Each follows their journey...

Ana Maria ZAHARIADE


This article is the Romanian version of the contribution to a volume titled "Dada and Its Later Manifestations in the Geographic Margins: Israel, Romania, Poland, and North America", edited by Ronit Milano, Raya Zommer-Tal and Noam Gonnen, which will be published by Routledge.

"The new style is inside of us and certainly not in the materials, no matter how new they are. Through its means, art dematerializes the material." (M. J.)

In 1994, when I was just starting to unravel the architecture of Marcel Iancu following the thorough research done by Anca Bocăneţ(Iliescu) in view of  Marcel Iancu’s centenary1, chance brought along my path a bewildering canvas from the Art Museum in Tel Aviv –  Ball in Zürich2. It is not the only ball in Zürich painted by Iancu, yet this particular “dance floor and battle field” painted very early, in 1915, troubled me and stuck with me as a metaphor of the avant-garde, of the eagerness in search of experiences transformed by unforeseen barriers from juvenile exuberance into a dramatic struggle. This painting gave me the feeling of an unsettling premonition; I was under the impression that young Iancu sensed what life had in store for him; only his life in Romania, perhaps....The preparations for the centenary exhibition in 1996, the catalogue and the accompanying scientific events wiped from my mind the anguish of “the ball” in 1915. Exhibiting Iancu’s architecture, for the most part novel, in Romania,  revealed “a story of success” – the avant-garde painter and the bold “apostle” of modernism in Romania proved to be a remarkable and prolific architect as well. I remembered the angst of the Ball in Zürich only twelve years later, on the occasion of a kind of compendium to the centenary catalogue3, when I considered the distance between Iancu’s presumed aspirations and what reality allowed him to achieve. I also resumed the premonition in the painting in the online conference organised in 2021 by the Janco-Dada Museum in Ein Hod in collaboration with the Department of the Arts at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev4, based on which I aim to revisit Marcel Iancu’s architecture for the Arhitectura magazine. 

I will attempt to consider both the author and his work from a more critical perspective and, undoubtedly, more subjective perspective while trying to part with the schematicism of a glorifying narrative; in a sense, I will try to humanize “the hero” by searching for the anguish in the painter of the Ball in Zürich behind the prolific architect in Romania. I will seek to present Iancu’s architecture from the perspective of the duty to “break the mould and transcend the stiff canons”5 which the 26-year-old young man had assumed upon his return to Romania, in 1921.


***

Although he evenly invested his innovative vitality in several directions (painting, graphic art, performance, architecture as well as art and architecture journalism), it was not architecture that ensured his notoriety. In a sense, it is only natural; architecture does not appear to be the most auspicious environment for any kind of pursuits liberating from pre-established rules; compared to the possibilities offered by painting, graphic art or journalism to quickly translate the innovative ideas into work, architecture is obviously a far less flexible artistic medium, if only because it requires considerably more money to exist, clients willing to pay for novelty, and the actual execution is difficult and lengthy, delaying the time from idea to its objectification into the building. By essence, architecture is “conservatory”: it aspires to permanence, it is stable, rational and constructive, hardly compatible with the iconoclastic spirit of Dadaism (at first glance at least). 
Still, architecture was Iancu’s main profession (at least four to five months a year, as he himself declared6) and, most likely, the main source that secured his living and helped him to financially support other activities (magazines, painting, artistic performances etc.). Since Iancu is the only dadaist (to my knowledge, at least) who practised architecture, and for a long period, one may wonder how he managed to reconcile the apparent Dada-architecture bipolarity7, how he was able to combine the caustic negativity of the avant-garde with the steady positivity of architecture, and the ruleless freedom of Dadaism with the rigour of architecture design. Could this have been one of the obstacles he was hinting at in his 1915 painting?
The herald of the avant-garde
Certainly, the Dada experience paired with his blazing charisma and personality helped him shine from the very beginning in the avant-garde artistic environment of Bucharest, which he presided over before long:

Around 1925-26, every Tuesday, my house in Bucharest was home to those who were attempting an escape from the foul forms of the past. During those reunions of spirit and art were devised so many works that scandalized, impressed, materialized in new trends in literature, painting, theatre. Ruling over all and everything was the personality of Marcel Iancu who, I believe, should be given the credit for modern Bucharest.8

And not only did he resume his position as the radiant nucleus of new free art and universal abstract language, he has also done it spectacularly and with lasting echoes. For instance, the opening ceremony of the international art exhibition organized in 1924 by the Contimporanul group, an event of an unprecedented magnitude9, was recorded by Camil Petrescu in his novel, Patul lui Procust:

