Arhipera Lectures 2012

A R H I P E R A
International Summer School

of Participatory Architecture
Dor MruntJuly 2012
the journalthe lectures
content
4
14
22
AN INTRODUCTION TO PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE | Lorin Niculae

THE EMERGENCE OF PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE. CONTEXT | Lorin
Niculae
THE METHODOLOGY OF COMMUNITY BUILDING | Lorin Niculae
46
TRANSCRIPTIONS | Klaske Havik
60
CRITICAL DETAIL | Sebastiaan Veldhuisen
66
LECTURES ON VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE | Alexandru Clin
76
A FEW THINGS ON ARCHITECTURE FOR THE POOR | Augustin Ioan
88
FOR A POST-APOCALYPTIC ARCHITECTURE | Augustin Ioan
106
THE NEW VERNACULAR | Vintil Mihilescu
Lorin Niculae is teacher at the Basics of Architectural

Design Department at the University of Architecture
and Urbanism Ion Mincu (U.A.U.I.M.) since 1998.
Architectural experience since 1994. He received
his Bachelor in Architecture at U.A.U.I.M. in 1998
and his Masters in Marketing at U.A.U.I.M. in 1999,
writing The Social Representation of Collective
Housing in Romania (dissertation). He graduated
the U.A.U.I.M. Doctoral School in SD-SITT (2011)
Arhipera_The Social participatory Architecture,
doctoral thesis. He began working in the area of
social architecture in 2007 and, starting from the
year 2010, he has ran the Housing Department in
Soros Foundation Romania (S.F.R) by introducing the
participatory design method for the beneficiaries
of housing projects. Currently, he is the Director of
Community Building Department, S.F.R.
In 2011, he founded the social participatory
architecture group Arhipera; the groups members
are voluntary architects and student architects who
work in the architecture programme for vulnerable
groups bearing the above mentioned name.
Founding member of
Ordinul Arhitecilor din
AN INTRODUCTION
TO PARTICIPATORY Romnia.
ARCHITECTURE Humanitas Library
founding shareholder.
AN INTRODUCTION TO PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE
Lorin Niculae
trans. Silvia Gigoi
What if you cant prove you had a house?

(Hernando de Soto)
One of the most pressing urban planning issues of the world, and
particularly of each country, is the urban housing for people in
poverty and especially for people in extreme poverty.
The global demographic growth happens mostly in disfavoured areas,
where resources are scarce or absent. Besides social exclusion
caused by poverty, disadvantaged groups cannot access basic
facilities and, as far as the study is concerned, they do not
have access to the architecture made by architects, with direct
impact on the quality of built environment and on the quality of
life. As early as 1995, Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper declared
that only 2% of the population who bought houses consulted an
architect (Bell, Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service Through
Architecture 2004, 13).
In 2012, an enormous global social pressure, which particularly
affected Romania was caused by the explosion of a precarious built
environment and the unprecedented expansion of ghettos, slums,
suburbs or extremely poor housing areas, which, however called
in one part of the world or another, cause local authorities
despair and urban and rural inhabitants as well, people who are
directly confronted with this issue. Current architecture practice
(if improvised shelters are considered to be part of) raises some
serious stability and health problems for its users. Last, but not
least, its volume and expansion are overwhelming.
Lorin Niculae
Given this situation, during the last decades there has been an
imperative need for architecture to redefine its field of action, to
become an architecture of change, not only aesthetically but also
socially and ethically relevant. An architecture which is good as
far as design quality and professional standards are concerned,
must satisfy as many users as possible, it must be permeable
and flexible. Rather than creating blueprints for buildings, this
architecture puts the emphasis on creating an economical, political
and social network, capable of changing built environment in areas
with extreme poverty and also changing the communities themselves
as far as their social and material poverty is concerned.
It is time for mainstream architecture to take into consideration
the unseen face of the profession and start looking for the
necessary resources and energy to take part with responsibility in
what is to become the prevalent built environment. It is high time
for it to provide real solutions to real problems. Maintaining the
architectural speech at a top notch or, in many cases, at a purely
conceptual level in Romania in 2012 is similar to bishops debate
on angels gender while Constantinople was being attacked by the
Ottoman cannons.
This paper is also a warning. In the absence of an active involvement
of architects in developing the built environment for people in
extreme poverty, other factors take over the problem. These are
the local authorities who, in search for a solution and lacking
the necessary know-how, go for authoritative solutions which, far
from feeding the need, amplify it.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 25 (1) says
that Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for
the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including
food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social
services, (...) (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights 2011)
including the access to housing in the system of factors that
influence the social performance of people and families.
As early as 2007, Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European
Union sanctions in article 34 (3) that: In order to combat social
exclusion and poverty, the Union recognises and respects the right
to social and housing assistance so as to ensure a decent existence
for all those who lack sufficient resources, in accordance with the
rules laid down by Community law and national laws and practices.
(Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union 2000).
These statements show that, from a political point of view, the
need of intervention in situations of extreme poverty is known and
assumed.
The commitment of the EU presidency generated the political line
at the European Parliament and of the European Committee level
for combating poverty by allocating financing lines. Starting with
2014, these will also include housing, under the ethical aspect,
as a premise for the improvement of social and economic aspects.
Vntori, Neam county, 2010
Given this political, social and economic environment, it becomes

crucial for Romania in 2012 to be capable of absorbing correctly the
structural funds on affordable housing for disfavoured categories,
whose access and administration will be part of the attributions
of local public authorities, in accordance with the principle
of subsidiarity. In order to have access to the European funds,
they will have to work out local housing politics, as regulators
(as they also did until now), and also as implementers. However,
without a methodology, a guide-book or an intervention model for
housing, the possibility of absorbing structural funds for housing
does not necessarily imply the local authorities capacity of
creating and drawing up eligible projects.
This certain deficiency makes public local authorities liable to
taking the wrong decisions, not out of bad intent, but because
of lack of information on efficient techniques, as there is not a
significant built environment in Romania, enough to give an adequate
answer to the problems. A few positive examples, insufficiently
publicised, are a drop in the ocean it is very unlikely that
local authorities in Constana had access to the practices in
Sruleti (Clrai county) for example. What is more, assuming
some successful examples from rural areas and adapting them to
an urban methodology can end up as an useless attempt with an
uncertain result.
Therefore, throughout this article, I am going to present the
antithesis
between
social
participatory
architecture
and
authoritative architecture for mass housing with its tendencies
in the context of radicalization of the political speech on
administrative resources and efficient possibilities of solving
the problem of living in extreme poverty.
Lorin Niculae
Bleti, Ursrie, Prahova county, 2007
A fundamental characteristic of the social housing is that it

