The Swan Song

I would like to begin with a confession: I do not want to bore the readers of the present with my 20th century stories.

Prologue

In 1964, I may be wrong by a year, a young French chanson singer, known for the music and lyrics of his compositions and those for other musical celebrities of France in those years, came to Bucharest, on the stage of the Palace Hall. His name, Gilbert Bécaud. It has been speculated that many of the singers invited to our country at that time were leftists, sympathizers of communist regimes, starting with Russia and ending with our country. It is true that the first of them, Yves Montand, was a member of Maurice Thorez's French Communist Party, but Bécaud did not strike me as a leftist at all, especially listening to his ballads. Why did I mention him in this prologue? Because in one of his songs, much to the amusement of the audience - French was well known to school and high school graduates in those days, although Russian was compulsory - he amusingly mocked the old people's habit of invoking their memories of their youth on any occasion, in this case the wedding night of young lovers.

The title of the song "La grosse noce" - a big wedding in a personal translation goes something like this:
... while the bride and groom
devour each other with their eyes,
over dessert, everyone sings his own story
including my grandfather, who left Bavaria for the war.
He doesn't forget every chorus and pint of beer
echoes of the Paris of yesteryear ...
chorus
Eins, zwei
Ein tag in Paris mit einen grosse mademoiselle
Paris, Tour Eiffel und die Folies Bergère etc. ...

The melody, preserved today only in the repertoire of the dance samba of the provincials of Hexagon, and the long-forgotten lyrics, had on me the effect of the popular Romanian saying: 'Beware of incense like hell! In my didactic performance, and especially approaching the age of my grandparents, I avoided the suffocating "in my time", and I moved the memories of my "wars" from the past, as events of yesterday or at most those of a week ago.

Primo Tempo

But the invitation to write about the Hotel Lebăda obliges me to send, let's call it, a "time probe" back more than 50 years, to bring back evidence of an important moment in my life, namely that of winning an architectural competition, which ended happily and with its realization when I was 29!
We gave competitions not so much in the hope of winning a prize, but out of pride in freely expressing our ideas, as opposed to the Stalinist architecture that intoxicated us in the 50s. Although at that time the Union of Architects organized 2-3 competitions every year, very few of those awarded had the chance to become reality. I am reminded of my classmate Adrian Panaitescu, the winner of the competition with the theme "City Hall of the City", whom we will meet soon afterwards in the team of architect Mircea Alifanti for the design and construction of the city hall in Baia Mare. The resemblance between the two projects is no coincidence, as Adrian was not just a simple collaborator of his teacher, but much, much more than that!

Mile 14.5

The 1960s and the years that followed, with a certain degree of economic stability, triggered an interest in the thinking and treatment of "leisure time", of "leisure", a universally adopted formulation of the theorist Joffre ^Dumazedier1, including in our ^country2, in the valorization of the natural environment and the knowledge of heritage.
We could feel the impetus of tourism supported by car mobility - motels - as an accommodation formula imported from the United States and promoted in particular by Greece and France. Personally, I was fascinated by the architecture of Aris Konstantinidis' summer and winter resorts at Port Grimeau and La Daille, Val-d'Isère. Fellow architects were erecting motels in scenic areas or cultural areas, and students were tackling them in their school assignments. One of the successful examples in the Olt Valley, in Călimănești, belongs to the then young architect Ștefan Perianu. The echoes of that new attitude towards the natural environment, materials and built forms haunted my imagination throughout the creation of Milei 14,5.

Ni vu, ni connu

From the start I was tormented by the thought of how to attack this project and especially the concept of the accommodation unit.
I wanted to understand this fascinating "world" and the all-consuming passion of anglers and hunters in love with the puddle, being pinched by neither. I had to see the "faces" of those characters who were going to occupy the so-called hotel in the Delta, they who were content with a simple cottage at mile 13.5 on the Sulina Arm. I was to learn more about their mentality, tastes, schedule, behavior and vocabulary during the construction site. There was a 'caste' of fishermen made up of officers with many rods, equipped with the most expensive and sophisticated prey-baiting equipment in the silent world. They stood at a distance on the water's edge, spying and silently envying each other.
The workers on the pontoon, out of pity for the driver of the "Carpathian" with which I was coming to the site, an amateur fisherman himself, gave him two rods, rope and hooks to make his waddle safe not far from the colonel's companions. And, like in Louis de Funés's movie "Ni vu ni connu", he was catching fish with every cast of his rod. For a while, the military band endured the affront of the unpopular man's performance, but after a while, one of them couldn't stand it any longer: he clutched his three carbon spears in both hands, with their attachments, and smashed them angrily on his knees! You will recognize that they are "a world".... different!