It was the vernissage of a collective exhibition by a group of avant-garde painters and sculptors...[...] What was strange, though, was that this exhibition was directed precisely “against art” (Down with art!), yet rather against all fellows who had, neither one apparently, any talent at all. People were coming also because a very well-known journalist, a combative and enduring revolutionary, was to give a talk at the vernissage ...[...] Across the room (whose walls were clothed in cardboard-like colour burlap and illuminated from above by some small zinc gutters enveloping the white lamps similar to the theatre ramps) there were some low armchairs shaped like the American ones, but made of thick whole wood and seemingly cut into black layers alternating with pale yellow ones. Pervading the atmosphere was a vague feeling of improvisation, like on a stage set...10


Followed by Tudor Vianu’s comment:

...The darkness of the room, in which a very large crowd of people was swarming and the opening word got somehow lost [...], was suddenly torn apart by a drum rumble. The lights which were lit at the same time revealed on the bandstand, behind the speaker, a jazz orchestra which was not without the Black musician. The crowd of guests found it difficult to advance at the sound of chords, horns and drums. I wonder if the exhibition planners had premeditated this first general impression, the staggering mix of tones as if in a huge kaleidoscope of colourful butterflies because, at least for the intervention of the jazz orchestra, I was certain we were dealing not only with a staged effect, but a genuine modernist ritual dating back to the Dadaist events.11


In preparation of his architecture
However, no matter how prodigious this activity and the “total architecture” complementing it may have been, it is quite unlikely to have resulted in planning commissions in a Bucharest which placed great value on “national architecture” or various forms of ecleticism that materialized into the first aspects of more modern housing. Hence, young Iancu was able to start his career in architecture pleading for modern architecture and making architectural drawings rather than building. Naturally, this is the direction in which he was able to pursue the avant-garde activism that he promoted in the pages of Contimporanul magazine, founded shortly after his return to Romania and that he financed throughout its entire existence.12 As a matter of fact, his first interiors, as provoking as the magazine itself, date back to the publication’s early years. Up to the magazine’s collapse in 1932, Iancu has quenched the thirst for new ideas of the young generation of Romanian architects and kept them updated with their Western peers’ concerns by building  a network of international participants, all first-rate figures (Adolf Behne, LC, van Doesburg, Alberto Sartoris, etc.), with the help of which he incessantly disseminated the ideas of modernism. Without having been a systematic theorist – it would have perhaps gone against the Dada spirit –, he was the only Romanian architect so closely related to the new ideas developed in Europe at the time. His voice was strong and enthusiastic even when slightly unclear, at times caustic-toned, other times more reflexive, as if he wanted to make clear to himself the new ideas.13 He moved smoothly and freely between art and architecture, the avant-garde aesthetics and urban planning, maintaining an intense atmosphere of theoretical effervescence. He was convinced that once “the plastic arts made, after the war, their first assault that was to liberate and lighten the path for architecture” (Stil nou: Arhitectura), he states, quoting Hilbersheimer, that: “like any discipline, architecture too faces the necessity to shed light on the means that shape its foundation and its very essence” (Arhitectura Nouă); in a word, to formulate and follow the principles of “new architecture”14. It remains to be seen how he tried or succeeded in responding to these ideas through what he built. 
His architecture career 
During his almost twenty years of activity in Romania (1921-1939), architect Iancu designed over forty buildings known to us to date15. He worked together with his brother, Iuliu – maybe unduly overshadowed in the history of architecture by Marcel’s renown – at their shared practice, Bureau of Modern Studies, situated in different buildings they had built for their family. They often signed with “Marcel Iuliu Iancu”, as if they were one and the same person, but we do not know the exact role each of them played in the organization of the project. What we know for sure is that none had the legal right to obtain the building permit since they only had the title of “uncertified architect”. As such, until 1934, when Marcel obtained the signature right16, the permit files were signed by another architect (Constantin Simionescu). 
Nevertheless, a more difficult obstacle to overcome, at least initially, was getting commissions by which he would assert his ideas on “new architecture”. On the local market, where “the national style” was almost the norm and highly popular, the clients wishing for a modernist ambient were atypical and scarce. So the first commissioners were his family and a few friends who shared the same artistic inclinations (painter Henri Daniel, for instance). Even after the circle of clients widened, the majority came from the artistic or cultural areas of well-off bourgeoisie, with many belonging to the Jewish community. All were part of that urban middle (and upper) class bourgeoisie, increasingly influential and self-aware after World War I, that found itself distinctly represented in modernism.17 This explains why Romanian interwar modernism was overwhelmingly the product of private investment since public commissions demanded for a “national architecture”, but mostly explains, in Iancu’s particular case, why he had no public commissions; when, towards the end of the period, forms of modernism had become acceptable for public funding as well, it was too late for Iancu – the political context had become increasingly less breathable for Jewish architects. 
On the other hand, the rather limited variety of commissioners reflected into the reduced amount of building typologies he was summoned to design – mainly residential houses, most of which were individual homes and small apartment buildings (a typical modernization programme in Bucharest)18, with only three buildings having different functional programmes (a swimming pool, a company headquarters and a sanatorium, the most elaborate of them). Another consequence is their positioning within the city since, except for the sanatorium, all are located in Bucharest; they are situated mainly inside and around the prominently Jewish area of the old city, as well as the new neighbourhood of luxury villas in the north of the city, almost absent from the “central area” with the most visibility19. From this point of view, his wish to render new architecture highly visible in the city so that people crave and demand for it – a wish he oftentimes expressed in Contimporanul – was a relatively partial succes. 
Otherwise, without taking great risks, it can be said that all Iancu’s projects in Romania were modernist.20 To what extent was Iancu able to express, through them, the “new architecture”, the “new style” which he advocated for in the pages of the magazine? Iancu called himself “a radical artist”; was he a radical architect, too?
A new architecture?

