”Arhitectura” magazine. Merits of the Beginning

With issue 5-6/2016, the magazine "Arhitectura" marks 110 years of existence as a publication dedicated to the field and the official mouthpiece of the Romanian Architects' Organization.¹ Throughout these years, with a few exceptions represented by issues published under a different ^aegis2, the organization has been a careful patron of the periodical, supporting it materially and staunchly imposing its ideological and stylistic orientation. This, of course, took on special significance in the period 1948-1989, when the journal, as indeed the organization, would operate under communist political dictates.

In 1906, the magazine appeared after a long silence of the ^guild3 and, not coincidentally, at a moment of grace in Romanian history and of enormous cultural effervescence occasioned by the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the reign of King Carol I. It will remain unique in the ^specialized press4 for various and frequent intervals.

Over its 110 years, "Arhitectura" managed to produce 391 ^issues5 whose periodicity and grouping into volumes are extremely ^variable6, reflecting the all kinds of obstacles it encountered throughout its existence. For, crossing three historical epochs in dramatic disjunction, and in their time, numerous politically charged periods of great tension, the journal navigates the troubled waters of the history of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, facing problems and difficulties that will sometimes overcome it, but which it will often overcome with tenacity. Its fundamental goal, very difficult and undeclared as such, but clear from the very beginning, is to gather and keep together Romanian architects, so different in their studies, style and professional experience, in the idea of forming a strong association, able to support their interests and to support the national culture in the full momentum of identity structuring. In this sense, right from the very first program-articles, the magazine has been more and more clearly stating its intention to inform its readers about the essential events in the field, to campaign for the causes of the profession and heritage, to open accessible channels to the general public, to express its views, to raise alarm bells at key moments, and at certain stages to indicate or even to draw directions, to carry out agitational work or to impose its prejudices in various causes.

The magazine's first period was between its founding and the political fracture at the end of the Second World War, which was followed by the establishment of communism in ^Romania7.

In this early period, although marked by crises and more or less easily explainable syncopes, years of silence and sometimes incongruous discourses, the magazine proved its determination and robustness, surviving the terrible events that shook the foundations of the world and of the place: the First World War, the great economic crisis of 1929-33, the Carlist dictatorship and then the Second World War, all accompanied by chaos, misery and disasters. Until October 12, 1944, when the last pre-Communist issue went to press, "Arhitectura" was present in the Romanian press more or less rhythmically, depending on the circumstances, for 38 years, during which it published 43 issues, grouped in 36 ^volumes8. Throughout these years, the magazine will repeatedly fold and reorganize itself, generating several series and sub-series that will change the editorial board, the platform-program, the periodicity, the general and cover graphics, the fonts, the color tones of the images and even the ideological and stylistic orientation, in a perpetual process of adaptation to the new that invades all areas of ^life9.

Its covers, very diverse, swing between dramatism (1906), baroque complexity (no. 1 of 1916), absolute sobriety (1926), art-deco essentialization (no. 12 of 1938), proletcultist purging (1940) and vague graphic indecision (1931-'33). With their cardboard, whether weaker or better, with their austere or opulent colours (no. 12 of 1938 has a thick cardboard cover, metallic bronze), with their fonts migrating from the archaizing, à la Mincu, through the art-deco influenced and on to the classical-Romanesque, they speak eloquently of the magazine's problems and aspirations and of the whirlwind of changes it has to face.

In its 38 years, its contents will include 260 articles, essays, debates, chronicles, reviews, reviews, notes published by almost 90 authors, many of them well-known architects and very active in the ^field10, but also prestigious men of letters and ^culture11, engineers of various specialties, as well as illustrious anonymous persons. Their writings cover a broad field of topics that intersect the field in the arena of the magazine's continuously revised program. Thus, while only the two issues from 1906, although marked by the programmatic article, written in an emotional key by the architect Remus Iliescu, do not yet say much about architecture, the two following issues from 1916 are already more pragmatic and better organized, and the issues after 1930, without having succeeded in building much better structured platforms, are more coherently oriented and discuss, sometimes with particular vehemence, burning issues that are troubling the guild. The topics touched on, often for the first time in the Romanian history of the profession, deal with the various problems of the Society of Architects - organization, statutes, legislation, events, competitions, etc. - education in the field, notions of the theory and history of architecture and art, techniques, technologies and construction details, building problems, the new-emerging field of urban planning, architectural and systematization programmes and projects, not forgetting polemics or artistic reviews of exhibitions, biographies and ferpare.

