The truth is in the archives

Cultural projects

THE TRUTH IS IN THE ^ARCHIVES1

text: Loredana BRUMĂ

Postcard

In 1886, an authorization file was submitted to Bucharest City Hall for a house to be built on Lipscani Street. The project was signed by the architect Onderka. The building was typical for the period and its location in the city center: a narrow facade, with a ground floor dedicated to commercial activities, as indicated by the large glazed areas and the nameplate above the entrance. Above the ground floor, a high storey attracted attention with its carefully detailed ornamentation, typical of the eclecticism of the period. Each line has its role. We distinguish every outline of every future carving, stucco work, the decoration of the cornice or the elegantly proportioned corner of the carpentry; a collection of forms inspired by the most diverse cultures and times. In an effort to put the image in a realistic context, the architect amused himself by drawing two people chatting near the entrance to the building. Could they be the Markus Brothers? We don't know.
Almost a century later, a young doctoral student, an art historian, discovered this drawing at the Bucharest National Archives. She found it relevant to her study of late 19th century civil architecture and photographed the drawing. He did the same with several thousand other such documents. Some of the photographs were to illustrate his doctoral thesis "Civil architecture in 19th-century Bucharest", preserved at the Central University Library. But most of the visual documentation is kept neatly organized in numbered envelopes. Whether the original drawing signed by the architect Onderka still exists is unknown. One would have to go to the archives and search through all the papers recorded during 1886. The procedure is complicated, time-consuming and we are not certain that our drawing has not already ended up being scrapped.
In the meantime, the story of the envelopes continues into the 21st century, with the beginning of the scanning of the photographs and their gradual publication online on a dedicated website.

Some of the images are taken, graphically processed and turned into postcards. These carry the story of 19th-century Bucharest houses forward to a cosmopolitan audience, firmly anchored in the present. Others end up on display in front of primary school children. Inspired by the diversity of models and their complexity, they draw new houses, new shapes, new lines, new urban perspectives, but also bearing traces of the past. How many of these children will become architects? How many will remain interested in history and pursue a profession in that direction? How many will go on to discover for themselves the stories of yesterday's city? We have no way of knowing.
What we do know for sure is that that concern for the carefully controlled line, the visionary form between the ready-made and the imagination of the yet-to-be-born, like Onderka's when he drew for his clients of yesteryear, has somehow found its way to the present day. And we can sense that it has already left a mark on the minds of these little inhabitants of tomorrow's city.
By making some forms of documentation accessible to the general public, can we create the conditions for the restoration of identity values? Can education be a form of restoration?

The idea to collaborate on the digitization of the archive emerged in 2007 when, at the end of the event organized by the Cotroceni Museum on the occasion of the European Heritage Days, following a brief exchange of ideas, Dr. Cezara Mucenic told a little about a personal archive with numerous data and documents about Bucharest that she did not know what to do with and did not know who to leave it to, to be of use for further research.
The actual project took shape only in 2015, following a meeting set up by architect Ciprian Neacșu. That's how I found out about the plethora of notes and photographs of archival documents kept in envelopes organized by various criteria. Together, we prioritized the scanning of the material, leaving the ways of structuring, using and capitalizing on the resulting digital fund to a secondary priority. We started with two student volunteers, Anca and Silvia. They gradually retrieved sets of envelopes, scanned them and tried to decipher the notes. Based on these small beginnings, we managed to obtain a first grant in 2016: a support from the Romanian Union of Architects to create a website dedicated to the database and to continue digitizing the archive. Thus, we managed to upload online about 1,000 documents and expanded the team to a total of 12 people, mainly students from the Faculty of Architecture.
Much of the content of this archive is made up of material extracted in the 1970s and 1980s from the National Archives - Bucharest Municipal Directorate, the period of study covered being 1830-1960. The documents, either photographs after architectural drawings, or handwritten notes reproducing or commenting on various texts in the files analyzed, formed the documentary basis for the doctoral thesis "Civil architecture in Bucharest in the 19th century", developed over a 17-year period of study and defended on December 8, 1989 at the Faculty of History of the University of Bucharest.
After the scanning phase, the second stage followed, that of information processing. For the part of photographing archival documents, it was necessary to process the images, with the main objective of recovering as much as possible of the documentary content. As for the notes, they were first transcribed and then checked together with Dr. Cezara Mucenic, in order to avoid errors as much as possible.
The resulting digital database includes the initial form of the information, in the raw format, equivalent to the physical one, and, separately, a set of processed materials, for which the organizational part was very important, in the sense that the renaming had to take into account the content of each file, what it represents, what attributes it has, from which envelope it was extracted, what program it represents.
The project website was created as a user-friendly and easily accessible platform. ARCHIVE contains the images processed from the original plans in the archive. NOTES include both the corrected transcriptions and the original handwritten documents. STUDIES involves a series of historical studies from the post-decembrist period. The category PLANS is dedicated to fragments of old maps from the personal collection, which have been the basis of various researches carried out over the years.
Each uploaded document contains several attributes: year, function, street or area and architect, where known. Information can thus be sorted by one of these criteria. For example, in the case of a search for a particular architectural program, in the "search" section, enter the program in question and all entries with that attribute are returned. You can search by specific years or, more specifically, by street names.
The Cezara Mucenic Archive also includes an equally important collection, developed since 1994, of more than 150 historical studies for various buildings in Bucharest. These involve a different digitization approach, since, especially in the case of the studies from the 1990s, it is necessary to reassemble the files and correlate the written pieces with the drawings, which have been preserved in different ways.