Saying that the “new architecture” that Iancu aimed for is Modernism is much too vague, mainly because the term “modernism” as such is far from being clear; initially restricted to the hard core represented by the Modern Movement, it became very vast as regards its acceptation.21 However, given Iancu’s contemporaneity with the grand masters of the Modern Movement, whose ideas and projects he sought to disseminate, the first impulse would be to analyze his architecture within that new formal expressiveness developed in Holland, Germany and France in the 1920s and whose common features led the curators of the exhibition at MoMa in 1932 to merge them under the denomination International Style22. In the most common and intituive fashion, we might expect to find Iancu’s “new architecture” in the current signs in which we recognize the modernism of the time: simple, abstract volumetric geometry, orthogonality and linearity, large flat surfaces devoid of ornaments or decorations, flat terraced roofs, horizontal banded windows and parapets, free interior spatial fluidity unhinged by the structure or the façade, and finally, the signs that generated the metaphor of “white box” in the architecture of the time, a preference for concrete and metal as building materials etc.
We can undoubtedly pinpoint them as such in many of Iancu’s buildings where they are displayed chronologically. And also undoubtedly, Iancu was the first who used the new formal language in Romania. However, if we expect to recognize in his buildings an unconditional adhesion to the mainstream stylistics of the time, we will probably be disappointed: we do not find in his buildings the aesthetic themes of the modernism of the period in their essence the same way we do not find some other themes in the least, as if he would have taken no interest in them at all. Practically, except for the non-housing projects (the changing facilities of Kiseleff swimming pool/1931, the Poper sanatorium in Predeal/1934 and, partly, the headquarters of Bazaltin society/1935), where the International Style readily reveals itself, all the other projects exhibit a sort of unusual complexity, unspecific of the prevailing expressive line of the period. More manifest contiguities also occur in the high tenement buildings (Frida Cohen and the one built on Luchian Street in 1933, and Naum Ghica from 1938), as well as the thirteen attached houses designed by the two brothers in 1937 for their father’s real estate development on Trinităţii Street.23 Yet with all the other projects, mainly villas or small chic buildings, where the freedom of creation was certainly greater, the modernity of Iancu’s architecture moves away from typical formal themes, displaying a disconcerting variety (even a sort of ecleticism), the more disconcerting as a chronological continuity of an evident pursuit of certain typical formal themes cannot be identified – or, at least, not as far as I am concerned, as was the case with Horia Creangă’s architecture, that I cannot help but think of.24
Now is not the time to elaborate on several of these themes, but going a little into detail, we notice that apart from the interiors of Contimporanul headquarters (dated 1923-25), Iancu had to wait until 1926 to build, on his father’s property in the Jewish neighbourhood, the Herman Iancu building (where he held his practice) which, for all we know by now, is the first “modernist” building in Romania; at any rate, it is the first to make a radical break with the traditional expressive patterns, but its colourful and triangular volume draws closer to the plaster reliefs in Zürich in 1917 rather than the shared characteristics of the International Style. 
In fact, Iancu himself thinks that the Fuchs Villa in 1927 is “the first modern villa” in Romania. Historians also agree, in general, that the Fuchs villa opens the series of Iancu’s “white boxes”, a series they later pursue in the following projects. I dare doubt there even was such a series in Iancu’s architecture, not only because the label is rather poetic and ambiguously dependent on various references, but mainly because I see nothing to convince me that Iancu would have truly wanted to design “a white box”. On the contrary, Iancu seems to be constantly trying to contradict it in different ways, elaborate on it, move away from its essence; even in cases where the main façade alludes to the idea of the “white box”, the volumes rarely display the simplicity suggested by the main façades, their whiteness is disturbed by the strong vibrations of coatings or even the colours, and their simplicity is interrupted by the graphic or sculptural design and various profile diversions/schemes etc. 
Certainly, we can regard these inconsistencies with the “new style” of the era as potential acquisitions or reminiscences of different terminologies (from neoplasticism or expressionism to Art Deco, Mediterranean architecture etc.), as the art and architecture historians have already done in their thorough morphological analyses. From this perspective, Iancu is not a radical modernist. Yet I wonder how relevant this perspective is for the “new architecture” in Iancu’s vision given that his buildings are, unquestionably, original, perfectly coherent and utterly expressive.
It is for the same reason that I cannot suspect Iancu of hesitation in employing the new formal language even though, according to some, his architecture is marginal in relation to art. From my point of view, the only valid conclusion here is this is not the note in which Iancu’s path towards a “new architecture” should be read in for I find it difficult to believe his purpose would be that of adhering to the dominant language already established by the masters of the period. It would have been too far from the Dadaist refusal to adhere to a specific style, which Iancu resumes.
Iancu’s upset
I dare believe Iancu himself confirms, by means of an unsettling epistolary episode, published in Contimporanul în 193125, that we need another reading key. The episode starts with the open letter of G. M. Cantacuzino to Iancu, a very beautiful letter from which I present a few excerpts: 