But throughout this phase, the most important subject of the magazine remains the stylistic dispute with modernism, rather a long series of diatribes directed against this movement which, from the 1920s onwards, has been making its way with increasing determination in architecture and other branches of art. This dispute, perpetuated for more than two decades, is nothing but a movement of resistance and defense of the Romanian Architects' Society which, traditionalist by composition and convictions, is making sustained efforts to continue to respect its oath of allegiance taken at its foundation, that of protecting and supporting without deviation the values of national art and architecture, against the background of the need to shape the identity of the culture of the young Romanian kingdom. Thus, the Society, through its press organ - the magazine "Arhitectura" - will seek for years, often fiercely, to resist the astonishing and drastic changes in the cultural model, with its innovations, patterns of life and behavior, with their styles and models, as they were brought by the strong winds of change blowing from Western Europe. The dispute, no matter how fierce or how gentle and conciliatory, will not rest until the end of the stage. This is also the reason why the name of Marcel Iancu is never mentioned in the magazine, and that of Horia Creangă will appear only in 1939, without any comment, with the amazing project for the pavilions of the exhibition "Work and Good Will", and the one for "The Month of Bucharest", both realized together with Haralamb Georgescu (and others), and then only in the 1943-44 issue, with three projects, also without comment, together with the biographical note that he dedicates to him as a friend and collaborator.

Interesting and curious at the same time is the fact that, in spite of this position clearly expressed in the articles, throughout the inter-war period, a series of projects with a clear modernist tinge appear in the magazine, belonging to strong supporters of traditional ^values12 or to well-known, if less vocal, members of the Society. These projects, like the overwhelming majority of those published by "Arhitectura", do not benefit from any presentation or critical assumption. Even in these circumstances, it is to be assumed that the fact that they were published in the pages of the periodical was such as to bring them out of anonymity, placing them in the public eye much more quickly and more eloquently than the construction alone could have done with its limited materiality. In this way, a style is subliminally imposed on the taste of the consumer of architecture, and even on the profession itself, which is very different from the style promoted by the written discourse of 'Arhitectura', a style that has the advantage of novelty, originality, and provocative constructive gesture, as opposed to the traditional, already tired and therefore unsatisfactory style. Discussing the cultural consequences of such a gesture is complicated. It is obvious, however, that one of the greatest merits of the magazine in its first phase of publication is that of having published numerous illustrations - over 1,450 - which constitute an unparalleled database of architecture of the first half of the 20th century in Romania. The magazine contains tables, diagrams, sketches, sketches, sketches, hand drawings, portraits, reproductions of paintings and statues, but especially plans, facades, details of buildings belonging to projects analyzed or not in the text, as well as photographs of buildings realized in the period, to which are added some images depicting projects and buildings in other countries of the ^world13. With the written part sometimes reduced to a minimum, whole issues of the inter-war magazine bring to the fore a very rich ^photographic material14 and thus make up a particularly complex picture of the architecture of the period.

With texts that were either too many or too few, with texts that were either too dense or too inconsistent and chaotic, with images that were either exceptional or poorly edited, with an inexplicable periodicity, with often disregarded program-platforms, with oddly elliptical author lists, with covers that were produced as was possible in those days, "Architecture" in its early days, through all its contents, remains, without any doubt, an absolutely exceptional landmark and event-packed publication, full of information on the profession - the most comprehensive and persevering-present journal in the field. It continues to fully deserve our attention.