The accommodation cell

The anglers don't have breakfast in their room at 9am in the morning like the occasional tourist - they are out on their fishing trips from 3am. They are each "individuals", but they form a community living together, sharing their bitterness or victories of the day until late in front of the fire.
They do not come with their wives and very rarely with a son, only when he has caught the father bug.
They don't need a lot of luggage with city clothes, evening clothes, etc., just the bare essentials and bad weather. Lunch? A few sandwiches prepared since the evening, more important... the booze. This is how the accommodation "cell", as we called it at the time, was born: a window only for light, with the inevitable mosquito protection, a minimal bathroom with a shower, a wardrobe removed from the vestibule and migrated to the front of the room, equipment storage at the entrance, austere finishes.

Dear companions and vacationers

I was about to decide what the centerpiece of the hotel should be and how it should look. The answer came quickly after I figured out what is the daily pinnacle of fishing - the evening get-together with the dishes and the taifas sprinkled with the inevitable vodka. A huge cheminée with a tiered seating area in front, right in the two-tiered reception hall. It also brought the air of a chalet, everything orbiting around these islands and moments of relaxation. A restaurant, bar, terraces, belvedere tower for panoramic views, beach loungers, shade, minigolf and staff rooms with two piers, one main access pier on Sulina, the other on the old arm of the Danube, for small boats of tourists.
To be fair to the end, the theme was finalized half-way through the project, after the ground floor had been raised thanks to an intervention along the way, doubling the accommodation capacity and the public catering facilities for tourists in transit. Returning from a working visit to Sulina and seeing the commotion opposite Crișan, the Comrade asked what was going on there. He was told that a lodge-hotel was being built for fishermen and hunters! After finding out its capacity, he decided briefly to add another level to double its capacity for tourist groups.
At that time, tourism in the Delta was reduced to daylight excursions to Sulina and back. Paddle boats rarely ventured out to the other channels. It was a motley and colorful crowd, excited by the beauties of the daytime voyages, photographing the landscape enlivened by the flight and chatter of birds. Accommodation was catered for by the newly-built hotel in Tulcea, or one slept on boats if the trip lasted more than a day.

The lights of the Delta

The choice of materials and their chromatics tortured me with the worry of inserting my object naturally into the enveloping landscape, calm, clear and free of aggressive contrasts. I remembered Corbu's words about "... the skillful play of shapes in the light" and I felt that the light of the Delta gave birth to shades in permanent transition and, above all, a fascinating play of shadows. I decided to unashamedly borrow the colors of the environment - the obsessive green passing through the filters of seasons and clouds, throughout the sun throughout the day. As it veers to yellow and gold then rust and winter neutrals.
The mosquito-framed wood carpentry in two shades of green spoiled by the yellow of the skies at sunset, the tones of Babadag stones, of reeds - all colors of natural materials, plus the sad gray of concrete seemingly yet bearing the imprint of the fibers of the wood formwork.
On the outside, white handmade plaster, like fishermen's houses, and on the inside brick masonry, not the asizes, left exposed like concrete ceilings. The experience of the Algerian period, which followed, of "clay architecture" and then meeting the Chapel of Ronchamp reinforced my choice at the time. Forgive my straying into the poetic realm, which I do not master very well, but that's all I know. For those to whom this inventory of functions seems unnecessary (or perhaps natural), I would like to reveal that there was no initial theme, only a title and a capacity, and that it was put together step by step at the suggestion of the ONT agency in Tulcea and of an impetuous future administrator of the "Swan" who took up his post during the building site; he also suggested the name Hotel Lebăda, instead of the one I used, simply "Mila 14,5", to differentiate it from the one further upstream, at 13,5, on the same bank of the Danube.