does not involve individualities (like an architect traditionally
discusses with a client), but communities. One of the errors of
first years practice was negotiating the problem individually,
only with the direct beneficiaries of the social houses, without
involving the whole community in the process. As a result, the
community segregated in the haves and the have nots1. Another
consequence was the total lack of involvement of the beneficiaries
in the process of building, stimulating their passivity and making
the community an assisted one.
Social houses construction programs in areas of extreme poverty
must follow the principles of social participatory architecture.
The architect working in these conditions has to be a social
architect. It is about, neither more or less, a change of paradigm
of the architectural practice.
In the current paradigm, the development of a social housing
construction project for beneficiaries in extreme poverty starts
with the attempt of eradicating a settlement, a built environment
in extreme poverty, which represents an issue for local public
authority. Once the town hall makes this decision, it requests
a local urban planning to an urban design office, which will
take over the project from the local authority, using the area
placed at their disposal. Then follow the approval procedures,
the architectural details, the authorization for construction,
the technical project, the bid with the entrepreneurs and the
actual construction of the social houses, followed by the freewill
or authoritative resettlement of the poor from the slum to the
new neighborhood. In fact, local public authority is both the
beneficiary and the financier of the project, which develops only by
the rules it establishes. The level of authority and control during
the intervention is extremely high and the role of urbanists and
architects is secondary, given the extremely low budget for this
kind of actions. The typical hierarchical pyramidal model topdown is followed.
Normative
digm
para-
Intervention
Local
public authority
Architect
Entrepreneur
User
Normativity
Standardization
Prescription
Quality of execution
Centralized production
Lucrativeness
Consumption
Lack
of
possession
Concordance
Anonymity
Solves
problem
Profit
Funding
THEME
PROJECT
EXECUTION
HOUSE
Analysis
of
existing
and
projective
needs
Resource management
Adaptability
Flexibility
Indetermination
Diversity
Participation
Progressive
building
Decentralized
production
Development
Possession
Self-referentiality
Uniqueness
User+
Architect
User+
Architect
User+
Architect+
Entrepreneur
the
User
Participatory
paradigm
Table showing the stages of a project for social houses building in the two paradigms.
On the other hand, social participatory architecture suggests in

the first place starting bottom-up through the democratic process
of consulting the citizens who are to be involved in the project.
Even if the local public authority could be the initiator of the
project, the consultative process involves a decision network,
a consortium of people who make the decisions, where urbanists
and architects have a more important word to say. Besides, the
architects can start by themselves this kind of project, bringing
the idea of change to the community and working on the project
together with the people. Given these circumstances, they become
social architects.
Trying to improve the living in extreme poverty and always
confronting with low budgets3, I tried as a first stage to find minimal
living formulas for the families included in the program. Anyway,
this has been the architects pursuit ever since the activity of
building for disfavored categories started, it sedimented during
Lorin Niculae
Mayor Radu Mazres proposal for solving the lack of social houses in Constana city.
As a first stage, 1000 containers will be placed in Tomis Nord district in 2012. From
http://lideruldeopinie.ro/41525/modulul-social and http://www.stiri.com.ro/stire-4212/
case-sociale-de-8-milioane-euro.html Social housing becomes social mode.2
the C.I.A.M. II4 (Arnstein 1969), by the conceptualization of

existenzminimum, this term is translated nowadays in extreme
housing, formulated by the American architects Deborah Gans and
Matthew Jelacic, in their attempt of solving the issue of emergency
housing for the refugees in Bosnia.
But social hosing is not and it should not be an emergency housing.
Even if the budget does not allow the building of a new social house
for a family of 12 members, it is important to build the minimum
that can offer the necessary shelter, together with offering a
maximum potential for development, accessible for the users.
ARHIPERA concept for an evolutive social house in Sruleti (Clrai county)
The social house in extreme poverty is a living organism; its birth

means offering shelter; its growth means adapting to the familys
needs and to the way of living preferred by the users. The house
must be designed so as to contain in nuce the possibility of
growth. The social house in extreme poverty must be an evolutive
house.
The situation described in the present work opposes the practice of
inserting the social house into a barren environment, inducing the
development of social quarters. The social house that we propose
is inserted into an existing environment of extreme poverty, on an
existing allotment or on a newly delimited one, near a house that
is unfit for living, into an urban tissue that is in most cases
unstructured. I would like to add that, although inserting the
social house into an existing environment is the better solution,
in some cases it proves to be impossible, when a community has
occupied a land unfit for living (exposed to pollution or to the
risk of flood or of landslide, etc.), thus making it necessary to
relocate the families.
To be a social architect does not mean to give up practicing your
profession in order to design cages but, on the contrary, it means
practicing it so as to change the world you live in for the better.
It may seem naive if it werent true. In the context of the present
credit shortage, many architects had to close their offices for
lack of orders. If in the years to come social houses will mean
only very profitable contracts between the municipality and the
suppliers of containers or of prefabricated building parts, then
we shall witness the cutbacks of the highly important sector of
social housing from the body of Romanian architecture. More than
that, such radical solutions generate segregation and the only
long term effect is moving the poverty pockets from the centre
of the town to the outskirts, where the desired surveillance,
coercion and control can be implemented, claiming at the same time
the valuable real estate allotments in the town centre.
If, on the other hand, the architects will put on their rubber
boots for generating architecture where it does not exist, then
architecture will start to matter not only as a sector destined for
the elite (fewer and fewer this days), but also for the poor masses
(which become more and more numerous), and the architects work
and effort will contribute to diminishing poverty. This change is
necessary and possible to make.
At the same time, in defining the social architect within the
frame of his profession and at the level of power relation, he
is a mediator between often opposed vectors: on the one hand
the administration, who wants to solve the problem; on the other
hand the poor people, who they themselves are the problem. The
architects role is to understand the point of view and the system
of thought of both parties and to supply an architectural solution
capable of opening the limit, of making opposites meet. And this
11
Lorin Niculae
role is not impossible as long as the opposition of the parties

involved is given by the inaccessibility of the opposed systems
of thought. In other words, the architect is an intellectual,
part of the public sphere, who can induce social change, and good
architecture does good to many people.
This approach transfers the architect from the authority to the
agora, to the public sphere defined by the communitys needs and
aspirations. It is definitely not an easy decision to make. But the
reward of generating change where it seems impossible, of bringing
hope where there is none and of engaging all your creativity for
producing architecture out of extremely little, is well worth it.
NOTES
1
Using Saul Alinskys words.
The example provided by Mayor Mazre was taken over in 2012 by

the Group of counselors PNL of Bistria, who proposed the resettlement
in containers of the poor who couldnt pay their rent for the town halls
apartments. Mayor Andrei Rusu declared that Its an absolutely necessary
solution because we need to clear the city centre. We can find here a
traditional form of extra-muros exclusion of the poor.
3
note)
Budgets are always low relating to the issues scale. (authors
The critics of the congress can be found in Giancarlo De Carlos

Architectures Public, commented in this chapter.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arnstein, Sherry R. A Ladder of Citizen Participation. JAIP, 35. no.4,
1969: 216-224.
Bell, Bryan. Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service Through
Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.
Bell, Bryan and Katie Wakeford. Expanding Architecture. Design as
Activism. New York: Metropolil Books, 2008.
Blundell Jones, Peter, Doina Petrescu and Jeremy Till. Architecture and
Participation. London: Taylor&Francis, 2005.
Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. European
Parliament. 12 18, 2000. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/charter/
pdf/text_en.pdf (accessed November 22, 2012).
Dean, Andrea Oppenheimer and Timothy Hursley. Rural Studio: Samuel
Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency. New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2002.
Habraken, N. John. Supports: an Alternative to Mass Housing. London: Urban
International Press, 2011.
Hamdi, Nabeel. Educating for Real. London: Intermediate Technology
Publications, 1996.
. Housing Without Houses: Participation, Flexibility, Enablement. London:
Intermediate Technology Publications, 1995.
. Small Change: About the Art of Practice and the Limits of Planning in
Cities. London: Earthscan, 2011.
. The Placemakers Guide to Building Community. London: Earthscan, 2011.

