An Anniversary Photograph of the Society of Romanian Architects

Speech at the Symposium dedicated to the 125th anniversary of the foundation of the Society of Romanian Architects, Bucharest, BCU, February 26, 2016

Șerban ȚIGĂNAȘ, President of the Romanian Order of Architects

Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests and dear colleagues,

It is a great honor for every architect in Romania, or with Romania in mind, to celebrate this anniversary moment. I myself am doing it right now, serving the profession far from Bucharest, but, in fact, very close.

We are celebrating the first association of architects from these shores, noting how, only a few generations ago, they all fit in the same photograph. We will never know how they would have seen our profession as it is today, when the photo album has so many pages and most of them are virtual. The celebration of such a founding moment brings us back to a whole history, to the continuation of what began with the blinding flash of the camera that immortalized our illustrious predecessors. We are tempted, in the first instance, to retain the comfortable impression of a linear continuity of what the great architects of the past founded. In fact, our profession is one of perpetual reinvention, in the best sense of its origins, that of serving people in a changing world in which simply continuing is no longer an option.

We represent the Romanian Order of Architects thinking about what this young organization should continue. We are continuing what Romanian architects have lacked for many decades, bringing, as it happened 125 years ago, a model for a self-regulated and independent profession, a different way of organization. Just how much we have missed is too often seen in the way the building culture has evolved and it is not at all realistic to expect a sudden change. In fact, the Order represents a discontinuity, a non-continuity and a commitment to a different future than the recent past. This future has a part in each one of us, but it cannot be celebrated now, because it is not known to us, just as the masters of photography were not given the opportunity to know us. They too, in their time, were setting out on a new path, without continuing, bringing the association of architects as a meaningful model, learned from others.

Now, on the anniversary, we think of the past and the future. The past is to be celebrated by knowing it as it was and not as we might be tempted to wish it had been. The future, however, has only one thing we know, and that is that it follows on from the past, but we cannot know how. For us, as architects, the future is a responsible challenge, more so than ever before. That is why we cannot just carry on, in the sense of an implicit cursivity. What is needed is true creativity, an architect's creativity, like that of our forebears whose gesture we now celebrate. The photograph of our moment should be carefully taken for what we will offer for future anniversaries.