Dear Mr Marcel Iancu,
In addressing you this letter, I feel like I am talking to myself, debating and trying to control a personal opinion, to analyze a tendency of mine, to look for the explanation for an affinity. Not only the fact that I do not know you, that I have never had the pleasure of shaking your hand, that I have not seen your figure so much as in effigy places me in that special state of mind prone to the abstract and the objectivity, but more that belief of mine that you were the first in this country to turn his back on a weary and arid mentality. 
In our chaotic city, with its Balkan and colourless chaos of a «petty villainy», as Tudor Arghezi puts it, your robust houses appear the robust prerequisites of a robust future whose vigurous actions will not waste time with attitudes of retrospective admiration. As a precursor, you have imbued your entire activity with a fanaticism proper to the avant-garde. I was not part of this group.  Where you and your friends arrived in forced march, I arrived later, but with the same sincerity. My tardiness and that predilection for going my way in the capacity of  «cavalier seul» gave me the chance to wander more. I arrived by deduction where you arrived by passion. Never mind! Each follows their journey to their best knowledge. What matters is that your faith is in harmony with the trend of times. [...]
The signs of our civilization are so accurate, the path indicated by the social evolution trends is so clear for anyone who wishes to see that the new harmony cannot be searched for but in sober, severe and geometric aesthetics, an aesthetics of the combat and the will, of the austerity imposed through collective living and the organization of a society that is more and more homogenous while less and less free in its duties towards itself. The danger of this aesthetics is monotony, all the more so since the materials used nowadays, deliberately meager oftentimes, frequently leave the simple and unadorned forms hauntingly barren. 
However, I think that it is only by architecture’s resolute entering the rhythm of time that Bucharest can be saved.  A sound response to the ornate craze, a definite adaptation of the capital to the necessity of modern life and abandoning, as quickly as possible, the vanity of a “national style” (this designation is already ludicruous) may save our current Balkanized aesthetics.
There is nowadays an international, even intercontinental, modern style. Magazines and art across the countries display similar tendencies, and your heart wrenches when leafing through these magazines and comparing the activity abroad with what happens in our country. 
I hate those sighing over the past. As hard as times are nowadays, the prerequisites for a future success were laid so we do not fall prey to the cheap pessimism of late decadents. It is as a token of this belief that I wrote you these lines. I do not wish to retain you more «because art is long and life is short».
Yours truly,
Architect G. M. Cantacuzino26