. Urban Futures: Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction. Bourton Hall:
ITDG, 2005.
Hatch, Richard C. The Scope of Social Architecture. New York: Van
Nostrand, 1984.
Pearson, Jason. University/Community Design Partnerships. New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.
Porterfield, Gerald A, and Kenneth B Hall. A Concise Guide to Community
Planning. New York: McGraw-Hill Professional, 1995.
Sanoff, Henry. Community Participation Methods in Design and Planning. New
York: Wiley&Sons, 2000.
Sinclair, Cameron and Kate Stohr. Design Like You Give A Damn:
Architectural Responses To Humanitarian Crises. New York:
Metropolis Books, 2006.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. November 22, 2011. http://www.
un.org/en/documents/udhr/.
Turner, John F.C. Housing By People: Towards Autonomy in Building
Environments. London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1976/2009.
Voicu-Dorobantu, Roxana, Ana-Maria Marinoiu and Florin Botonogu. Social
Housing: an Economic Issue. Romanian Economic Journal, XI,
no.29, 2008: 171-183.
Ward, Colin. Cotters and Squatters, Housings Hidden History. Nottingham:
Five Leaves Publications, 2002/2009.
Whitehead, Christine, and Kathleen Scanlon. Social Housing in Europe.
London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2007.
. Social Housing in Europe II - A Review of Policies and Outcomes.
London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2008.
13
THE EMERGENCE OF
PARTICIPATORY
ARCHITECTURE. CONTEXT
THE EMERGENCE OF PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE.

CONTEXT
Lorin Niculae
trans. Silvia Gigoi
Since its appearance in 1960, starting with Habrakens manifesto

and continuing with Giancarlo De Carlo (1969), John Turner (1976),
Christopher Alexander (1982) and Nabeel Hamdi (1995), social
participatory architecture has been defined by the theoretical
and practical work of a myriad of great architects. In 1969, The
Skeffington Report (England) was the first governmental investigation
that raised the question of public participation in design. In
1976 participatory architecture was officially accepted in the
profession by creating a working group in the Royal Institute
of British Architects (RIBA), whose role was to examine the
relationship between profession and communities (Hamdi 1995, 20).
Social participatory architecture establishes the foundation of
its discourse precisely on the acknowledgement of the fact that
Modernism failed to fulfil the aspiration of democracy and rationality.
What Jrgen Habermas called the project of modernity must be
understood in the social and political context that generated it:
the armed conflicts and revolutions of 19th century, the decantation
of the ideals of Illuminism, the industrialization, the extension
of railroads and waterways involving mobility, the urbanization
(Habermas and Weber Nicholson 1989)1. The Industrial Imperative
was one of the main engines that startled the creativity of
modern architects, generating new ideals and ideologies. Modernism
15
Lorin Niculae
tried to obtain social equality by means of industrialization and

progress. Adopting Le Corbusiers phrase, J.J.P. Oud said that the
house would be relevant for the masses only when it has become
a machine, because production can provide social housing for the
entire society by creating series; manufacture production would
serve only a limited and wealthier public (Stamm 1978).
The doctrine of New Objectivity (Newe Sachlichkeit) brought about
the idea that a functional, comfortable and efficient object doesnt
necessarily have to be aesthetic, but it has to be accepted by the
society, just like industrial objects that are aesthetic because
of their simplicity and efficient use. New Objectivity also made
way for the idea of demolishing poor residential districts in city
centres in order to make room for the big metropolitan projects,
involving mass resettlement of the inhabitants to the outskirts.
(Frampton 1996, 289)
The ideal of Modernism brought order, rationality and accessibility
among the premises of obtaining individual freedom. Nevertheless,
since 1960, after cramming the districts with modernist blocks,
immune to the context, or infinite rugs of identical, standardized
social houses in city centres and in the outskirts, it was obvious
that these conclusive acts werent able to reconcile universal
truth with regional particularities, progress with tradition,
universal style with local cultural identities, social change
with capitalism. Under the leadership of Le Corbusier, Congrs
International dArchitecture Moderne (CIAM) advocated for utopias
in which the demiurge architect decided the fate of the masses by
means of his intuition of discipline and order. Article 22 of The
Athens Charter (1933) denounced that the suburbs are often mere
aggregations of shacks hardly worth the trouble of maintaining.
Flimsily constructed little houses, boarded hovels, sheds thrown
together out of the most incongruous materials, the domain of
poor creatures tossed about in an undisciplined way of life
that is the suburb! (CIAM 1933). One can notice Le Corbusiers
interest for unity and discipline, while diversity is seen as a
bad consequence of poverty and lack of perspective.
Fascinated by the technological progress, Le Corbusier was a
declared enemy of the streets. In an era when transport was prone
to become 100% airborne in a few years, Le Corbusier placed the
airport in the centre of the city, turning the street and the
sidewalk into an old, millenary and non-functional relic. For
instance, one of the articles of Athens Charter stipulated that
no block entry should be made directly from the street (art. 27).
Pedestrians would have had paths and promenades reserved for them.
Giancarlo de Carlo (1919-2005) is one of the leaders of social
participatory architecture, member of the famous Team 10, together
with Georges Candilis, Aldo van Eyck, Alison and Peter Smithson
and Jacob Bakema. Founded in 1953, during the 9th congress of
CIAM, Team X (or Team 10) provoked a schism at the heart of
THE EMERGENCE OF PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE. CONTEXT
Modernism. Disappointed by the functional segregation in Housing,

