Juliana Maxim Microraion
Post on 08-Nov-2014
54 Views
Preview:
DESCRIPTION
Transcript
This article was downloaded by: [Central U Library of Bucharest]On: 09 November 2012, At: 05:49Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
The Journal of ArchitecturePublication details, including instructions for authors and subscriptioninformation:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjar20
Mass housing and collective experience: onthe notion of microraion in Romania in the1950s and 1960sJuliana Maxim aa Department of Art, College of Arts and Sciences, University of San Diego,California, USAVersion of record first published: 17 Mar 2009.
To cite this article: Juliana Maxim (2009): Mass housing and collective experience: on the notion ofmicroraion in Romania in the 1950s and 1960s, The Journal of Architecture, 14:1, 7-26
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602360802705155
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantialor systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that thecontents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae,and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall notbe liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of thismaterial.
Mass housing and collectiveexperience: on the notionof microraion in Romaniain the 1950s and 1960s
Juliana Maxim Department of Art, College of Arts and Sciences,
University of San Diego, California, USA
IntroductionThe striking history of Romania’s postwar architec-
ture is often told in numbers: 6,000 dwelling units
were built in the year 1950, 30,000 in 1960,
120,000 in 1970 and 150,000 in 1975;1 340,000
dwelling units between 1956 and 1960;2 and
between 1960 and 1975, the figure stood at 1.12
million flats.3 The numbers are staggering, and
powerfully suggestive of masses in motion, millions
of lives neatly tucked into white flats, streaming in
and out of factories, pouring into parks and stadia.
To Western readers, the Orwellian ring is unmistak-
able, and, unsurprisingly, anonymity, monotony and
crushing homogenisation have been the tropes that
have driven up to now examinations of the architec-
ture of postwar socialist regimes. And although it is
easy to suspect that socialist architectural reality was
more complex than the one obsessively tallied by the
official literature, there have been very few efforts
towards a more nuanced understanding of socialist
architecture’s tasks, goals and overall ethos.
Using Romania as a case study, I will attempt to
colour socialist urban planning’s terse image by
tracing architects’ efforts to reconcile mass
housing with softer notions of neighbourhood and
collectivity. I hope thus to complicate a series of
assumptions about the purely utilitarian and ration-
alist character of mass housing inside the Soviet
bloc. I will do so by showing that the relentless
pursuit of efficiency and industrialisation was
always combined with experiential and expressive
concerns, a dual architectural enterprise that I wish
to relate, ultimately, to one of the favourite terms
of the politically charged language of socialist
regimes, ‘realism.’
Much of socialist architecture’s reputation as
impersonal, and as lacking a sense of community,
stems, in part, from socialist regimes’ own modes
of self-representation. Discussions of the 1950s
and 1960s in Romania, as well as in most of the
Soviet Bloc, often assessed the architecture of the
time in terms of cost and speed of production and
assemblage. Good architecture was that which
best answered the pressing housing needs of a
rapidly swelling urban population, and thus was
bound to favour, for instance, prefabricated panels
over detailed craftsmanship, or to express tremen-
dous concern for the number of square metres of
housing for each inhabitant, but only minimal inter-
est in the treatments of the facade. In other words,
the emphasis on norms and quantitative advance-
ment determined at once architectural practice,
and its frames of representation.
The misreading of socialist architecture as unidi-
mensionally oppressive has been amplified also by
its perceived foreignness. Difference, or at least
singularity, has been an obdurate trope of studies
of the art and architecture of the Soviet Bloc, and
an over-simplified reflection of its political isolation
from the West. The separation, within the history
of twentieth century architecture, of the Soviet
world from its European counterpart, is due, in no
small measure, to the socialist regimes’ own desire
for specificity, for an architecture that would
7
The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 14Number 1
# 2009 The Journal of Architecture 1360-2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360802705155
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
convey a radically different political, social and econ-
omic construct. Sources of the time insist on archi-
tecture’s unprecedented qualities: ‘Within world
architecture, soviet architecture is essentially a new
phenomenon, that develops according to laws that
are proper to socialist society. It is absolutely
normal that the construction of large ensembles
has, in soviet times, its own specific features, its
original character, its own criteria.’4
A shift in scale: from house to housingThe ‘newness’ of architecture under socialism
derived primarily from a radical shift in the scale of
the architectural object. From the early 1950s
onwards, socialist architects successfully redefined
the act of inhabitation by replacing the individual
house with collective mass housing, thus transform-
ing architectural design into urban planning. This
new paradigm could only occur alongside a trans-
formation of architectural practice: the socialist
state became the main, if not the sole, commis-
sioner of construction work; architectural con-
ception was no longer an individual pursuit and
instead occurred in design collectives composed of
large numbers of architects; and the object of archi-
tecture was no longer the single building, but was
always formulated at the level of the neighbour-
hood, the district and even the city. In Romania,
one of the first pieces of legislation of the newly
installed socialist regime concerned the positioning
of all design-related activities at the city level.
