Celia GHYKA

Locally Branded Utopia

”L’intérieur n’est pas seulement l’univers du particulier, il est encore son étui.”
Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capitale du XIXeme siècle

Five years ago, a prophetical article1 was written about the 500 houses American
Residential Park that were to be built in the northern part of Bucharest. Yet, at that time,
such an important operation was quite new, and not yet acknowledged as a threatening
phenomenon. It was rather seen as a curious, somewhat thrilling project, supposed to
gather together a community of VIPs, diplomats, expats, general managers of
multinational companies, eventually upper middle - class, into a well - organized,
perfectly secure, brand new residential area. After all, we have been expecting them (the
Americans) for half a century. We were witnessing the beginning of a new type of ideal
habitat insidiously finding its place into the collective urban imaginary.
Today, the outskirts of Bucharest, as well as of most of the Romanian cities, are
flooded with new districts of twisted, clean, rather grotesque housing developments,
expanding the city in a tentacular, awkward way, swallowing forests, orchards,
vineyards, cultivated land, lakes, finally spreading as an irrational construction fever
never to be stopped. However, there are some places left over from this strange disease:
beyond the railways, in the hidden valleys or in the immediate neighborhood of
industrial abandoned areas, extreme poverty settlements can be found, under
continuous danger of expulsion. The way these poverty communities relate to the
landscape seems to be one of the latest resistances to our increasing incapacity of
dwelling, for which stands the new look of the residential parks.

Simulacrum

The way Walter Benjamin describes the bourgeois interior of the 19th century recalls,
certainly, a type of middle – class Parisian apartment developed mostly in the last
decades of the glorious century of the first European Capital. However, the needs and
dreams of a social class upon which resides the construction of modern Europe could
not have been so different from the Oriental Europe habits, especially at the end of the
century and moreover, at the beginning of the next. Western influence had already
marched into this part of Europe, long before Benjamin’s Parisian bourgeois began to
fold his interior around himself, wrapping it up with velvety tissues and small cases.
According to Jean Baudrillard2 and the further comment of Eduardo Soja3, this is the
moment when image begins to “mask and pervert the basic reality”4, and therefore
reality has to be unveiled, and lived, as in an unfolding movement of curtains, velvets,
tissues, and boxes.
If we listen to 19th century chroniclers of Bucharest lifestyle, it appears that,
although the spatial forms differ radically, the Romanian petit bourgeois ideal of a
comfortable, cozy, tapestry decorated home surrounded by charming yet more or less
savage gardens embodies in a specific manner a very similar middle-class idea of
comfort, well being and privacy.
Nowadays residential parks and new developed suburbs seem, however, to have
converted the myth of an intimate, comfortable and private interior into an exhibition of
new, luxurious, sometimes meaningless complicated forms speaking about a need for
1
Cosmin Caciuc, “The American City in Bucharest”, in Arhitext Design 3/2001
2
Jean Baudrillard, La société de consommation, Ed. Dénoel, Paris, 1970 (Rom. Ed. Paideia, 2005)
3
Edward W.Soja, Postmetropolis – Critical Studies in Cities and Regions, Blackwell Publishing, 2003, pp.326-330
4
According to Soja, whereas the former Enlightenment could be captured in the metaphor of the mirror, the 19th century
metaphorical embodiment was not the mirror but the mask. Cf. Edward Soja, idem, p. 329
prestige and setting up for a hidden stage where finally nothing significant ever
happens.
Their surroundings either disregard any public or urban space, or are impeccably
designed and maintained, yet in both cases, they inspire artificiality and a certain feeling
that they might come from the outer space, a bunch of strange, perfectly functional
models deposited there in order to fly again to a secure and happy land. It is the
simulation of a settlement that has been reinvented, of a community that should
suddenly fraternize by the mere act of sharing the same surrounding, and maybe
sometimes, the same swimming pool. The phantasm of a way of life insistently induced
by the huge outdoor or magazine advertising always staging the mythical family: a
young and beautiful couple, two kids, necessarily tanned as if they are perpetually
returning from holiday, enjoying their new shower cabin, or the new pieces of furniture
eventually assembled by the happy father, or the swimming pool, or the washing
machine etc.
The home itself is always perfectly arranged, clean, windows are sparkling,
furniture is comfortable and, most of all, functional, as perfect, clean, sparkling our
comfortable as reality itself, now born on the TV screen or in the pages of the Interior
Design magazines. It is the representation that becomes the real. For Jean Baudrillard,
everything, territories as well as their representation are a matter of simulation and
simulacra:
“To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what
one hasn’t. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But the matter is more complicated,
since to stimulate is not simply to feign… [for] feigning leaves the reality principle intact: the
difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between
true and false, between real and imaginary.”5
It is how new urban imaginary of the residential parks institutes a daily life that
is played as if it were a computer game of ultimate simulation, as in the famous and
prophetical computer game SimCity, producing an artificial paradise and a primitive
community of the future. History has no place here, no other than to be the referential
for the mythical figures that transform the world of objects into a world of consumption.
By defining this simulation as ultimate, E. Soja joins the classical essay of Roland
Barthes6 on the rhetoric of myths. Hence, the simulation is ultimate for it assumes and
stresses the bourgeois ideal of being surrounded by an immutable world, a world in
which the only place of history is that of being essentialized through myths.