Work, Loisir and Transport proposed by the Athens Charter, the
young generation of architects searched for other principles of
structural development of the cities. The teams answer to the
report of the 8th CIAM in 1951 was a simple one, condensed into one
paragraph: Man may readily identify himself with his own heart,
but not easily with the town within which it is placed. Belonging
is a basic emotional need its associations are of the simplest
order. From belonging identity comes the enriching sense of
neighborliness. The short narrow street of the slum succeeds where
spacious redevelopment frequently fails (Frampton 1996, 271).
Modernism failed from a democratic point of view precisely by
enslaving its ideals to a power system (capitalist or communist,
individual or collective, it doesnt matter) which eliminated the
users individuality from the field of architecture (each system by
its own means) and caused mans alienation from their own house.
Habermas shows in his article republished in 1981, Modern and
Postmodern Architecture (Habermas and Weber Nicholson 1989), how
the system of mobilization of workforce, of organizing the sites,
of the general conditions of living in the city and last, but not
least, of locating the buildings led to the concentration of large
groups of people in the outskirts, since the project of modernity
failed to integrate social housing inside the city, as it failed to
integrate the factory as well. The construction of houses started
to subsume to economic and bureaucratic factors, detached from the
concept of family and tradition.
Therefore, Team X focuses on the feeling of allegiance and identity,
indissolubly related to mass housing. At the same time, the slum
and the poor outskirts are promoted as examples that satisfy a
set of basic needs, that nobody can live without. In The Doorn
Manifesto (Holland) in 1954, Team X formulates 8 principles; the
first one stipulates:it is useless to consider the house except
as part of a community owing to the inter-action of these on each
other (Smithson 1968).
The last congress, the CIAM X, held at Dubrovnik in 1956, gravitated
around the Smithson brothers diagrams of association and the
different levels of human association. The concepts discussed
were identity, cluster and mobility. In Dubrovnik as well, Van
Eyck presented the importance of human association. Thus, The
Functional City ends its programmatic existence. It is not by
accident that Le Corbusier, together with other founders of CIAM,
did not take part in the congress.
The congress of 1959, held at Otterlo makes the transition from
CIAM to Team X. Aldo van Eyck presents the diagram By us for
us which illustrates the principle Since man is both subject
and object of architecture, it follows that its primary job is to
provide the former for the sake of the latter (Van Eyck 1948, 89).
17
Lorin Niculae
The housing problem explicitly formulated by theorists of social

participatory architecture since 1960 resonates after 50 years, in
an unexpected proportion, considering the present times, in which
the explosion of slums, the rise in numbers of homeless people and
the governments incapacity to answer these issues in a democratic
way
requests an organized and aware architectural and urban
response. The architects riot against houses without identity in
1956 generated an architectural phenomenon which was insignificant
in size, an epiphenomenon that wasnt able to change the primary,
main-stream phenomenon of construction of mass housing. This
remained tributary to the economic criteria, the statistics, the
standardization and prefabrication. The users of the social houses
assumed their role of consumers granted by the developing agencies
and the social house became the product that the economic rise of
many countries was based on. The example of Pruitt-Igoe has been
forgotten and nowadays the only difference is in form: we dont
build blocks any more, but low-rise developments which repeat on
the horizontal the problems caused by modernist blocks lack of
identity and referentiality.
Starting with 2008, with the establishment of credit crisis,
followed by the sovereign debt crisis, people began to acknowledge
the fact that poverty exists and there is even extreme poverty,
not only in the third world countries, but also in the developed
countries and that there are no solutions for this problem yet.
Social mass houses cant be built in extreme poverty and this fact
was emphasized by the disaster of the unsuccessful interventions
starting from statistics and financial calculations. On the contrary,
practice proved that only small scale participatory interventions
can be successful.
Baia Mare, Horea street, social building mainly inhabited by Romanies. 2011
International interest for social housing appeared in the last years

as a result of continuous degradation of living conditions for the
segment of population living in poverty in the context of a more
and more acute social polarization, with the worst consequences:
social segregation, marginalization, social exclusion. The
emergence of homogeneous or discontinuous settlements in extreme

poverty must generate a proper social, urban and architectural
response as, for now, there is no National Operational Programme
for improving living conditions for disfavoured people confronting
this serious situation.
Baleti (Prahova), house built by Soros Foundation and Habitat for Humanity Romania,
for a Romani family. One can see users preoccupation to maintain the house clean by
placing a doormat at the entrance and leaving the shoes outside. Clean and airy interior.
Curtains were installed at the windows. Photography from august 2011. House inaugurated
on May 2010.
The response comes from central and local authorities who are
trying to solve the problem in the normative paradigm, starting
with the evaluation of the size and nature of the problem, deciding
the budget and eventually handling the architect a pre-established
project as far as the maximum admitted surfaces, the typology and,
sometimes, even the finishings are concerned. The most serious
issue that architects are confronted with is that their services
are requested only after the games have already been made and the
task has been received from the contracting authority. Contracting
authority is the client, when, in fact, the community occupying
the future designed social houses is as much a client as the
former. Practically, architects operate in a blind system, in
which the programme is defined by sociologists and economists and
the real beneficiary is inaccessible. The expression of architects
knowledge, experience, sensitivity and creativity resumes only to
a formal exercise, limited by a pre-established budget, designated
to a beneficiary defined by the average, without a real correspondent
(for example, families of 2,5 members).
The only way to escape this system of contingencies, detrimental
to the profession, is practicing a social participatory architecture
that starts with the community and overturns the paradigm, providing
the architect a central, creative role.
19
Lorin Niculae
NOTES
1
Jrgen Habermas, Modernity: An Incomplete Project, essay first

published as reading in 1980, when Habermas was awarded with Theodor
W. Adorno prize in Frankfurt. It was then read in 1981 in New York and
afterwards published as Modernism versus Postmodernism in the German
journal New German Critique, no. 22, 1981, consulted at http://sernt55.
essex.ac.uk/ar/ar936/f%20Week%206%20%20Habermas/Modernity%20%5BAn%20
Incomplete%20Project%5D.pdf
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CIAM. The Athens Charter, art.22. Modern Architecture - A

Database of Modernist Architectural Theory. 1933. http://
modernistarchitecture.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/ciam%E2%80%99s%E2%80%9Cthe-athens-charter%E2%80%9D-1933/ (accessed November
30, 2011).
Frampton, Kenneth. Modern Architecture: A Critical History. New York:
Thames&Hudson, 1996.
Habermas, Jurgen. Modernity: An Incomplete Project. University of Essex.
1980-1981. http://sernt55.essex.ac.uk/ar/ar936/f%20Week%206%20
%20Habermas/Modernity%20%5BAn%20Incomplete%20Project%5D.pdf
(accessed November 30, 2011).
Habermas, Jrgen and Shierry Weber Nicholson. The New Conservatism:
Cultural Criticism and the Historians Debate. Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 1989.
Hamdi, Nabeel. Housing Without Houses: Participation, Flexibility,
Enablement. London: Intermediate Technology Publications, 1995.
Smithson, Alison. Team 10 Primer. 1968. http://www.team10online.org/
(accessed December 18, 2011).
Stamm, Gunther. Architecture of J. J. P. Oud, 1906-1963: An Exhibition
of Drawings, Plans, and Photographs. Great Buildings. 1978.
http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Weissenhof_Row_Houses.
html (accessed November 30, 2011).
Van Eyck, Aldo. Projekten. Clean Design o5. 1948. http://www.
cleandesign05.co.uk/Architectural%20Solutions%20for%20Urban%20
Housing.htm (accessed December 15, 2011).
21
THE METHODOLOGY OF
COMMUNITY BUILDING
THE METHODOLOGY OF COMMUNITY BUILDING
Lorin Niculae
trans. Silvia Gigoi
Houses are expensive. However, it is