NOTES:

1 From its founding on 26 January 1891 until after World War I, the organization was called the Society of Romanian Architects. In the 1940s, it dissolved and disappeared for a while, only to reappear on the title page of the magazine "Arhitectura" no. 1 of 1953 under the name of Union of Architects of the RPR. This name has been retained to this day, with only the circumscription being changed to take over the changed names of the country: RSR, from 1965, and Romania after 1990.

2 Between 1948 and 1952, the periodical went under different names, under the aegis of AGIR.

3 It was then 12 years since the publication of "Analelor Architecturei și ale Artelor care se leagă" (1890-'93) ceased, a period during which, for reasons difficult to decipher, no other publication devoted to architecture appeared in the Romanian press.

4 I have not included in this strict category "Buletinul Comisiunii Monumentelor Istorice" (1908-1945) nor "Monitorul Unioni Orașelor din România" (1923-1942, which in 1932 changed its title to "Urbanismul").

5 The author of this article and Maria Gigă, for the period 1944-2016, checked the collection of the magazine and the issues that appeared in the collection records of the major libraries in Bucharest and in the country for the pre-communist period.

6 Thus, in 1933, a volume dedicated to the years 1931-'33 appears; in many inter-war years the journal publishes only one single volume per year, in 1953, the first after a long absence, only volume number 1 is known, and in the years 1907-'15, 1917-'18, 1921-'23, 1227-'29, 1945-'47, 1948-1952, 1993, '95, '97 the journal does not appear.

7 The existence and organization of the Guild of Architects then came under the sights of the destruction of values, which caused the periodical to cease publication for a number of years.

8 For details, see:, Gabriela Tabacu, REVISTA ARHITECTURA. Studiu Monografic e Indici, București: Ed. Humanitas, 2008, p. 445, ill.

9 A categorical change, perhaps the most obvious, although unconvincing, is recorded in the architectural discourse and rhetoric of the magazine after the establishment of the Carlist dictatorship. The year 1940 was a high point in the nationalism promoted by 'Arhitectura'. Then the war deprived it of content, but did not succeed in annihilating it.

10 Mention should be made here: Petre Antonescu, Victor Asquini, Ion Berindei, Ștefan Burcuș, Spiridon Cegăneanu, Arta Cerchez, Ștefan Ciocârlan, Statie Ciortan, Ion Al. Davidescu, Ioan Enescu, Nicolae Ghika-Budești, Remus Iliescu, Grigore Ionescu, Constantin Moșinschi, Nicole Nenciulescu, Stavri Opari, Ioan C. Roșu, George Simotta, Victor Smigelschi, Toma T. Socolescu, Florea Stănculescu, George Sterian, Pandele Șerbănescu, Victor Stephănescu, Ioan D. Trajanescu, Alexandru Zamphiropol. The most prolific, but also the most hard-hitting and dedicated authors are Ioan D. Enescu, published with 33 articles, Spiridon Cegăneanu, with 20 articles, Florea Stănculescu and Victor Asquini, each with 15 articles, Victor Smigelschi and Toma T. Socolescu, each with 12 articles, I. D. Trajanescu, with 9 articles.

11 Among these were Nichifor Crainic, Nicolae Iorga, Ioan Slavici, Emil Prager, Mihail Sadoveanu, Al. Tzigara-Samurcaș, Virgil Vătășianu.

12 This is the case with the architects Ioan D. Enescu and Ioan C. Roșu, strong voices in the traditionalist chorus, whose projects evolved without comment towards the stylistic coordinates of modernism.

13 Thus, for example, in issue no. 3-4, July-December 1940, on p. 8, there is a perspective of the German Art House in Munich, designed by Paul Ludwig Troost, and on pp. 9-13, there are images of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin and the Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg, both designed by Albert Speer.

14 See, for example, the 1930 issue which, in the written part, offers an explanatory note on the magazine's absence from the landscape for three years, in addition to which it publishes only two articles, but no fewer than 49 summarily identified images. Many of these are photographs of buildings that had already been completed, a sign that the architects had been very active professionally and had not had time to be present in the agora in writing.