Starting with the ‘Decision Concerning the
Construction and Reconstruction of Cities and the
Organisation of Activities in the Architectural
Domain’ of 1952, and continuing through a series
of decrees, the Central Committee of the Romanian
Communist Party mandated that the planning and
design of all housing projects be coordinated nation-
ally, through the State Committee for Architecture
and Constructions (CSAC), and at the city level,
through the newly-created position of municipal
architect-in-chief. The legislation also called upon
newly organised planning collectives to put in prac-
tice the principle of complex housing estates, also
termed ‘cvartals’; finally, it defined the planning
and construction of residential ensembles as the
main goal of the architectural profession.5
In 1964, in what amounts to an alternative
‘Charter of Athens’ of the socialist approach to the
city, Horia Maicu, then the chief architect of the
city of Bucharest, recapitulates the standards of
what had become, by then, current practice. His
‘Principles of urban development of the capital’
state as the first goal ‘[t]he realisation of a unified
territory, developed through structural units, with
large ensembles of dwellings and facilities.’ Third
in the list of priorities comes ‘[t]he creation of a par-
ticular life within the residential ensembles, achiev-
able through the total satisfaction of the needs of
a complex existence and of advanced comfort, in
correspondence with the structure of the cities of
our socialist society.’ (emphasis added)6
Such commitment to design on the scale of the
multiple and the collective, apparent from the early
1950s onward, did not come easy to Romania’s
architects, who, mostly trained in a Beaux-Arts
system before the socialist regime’s ascent to power
in 1947, had no experience, so to speak, of collective
housing. Prewar publications on urban planning
repeatedly spoke against collective housing,
8
Mass housing andcollective experience:
RomaniaJuliana Maxim
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
thought to foster dangerous communist tendencies,
and to be unfit overall for the Romanian workers’
mentality and habits, which were considered quin-
tessentially rural.7 In an exceptionally candid 1954
article describing the planning and construction of
Vatra Luminoasa, one of the earliest residential
ensembles commissioned by the new regime, the
authors explain that their initial preference for indi-
vidual housing had been sternly contradicted by
the State Committee for Architecture and Construc-
tion (CSAC), which had decided instead in favour of
four-storey buildings of 40–50 flats each. The same
article reveals that the architects of the time saw
mass housing superseding the single-family home
not only as a political act, but as project with import-
ant consequences on the city form: ‘It is not longer
relevant to design in two dimensions – that is, in
height and width – but also, necessarily, in the
third dimension, depth. Whatever we say, we have
to acknowledge that, until now, the third dimension
was still just in reference to facade elements.’8
Emblematic of a practice in a state of flux, the
article announces a design principle that will
underlie much of the 1960s’ developments: a pro-
gressive abandonment of a directional, street-
oriented understanding of residential buildings in
favour of a newly-found urban ‘third-dimension’,
and a condemnation of the traditional preoccupation
with facades as narrowly decorative and outmoded.
The microraionmicroraionContemporary architecture has moved away from
the building – modest or significant – that was
considered not too long ago as a self-sufficient
object and thus relatively independent from its
surroundings, and on to more complex problems,
concerning large residential ensembles, urban
structures, or territorial organisms. It is now
seeking to solve increasingly ample problems
with a deep social content. A building today is
considered an organic component of a totality,
the two being mutually dependent. [. . .] At the
centre of architectural concerns, holding a princi-
pal place – internationally – are large housing
ensembles.9
Each architectural object should be designed
not only as a comfortable, durable, and beautiful
construction, but also as a component of the
architectural complex.10
In thinking about housing, the shift that occurs in
Romania in the 1950s consists not only in transform-
ing the individual dwelling into collective blocks of
flats; but also, and more importantly, in abandoning
a traditional conception of the city as an accumu-
lation of individual parcels containing single build-
ings in favour of larger, state-owned land units
shared by several, and perhaps dozens of buildings.
These two principles, the block of flats and the
appearance of much larger land units that could
accommodate an ensemble of buildings, coalesce,
in 1960, in the notion of microraion, which
becomes the official modus operandi not only in
Romania, but also in all states of the Soviet bloc.
Publications of the time contain numerous and
intense discussions of the notion of microraion,
but its definition is perhaps best summarised in the
architect Marcel Locar’s (1902–1983) article on
socialist urbanism, published in 1960. In Locar’s
words, themicroraion is a residential ensemble con-
ceived so as to constitute an organic unity, aimed at
9
The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 14Number 1
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
connecting its inhabitants through the everyday use
of shared social and cultural institutions, a point
always reiterated in all writings. The microraion
was intended to occupy a clearly defined territory,
delimited by streets with intense traffic or by other
strong dividing elements, such as waterways, or rail-
ways. To achieve a certain functional and experien-
tial cohesion, its territory was not to be crossed by
important streets, and pedestrian and car traffic
were to be, preferably, separated inside the micro-
raion. The maximum distance between any dwelling
and public transportation should not be more than
500 metres. Locar suggests that the size of the
microraion should not go beyond 10–12, 000
inhabitants, although there seems to be, in the pub-
lications of the time, little consensus over this
figure.11
The microraion shared many of its principles (and
origins) with the western notion of the neighbour-
hood unit, which had been developed in the
context of the large capitalist city; in the context
of postwar Romania, however, the discourse sur-
rounding the notion tended to foreground the
microraion’s ability to overcome the capitalist div-
ision of the city’s surface into small, fragmented
units, and the repetitive logic of the row and of
the urban grid. The emergence, in the late 1950s,
of the microraion as the basic planning unit of the
socialist city testifies, indeed, to a search for urban
expression and a thinking about the city in ways
that cannot be solely translated into numbers.