more expensive not to build them.
Bryan Bell (Bell and Wakeford 2008)
INTRODUCTION
Next I will analyse the ensemble of methods specific to social
participatory architecture applied in extreme poverty for the
construction of social houses, as redefined and conceptualized
through practice. In its form presented here, the methodology is
based on the structuring effort undertaken during the community
building program of Soros Foundation Romania between 2009 and
2012. Briefly and without going into details, the programme aimed
at the strengthening of rural communities in extreme poverty, the
construction of new houses, the rehabilitation of some of the
existing ones, the completion the settlements functional matrix
with the missing functions in the territory (usually services)
and the insurance the sustainability of the projects. In 2009 and
2012, the programme was unfolded by Soros Foundation Romania (SFR)
in partnership with Habitat for Humanity Romania, in Bleti
(Prahova) and in Vntori (Neam). In 2011 and 2012 the project
was completely undertaken by SFR and is carried on in Sruleti
and Dor Mrunt, both in Clrai county.
23
Lorin Niculae
For the presentation of the methodology I will appeal to examples

from the ongoing program, therefore the stated concepts will have
a correspondent in the real situation. Although the subject of the
study is social participatory architecture, we have to cope with a
program that includes several subjects, as we shall see next. For
this reason, I will also state very briefly the other components
of the program to allow the reader to envisage a complete image
for placing, while keeping it in the right proportions, the
participatory architecture.
photos during a participatory meeting in Sruleti, jud. Calrai, from 31 August 2011
The scheme of relation

system
within
the
framework of community
building
Community building represents a recent concept promoted in

participatory architecture by Nabeel Hamdi. It refers to building a
systemic frame of social and production relationships at community
level able to support the community, of which the relationship with
the built space occupies a central place (Hamdi London). In other
words, in order to replace the existing extreme poverty housing
with the desired housing corresponding to the stability, aesthetics
and comfort standards, it is necessary to place this objective
in a system of mutual supporting objectives which converge to
sustainability. Community building integrates housing, employment,

health, hygiene, education and culture fields. Employment supports
housing just as housing can credit with employment.
During this period, I have permanently up-dated the initial
methodology to the actual situation and I have integrated the
feedback of the three years practice. Definitely, this methodology
represents a stage, a partial conclusion, offering a flexible frame
for organising and structuring the intervention, a methodology
which is required to be adapted to every concrete situation on the
site and to be modified and be completed according to new data,
situations, groups of beneficiaries, legislative or any other kind
of changes.
The role of methodology seen, as I mentioned, as analysis of
program-specific methods ensemble, is to supply the necessary
minimum instruments and to structure the intervention issues of
all entities interested in the ongoing of such a programme, NGOs
or governmental agencies. This is necessary because the premises
for the development of a social houses construction programme,
most definitely, change in relation to the traditional structure of
such a programme.
Giancarlo De Carlo defined the development of most investment
projects thus (Hatch 1984, 3):
No.
Action
Responsible
Selection of the site
Owner
Establishing the function
Financing
2
4
Spacial organisation
Supervision of the construction
10
Form and structure
Architect
Use
Users
Construction management,repairs
Recycling
Owner
Elimination and replacing
In relation with this traditional structure, in the case of

social houses in extreme poverty construction programme, the
participatory process implies both the user and the architect
in establishing the function, selection of the site, actual
construction etc. Therefore, De Carlos table changes accordingly:
25
Lorin Niculae
No.
1
2
3
Action
Establishing the function

Selection of the site
Financing
Responsible
Owner + architect + user

Owner + architect + user
Owner +user
Spacial organisation
Architect + user
Supervision of the construction
Architect + user
7
8
9
10
Form and structure
Use
Architect + user
Users
Construction management,
repairs
Owner + user
Elimination and replacing
Owner + user
Recycling
Owner + user
We see therefore, that the architects role, far from being

diminished, becomes more important and covers more steps in the
construction life span than in the traditional system, yet this
depends a lot on the level of participation of the beneficiaries
that the architect (or the expert) would like to have and to
trigger. The best representation of the level of participation is
the Participation scale model stated for the first time by Sherry
Arnstein in 1969. (Arnstein 1969)
Participation scale, according to Sherry Arnstein
The scheme of participation scale, taken from the document

consulted, shows the different levels of participation. From the
bottom upwards, this can climb from non-participation to the
power delegated to the citizen, crossing through manipulation,
therapy, information, consulting, reconciliation, partnership,
delegate power, civic control.1 Along with the birth and the
theoretical outline of the participatory speech, starting with
1960s, this started to migrate from the public sphere of nongovernmental organisations to that of public authorities, their
official speech becoming present, sometimes grounded, other times
only to mask undemocratic decisions. For example, the recent case
of shifting the gypsies from Baia Mare was instrumented by the
local authority by appealing to a language in which the words
partnership, consulting, delegation had a central role,
while the actions behind these words were, in fact, pressure,
summons, threats and influence.
Real participation, in Dor Mrunt, Clrai County UAUIM students, members of Arhipera.
21.09.2011
The border between the participation steps is vague and its

achievement depends a lot on the intention and the skill of the
social architect who implements the community building project.
Sometimes, aiming at a certain result that he considers good for
the community, he can reduce the real level of participation to
tokenism. He consults the community, creates the appearance of
integrating the feedback, but, in reality, he materialises his own
predetermined ideas. This was what De Carlo was criticised for,
justified or not, in the case of the project in Terni. One of the
purposes of this methodology is to present the instruments through
which a real participation can be reached in the framework of a
participatory architecture project.
GENERATING A COMMUNITY BUILDING PROGRAMME.
A social programme is defined as a set of activities or projects
oriented towards an objective/group of objectives, in which the
human, material and financial resources are coherently organised
to produce goods/servicies or environmental changes, as answer to
certain needs. (Istrate 2004)
Any intervention on the dwelling, on this level, needs an
implementation programme, which we shall define next, through aim,
27
Lorin Niculae
objectives, principles and actions. This programme is both reactive

and proactive. It is reactive as it tries to respond to a clear,
identifiable and quantifiable need, namely the need to dwell. It is
proactive as it suggests an approach starting from the positive
characteristics identified in the community and from the abilities
of the groups of users, it dwells on consolidating all these traits
and, finally, it militates for an architecture of public interest
in Romania.
The project for increasing the quality of the built environment,
achieved by means of social participatory architecture, is a part
of the community building programme which reunites and integrates
many projects in synergy, according to the particularity of each
programme. A participatory architecture project can be developed
only in conjunction with a social economy project, which is capable
to support the community in both the construction and the house
maintenance effort; with a project of social assistance focused
on community development, that includes education for children
and adults, professional training, access to health support; with
a project of networks extension in the site; with a project of
clarifying the legal situation of the land and the houses.
images from the construction site at one of the houses in Dor Mrunt. Supervision of the
site by the members of Arhipera, who made a participatory design of the house. January
and May 2012.
PURPOSE
The purpose of the programme is to improve the living conditions
in the communities affected by extreme poverty and to create
a model of intervention nationally applicable, able to create
an architecture of public interest in Romania. The integrated
intervention on dwelling in the studied communities, namely that type
of intervention which refers to dwelling as an entity indissolubly
linked to both the urban space and the urban life, supported by
actions which refer to the increase of self-supporting potential
of social actors envolved (employment) and their access to basic
services (health, education, culture), can involve fundamental
changes at the level of the users way of life, on a long term. The
projective change of the relations of production in the area (the

