Festival dell'architettura

The densification process started (with greater strength in the second half of the twentieth century) from the city of Bucharest having its ultimate objective the construction of modern Romanian capital: exaggeration in a way of building a city, with the main intention of setting a clear and strong image, it acts as a principal objective in the designing phase, called  “imageability” by Kevin Lynch,  it is“the quality which gives a physical object a high probability of evoking a strong image in every observer” (Lynch, 1960). 

The great Bucharest pursued by Ceauşescu is nothing but the natural continuation of renewal tension of a city that, since its founding, appeared as a low-density settlement and for this reason it is commonly called "big village". This renewal tension is the basis of a consensus of all the changes that come through the urban fabric from mid-nineteenth century, a feeling that Ana Maria Zahariade (historian of architetture) describes with the following words: “For the Romanians, the «large village» was the metaphor of the gap between them and Western Europe, the expression of disappointment and inferiority complex” (Zahariade, 2010).

This process becomes clearer in those places where the new layer overlaps the fabric of the "big village" in a thin film: a city that we could define as Potëmkin city (named after the Russian prince who is said to have built, in 1787, villages of paper mache to impress his queen).

The term “Potëmkin villages” is used in a journalistic jargon, it describes those cities exclusively built for propaganda purposes. The Potëmkin city is the result of the crush between the “big village” and the superimposed model. It is a lining that gives back one coherent thing, an image, unless we are on the right side, which means in front of it. More precisely the Potëmkin city is the synthesis of its face and its back and in this duality it gives us the dimension of the absurd. 

Looking at the Calea Moşilor, one of the historic main streets linking the city with its territory, we see that its importance is underlined by the intervention of the densification of its fronts. Through the interruptions necessary to innervate some secondary roads, the change in scale between the two different urban density is highlighted. 

Expropriations, which were difficult even during the regime, were implemented with the only purpose to empty the soil for the construction of new buildings. The line between the new and the old is not therefore a straight one, but it is fragmented tracing the boundaries of the property behind. 

The consistency of the back of the Potëmkin city, here, is clear: in the contact surfaces there is no attempt of any mediation. 

The resulting spaces are sometimes immense, other times between the old and the new difference is more than a meter smaller, but what unites these spaces is their non definition. This was only a transitional phase, but today, when the idea of substitution does no longer make sense, the Potëmkin city has become a consolidated form: in its consolidation process it has not resolved its problems, and neither history could correct, or at least mitigate, its imbalance. 

For those who wish to delve into the phenomenon, there can be two cases: the first is the case in which it is evident that these spaces are pending soils now expropriated; the second is where the old buildings persist expropriated only of their ground, in this case the residual space is also reduced to a few centimeters.

The new buildings, arisen thinking that the city behind would one day be replaced, do not relate to what lies behind them. The city has, at the same time, always had a low-density, basing on neighboring cells without communication between each other, for this reason the access to individual units is set along the old streets, and on these spaces none of them will have an opening. 

In this area the ground floors are all dedicated to commercial activities and the buildings are fully inhabited, but these fragments of the Potëmkin city are unrelated  to urban experience, we must follow complex paths if we want to study them: a condition that foreshadows the need of those micro-operations that would improve the permeability by attributing to the basement level public functions, thus allowing and encouraging this permeability, in order to make urban experience as much continuous and integrated as possible. 

Difficulties involved in the Romanian process of democratization and the economic conditions of the country have made hard to find tools to regulate this phenomenon, and even individual private interventions cannot give concrete answers. However, you can find answers in some studies for these parts of the city, among them we might point out “Apartment bolcks and Their Rehabilitation” of the Zeppelin group (AA.VV., 2009): in this redevelopment of large apartment buildings built during the second half of the twentieth century, the construction of new apartments on the top level allows the rehabilitation of the ground floor, currently used as apartments, so as to introduce activities which are public and commercial and can reactivate these spaces between the buildings and  improve its permeability

This process, moreover, is also addressed from the point of view of an economic feasibility: through micro interventions the conversion of the housing complex is self-financing.

The importance of this research is to give an answer to a problem which difficult to be faced on the urban scale of the city. The small scale of the building offers a sustainable model that will continue to work within this particular aspect of densification.

Luigi Pintacuda is PhD in Architecture at the IUAV University of Venice. He lives in Palermo, where he works as architect and collaborates with the Faculty of Architecture of that city.

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