Look back with anger, look forward with naivety!

An instant classic, John Osborne's play, Look Back in Anger, is primarily an individual drama with a very good title, but its value is grounded in its fundamental ability to reflect the social milieu of the late 1950s, of the class tensions typical of a capitalist regime and, not least, of living in a semi-slum apartment. Richard Burton, a now-forgotten star who won 16 Oscars in his time and gave memorable voice to that anger, was probably unaware that L'Unité d'Habitation a Marseille had been completed only a few years before and that the design of the near future of mass housing was almost set for times to come.
Anger was very much present at the time, a consequence of the war, quickly countered by the need to forget all the horrors of the previous decade and make room for the baby boomer generation. Children who were born in 1950 into a population of two and a half billion people are now the grandparents of a world of more than eight billion souls. We don't know how angry they are, but surely their grandchildren are worried sick about our planet and their future. The phrase "angry young people", which arose out of the critical reception of Osborne's realist theater, is now picked up and radically transformed by Greta Thunberg's generation into their own anger, a wonderful narrative twist, from a young man's bitter solipsistic judgment of a post-atomic society to a girl's incandescent burst of activism as she builds her discourse on scientific fact and fights for a cause that was on the brink of extinction: that of the common good.
The Romanian Pavilion is not just a series of material objects, but also a collection of stories that could have been acted out at some point on a stage by real actors in design and planning, their clients and beneficiaries, with the occasional guest star, perhaps even brief special appearances by petty politicians. But staging it as a theatrical performance would have been overly dramatic for the Architecture Biennale, and a slightly risky "wink" to the Biennale Teatro, which will run in parallel in Venice this summer, for a while. Architecture as performance art is not an unexplored idea, especially as a theater of objects that can create a certain situation, but also as a process with a limited lifespan that embodies clear messages. In addition, most architects are not too keen on this side of architectural practice because it is safer to play the masterful, correct and grand game of volumes simultaneously brought to light. The examples I have chosen for volume and exhibition do not ignore form and expression, but they tend to be grounded in a certain kind of anger at the current state of affairs, and to resist it with a very welcome naivety.
I have chosen projects that are also stories, but the way in which many of them are presented is mediated by a material representation, a classical display of exciting artifacts that sometimes have meaning at first sight, sometimes need to be associated with a narrative. However, narratives are not the strong point of architectural discourse, primarily because there is not enough drama in a building, even in a dramatic historical situation architecture comes up with a solution to a number of mundane problems, such as protection against the elements.
In a very courteous and non-polemic way, we prefer to look to the past with naivety, not particularly to emphasize the respect we owe, of course, to our forerunners, but in an attempt to learn from their happy experience to discover solutions for what was in their time the future. There is a huge advantage in being part of an exhibit that has a desire for research but a relaxed attitude towards methodologies, and it can easily be said that a slogan like "Wie es eigentlich gewesen", or "How it actually was", as the founding fathers of modern history claimed was the aim of their scholarly approach, is in reality of little importance when it comes to an unmediated interaction with a historical artifact.
What matters to a non-specialist, more than the authentic nature of the artifact and the wealth of information that would likely cause him to immerse himself in the past, is how he is transformed by the experience, what he can draw from it for himself, not from a consumer experience, or as a consumer of history, but as a person living in the present. The past remains important in its own right, but we should recognize that, according to François Hartog, we are always forced to talk about it using the powerful filters of our present. The same goes for the future, a realm of imperatives to be imagined, as the Biennale's theme urges us to do, but which is, again, passed through the powerful filter of our current set of habits. We set out to illustrate the latter idea with lateral pedagogies, but let's deal with the past first.