This letter in which Cantacuzino is consonant with many of Iancu’s ideas (which would deserve a commentary of its own) clearly indicates that Iancu’s renown had surpassed the boundaries of the avant-garde artistic circles and that his role as a promotor of modern architecture was confirmed within the progressist cultural elite of the time. Taking into consideration the author’s social and intelectual status, Cantacuzino’s letter is an ackowledgement of great importance for Iancu’s success as a modern architect, only a few years after his first articles on architecture and even fewer since his first modern houses; we might say it is the confirmation of a “a story of success”.
Iancu’s reply, written several months later, probably after some time of reflection, is paradoxical27. Presumably, Cantacuzino had touched a sore spot in Iancu’s expectations of himself and what he had assumed, a punctum dolens which aroused the rebelling dadaist; he bitterly rejects, on the edge of politeness, and brimming with bitterness, the quality of precursor of the modernist boom in 1930’s Bucharest as well as Cantacuzino’s optimism. It is precisely through this virulence that this little epistle becomes significant for what the “new architecture” meant for Iancu. It had to be something else than what was foreshadowed in Bucharest, where an increasingly larger number of architects took to the path of modernism28.
However, instead of enjoying the success of his pioneering labour, Iancu disavows this development; he disapproves of the “costumed” plans and façades, “the meaningless masquerade [...] infatuated with the adoration of the golden calf ”, the fact that “yesterday’s cubist crazes” have become “beauty ideals, even commonplaces” devoid of evolution or prior reflection; he denounces “the trade of modern ideas”, “frauded” from “fashion magazines, cinemas and vending machines”; he likenes it to the import of silk stockings...We can easily deduce that the pamphleteer-like virulence of the epistle derives from the fact that in Iancu’s view “new architecture” was more than the mimetic use of the expressive vocabulary of the Modern Movement which was unfolding before his very eyes. What would then be those qualities of new architecture whose absence made him disavow what others deemed as a victory of Modernism?