The shift from the efficiency and economy of the
grid to the formal playfulness of the microraion is
visible in Romania’s break away from the early
Soviet-inspired model of the cvartal, such as
Floreasca (1956–58), which organised identical
buildings into regular patterns orthogonally
aligned with the street grid (Figs 1, 2), in favour of
more picturesque, less predictable and entirely un-
geometric arrangements of buildings of various
heights and footprints that characterise the large
housing estates from 1960 onwards (Figs 3, 4).
That the spread of the microraion as a norm for
urban development functioned as an open criticism
of the grid’s uniformity and monotony is an argu-
ment often encountered in architects’ writings of
the 1960s: ‘The simplicity with which [the Floreasca
district] was conceived, the uniformity in height, the
positioning of the housing blocks, the lack of
concern for facilities, and the use of a restricted
range of block types, led the almost 3,500 flats to
seem monotonous and without personality.’12
Although mostly composed of mute, abstract
buildings, the microraion is shaped by a search for
formal effect. Unlike the grid, it does not proceed
through the systematic repetition of a single build-
ing type, and instead reads as a collection of
forms; if a building type is repeated, it is as a
short, rhythmic series, each element of the series dif-
ferentiated either by staggering, or by varying its
orientation (Figs 5, 6, 7). The grid was formed by
the addition of identical elements and therefore
could be endlessly extended (Fig. 8); by contrast,
the microraion is a fully constituted, unbreakable,
organic and finite entity inside of which each
housing block stands as an irreplaceable com-
ponent.
Two new neighbourhoods in Bucharest, Balta
Alba (a district built on the site of dilapidated quar-
ries and brick kilns, and developed at lightening
10
Mass housing andcollective experience:
RomaniaJuliana Maxim
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
speed between 1961 and 1966, during which
36,000 flats, or 1,087,000 square metres of built
surface, housing 100,000 inhabitants, were con-
structed) and Drumul Taberei (1965–early 1970s),
show how the disappearance of orthogonal circula-
tion axes, now replaced by sinuous, intricate paths,
prevent the organisation of buildings into rectangu-
lar city blocks (see Figs 5, 6 below). The repetitive
city block of regular size and formed by a regular
street grid is abandoned; instead, the settlements
occur according to a system in which progressively
smaller urban units nest inside each other (Figs 9,
10). Fully-formed urban units incompatible with
expansion, both Balta Alba and Drumul Taberei
occupy territories that are clearly bordered on all
sides by arteries of rapid circulation. When those
arteries don’t exist yet (as in Balta Alba’s south-
east corner, Fig. 11 below), the district implies such
strong boundaries in the orientation and positioning
of its buildings. The larger territory of the district is
subdivided into clearly individualised microraions
(marked by the dotted lines in the map of Drumul
11
The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 14Number 1
Figure 1. Aerial view of
the Floreasca housing
district (1956-58),
Bucharest. Published in
Arhitectura RPR, 6
(1964).
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
Taberei (see Figure 9 below), where the neighbour-
hood unit or microraion is designated, in the
caption, as ‘housing complex’).
Balta Alba, for instance, contained six residential
neighbourhoods (cartiere), each subdivided into
two neighbourhood units (microraion), all of
them served by a cultural and administrative centre
and a large recreation area around two central
lakes (see Figures 10, 11 below). Although hier-
archically related to the whole, each subdivision
enjoyed a significant amount of functional auton-
omy, and contained at least one commercial
centre, medical centre, nurseries, schools, sport
and recreation facilities, and administration build-
ings. Differences in size and plan between micro-
raions suggest a search for a distinct character,
and a clear stance against visual monotony,
mostly attempted through the variation of building
types, their position and rhythm. For instance, in
Balta Alba, in some microraions the buildings
obey an orthogonal arrangement (while the
streets connecting them loop and wind free of geo-
metric logic); in some others, buildings are distrib-
uted, fan-like, in a progressively rotating series
(see Figure 11 below). Finally, within eachmicrorar-
ion, smaller residential groups of 4–5 blocks of
flats are formed. These units of decreasing com-
plexity and size corresponded to a similar hierarchy
of social relationships, so that the city provides the
stage for a range of encounters, from the most inti-
mate and everyday, to those in a larger, less familiar
community.
The building no longer stands in relationshipto a street, but to the neighbourhood
The characteristics of these large ensembles are
their organisation in complex structural units
(in decreasing order of size and complexity,
these are the district (sector) – neighbourhood
(cartier) – neighbourhood unit (microraion) –
residential groups), the mixing of spaces for
dwellings and facilities, and the spreading out of
the buildings, with important effects upon the
architecture of the street.13
12
Mass housing andcollective experience:
RomaniaJuliana Maxim
Figure 2. Early phase of
the Floreasca district,
planned according to
the cvartal notion.
