While the first modernists, like
LeCorbusier were fascinated by cars and hangars, architects of the so-called
“Second Machine Age” looked at space forms and chemical plants instead. Since
those provided the kind of “dismembering” needed to prove their point. Without
bodies to contain them, the internal mechanism could proliferate malignantly,
from hourse to city to the whole envinronment. All of those were systems of
control and manipulation of the urban structure, which gradually evolved and
took over the architectural discourse, and from which the Western envinronment
was saved since they remained largely urban utopias rather than became
realities. In the East and in Cuba though, megastructure – as a macro concept
regarding a whole country as the site for heroically extending the central
control over it – became increasingly popular since the sixties, only to devour
its host –the city- in the late eighties Romania.
For megastructure was not the “neutral
grid” neither in its original understanding nor in its East European
counterparts. First of all because the frame was dominant, permanent, fixed and
structural. Secondly, because given the above mentioned inner quality, it was
supposed to be expressed in a monumental way, which eliminated definitively its
neutrality. The frame was not the background against which the city projected
its functioning but the functioning mechanism turned into the very essence of
the city/environment.
In the late 60s Romania, as well as the
west earlier, the community spirit was replaced by “civic centers” – monuments
dedicated to it, best described, as were its West European counterparts as
“grotesque civic monuments with compulsory piazzas” inspired by the last Le
Corbusier. It is where the frame structure exists that the internality of the
architecture exhibits its “heroic” part in sustaining the whole.
The grids were metaphors of control
displayed on the facades of major administrative buildings built since the late
‘60s in every county capital city. Although the structural/decorative frames
did not become autonomous, as in megastructures, this exhibition of inflated
concrete grids is perhaps the most important feature of East European official
architecture in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Communist Eastern Europe, plagued by
prefabrication and social housing after 1954, was the perfect playground for
megastructures – an efficient way to control the environment and its
inhabitants.
During the ‘60s, vast areas of the environment
and historical city centers were destroyed everywhere in Europe in the name of
development. Modernism took over and imposed “a simple and architectonic order
on the layout of human society and its equipment”.
Perhaps the most striking development in
modern architecture after the war was the steady disappearance of other senses
but vision in experiencing the built matter. In fact, seeing became more and
more the only possible way in experiencing architecture. Yet, the more the
visual took over, the more substanceless the façade became. Glass was used
either as a mirror, or a transparent “skin” whose primordial function was not
to protect, but to unveil, even expose the structural skeleton.
In western Europe and the US, roughness and
opacity (flattering the tactile and being key qualities of an aesthetic based
upon concrete) were increasingly and deliberately suppressed from the
discourse, by focusing on smoothness and transparency (which in turn emphasized
sight, and were centered around glass and metal). More and more, the choice of
materials, surfaces and colors of modern architecture was intended to
complement a unique sense, and thus to alienate the being from its built environment.
However, one cannot find the same process
in the East, where Khrushchev’s laudation for cement and concrete was absolute.
One can make edifices out of concrete: rough, powerful, heavy, thus monumental.
Concrete was “revolutionary”, as it was an outcome of the heavy industry, progress
and materiality and it was grey, which is the worker’s color.
Glass is cool, both transparent and
reflective, fragile and easy. It is present, corporeal as well as absent and
virtual.
Architecture had to be present, visible,
material, whereas glass offered but elusiveness, was slippery and metaphysical,
could entail uncontrollable reflections under various light conditions: “a
giant Hall of Mirrors, or Skyline of Mirrors [which] implies, of course, total
abdication”.
The reflected city is not the real city any
more, but an image, an interpretation of it, it’s the other city from beyond
the mirror. Mies van der Rohe could assert back in 1919 that “the important
thing in a glass tower is the play of reflections” and perhaps in the West
something needed now more than ever, a second cornea, a screen prosthesis to act
as protective/interpretative intermediary between reality and being. Perhaps
one could build with glass in the most ethereal ways yet this was not the case
in the East. Enframing the glass panels was the norm in Romanian architecture
during this period.
Charles Jencks gives an exact “hour” when
modernism “died”. The rest, post-modernism and its association with
conservative revolution, the implosion into supermarket and Disneyland
architecture is now well known history. One may not be and in any case one may
not stay in the avant-garde if adopted by mass culture. Without a critical
edge, the discourse becomes degraded and collapses. Post-modernism died of too
much love.
However, post-modernism theories outlived
post-modernist practice, yielding many fertile concepts: fragmentation,
collage, pastiche (quotation for aesthetic purposes), simulation (the eulogy of
the facade,of the artficial and the superficial), the theory of simulacra and
the critique of furniture as bourgeois monuments.All these concepts are usefull
today not only to the study of American megalopolies but also for interpretation
of the ‘New Civic Center” in Bucharest.
Between the lines both these
populist-conservatory,eclectic,nostalgic,schizoid discourses are informed by
similar grounds.
Some testimonies indicate that some of the
better architects involved with the design of the civic center intended to
produce, in fact, historicist post-modernism. It seemed possible to manipulate
the regime in that direction; was it asking for historic references and
prestigious quotations from the past? Very well, it would get them. A parade of
Bofill-isms, Krier-isms and other idioms of the post-modern decade joined hands
in this contest for the “New Civic Center”.
It was an opportunity unmatched by any
since Carol II, that of rebuilding Bucharest from ground up. It was the chance
to edify a post-modern Bucharest, the amplest such intervention in Europe. The
guilt for the demolitions would forever belong to Ceausescu: dictatorship often
provides such joys to architects. Yet, the renown of the new buildings would
forever belong to their creators.
It appeared that, by an utterly weird turn
of events, architecture would (could) fare better than all the other arts and
the rest of society, too. Moreover, architecture seemed to become a flagship
art, as it had been before under other dictatorships. The Institute of
Architecture organized “research” trips in the West from which some even
returned.
Soon, it became obvious, however, the
Romanian “post-modernism” had no connection, other than “façade-ism”, with the
Western discourse, and that the vast destruction of the center of Bucharest was
not going to be followed by vast architectural experiments.
“The amplest post-modern intervention in
Europe?” The Victory of Socialism
Boulevard and the House of the Republic are products of the same type of urban
intervention aiming to “rationalize” and monumentalize the
organically-developed cities of Europe.
The methods of composition – collages of
classical/eclectic elements, quotations with an evocative/aesthetic function,
simulacra, eulogy of the urban facade-are without a doubt analogous to those
celebrated by post-modern architecture.
Essential ingredients are, however missing:
the irony, the double coding, the aside or clin d’oeuil to warn us, jokingly,
about the concessions to kitsch meant to flatter mass culture.The ensemble, on
the contrary, is starched and
dead-serious, taking itself and expecting to be taken seriously, like a group
of party officials and Security members.
The humour here is involuntary, the irony
belongs to the critics, not the authors, to the interpretation and not the
creation. Robert Venturi carefully took apart the failures of modern monumental
buildings and concluded that they wanted to “speak” with the “wrong” words.