Secondo tempo

The construction site and execution period is also worth mentioning for the kind of adventure I went through. The traineeship, not in its current sense, also existed in the years immediately following the award of the architect's diploma! As it was not a condition of the profession, nor a "right to sign on", it was more relaxing and much more profitable. I dare to speak strictly about my own case, because what I drew in the morning, I often supervised, "adjusted" or changed in the afternoon on the building site. Far from being reluctant with us beginners, we were treated with a certain amused indulgence, from craftsmen to engineers, when the originality of the details pushed the threshold of rationality.
One of the veterans of woodwork, the famous Papa Neuman, from the furniture, paneling and carpentry workshops of the Carpathian Trust, phoned me as soon as he received my plans, with his eternal remark: "Your detail is very, very interesting, Mr. Architect, but please come and see it, I have 2-3 other options! For the entire ceiling "à la Alvar Aalto" of a movie theater, I finally gave the site engineer more than 40 bottles of wine, in a losing bet for every glaring mistake.

Wasted sites

Well, my luck ran out at Mila 14.5, where my experience gained in so-called site practice was superior to that of the construction trust, the only one in the Delta, which exclusively carried out difficult works such as land consolidation, pontoon and Danube bank walling; no hotels. Strange coincidence, however, the then director of this trust, Eng. Buhancă, would become, a few years later, the director of the Carpathian Institute! The management of my construction site was entrusted to an engineer with an unfinished university degree, expelled in his fourth year, with a predestined name.... Lepădatu. Well, it was a challenge for him and his teams of unskilled, mostly local people, whose construction skills were reduced to thatch walls and thatched roofs in their own homes! This meant, in the first year of construction, two site visits a week; luckily there was a Russian LI-2 airplane race (copied after McDonnell Douglas), from the war, at Tulcea airport. The following year it stopped working, so we cooled it down and replaced it with a Volga of the Carpathian Institute, driven by Fane the driver, as I said before, a great amateur fisherman. "Mr. Architect, shall I prepare the ice-box in the trunk for the catch?"

The reef, child's play

And because every story has a climax, it's worth mentioning it now, towards the end. I had decided at the competition to use reed to cover the hut, an option I haven't given up even in the project.
The doubling of the capacity messed with the original construction solution of load-bearing masonry, ground floor, first floor and timber-framed. I had to have the level set back from the attic to be on reinforced concrete framing and slab, but found myself clueless about the detail of attaching the reeded sheathing to the slab.

I asked left and right all the detailing specialists, including my college professors - Hart, Alifanti and the famous "Șteji" (Teodorescu) from Finishing, but they left me in the dark.

On the construction site, Lepădatu and his unskilled workers shrugged their shoulders.
A lipovean from Crișan, hearing my lamentations, approached me and told me to stay calm as he was doing the work for the entire hotel roof.
"Alone?" I asked, surprised.
"No, with my son", he said.

He came the next day with a 5 year old kid, they both started work, to the total amazement of everyone present. The kid, lying with his back on the board under the sheath, took the needle from the head of the wire with which his father sewed the sheaths of the wooden balls, which were firmly attached to the board with whiskers, and returned it to him to tie it. And on and on they went, from cornice to ridge, and in a few days they'd eat the whole sheathing. I was to return to my professors with the problem solved!

Ultima verba

I have peppered this story launched back in time with numerous details. Because the whole period before December 1989, labeled communist architecture, far from bearing unique features, has known moments of architects' efforts to honor their profession, rejecting or skillfully concealing the ideological pressures and abusive interventions of the political authorities of the time. Their names and the works they produced deserve to be recalled from time to time in order to distinguish them from those of the few who served the system with bowing obeisance.

Epilogue
The opening of the young people of 1960s Romania to the West, especially through music, seems to confirm a lesser-known quotation from Confucius: "Do you want to know the truth about a country? Listen to its music".
I would paraphrase, from the disappointment of the last three decades:
Look at its architecture. Far from being mean!
It is an exhortation of hope kept alive by the students to whom I have been a guide.

Notes:

1. Vers un civilisation du loisir - Ed. du Seuil 1962.
2. See doctoral theses in architecture: Anka Borgovan, Victor Fulicea and Mircea Ochinciuc - Library of the "Ion Mincu" Institute of Architecture.