(1956–58, architect
Corneliu Radulescu and
associates) ‘The new
neighborhood (cartier),
which is by itself a small
town able to
accommodate 11,000
inhabitants, consists of
5 main groups in which
the residential buildings
are oriented linearly,
along the pre-existing
streets of the old
parcels. Most of the 84
buildings are built from
standardised elements,
have uniform height
(ground level!3), and
occupy 30% of the
land, which results in a
net density of 450
inhabitants per hectare.
Collective services –
most of which have
been located in the
central garden – consist
of 2 schools, 4
preschools, a public
bath, a laundry, a
cultural centre with club
and library, a film
theatre, and a general
store.’ From Grigore
Ionescu, Arhitectura
RPR 1944–69, pp. 66
and 68.
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
Much of the microraion’s character is determined
by the demise of the street as a place of urban
experience; instead, large, collective green spaces
that occupy most of the unbuilt-up surface come
to constitute the places of social interaction.
Indeed, along with the street itself, the traditional
opposition between the public nature of the street
and the private nature of the individual residential
plot is abolished, and the land surrounding the resi-
dential buildings is now neither private nor public,
but uniformly collective. Along with the street, the
small private gardens that had previously defined
the experience of private dwelling in Bucharest,
disappear in favour of common lawns and green
spaces. (The balconies or loggia, which become
systematic features of the socialist flat, can be
seen as a compensation for this loss of private
exterior space.)
The streets that remain are of two very different
categories: inside the microraion, pedestrian paths
meander through green spaces, and narrow
winding lanes, having fulfilled their sole function
13
The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 14Number 1
Figure 3. Aerial view of
the Balta Alba housing
district (1961–66),
Bucharest. Published in
Arhitectura RPR, 6
(1964).
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
of delivering motor traffic to a single building, dead-
end at its doorstep; around the microraions, large
thoroughfares or boulevards that traverse the
entire housing estates as corridors of rapid transit,
and with which intersections are kept to a
minimum. These lines of heavy traffic act also as
boundaries between microraions, as markers of
inside and outside. The life of the population is to
occur away from them, in the green interstitial
spaces and along the secondary paths inside the
microraion (Fig. 12).
Such a decoupling of dwelling and rapid circula-
tion is clearly seen, for instance, in the planning of
Drumul Taberei, where the choice of a circular
thoroughfare is aimed at reducing the number of
high-traffic intersections (see Figure 9 below). The
thoroughfare loops without interruption, as
narrow lanes peel off to the side to penetrate each
subdivision (microraion) of the district. Although
buildings are arranged orthogonally within each
microraion, the circulation pattern does not
conform to a grid, but turns this way and that, is
interrupted, and progresses sinuously, looking
more like park trails than places of efficient, rapid
and economic motion (see Figure 4). Buildings,
rather than streets, are what provide order, struc-
ture, and visual identity to the microraion.
The abandonment of the linked notions of street
grid and city block deeply transformed the relation-
ship between street and building by interrupting
their traditional connection – an act of severance
that further explains the socialist attacks on the
idea of an architecture of facades. The street-corri-
dor, with its double function of urban transit and
dense housing, framed on both sides by a tight
14
Mass housing andcollective experience:
RomaniaJuliana Maxim
Figure 4. Partial plan of
the Drumul Taberei
housing district,
illustrating the
subdivision of the
district into microraion
or superblocks, each of
them bordered by
important axes of
circulation, and
following a different
internal organisation.
Pedestrian paths are
visible, as is the
predominance of green
spaces.
From Grigore Ionescu,
Arhitectura 1944–69,
pp. 134–5.
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
succession of facades, was considered particularly
inadequate:
Because of the way in which buildings are dis-
posed on the land, the microraion transforms
the traditional physiognomy of the street,
which used to be fragmented in parcels and
flanked on both sides by buildings that
formed a closed edge. Thus, the street-corridor
constituted an artery that had circulation as
its principal function. Instead, buildings are
now freely distributed throughout the territory
of the microraion and thus can achieve
optimal orientation.14
Thus, another consequence of the emphasis on
large residential ensembles and the corresponding
criticism of an architecture concerned with individ-
ual buildings, is a radically diminished importance
of the street front and therefore of the building’s
facade. Indeed, once detached from the street and
situated in a large, collective, park, the building’s
four sides become equally important, and only
15
The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 14Number 1
Figures 5, 6. Plans of
two microraions inside
the Drumul Taberei
housing district,
Bucharest. Published in
Lazarescu, Urbanismul
ın Romania.
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
16
Mass housing andcollective experience:
RomaniaJuliana Maxim
Figure 7. Model of the
Balta Alba housing
district. Published in
Arhitectura RPR, 6
(1964), p. 17.
Figure 8. Model of the
Floreasca housing
district, 1957. Published
in Arhitectura RPR, 7
(1957).
