School of Architecture - between tradition and innovation in Romanian built space

The complexity and variety of the built space, as well as the investigation of its evolution is revealed by identifying the process of authentication, selection and sedimentation of resource values specific to a given place and time (resource, cultural, identity, functional, perceptual connectivity and affectivity values).

"Monuments, like books, are commented time" - said Mircea Eliade (1949).

Every built space has an initial determination, conveys a history of construction and existence, becoming for us a permanent testimony and revelation of our own identity.

In this process the characteristics of the place "Genius loci" must express the spirit of the place - "Stabilitas loci" (Norberg Schultz, 1971).

The space decoded by "Sein" (to be) as the anatomy of existence is completed by experiencing it, by "Da Sein" (to be there) as the meaning of existence (Martin Heidegger, 1927).

The living in space of being is a fragile balance between the multiple constraints received at birth, such as ethnicity, gender, religion, and the customs acquired through experience, direct living, says Gabriel Liiceanu (1994).

"Imageability" (the capacity to evoke images), determines the reference to the original topos as a sense of becoming and extends it beyond boundaries to territory, landscape, as a sense of comprehension. (Kevin Lynch, 1960).

European inclusiveness, a desideratum of the pasoptopian revolutions, has persisted to the present day. The disappearance of the empires and the redrawing of the maps of the continent at the end of the 19th century triggered the twofold aspiration towards modernity of the new nation states as a sign of progress and as a source of identity.

Young Romanian intellectuals, including architects, educated at the great European universities of Paris, Berlin and Milan, brought to the Romanian space the upheavals and controversies linked to the conceptual and stylistic orientations of the time.