Myths

The ideal habitat continuously transforms the products of history in essential

types, trying to stop the perpetual production of the world and its constant change into
something that can be measured and possessed7. Therefore, the structures that engender
consumption rely, use and abuse of these mythical figures, being endlessly redefined by
their shifting significant. Myths refuse explanations, aiming to simplify the reality
through statements that turns it into a natural, inherited, immobile world.
Consequently, publicity is beyond the notions of true or false, for it responds to
diffrent kind of test: that of a self-fulfilling prophecy8. Its main paradigm: tautology,
constantly speaking of redundant evidence. Arranging, choosing or building a home are
therefore only referring to the actions or products they express: “we offer you a home to
match your own taste”, “roofs that protect you” (what else could a roof do if not
protect?), plants that make your home green (what could plants do otherwise?),

5
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulations, Ed. Galilée, Paris, 1983
6
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Ed. Du Seuil, Paris, 1957, pp.225-226
7
idem, p.229
8
Jean Baudrillard, 1970
“valuing the objects that surround you, you come to value yourself”, “the flexibility of
the design concept that allows you to make it – your home! – personal”.
Thus, the myth is stripping the object of its very history, and moreover, it is
taking away any history – it has always been there, as such. Some of the myths related to
the ideal home are obviously recurrent, others more subtle.
Nature
This very idea of nature becomes a true rhetoric of natural values: comfort, warmth,
light, space. Nature (read garden) is seen as an ultimate oasis (of silence and green). Yet
this dreamed nature consists of the swimming pool and a few hundred square meters of
prefabricated pavement, eventually some plants, always in pots, for nature has to be
domesticated to its last consequences.
Materials and colors
They are almost always related to the idea of luxury, of showing off, of prestige,
and therefore they have to look new, polished, clean, and ostentatious. There is a certain
hysteria linked to ceramic and over finishing surfaces and tiles, nourished by enormous
outdoors showing beautiful women, ecstatic about the new floor stones they are offered
in promotion.
Materials are always described in terms of quality and value: we might even
think there is a whole axiology set up in order to justify the lack of any concern for
signification.
Colors have to be aggressive and unusual, for some decades of blocks of flats
assumed to be grey and monotonous had to be replaced with something that could
contradict them. As a result, the new (or refurbished) houses are yellow (“as sunny
summer days”), red, mauve, orange, green, magenta and the palette may continue.
Limits
The opaque fence and the security system are both symptoms of the same
obsession of individualism. “As a prestige symbol- and sometimes as the decisive
borderline between the merely well-off and he truly rich – security has less to do with
the degree of personal safety than with the degree of personal insulation, in residential,
work, consumption and travel environments, from unsavoury groups and individuals,
even crowds in general.”9
The roof has to be as complicated as possible, for having the same simple roof as
traditional houses have had for centuries seems to offend the owners, as much as it
offends the architect, desperately trying to invent the most hilarious and absurd angles
and roofing systems.

