Architecture Without Architects: Building Home and State in Romania: Fid-Bau Portal

Architecture Without Architects: Building Home and State in Romania

Drazin, Adam

This article argues that under certain circumstances, the building of modernist blocks can be seen as homemaking activity, comparable to domestic bricolage; although in most cases, this style has become linked with forms of social exploitation. The treatment of homemaking with respect to architecture tends to fall within two camps, those in which a building's structure is inalienably linked to identity, and those where homemaking primarily means appropriation of interior spaces. Using historical and ethnographic data, architecture in urban Romania is explored in terms of an opposition between house and block. This quest reveals the complex local struggles involved, including emotions, party politics, violences, and the drive to put family first. It is argued that the apparently alienating character of the architectural landscape of Suceava is not the inevitable consequence of the block form, but of the relations of meaning and ascription of meaning which have happened around architectural exteriors and interiors.