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
subtly different. In one of the several Soviet writings
on planning that were regularly translated in the
pages of Romania’s official architectural publication
Arhitectura RPR, we read a similar analysis of this
transformation:
Our architects don’t need to dealwith a front and a
back facade, but instead, inmost cases,with build-
ing parts of equal importance, where each side is a
principal side, each is a facade. It is easy to imagine
the new compositional problems that arise, when
confronted with an architecture that wrenched
itself away from the conventional framework of
the frontal plane, [and inserted itself] in the real
space of the city, in the space of life itself.15
Socialist planning thus revises the traditional relation-
ship between architecture and city, as buildings no
longer encounter the city one-on-one, and immedi-
ately, through street facades, but only through the
mediation of a group or neighbourhood. It also
follows that in a socialistmicroraion, a single building
has little capacity to accrue meaning by itself, but
signifies only as part of an ensemble; the ultimate
outcome being that a building, in this conception,
is never understood (or represented) by itself. The
weakening of the differentiation between the four
facades and the abandonment of a street front,
two aspects that have directly contributed to the
reading of socialist housing districts as anonymous,
were thus initially seen as away to direct signification
towards larger spatial units. It is tempting to find
in such ‘collectivisation’ of buildings a spatial meta-
phor for their inhabitants’ own overcoming of
individualism.
Balta Alba and Drumul Taberei – the demise ofthe urban streetIn the new housing districts and their microraions,
blocks of flats are moved away from the street,
17
The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 14Number 1
Figure 9. Map of the
Drumul Taberei housing
district. The dotted line
indicates the limits of
the microraions (here
called ‘housing
complexes’). The black
triangles indicate
schools, the white
triangles, nurseries. The
circles designate
commercial centres.
Published in Lazarescu,
Urbanismul ın Romania,
p. 62.
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
18
Mass housing andcollective experience:
RomaniaJuliana Maxim
Figure 10. Map of the
Balta Alba housing
district. The dotted line
indicates the limits of
the microraions (here
called ‘housing
complexes’). The black
triangles indicate
schools, the white
triangles, nurseries.
The circles designate
commercial centres.
Published in Lazarescu,
Urbanismul ın Romania,
p. 47.
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
and towards the interior of the plot; they are also
released from the orientation of the street, and
positioned according to other factors, such as sun
orientation, winds, views, or overall visual effect.
The diminishing role of the street in giving shape
to urban life can be documented in the design
process for the Balta Alba district. Although the
first steps of the project traced the major circulation
roads (the four thoroughfares that limit the district
to the north, south, west and east), the interior cir-
culation arteries remain fluid until the very last
stage. It is the positioning of buildings, their
spacing, their orientation and their number, as well
as their dimensions in plan and height, that take pre-
cedence over the tracing of the interior streets,
which clearly come after-the-fact.
In 1963, with less than a third of the district com-
pleted, the buildings of Area 1 (upper North-West
19
The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 14Number 1
Figure 11. Model of the
Balta Alba housing
district, 1965. Design
collective: Nicolae
Kepes, Nicolae
Porumbescu, Aurel
Caciula, Sully Bercovici,
Margareta Dımboianu,
Victoria Gılca, Ana
Keszeg. Published in
Arhitectura RPR, 4
(1966).
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
corner of the district, and designated in the
literature as Balta Alba – Institutul de Inframicro-
biologie) are firmly in place, with detailed flat
plans, while the interior street that moves
through the microraion’s centre keeps changing
its course, first stopping abruptly (Fig. 13), then
becoming a loop (Fig. 14), eventually meeting
another east-west interior street, to emerge into
one of the main north-south boulevards (see
Figure 11 above). Throughout the final design
stages, the buildings are firmly positioned, but
the street comes and goes, hugs the buildings,
then distances itself from them; the architects
seem to consider its exact location almost a
matter of decorative concern.
The microraion is clearly a pedestrian realm,
with transiting motor traffic severely curtailed
(see Figure 12). At first sight, this radical decoupling
of pedestrian traffic from motor circulation – which
is expelled to the edges of themicroraion – seems a
direct application of the functionalist doctrine of the
Charter of Athens, which divided the city according
to functions and separated rapid car circulation
from residential areas. But the resemblance to
functionalist planning stops there. It is the mixing,
rather than the segregation of functions that deter-
mines the microraion’s unity and organisation. Each
unit contains at least one primary school, several
nurseries, playgrounds and several local commercial
centres. Often, one can find a small medical unit,
or a cinema, or a post office, or another facility
of local utility. Much like the residential buildings,
most elements of daily use are not lined up along
the main transit corridors, but instead scattered
within the microraion, their independence from
the street reinforcing the inward convergence of
neighbourhood life. In Drumul Taberei, for instance,
schools and nurseries are placed at the centre of
each microraion. Only commercial centres stand in
close proximity to the large boulevard, but they
are not addressing the street exclusively; instead,
they offer access from all sides, and can be
equally reached on foot from the heart of the
neighbourhood unit and by car from the main
road. In other words, they, too, lack a clear front
and back (Fig 15; see also Figure 9 above). The
reduced porosity of the urban unit, added to a
relative functional autonomy, concur to make life
inside the microraion one single, uninterrupted
experience.