users will self-support at the end of the strategy application)
generated by the application of the intervention programmes, will
allow the proper use of the material base created, namely of
the initial capital represented by a house. These changes are
necessary not only in view of the post-utilization of the house,
but mainly with a view to reaching the social aim desired: social
integration and elimination of segregation.
OBJECTIVES
Initially, the programmes objectives referred only to the changes
foreseen at the dwelling level, but, as we consider more thoroughly
the causes that generated the precariousness of the sheltering
(since we cannot define it as dwelling), I went the causative
way backwards, passing through extreme poverty, unemployment,
spatial and social segregation and arriving to social exclusion
as primordial factor that generates the existing situation in
the community. Thus, the programmes objectives were translated
in a way that architecture had to find the correspondent and the
equivalent in other fields of social life: access to a dwelling
according to norms and legislation can be achieved only if the
family has a proper level of employment and education; the correct
location of the house depends on the negotiation with the local
administration for good quality land within the built-up area;
the dwelling expression and its spatial-volumetric conformation
is generated by the dwelling tradition and the local cultural
identity of the community.
Built environment in Sruleti and
Dlga (Dor Mrunt), Clrai county, 2011
The programmes objectives became:

-social inclusion
-development of the communities capacity, autonomy
-spatial justice, eradication of ghettos from the communities
-creation of social infrastructure and of operational social
services
-creation of architecture of public interest in Romania
29
Lorin Niculae
THE PRINCIPLES OF COMMUNITY BUILDING

Since the beginning, but mainly during the programme, some essential
principles of intervention decanted themselves and influenced
the choice of the set of methods. These comprise the principles
magistrally stated by Ctlin Berescu and Mariana Celac in the
first far-reaching work dedicated to dwelling and extreme poverty in
Romania (Berescu and Celac 2006, 96-99), shifting the accent from
norm to practical method. It is about democracy and human rights
ruled principles, about social, economic and urbanistic principles,
applied on the spot, that proved useful in reaching the aim of
the programme. We will not present them in categories, since a
principle, although belonging to urbanism, has repercussions on
the social field, and a democratic principle guarantees the urban
action. We will focus next on listing them in a concise manner,
mentioning that this enumeration is not exhaustive, as it is
generated strictly by our theoretical experience and work on the
site. The subsequent or similar experiences developed by other
organisations cam complete this list. These principles integrate
the corollaries of social participatory architecture stated in the
chapter on the definition of paradigm, adapting them to the actual
situation on the site.
bottom-up intervention
Generally, in Romania, the interventions at the level of the urban
tissue are realised bottom-up. General Urbanistic Plans (GUP)
and Zonal Urbanistic Plans (ZUP) are drawn by urbanism offices,
at the General boards or local authority request. These are
not submitted to the inhabitants analysis. It would not even
be possible in the present form of drafting and codification of
the information. For this reason, the whole process lacks in
transparency at the level of the inhabitant, affected by the
decisions made at higher level. Some top-to-bottom interventions,
though animated by good intentions, ended up by becoming hateful
and failed to reach their aim. Decisions to move the inhabitants
in extreme poverty to collective houses, for example, made without
consulting them, faced the inhabitants resistance as they wanted
to continue living in old settlement, no matter how wretched or
how justified the decision of moving.
On the contrary, an action that starts from the bottom, from the
citizen, involving him in making the decision from the first steps
of urban and architectural design will be seen as a positive action
and its result will be appreciated by the beneficiaries, who will
recognise themselves in this result. Certainly, such approach
will consume more resources, requesting actions of community
consolidation, work with the community, yet this is far from being
a drawback; on the contrary, a consolidated community will have a
higher capacity to support the intervention and to continue its
results through its own forces.
Comparative scheme between the top-to-bottom model (left) and the bottom-up model
(right). One can see the higher contribution of architecture and its proximity to the
decisional level in the case of the bottom-up model.
social participatory architecture

The first consequence of the principle of the bottom-up intervention
is participatory design. The fundamental decisions referring to
dwelling must belong to the community who participate in the
programme on the highest step of the participation ladder, that
is civil control. There are many definitions for design that
operates with different decisions depending on the application
(interior design, clothes design, industrial design). It is
precisely because of this diversity that it is necessary to impose
a definition for the present paperwork, namely the one of Herbert
Simon design represents the change of an existing reality into
a desired reality. Thus conceptualised, the design starts from
revealing both the existing and the desired reality, and this is
not as handy as it seems at first sight. First of all, we have to
cope with a community, not with an individual. From the start,
the procedure for collecting data are more complex and operate
with other indicators. Then, as I stated in the introductory
chapter, both the variables of existing reality and the variable
of desired reality fluctuate in an ample manner in short intervals
of time, whereas such an intervention programme develops over a
medium or long term. To this respect, the permanent up-dating of
the programmes elements, by monitoring and integrating the feedback, is a sine qua non condition for adapting it to the reality.
Otherwise we shall face blocking out for failing to be adequate.
intervention for social inclusion and spatial justice
The concept of spacial justice, introduced in 1968 by Henri
Lefebvre (Lefebvre, Le Droit la Ville 1968), (Lefebvre, Espace
et politique 1972), refers to space as a fundamental factor of
social structure, in relation with social justice. Spatial justice
is a democratic instrument that regulates, when applied, tha fair
distribution of services, of production facilities, of utilities
in the territory, so that there are no disparities at the level of
31
Lorin Niculae
individuals and groups of individuals that populates the respective

territory. Generally, the settlements in extreme poverty are
situated at the outskirts of a city or of a village, or else occupy
determined enclaves situated inside the city or village. It will
be taken into consideration building the new houses in areas of
interference between the settlement and the city/village, in order
to favour social exchanges and inclusion. During the programme, I
have noticed that some representatives of the local authorities
tend to allot sites for building new houses outside the cities, or
in industrial or polluted areas, lacking infrastructure. Building
a house represents an investment that must represent an initial
capital for the beneficiary. Or, if the site does not have real
estate value, than the house, even if new and well built, will have
an adequate low real estate value, the house will be un-saleable
and the initial capital will be as inexistent, the only value of
the house being that of shelter.
Left,spatial injustice by location, at Fakulteta, Sofia. Right, spatial injustice by

limitating the fundamental right at free circulation. Milano, Italia.
A very difficult approach is questioning the current situation,

when a vulnerable community is deprived of spatial justice, and
the majority of people think that this is the right and necessary
way, without taking into account that it was precisely the spatial
injustice and social exclusion that led to community degradation.
Campo
nomado
Chiesa
Rosa,
Milano,
instalation for lighting as nocturne.
for
bosniac
Romanis.
metres
fence,
electric
more for many