“New architecture”
Of course, we find ourselves on the realm of suppositions and interpretations, but it is worth taking one more look at Iancu’s projects, for it is hard to believe he would not have at least tried to put into practice those directions he deemed important for architecture, even more so as many of them are luxury villas projects, a generous programme which was since forever the preferred area for expressive experiences. This time, we will not be searching for those formal signs which help us to commonly recognize a modernist building, but precisely those through which Iancu is moving away from the easily recognizable outline and which distinguish his architecture from the Bucharest-based modernism of the thirties. 
Hence, I will set aside the three projects with other functional programmes since they are very accurate examples of the international mainstream of the 1920s-30s, as well as most tenement buildings (Costin/1933, Clara Iancu/1933, Cohen/1935, Alexandrescu/1935, Chapier/1935, Carniol/1935, Luchian St./1935, Moga/1937, Ghica/1938) and those in Trinităţii/1937 parcelling, whose architecture is closer to that sense of “modern language consumption” it condemned. I will also exclude the early volumetric sketches and their initial reverberations, which do not seem significant for the time being. What stands out are several projects whose expressive nature has a disconcerting effect because, albeit overtly modern, they are difficult to fit stylistically and bear a knife-edge balance between the unusual and the familiar, between audacity and moderation. These would be: the interiors of the headquarters of Contimporanul /1923-25; several small-sized apartment buildings (Herman Iancu /1926, Clara Iancu/1932, Gold/1934, Haimovici-Vătărescu/1937); the villas (Daniel/1926, Fuchs/1927, Lambru/1928, Chapier/1929, Bordeanu/1930, Chihăescu/1930, Iluță/1931, Wexler/1931, Juster 1931, Reich/1936, Hassner/1937, Pătrașcu 1937). 
Taking a closer look at the way in which they are approached formally, we notice that all are objects displaying a powerful abstract expresiveness, what Iancu deemed as the only truly universal language, but which is employed very differently: sometimes it is very discreet, nearly lost in a graphic scheme (a rather unusual thing in architecture), other times it is remarkably sculptural. Without question, the modernity of these buildings is not tributary to structural innovations; they are, in general, instances of masonry construction, and Iancu has never extolled technology in his texts, he actually criticises the tendency to deem it as  a warranty of modernity. Nor is it tributary to a very free planimetric organization, although the fluidity and openness of interior organization is to be found in many projects, but is closer to the Raumplan than to any other free plan variant. Neither of his buildings proposes a genuinely “revolutionary” spatiality if it were not for the particular fashioning of the interiors. 
In fact, Iancu does not appear to target the exterior volume as a whole or the interior space as such, but the limits and their junctions. Therefore, the sculptural or graphic quality is implied, stemming rather from the plasticity of the elements defining and composing the object or space – for the same method is employed both on the exterior and the interior. These limits may be full sculptures (Herman Iancu House/1926) or may derive from the articulation of some simple and powerful forms (Juster Villa/1931); they may adapt and metamorphose (Gold Building/1934, where the method is also visibile on the interior); they may turn into large abstract graphic schemes, either flat – of a blazing white (Reich Villa/1936), with changes in textures (Poldi Chapier/1929) or colourful (the interiors of Contimporanul/1923-25) -, or protruding (Clara Iancu/1931); they may casually feature works of art (stained glass or bas-reliefs) or visually use standard means such as a diversity of plasters, textures and shades, various profiles and moldings etc. (which are to be found in almost all the buildings, including those we have initially excluded). 
All these expressive means are not exactly traditional for the Modern Movement, but it is pointless to look for their origin in other styles because the genuineness with which Iancu makes use of them encompasses rather the sensible, inexpensive and unextravagant simplicity of the spontaneous shift between sculpture, graphic art, coloristic practice and architecture; we find here the freedom of sculpturally and graphically defining various constructive, functional or finishing elements (walls, parapets, bay windows, openings, furniture, plasters etc.), of combining in unexpected fashions the modern artistic vocabularies and assigning them to a particular architecture object alone. All work together for the creation of the ultimate, ever different expressiveness of the object or interior space while each of them acquires a sort of artistic autonomy, original yet inconspicuous, modern yet hardly classifiable; they appear to be the components of a “total piece of work” to which they participate in an unconventional yet natural manner.
It is probable that this seemingly eclectic collaboration is where the impression of a probing modernism comes from; all the more so since many of his houses make manifest a sort of “artisanal materiality” which makes them fit smoothly into the local atmosphere. But the idea of expressing materiality as an aim of a manual process is an artistic method that Iancu has used dates as far back as the abstract reliefs in Zürich and in some stained glass works, through which he makes concspicuous “the artisanal process”, the vital dynamics behind the visible. That is how Iancu proceeds, for example, with the plasters and their texture variations, which may seem to be taming modernist radicality. In my view, the procedure is part of the manner in which Iancu connects art and life - “art is life”, one of the shared ideas of the avant-gardes, also advocated by Iancu. 
The manner in which Iancu approaches architecture corresponds to his idea that there is no actual barrier between architecture, with its rigor, and other plastic arts, with their freedom. It is an idea he stated on several occasions (dating back as early as Zürich)29, since in his view there is no real dichotomy between the two orientations. In so doing, Iancu engages in a register of compositional freedom which artistically shapes the delineations of the volume and the interior space without paying attention to the agreed principles of the modernism of the time. Iancu does not wish to apply a dogma or a style; he seeks. He seeks systematically. His compositional freedom is neither boundless, nor a gesture “pour épater les bourgeois”. In his words, it seems that the “new architecture” is nothing but a systematic search, “the passion for the artistic synthesis of natural and simple forms, representing function” (Arhitectura nouă), which becomes thus a new approach of the project, but only “in vivid contact with the modern plastic arts”. 
The idea of a fellowship of the arts, developed as early as 1919 in the conference On Cubism, Abstract Art and Architecture held at ETH Zürich is persistently resumed in numerous subsequent texts. As for his projects, it is more than the idea of Gesamtkustwerk that the Dadaists fully experienced in their creations, and the vernissage in 1924 described in the first pages of the article stands proof in this regard. It can be shown that Iancu regarded his reliefs and even his masks in Zürich as objects of architecture or compatible with architecture, which renders plausible the hypothesis that he designed his buildings in Romania following the same idea, but in reverse. We can read his architecture in the key of the freedom to create the building out of large artistic reliefs and graphic schemes whose relative autonomy (that we can decipher most clearly in the anamorphism of the façades of Gold building, situated between Herman Iancu building and the International Style) contributes to the demarcation of the volume or the interior space, sometimes even undermining the sense of conventional delineations (for example, the interiors of Contimporanul, or, in another sense, the interiors of Iluţă villa or Gold building). This appears to contradict, to some extent, the idea that the exterior expresses the interior of the building, whereby Iancu’s adherence to the functionalist idea is currently illustrated, but only if we overlook the fact that for Iancu, the interior space as such was not necessarily equivalent to functionality, but to a spatial artistic creation where art and architecture, as compatible as in the reliefs in Zürich, work together30.
And it is also here that we find the key for understanting Iancu’s irritation in his reply to Cantacuzino. Iancu cannot conceive of another manner to make architecture other than from the perspective of the artist, “knowing the whole concept from plastic art to architecture” – as he puts it. And this “can only be done in discipline”, Iancu tells us, words which might hint at the effort of adjusting his artistic endeavour to the constraints of architecture. It is a self-imposed discipline in which, I believe, lies the most original and enduring dimension of the path through which Iancu wanted to reach the “new architecture”. What Iancu aims for is an ever new yet imperfect artistic pursuit, not the beaten path. Probably, this is what he tried to do every time he had the opportunity, hence the atypical diversity of his projects. And this is what he could not find in the Bucharest-based modernism of the 1930s, where he immediately understands that the new language is “consumed” with no critical selection.
I wonder if Iancu’s reply to Cantacuzino, obsessive in its bitterness, does not bring to light a more profoundly avant-garde architect than other propagandistic texts that he published. From this point of view, those few buildings I mentioned in the latter pages appear to be built manifestos of another, more subtle, freer and more complex sort of design which Iancu is persistently seeking for – the path of a radical „raisonneur”. 
“Each follows their journey...”
Seen from this perspective, Marcel Iancu’s architecture career in Romania was not only “a story of success”, but concealed professional asperities and emotional disillusions. We will never know if these contributed to his decision to leave for Palestine and to start there a new career in architecture, very different actually – perhaps even paradoxical at first glance, but this is another matter. In any case, the Romanian political horizons had become increasingly threatening not only for his artistic pursuits, but even for his life31. This must also have been the greatest human disillusion, as he confesses in an uncommonly calm-analytical tone uncharacteristic of him, which makes it even sadder:

When I returned to Romania [in 1921, AN], I heard, it’s true, of the existence of an anti-Semitic movement, but the effects of antisemitism did not reverberate on me. I was freely working, exhibiting and building in Bucharest and other cities in Romania. Nobody dared to offend me or fault me because of my origin. Yet, all of a sudden, around 1930-1931, with the emergence of Hitler, both people and morals started to transform. Hitler’s Romanian zealots managed to change the climate and turn Romania into an antisemitic country.32

It would seem that it is not out of place to regard the Ball in Zürich as featuring the premonition of his inner drama, of his metamorphosis from the rebel returning to Romania in 1921, whose short period as méchant dadaist ensured himself an enduring posterity, into Marcel Iancu, the mature architect who consistently and exasperatedly sought to open for the Romanian environment the path towards “new architecture”, but who was banned as an artist and threatened as a human being and whose architecture is currently at risk of getting lost under the flow of indifference and public neglect which still surrounds it. 

NOTES


1. The architecture research for Marcel Iancu Centenary was initiated by Anca Bocăneţ (currently Iliescu), to whom is owed the discovery of the majority of Iancu’s projects in Romania. Nicolae Lascu and I seconded her in the preparation of the catalogue and the exhibition.

2. https://pbase.com/anhminh/image/170326339
3. Marcel Iancu. Biroul de studii moderne [Bureau of Modern Studies], collective volume, Simetria, 2008, as part of the project Marcel Iancu - arhitect, developed by E-cart.ro Association şi Simetria Foundation for Architecture and Urban Planning.
4. The online international conference series Marcel Janco and the Dada Spirit. https://www.jancodada.co.il/?page_id=4073&lang=en
5. Geo Șerban, Marcel Iancu. Locul și statura [Marcel Iancu. The Place and the Stature] in the catalogue Centenar Marcel Iancu (1895-1995), collective volume by the Union of Romanian Architects and the National Museum of Art of Romania, Simetria, 1996.
6. Francis M Naumann, Janco/Dada: An Interview with Marcel Janco, 1982, pp. 80-86.
7. For the Dada – architecture dichotomy, see Adele Robin Avivi, Between Dada and Architecture: Marcel Janco in Zürich and Bucharest, 1916-1939, master’s degree thesis in Art History, University of California Riverside, 2012; https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9w08b24h
8. Dida Solomon-Callimachi, interview in Clopotul, 1st January 1934, cited in the catalogue Centenar Marcel Iancu (1895-1995), cit., p.19.
9. The event is largely covered in Contimporanul no.50-51 and 52 (November-December 1924 and January 1925).

10. Camil Petrescu, Patul lui Procust [Bed of Procrustes], Eminescu, 1970, p.150.
11. Tudor Vianu, Prima expoziţie internaţională Contimporanul [The first international exhibition of Contimporanul], in Mişcarea literară, no. 4, 6th December 1924.
12. He co-founded Contimporanul in 1922, along with Ion Vinea and Jacques Costin, a magazine whose longevity compares to that of De Stijl or even Der Sturm.

13. See Nicolae Lascu, Arhitectura în eseurile lui Marcel Iancu [Architecture in Marcel Iancu’s Essays] and Marcel Iancu. Texte de arhitectură [Marcel Iancu. Architecture Writings] in the catalogue Centenar Marcel Iancu (1895-1995), cit. pp.212-240.