20
Mass housing andcollective experience:
RomaniaJuliana Maxim
Figure 12. Circulation
diagram for a
microraion, showing
the differentiation
between vehicular and
pedestrian paths.
Transiting car traffic
occurs on the
microraion’s edges.
Published in Arhitectura
RPR, 6 (1960).
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
The agenda of social integrationIf the Romanian socialist city discards the tra-
ditional notion of the city block in favour of the
microraion, it is not solely for the sake of effi-
ciency and a rational densification of land;
although these two aspects are certainly part of
the reasons why the microraion replaced a more
traditional urban fabric, the success of the micro-
raion in the 1960s came primarily from its pur-
ported ability to function as a tool of social
integration and of the abolition of class divisions.
The microraion’s organisation was meant to be
21
The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 14Number 1
Figure 13. Plan of the
Balta Alba district in
1963. Area 1 (Balta
Alba – Institutul de
Inframicrobiologie) is
the N-W corner of the
district (on this plan, the
upper left corner).
Published in Arhitectura
RPR, 4 (1963).
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
homogeneous enough to prevent architecture
from introducing economic and social differen-
tiation, while still providing a sense of neighbourly
intimacy and belonging. One of the main figures
of the architectural profession in socialist
Romania, the architect Cezar Lazarescu formu-
lates clearly this agenda of integration:
The residents of the new ensembles generally
come from different backgrounds, have diverse
professional profiles, and, as an age group,
occupy the base or the middle of the population
pyramid. Once settled in their new location (as a
result of being assigned to their new flat, or
because of new jobs) they try doubly to adapt at
once to the other newcomers, as well as to the
pre-existing collectivity.16
The desire for togetherness that undergirds the
planning of the socialist city is revealed in the
many statements that lament its lack: ‘What was
not fully successful, despite the programmatic prin-
ciples, was the constitution of a physical framework
favourable to social cohesion and to human inter-
relationships’, Lazarescu wrote about the urban pro-
jects of the 1950s.17
The terminology used in the publications of the
time to designate these new spatial units of urban
life reflects the desire to promote the microraion
as an instrument of social cohesion. Although a
vast range of scientific-sounding terms was avail-
able (such as microraion, raion, sector, complex
housing unit, etc), the new housing developments
were consistently referred to as neighbourhoods
– cartier – a much softer term with almost
bourgeois (and certainly Western) connotations.18
The sediment of such understanding of the city by
neighbourhoods is still perceptible today in the
22
Mass housing andcollective experience:
RomaniaJuliana Maxim
Figure 14. Detail of
Area 1 (Balta Alba –
Institutul de
Inframicrobiologie) of
the Balta Alba housing
district, 1963. Published
in Arhitectura RPR, 4
(1963).
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
language of Bucharest’s inhabitants, who will
often mention their (socialist) district as a mark of
identity.
The search for spatial frameworks that would
intensify and transform social interactions, and
counter the alienation of the big city, which
turned out to be the defining project of socialist
planning, was also the principle behind urban sol-
utions developed contemporaneously in the radi-
cally different political context of a democratic
Western Europe. The self-sufficient neighbourhood
unit, with its de-centralised and shared institutions,
and its accent on parks, was receiving significant
attention in the postwar period throughout
Europe. Many West European countries built ver-
sions of the microraion in the 1960s, but it is the
urban projects undertaken in the Netherlands
in the late 1950s by architects such as Lotte
Stam-Beese (1903–1988) and Jakob Bakema
(1914–1981) that I would like briefly to invoke in
order to show the striking parallels that existed,
for a decade or so, between Western European
and socialist planning ideas.
In the case of Stam-Beese and Bakema, such proxi-
mity is not surprising: Lotte Stam-Beese and her
husband Mart Stam (1899–1986) had been active,
and influential, in the Soviet planning brigades of
the early 1930s, where they had been in charge of
planning new residential districts and industrial
towns (such as the development of the city of Orsk).
Mart Stam, upon the couple’s return to Amsterdam
in 1934, became Jakob Bakema’s architecture pro-
fessor, and Lotte Stam-Beese and Bakema worked
together on at least one urban project, the plan for
the Rotterdam suburb of Pendrecht.
There is significant overlap between a project
such as Balta Alba and Pendrecht. Both establish
the neighbourhood unit as a basic module of
urban design. Both decentralise everyday insti-
tutions, such as schools, medical facilities, parks,
shopping facilities and even utilities, such as
heating plant and electricity plant, which they distri-
bute throughout the modules of the district. Both
produce an urban environment that substitutes the
collectivity of the neighbourhood for the traditional
publicness of the street or the plaza. Both projects
imagine the city as composed of increasingly
23
The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 14Number 1
Figure 15. Diagram of
functions inside the
microraion. At the
centre of themicroraion
stand the green spaces,
immediately
surrounded by
education facilities
(schools, nurseries.)
Commercial facilities
are on the outer edges
of the microraion. The
thin diagonal lines
signify housing.
Published in Arhitectura
RPR, 6 (1960).