The intervention is intended to involve as many members of the
community as possible, in different ways. An action focused only
on a few beneficiaries will not mobilize the community and will
arouse animosity. Thats why the selection of the families to
involve in the programme is very important, and this selection,
as well as the needs to be satisfied for each family, must be
done in a democratic manner by the entire community, through
efficient delegation of decision to the community2. Also, in order
to involve a larger segment of beneficiaries, it is desirable that
along building new houses, rehabilitation work on the existing
ones be done, too, rehabilitation requiring a lower budget than
building anew. The works of rehabilitation can refer to emergency
interventions on houses or constructive elements in danger of
collapse (consolidation of walls, replacing ceilings made of
earth), replacing covers or equipping the house with functions
adequated for disabled users (bathrooms, access platforms). In
this way, a significant part of the community will take part in the
change from the very beginning of the programme.
Arhipera members, working at the initial model of an evolutionary house.
The initial model of an evolutionary house, on the site. The budget of the programme
provided the building of 2 such houses, with 4 rooms, for each community in the programme.
33
Lorin Niculae
After the proposal of the communities to introduce 4 families into the programme, the
house was redesigned by reducing the building volume by means of a bay. Thus, 4 such
houses could be built in every community. To the right, a house where the transformations
done by the family during the site work can be seen.
the best balance between the necessary locative surface and the
level of finishing-equipping (cf. Turner)
This principle represent to a large extent a truism, as long as the
architecture manifests itself in the traditional area. In the
participatory area, the finishing and even the conformation of the
house is the result of negotiation with a family that takes into
account a possible enlargement of the family members number in the
near future, who needs certain things more that others. Generally,
we highlighted this optimum balance when the house is equipped
with additional protection for bad weather (including an extended
roof that can cope with an enlargement of the built area of the
house) and with a minimum interior finishing that can be purchased/
manufactured by the family itself.
continuity of dwelling and evolutive dwelling
We will try to ensure the
continuity of dwelling on
the site. In the case of
building new houses, the
beneficiary families prefer
to remain in the community,
where mutual help and social
extended
relationships
work.
Through
practice,
we reached at the same
conclusion stated by Turner
referring to the benefits of
a slum upgrade as opposed to
moving to a new location,
for example.

(Hamdi London, 121)
When consolidations are made, it is important that the family

stays in the house during the intervention. This thing favours the
implication of the family members in the building or rehabilitation
work. Each stage of the building process is visible. The family
is not exposed to the stress involved by moving, and this is a
very important factor to be taken into consideration, with both
psychological and economic repercussions on the family as long
as we are talking about a house in the rural environment that
represent the nucleus of the household. That is why moving the
people and the goods will be avoided as much as possible. At the
same time, the feedback received in real time from the families
is capitalized in the different evolution of every architectural
typology; each house becomes the expression of the transformations
during the experience, in the way stated by Habraken, totally
appropriating it to the use.
For rehabilitated houses, we found solutions for coating walls,
for thermo-isolating the facades, for replacing the exterior
carpentry, even for replacing the roof without the need for the
residents to leave the house.
In the case of newly designed houses, they were placed on the same
allotment (when there was already a house on the leased site) or
on allotments leased by the mayoralty. During the 4 years of the
programme, we encountered only one situation when the asigned
family wanted to leave the community area and this was due to the
fact that the mother wanted to raise her children in an environment
protected against the juvenile crime that characterizes a community
in extreme poverty.
Houses in Bleti (Prahova county) that had the roof replaced without
family. 2010
moving the
The buildings designed starting with 2011 in the framework of the

community building programme, whether houses or social centres,
were designed to adapt to growing familial or communitary needs as,
along with the modification of the family structure or the raise of
the communitary usage level, they would not be abandoned in favour
35
Lorin Niculae
of some bigger ones. The houses were provided with an extension

of the roof surface with one bay in respect to the compartmented
space. The enlargement of the built area of the house can be made
by the family itself starting from the existing structure that
supports the roof. The effort as materials and labor is minimum
and affordable for the family.
On the left, evolutive house in

Design Arhipera 2011.
Sruleti. On the right, evolutive house in
Dor Mrunt.
The social centres are built as pavilions, therefore new pavilions

can be added in the growing matrix provided by the project. In this
manner, both the investment and the building effort of the family/
community decrease, and the investment becomes sustainable.
On the left, social evolutive centre Sruleti. On the right, social evolutive centre
Dor Mrunt. Design Arhipera 2011.
the principle of sustainability

The sustainability of the intervention can be reached through:

-usage of local and recycled materials. Thus, the repairs will not
require investment.
Generally, in the communities affected by extreme poverty, the buildings widely use
reused materials. In Podenii Noi (Prahova), we discovered a local craft in using this
materiales, though. The two buildings above prove a well controlled craft and even an
aesthetic value of the facades.
-usage of local workforce and technologies. In some communities,

though there is valuable raw material, it is neglected by the
locals, and skill of processing it was lost. In this situation,
the qualification of the locals is necessary so that they can have
access to the resource, both for dwelling needs and for supporting
activities of social economy able to provide a constant income to
the community.
-the minimum investment that ensures the maximum effect will be
made. For this reason, every case will be considered separately.
the principle of the visibility of the intervention and the
immediate result
The programmes debut in the community is one of the most difficult
stages of implementation because of the peoples and the local
authoritys inertia, of their tendency to indulge themselves in
a bad situation(extreme poverty), a situation they know and for
whom the necessary adjustments(the subsistence economy) developed
in time. The greatest challenge, though it may seem bombastic, is
creating hope. That is, according to the definition of Paulo Fiere,
a more and more critical perception of the concrete conditions
of the reality. Society reveals itself as something unfinished,
rather than something inexorable; in becomes challenge, instead of
resignation (Fiere 2005). Often, the hope is muffled by informal
leaders, usurers, pimps and sometimes, even mayors, who try by
all means to maintain the status-quo, knowing that a change for
the better, a community consolidation, can generate the change
of the existing balance of power, in which a few people gain
from the more emphasized poverty of the many. That is why the
visibility of the intervention is one of the strongest engines of
community consolidation. The delay of a programme usually implies
its abandon by the community.
the principle of involving the locals into the production and
post-production processes
37
Lorin Niculae
This principle is extremely important both in terms of the direct

result of reducing the cost of the investment by using local
workforce, and in terms of the long-term effect that it ensures
taht: not only the utilities able to serve the dwelling, but also
the qualified staff able to use them remain on the site.
This desideratum can be reached only through a coherent investment
policy that must follow some necessary steps, as:
-
hiring the adult and unemployed locals as unqualified, for
starters, workforce;
-
bringing to the site the engineers, the foremen, the
technicians and the workers able to instruct and to qualify
unqualified workers;
-
organizing training courses for qualifying the locals;
-
creating some structures of social economy for production
of construction materials (quarry, gravel, sand, clay), brick
kilns, carpentry workshops etc. whose staff will be ensured by the
locals involved in the programme, under qualification;
-
as the programme develops, qualification level of the staff
increases. Consequently, the remuneration and the capacity to
support the newly built houses increases;
-
at the end of the programme, those productive functions
will remain in the site, will serve the whole settlement and will
facilitate changes between gypsies and the majority of the people
of the settlement;
-
besides those functions, at the end of the programme, the
area will be inhabited by a productive segment of population, able
to provide qualified work both inside the settlement and in the
adjacent areas and thus the premises of the users capacity to
support their houses are created.
the principle of self-financing
During the development of the programme in Bleti, we noticed
that along with the appearance of the new houses, the members of
the community who hadnt been involved in the project started to
save money and consolidate/ arrange their houses, using qualified
workforce and the know-how of the constructors brought for
building. A similar phenomenon took place in Sruleti and Dor
Mrunt, where, even if the projects budget stipulated that the
concrete floor of the first level would be used only for 2 bays,
all the beneficiaries managed to supplement, on their own, the
concrete floor for 3 bays, according to the designed area of the
roof, increasing considerably their chances to partition and use
the third bay as the third room of the house.
Even if the contract with the entrepreneur provided pouring of only

concrete floor, the beneficiaries of the houses counterbalanced the
with labor for digging in limited areas for the foundations and for
the pouring of the concrete. Photos from Sruleti and Dor Mrunt,
approx. 40sqm of the

supplement of 20sqm
the preparation and
April and May 2012.
the principle of complementarity