14. The quotes in Marcel Iancu’s writings are taken from Marcel Iancu. Texte de arhitectură in the catalogue Centenar Marcel Iancu (1895-1995), a collective volume by the Union of Romanian Architects and the National Museum of Art of Romania, Simetria, 1996. So as not to hinder reading, the text title is provided between brackets only when it is taken from other texts.

15. In the meantime, Nicolae Lascu has discovered another project. All those known by 1996 are presented in the catalogue cited above.
16. The signature right as “certified architect” was obtained from the new Architects’ Body. Iuliu Iancu’s name is not mentioned.
17. The changes following the First World War (the liberal élan, the economic progress and prosperity, the increased importance of modern bureaucracy, the advances in education etc.) contributed greatly to the development of modern architecture, particularly in Bucharest. The ethos of new social strata, the trust in investment safety, as well as the efficacy of modern buildings account for the steadily increasing pace (until the nationalization) of modern edifices, virtually untouched by the crisis in 1929-33. The Jewish community in Bucharest fully participated in this economic bloom (dominated by ethnic minority entrepreneurs), benefitting from freedom, affirmation, culture and prosperity until the radicalization of right-wing forces and xenophobic and antisemitic tendencies, the violent “Romanization” of the institutions, the persecutions and the pogroms.
18. 13 villas and 13 lower-budget houses, 10 small apartment buildings (a typical building programme of interwar Bucharest and an efficient tool for urban development), 4 high tenement buildings.

19. It is the “central area” configured in the interwar period regarding the tracing of the north-south axis (Magheru Avenue axis), the place of remarkable modernist constructions of greatest visibility.

20. The statement is not imprudent, even though the chronology of his projects also comprises three contradictory examples (houses dated 1922, an unidentified villa from 1927 and the permit project for Marinescu villa from 1937, which was not built accordingly anyway). Still, any closer look can confirm their total lack of significance.
21. There is an extensive debate on the term; in this respect, see Maria Todorova, Modernism, in Modernism: The Creation of Nation-States. Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770–1945: Texts and Commentaries, volume III/1, ed. Ahmet Ersoy, Maciej Górny and Vangelis Kechriotis, Budapest: CEU Press, 2010, 4-22.
22. The term “International Style” was first used by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in the essay The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, which served as a catalogue for the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, 1932.

23. The Iancu brothers were also the entrepreneurs of the entire project. Out of the 22 houses, nine were designed by other architects.

24. See Ana Maria Zahariade, “Arhitectura locuinţei în creaţia lui Horia Creangă” [The Architecture of the Home in Horia Creangă’s Creation] in Nicolae Lascu, Ana Maria Zahariade, Anca Iliescu, Florinel Radu, Horia Creangă. O monografie [Horia Creangă. A Monography], ed. Ștefan Ghenciulescu, Diana Mihnea, “Ion Mincu” University Press in partnership with Zeppelin Association and SG Studio, 2019, pp. 18-99.

25. My first comment on it was in “După doisprezece ani: Gînduri despre arhitectura lui Marcel Iancu” [Twelve Years After: Thoughts on the Architecture of Marcel Iancu] in Marcel Iancu. Biroul de studii moderne, cit.
26. G. M. Cantacuzino, “Scrisoare adresată lui Marcel Iancu“ [A Letter to Marcel Iancu], Contimporanul no. 96-98 (1931): 9-10. In Mirela Duculescu, George Matei Cantacuzino (1899-1960). Arhitectura ca temă a gândirii [George Matei Cantacuzino (1899-1960) Architecture as a Theme for Thought], Simetria, 2010.

27. Iancu’s reply was published in Contimporanul no.99, September 1931, and featured in the catalogue Centenar Marcel Iancu, cit. p.229.

28. A study carried out by Luminiţa Machedon shows that by the end of the interwar period around 100 architects had designed at least two modernist buildings.

29. Francis M Naumann, Janco/Dada: An Interview with Marcel Janco, cit.

30. The subject of the compatibility between the artistic methods in Zürich and the architecture in Romania is discussed in great detail in Adele Robin Avivi, Between Dada and Architecture: Marcel Janco in Zürich and Bucharest, 1916-1939, cit.

31. For instance, Jacques Costin’s brother was killed by the legionaries. Romanian antisemitism had become very aggressive, not only through rasist prohibitions and exclusion, but also by means of violence and terror, a context that Iancu recalls with unespeakable sorrow in various letters. See Vlad Solomon, “Confesiunea unui mare artist” [The Confession of a Great Artist] in Observator culturalhttps://www.observatorcultural.ro/articol/arte-vizuale-confesiunea-unui-mare-artist/
32. Idem.