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
complex, telescoping units of collective life, which
would start from the smallest form of association
– such as, in Romania, the stairwell (the flats
served by the same staircase formed a unity) –
and progress towards larger ones: the building,
the sub-neighbourhood, the neighbourhood, the
urban sector, and finally, the city itself. Both install,
within the city, layers of increasing size and com-
plexity in terms of their facilities and political
weight.19
Despite extensive formal similarities, and despite a
shared reading of the neighbourhood unit as an
incubator of collective feeling, the emphasis put
on the residential estate as the basic sphere of
urban life acquired different connotations under
socialism. While both Dutch and Romanian archi-
tects counted on the neighbourhood to enhance
collective life and to function as a transformative
device, the aim and content of that transformation
was formulated differently. In the Dutch case, it
meant an amplification of a long-standing tradition
of civic involvement, and aimed at recovering indi-
vidual characteristics within conditions of mass
living and a neighbourly sense that would combat
the anonymity of modern life in the city.20 In the
Romanian case, it was not as much individuality
that was promoted, as the demise of the traditional
social structures of the extended family, and their
replacement by an entirely new form of collective
life, based neither on family nor class, but on
shared urban spaces.
The novelty of life inside the socialist microraion
was conceived at once in pragmatic terms (access
to basic facilities, sewer, running water, etc.), and
in ideological ones, in the undoing of old social net-
works based on the extended family. Lazarescu, for
instance, expressed the social novelty of the micro-
raion in terms of improved material housing con-
ditions that would ultimately transform life itself:
The new residential ensembles received real inter-
est from the population, even amongst those
groups not urgently in need of lodging. What
proved to be most attractive was the quality of
the flat, its salubrious character, all its modern
sanitary fittings, and the proximity of basic facili-
ties. Thus the new ensembles came to constitute
a different mode of life from that of the old neigh-
bourhoods.21
Themicroraion actively determined such ‘a different
mode of life:’ from the importance of pedestrian
paths, to the shared institutional resources, to the
size of the flats, to the extensive provisions for
childcare outside of the family, its physical structure
promoted participation in the abstract collectivity
achieved through multiplied urban encounters.
The small size of the flats, for instance, most of
which had only one or two bedrooms, made it
clear that urban life was to be lived in small, mono-
nuclear families of parents and two children, and
was antagonistic to the co-habitation of the
extended family and its forms of socialisation.
Accordingly, domesticity was de-emphasised, and
women were expected to integrate with the work
force, as the modest kitchens and the numerous
provisions made for nurseries and pre-schools
within each microraion testify.
The city as work of artThe examination of some of the ideas associated
with the microraion – the shift in the scale of
24
Mass housing andcollective experience:
RomaniaJuliana Maxim
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
architectural intervention in the city, the demise of
the street in favour of the organic unity of the
neighbourhood, the agenda of social transform-
ation and integration – has shown that the micro-
raion was in part a search to enrich, even
transcend, the much-advertised efficiency of stan-
dardised mass housing. Therefore, the attempt to
discuss socialist planning as more than grim regi-
mentation of life is perhaps best concluded by
pointing at a circumscribed but intense effort, in
the theoretical writings on architecture of the
1950s, to give the socialist housing district the
status of a work of art.
Far from being considered a purely scientific
product, mass housing was also, in the late 1950s,
one of the most cherished demonstrations of the
artistic notion of ‘realism’ in architecture. Trying to
counter the assumption that architecture, unlike
the artistic image, could not reflect reality and there-
fore could not be truly art, the magazine Arhitectura
RPR published, throughout the 1950s, an impas-
sioned discussion of architecture’s own claim to
realism and, through it, to artistic status. The main
argument stated that, while architecture’s principal
aim was to satisfy practical needs rather than
procure ‘aesthetic moments’, it was able to
surpass a merely utilitarian definition and reach
into the ‘ideological and artistic realm’ through
compositions at the city scale.
The abstraction of facades, their lack of decora-
tion and differentiation, the austerity of standar-
dised construction that mark the buildings of the
1960s, are easily, and often, perceived as a refusal
to signify. But while each residential building, taken
individually, might be devoid of artistic qualities,
it was seen as acquiring expressive attributes
collectively. Much like in a Lego construction, aes-
thetic and ideological content was shifted away
from the standardised component, and towards
the result of their complex combination. The Soviet
essays of aesthetic theory that filled the pages of
Arhitectura RPR throughout the 1950s, bore titles
that militantly stated this idea: ‘The housing district
– a superior step of architectural artfulness’, or ‘On
the aesthetic qualities of mass construction’. Their
content is equally clear: ‘In mass constructions, the
dialectical unity between the utilitarian side and
the ideological-artistic one manifests itself not in
each single construction – which, taken separately,
might not be a work of art – but in the comprehen-
sive solution to urbanistic problems.’22
Among solutions for mass housing, themicroraion
embodied particularly well the notion of ‘realism,’
thus ensuring it a particularly strong claim to artistic
status. The microraion was ‘realist’ because it corre-
sponded closely to the needs of its inhabitants, and
provided conditions of living and dwelling that were
‘of their own time,’ and in step with the material
and cultural life of the present.23 But more impor-
tantly, ‘realism’ required an architecture able to
offer its inhabitants an experience that went
beyond the mechanical satisfaction of material, tan-
gible needs. Striving to access the realms of the aes-
thetic and the affective, socialist planning in Romania
counted on the microraion actively to create a new
social order and to arouse a sense of collectivity.