Postcard

By creating this online database, we tried to take this thread further, to develop a useful working tool for researchers, architects, students of different specialties, but also a simple website for a Bucharest resident, curious to discover what was on his street before.
In 2017, the project continued with the digitization of documents and a series of actions to draw the attention of the general public to this useful approach.
Thus, at the end of September, during a lesson "De-a Arhitectura" in class III B, St. Sylvester Secondary School, an experimental exercise was carried out during which students deepened notions such as heritage, archive or architectural project, using as supporting documentation extracts from the digital archive.
The month of October was dedicated to the production of a booklet presenting the digitization process in a bilingual Romanian and English format and a video documentary called "The Truth is in the Archives". The film talks about the formative path followed by art historian Cezara Mucenic, her doctorate, which she completed under "special" conditions in the difficult times of communism in the 1970s and 1980s, and her historical studies as an expert on historical monuments. The issue of the need to make documentation accessible for architectural research is addressed, as well as the difficult situation of Romanian archives compared to those in France, where digitization has been a priority for years and where there is already a real impact as a result of these investments considered to be of public utility. The documentary is peppered with informal details, about the role of the family and the impact of research, past emotions and experiences for the future, and various interviews, some deeply serious, others more relaxed, in Romanian and French. The launch took place on November 14 at a simultaneous screening in Bucharest at the UAR's Center for Architectural Culture and in Paris at the École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Paris-Belleville. The screening was followed by a debate in Paris on the importance of digitization of architectural archives, in the presence of art historians Cezara Mucenic and Jean Paul Midant, and was streamed live on the project's Facebook page.
In the interview for the video documentary, prof. dr. dr. arh. Nicolae Lascu underlined the particularity and importance of this archive: "Dr. Cezara Mucenic "discovered" this archive of the Bucharest City Hall, the technical fund, where you can find urban planning projects, building permits and other equally necessary documents. It was she who opened this slope that we all now use. Another important aspect is this meticulousness, this pedantry that she had and still has to write everything down, to remember the essential things - apparently insignificant texts, such as the visa of one or another of the city hall's services during the authorization procedure for a building and all the sketches and projects that exist there."

House on Lipscani Street, 1859. Arch: Anton Onderka (ACM)

Beyond being a new collection of architectural documents made available to the general public, the "Cezara Mucenic Archive" is a project that tells a story made possible at a time when many claimed that "such a thing cannot be done": a doctoral dissertation completed in the troubled times of 1970s-1980s communism in a field uninteresting to the priorities of that era, an architectural research built from the ground up without premises and preconceptions, based solely on a sustained desire to discover and understand big picture visions, a deep, thorough and methodical study of local archives otherwise inaccessible to the general public.
Perhaps we often find it difficult to work with architectural heritage, perhaps we often lose patience and simply want to move on, to 'get on with it'. But when we learn about such experiences, perhaps the most important thing is to realize how lucky we are and to look at our challenges differently, with more openness, patience and care.
The "Cezara Mucenic Archive" is not only about Bucharest, with its archives and local heritage, but above all it is about role models, life models, professional role models. We need these 'living archives' to inspire us, to learn from, to show us the way.

Historical study - an essential tool in the restoration of architectural heritage?

In the early 1990s, immediately after the Revolution, there was no institution directly responsible for systematic research of historical monuments. There were not enough specialists to undertake a comprehensive historical research on a national level. In a first phase, the work was based on lists of approximately dated monuments, correlated with records based on oral information. The establishment of zonal commissions was a first major step in systematically structuring the work with historical monuments. After a short time, the need for certified specialists was recognized. The first to be co-opted were those who at that time had already carried out some applied historical research. In '93-'94, the first historical studies were 3-5 pages long. Today, they can run to 30-40 pages or more.
"According to the legislation, any intervention on a listed monument or a building in a protected area requires a historical study to establish the permissibility and the right to intervene. It is an architectural or town-planning study. It remains to be discussed to what extent they are really used and taken into account by the authorities, the town hall, the owners. In any case, they are part of this package of documents that precedes the realization of an investment on a historical monument or building in a protected area. From a historical point of view, they represent an extremely important value because they allow us to discover the value and interest of a building" (Prof. Dr. Nicolae Lascu, architect).
Historical studies are requested by the owners of the buildings analyzed. In the case of public institutions, they are commissioned only for the buildings in which the legal entities carry out their activities. The role of this type of research is extremely precise and clear: a historical study must respond to a number of issues designed to help the designer to understand the specifics of the site in question and to provide arguments for the intervention decisions taken. On the other hand, it should enable the commission to make a thorough and detailed assessment of the existing context. Beyond the presentation of the chronological evolution, an extremely important component of this documentation is that related to prohibitions and permissibilities, on the basis of which elements of major heritage importance are differentiated from interventions of a parasitic type, for which sometimes even removal is recommended.
Obviously, the structure of such surveys varies from one specialist to another and from case to case. A general aspect on which Dr. Cezara Mucenic particularly insists, however, is the work with historical plans and the superimposition of data related to the house under analysis with extensions towards the neighborhood and the street as a whole. In this way, the aim is to establish a link with the nature of certain specific features. It is important to identify whether certain situations have arisen as a result of a rule of the place or a singular decision. To this end, historical documents on the development of the setting as a whole and the inclusion of images of properties in the immediate vicinity, for example, are useful. Another extremely important aspect is the interior of a building, a seemingly insignificant building can often conceal spaces of a very special intelligence, carefully proportioned and with unique decorative ornamentation.
Beyond the applicability of these studies in the case of specific interventions on certain historical monuments, their role as precise tools for the 'heritagetization' of the built environment is extremely important.
Today, in the digital age, when we have at our fingertips such accessible means of exchanging information, the free publication of this type of document, especially online, is becoming indispensable.