Invitation

Speech at the opening of the exhibition Romanian Architecture in the European Context, Dalles Hall, Bucharest, 1991, published in "Arhitectura", 3-4/1991

We are celebrating 100 years since the foundation of the Society of Romanian Architects. They are, I think, the hardest years in the history of Romanian architecture. The first part were the years of the efforts to establish a national school, and the last part involved the forty years of terrible trauma that our architectural heritage suffered. We celebrate this year's event in the architectural ambience created by the aftermath of a catastrophe that has come to an end and with the hope of the return of the good years. We are therefore celebrating a history and at the same time retracing a path.

It is a well-known dispute over the primacy between the artistic and the utilitarian aspects of architecture. But there should also be a third dimension - that of responsibility. Architecture manages the space of our intimate movement and the space of social movement. It gives meaning to man's most mysterious gesture in the world: dwelling in space, adapting his hard-to-define spiritual perimeter to a given space.

In a book by a German Romanticist author, it is said that each territory in the world creates its own particular fauna thanks to specific telluric energies. These energies produce elephants in one place, bears and deer in another, crocodiles in another. But these influences must also work on humans, so that people who live in elephant space have elephants inside, people who live in bear and deer space have bears and deer inside, and they have crocodiles if they live in crocodile space.

We carry within us the architectural forms that surround us, and that is why architects bear the great responsibility for the forms we carry within us.

After forty years of disaster, we have within us the forms of disaster that surround us. We have around us forms that have no memory and no becoming - and we have within us a state of uprootedness. Around us, the spaces are dull and monotonous, and within us there is intolerance, the effect of a lack of understanding for diversity. And if all around us, architecture has a mere function of shelter - and our life is just functional survival. We have, outside, a house of the people and we don't realize that we carry this terrible form inside. We carry inside us the wounds of our localities, the emptiness of the Văcăreștilor, the emptiness of the Union Square in Iași, the emptiness of Schei and so many others that have left us desolate. This suspension within us now needs criteria, tradition and recovery.

We hope, at the beginning of a hundred years, that things will get back to normal. And, to borrow a term from architecture, I invite you, gentlemen architects, to build us from within, to build us in the high sense that this word has in Romanian, to 'edify' us: you will thus help us to rediscover the ethics of verticality.