Notes and references1. C. Lazarescu, Urbanismul ın Romania (Bucharest,
Editura Tehnica, 1977), p. 44.
25
The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 14Number 1
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
2. G. Ionescu, Arhitectura ın Romania ın perioada anilor
1944–1969 (Bucharest, Editura Academiei Republicii
Socialiste Romania, 1969), p. 57.
3. C. Lazarescu, Urbanismul ın Romania, op. cit., p. 52.
4. N. Colli, ‘Despre unele particularitati ale constructiei de
ansamblu a oraselor’ in, Trapeznikov, K., ed., Problema
ansamblia v sovetscoi literatura (Moscow, State Pub-
lishing House for Construction and Architecture,
1952), pp. 29–34; quoted in Sistematizarea, construc-
tia si reconstructia oraselor si a centrelor populate.
Material documentar (Bucharest, Institutul de Docu-
mentare tehnica, 1954), p. 22.
5. Hotarırea Comitetului Central al P.M.R. si a Consiliului
de Ministri al R.P.R. cu privire la constructia si recon-
structia oraselor si organizarea activitatii din domeniul
arhitecturii (Bucharest, Editura pentru literatura
politica, 1952). See also G. Ionescu, Arhitectura ın
Romania ın perioada anilor 1944–1969, op. cit.,
p. 66.
6. Horia Maicu, ‘Probleme de sistematizare a capitalei’,
Arhitectura RPR, 6 (1964), pp. 8–13; 10.
7. D. Marcu, G.M. Cantacuzino, R. Bolomey, et al, Planul
Director de Sistematizare. Rezumat at memoriului
colectiv (1935).
8. N. Sburcu, ‘Locuinte noi ın cartierul Vatra Luminoasa’,
Arhitectura RPR, 9 (1954), pp. 19–25; 19.
9. Gustav Gusti, speech at the 9th Congress of the IUA
(International Union of Architects), Prague, July, 1967:
published in Arhitectura RPR, 6 (1967), pp. 2–8; 2.
10. G. Minervin and M. Fedorov, ‘Despre calitatile estetice
ale constructiei de masa’, Arhitectura RPR, 5, 48
(1958), pp. 23–25, first published in Architecture
USSR, 2 (1958).
11. M. Locar, ‘Pentru dezvoltarea urbanismului socialist’,
Arhitectura RPR, 4 (1960), pp. 5–7; 5.
12. Traian Stanescu, ‘Noi ansambluri de locuinte ın capi-
tala’, Arhitectura RPR, 6 (1964), pp. 14–22; 15.
13. Cezar Lazarescu, Urbanismul ın Romania, op. cit.,
p. 47.
14. G. Ionescu, op. cit., p. 75.
15. Archin, D., ‘Ansamblul – treapta superioara a maes-
triei ın arhitectura’, in, Trapeznikov, K., ed., Problema
ansamblia v sovetscoi literatura (Moscow, State Pub-
lishing House for Construction and Architecture,
1952), pp. 35–44; translated in Sistematizarea, con-
structia si reconstructia oraselor si a centrelor popu-
late. Material documentar (Bucharest, Institutul de
Documentare tehnica, 1954), p. 31.
16. C. Lazarescu, op. cit., p. 57.
17. Ibid., p. 50.
18. Cartier, from the French quartier, progressively replaces
the much older ottoman term of mahala in the late
nineteenth century, as part of Romania’s project of
modernisation of language and culture.
19. For a good discussion of the Stam-Beese/Bakema
project, see Cornelis Wagenaar, ‘Jaap Bakema and
the Fight for Freedom’, in S. Williams Goldhagen and
R. Legault, eds, Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation
in Postwar Architectural Culture (Cambridge, MA., The
MIT Press, 2001), pp. 261–277.
20. Ibid., p. 269.
21. C. Lazarescu, op. cit., p. 50.
22. G. Minervin and M. Fedorov, ‘Despre calitatile estetice
ale constructiei de masa’, op. cit.
23. For what is, to my knowledge, the best discussion
of the notion of ‘realism’ in architecture (although
in a non-Soviet context), see Stanford Anderson,
‘Sachlichkeit and Modernity, or Realist Architecture’,
in, Harry Mallgrave, ed., Otto Wagner: Reflections
on the Raiment of Modernity, proceedings of the
Otto Wagner Symposium, Santa Monica, November,
1988 (Santa Monica, CA, The Getty Center for
the History of Art and the Humanities, 1993),:
pp. 322–360.
26
Mass housing andcollective experience:
RomaniaJuliana Maxim
Dow
nloa
ded
by [C
entra
l U L
ibra
ry o
f Buc
hare
st] a
t 05:
49 0
9 N
ovem
ber 2
012
top related