makes us not not perceive it from too-submerged, but not know it as a possibility? I am thinking of the collective/communal dimension of landscape. In Germanic languages this dimension is contained in the word itself - landshaft/landscape. Even in Latin languages the root of the word refers to a collective reality - pays/landscape. Land is a territory of collectivity, of a common culture. On the other hand, the Romanian word of Slavic origin - priveliște - refers more to the visual-perceptive dimension of landscape, which seems to be absent from the life of the Bucharest inhabitant (at least).

Read the full text in issue 5/2013 of Arhitectura magazine

Photo:

Oana Pîrvu