Exporting hard modernity: construction projects from Ceaușescu's Romania in the ‘Third World’: Fid-Bau Portal

Exporting hard modernity: construction projects from Ceaușescu's Romania in the ‘Third World’

Vais, Dana

The paper addresses the construction projects exported by socialist Romania to Africa and the Middle East, published in the review Arhitectura . These projects should be juxtaposed with architectural trends inside Romania, which they followed in terms of architectural development; the stress on typification and prefabrication; and the discourse on ‘specificity’. The paper argues that architectural exporting relied on the political affinities and development similarities that existed between Romania and the countries of the ‘Third World.’ While Romanian construction projects in the Third World were acts of modernisation transferred from a supposedly industrialised country to underdeveloped ones, this paper points out the similarities between them, including anti-capitalist state economies and often authoritarian regimes. It focuses on the discourse that accompanied these transfers, as part of the more general ‘development discourse’ and argues that this North-South transfer was based on a shared concept of hard modernisation.