Local variations

The rhetoric of the post communist upraising middle class myths has been rapidly
swallowing imported myths, mixing them with some sort of local specificity, inherited
partly from a two or three old generation of urban family tradition, partly from a rural
background of social and spatial practices. The middle class that used to provide the
standard to be imitated and, if possible, achieved by all the lower middle class forming
the majority of urban population has disappeared – either through physical extinction
(imprisoned or too aged) or through a constant impoverishment and social liquidation
pursued by the communist ideology and authorities. What remains of a bourgeoisie that
constructed the modern Romanian State have either left abroad or moved to the
common blocks of flats, vanishing into the dullness of the apartments where more of
half of the urban population lives. Therefore, one of the specificities of the Romanian
middle-class myths is the absence of norms to inherit, and the almost total formatting of
the latter ones by the media and advertising industry.

9
Soja, idem, p.300
 If myths essentialize history using it as a common referential, yet of which history
are we speaking in this case, after all? How does a new middle class select its myths and
inherently, the form of their ideal home? The Communist period is seen, at least from
the architectural and urban perspective, as a damned one: the age of demolitions
(though they only started in the last decade of the regime) and of blocks of flats (though
some of them are of remarkable design qualities). Modernism is associated to the same
period, and sometimes even exceptionally refined modernist houses are seen as
belonging to a dull, aseptic, cold architecture that cannot provide the mythical figure of
the ideal home.
So what is there left to become a model? Most probably a mixture of South American
soap operas décor and the proposals of interior design magazines: glittering, efficient,
functional and – most important – “personal” design solutions. If one chooses to buy the
whole concept that, even if unique, can be entirely found in the pages of the magazine,
the house will already have a name (a feminine name, of course, or a flower name). The
well – off can chose an already built one in a residential park, and some even chose a
real architect to shape their personal dreams. They are most of them computer simulated
(pseudo)realities, ready to be implanted anywhere on the planet, with slight adjustments
if topography so requires.
The dreams are often confuse, and we must admit that sometimes the architects
only help them get dizzier. They alternate between the desire for modernity (and then
the house is dynamic, modern, contemporary, aggressive) and the secret need for
classical referential forms (symmetry is one of the recurrent themes).
Nevertheless, they all have to be “aesthetic” (as depicted in the magazines, the
word “beauty” is rarely or never employed) and “complex”.
This paradox sometimes concludes with absurd, half triangular forms (what
remains of the strange combination of symmetry with modern dynamics) or with
grotesque (mis)interpretation of the classical. These awkward and incredibly
complicated forms are often combined with some inherited elements of former rural or
local urban spatial practices, like the bench in front of the fence (a place to have a chat in
the rural space). Strangely, however, the only things that have been completely lost are
the formal elements that used to define a specific landscape:
- the occupation of the plot (now volumes are huge, massive, occupying most of
the land, as if the block apartment has only been expanded and returned from
his vertical manifesto to a horizontal, domestic condition)
- the relationship to the street and the limit (formerly defined by a transparent
fence providing visual continuity between the public and the semiprivate,
actually becoming completely opaque as to express the continuous retrieval of
the public sphere into the private, individual space)
- the formal vocabulary (window forms, façade composition and roofs as
complicated and as possible)
The contamination is spreading towards the periphery and then carried away
towards the rural areas, where the need for confirmation and a newly instituted prestige
is equivalent to the rejection and replacement of the traditional: multi angled roofs,
zigzag columns and polygonal windows have become today the reference and the
construction practices of the craftsmen.
If the utopia of a computer-simulated world seems to shape the collective dream
of a perfect home, yet the reality of housing is far more complex and contradictory (half
of the urban population is living in blocks of flats, one million in bidonvilles, as we are
about to find out in the further readings of this book). Housing is also about blocks of
flats, poverty communities, the switch between the urban and the rural, and the
normality of traditional urban housing.
The re-mix of all these different perspectives has the best chance to provide a wider,
colored, sometimes violent image of contemporary Romania.
Published in “remix”, Romanian catalogue for the Venice Biennale, 2006