The new, the old, the modern : architecture and its representation in socialist Romania, 1955-1965

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the architectural culture of postwar Romania participated in the socialist regime's attempt to construct a new and collectivist environment. The dissertation works from a close reading of examples drawn from three different domains of architectural practice: the architectural and urban design of the Floreasca housing district in Bucharest; the writings of the architectural historian Grigore Ionescu; and the photography of architecture in the magazine Arhitectura. A consistent set of aesthetic and discursive practices emerged from the interrelation between words, images, and actual buildings in each of these examples: the city as new unit of production, standardization, an attack on subjectivity and individualism, technological essentialism, and abstraction were all attributes of the architecture enlisted by the socialist regime in order to establish and consolidate its ideological identity. The dissertation challenges the received descriptions of the postwar artistic context of the Soviet Bloc as one dominated by anti-modernist tendencies, as well as the complementary assumption that, in Romania, the thriving modernism of the interwar years was brought to an end by the postwar socialist regime.

(cont.) On the contrary, this dissertation shows that many practices characteristic of the Modern Movement and Soviet Constructivism not only persisted, but also reached an unprecedented scale and intensity in the architecture of socialism in the late 1950s and 1960s. By considering the processes through which specific modernist tenets of the 1920s and 1930s migrated or persisted inside socialist Romania, the dissertation highlights the paradoxical condition of socialism's architectural culture: on one hand, socialism required its culture to be revolutionary, and therefore unprecedented; on the other hand, it heavily relied on undesirable capitalist precedents. The dissertation investigates how the tension between old and new was negotiated, thus exposing the ways in which aesthetic meaning was produced and controlled under totalitarian socialism.