We will propose, after the analysis, to fill in the functional
matrix of the settlement with functions placed in the studied area
according to the following basic principles:
1.
the principle of differentiation: the new functions will
differ from the ones existing in the administrative territory of
the settlement, capable of serving the area of intervention. The
functions will complement the existing functions in the territory
only when, after the analysis, the existing ones prove to be
insufficient or poorly reported to the area;
2.
the principle of relationship: the new functions must be
necessary not only to the community, but to the whole settlement,
so that they create the premises for productive trade between
community and settlement. New functions should be attractive and
competitive for the whole community.
New functions that are going to be brought will be adopted exclusively
by members of the community, also involving a continuous process of
formation and qualification (which will start with the development
of the investment programmes) and a process of self-financing.
In the images below one can see the proposal for the completion
of the existing functional matrix in Bleti at the beginning
of the programme. Thus, new functions appear in the area of
intervention, such as Ursria, a social centre (represented by an
orange ellipse), service areas (yellow rectangles), and also an
area for worship, given the great distance from the rural church
and the vicars strong disinterest in the fate of the Romani
community.
39
Lorin Niculae
ACTIONS.
The methodology of the intervention will focus on two axis starting
from the objectives.
The first axis contains the five stages of constitution of economic
capital: research, analysis, design, implementation, scaling the
model. The second axis ( the order of enunciation does not reflect
the hierarchy for the two axis, these are of equivalent value and
inseparable, it is only an effort of taxonomy) contains the five
stages of constitution of social capital, of community development
through the project: preparating the community, community
consolidation, implementation of the Community Action Plan (CAP),
sustaining and development of the project, its extension in the
territory.
There is a horizontal sinergy and synchronisation between the five
stages of the first axis and the second axis respectively. That is
why we shall structure them according to the table on the right.
Structuring the methodology horizontally, by applying the criteria
of differentiation of the objectives of the intervention (capital
vs. social) and vertically (enumerating the compulsory steps
for reaching the goals) gives the advantage of coordinating the
actions.
The complexity of the integrated intervention model needs performance
management programme, as well as organizing the internal processes
in order to be able to correlate the activities on all the axis
in the scheduled intervals. For this purpose, the department for
Community building was created in the Soros Foundation Romania in
2012, and its role is to develop an integrated programme which
runs according to the structure described above. This department
coordinates the activities of social participatory architecture
programme Arhipera, social economy programme Rures, education and
culture programme A.C.T., as well as social assistance programme.
The model of community building department can be exported to
possible County Offices of community building, as these structures
could be created by means of European funds under The Prefecture
of every county.
THE METHODOLOGY FOR COMMUNITY BUILDING INTERVENTION

AXIS 1
AXIS 2
CONSTITUTION OF ECONOMIC CAPITAL
CONSTITUTION
OF SOCIAL
CAPITAL (HUMAN)
Research
Collecting data
Preparing the
community
Analysis
Analysis
Solving the ID and property related issues
Allotment
Infrastructure
Consolidating
the community
Forming the
Local Initiative Group
(LIG)
ACTIONS
Design
Participatory arhitecture
Financing
Participatory design
Education
Implementation
Scaling
Open system
construction
Social
economy
Forming
Founding
social
industrial
units
Evaluation
of results+feedback
Production and
sale
Scaling the model
Implementation of the
Community
Action Plan
Transforming
the LIG into
an association
Decisions of
action of the
association
in order to
reach social
and economic
goals
Sustaining
the development
Expansion in
the territory
41
Lorin Niculae
EDUCATION.
In this paperwork I have referred to the activity of participatory
architecture group Arhipera, mainly consisting of students of UAUIM
and architects that graduated this institute. The groups activity
is based on volunteering, and theres a great and diversified
demand for design. The group activates in the homonymous programme
of Soros Foundation Romania, coordinated by the author of this
paperwork.
I have founded this group in Soros Foundation Romania in 2011,
trying to answer the following question: What if community
building programme really turns into public politics, then who will
practice participatory architecture in communities? Will there be
architects aware of the enormous social value of architecture,
capable of working pro-bono in communities? And if there are, will
they know what methods to apply so that the result be positive and
sustainable?
On March 2011 I invited four of my best students of UAUIM to found
this group. Thats how Arhipera_architecture on edge_ was born, a
group of architecture for vulnerable groups. Nowadays, the group
consists of 17 members, is developing 8 big projects, at home
and abroad (Uganda) and takes part in national and international
conferences and symposiums.
Arhipera members during a class of housing design using only recycled/reused materials.
April 5th 2012.
The adopted educational model aims at sustaining the transformations

of mainstream architecture (I named so the current architectural
practice starting from the demand of a client or local authority)
in order to be able to cover participatory architectures purpose,
shown in the following scheme.
It may seem at first sight that mainstream architecture loses a

part of its means of expression gained especially by means of
technological progress and investment budgets, but in fact it
earns in extent, in practicability, in experiencing with reduced
means and in direct dialogue with community members.
A similar educational model has been applied by the Faculty of
Architecture of Auburn University in partnership with Rural Studio
group, since 1992. Students make participatory design and then
build houses, social centres, churches and sport facilities for
vulnerable groups in the area. At the end of the activity, the
construction is donated to the family or the community, by case,
and the students gain practical experience, which is extremely
important for their future profession.
ADVOCACY
Community building Department of Soros Foundation Romania fights
for an architecture of public interest in Romania, many directions
being involved:
1.
introducing social architect qualifications in COR system
and creating operational standards for the profession;
2.
equalization of volunteer practice of newly graduate social
architects with internship, involving the modification of HCN nt.
746/ 2009 of Order of Architects of Romania;
43
Lorin Niculae
3.
introducing social architecture projects in the university
syllabus for universities of architecture and urbanism;
4.
founding county offices for Community building to take
over the model of project management and internal organization
developed in Soros Foundation Romania. Results of applying the
model are verified in practice.
5.
leading public politics in housing domain for vulnerable
groups in the direction of participation and preventing the risk
of actions that cause social exclusion, solving quantitatively the
housing problem.
NOTES
1
Tokenism is referring to mimicry the participation, to

maintaining it at a simply formal and committed level. (n.a.)
2
In 2009-2010, the community building programme of Soros

Foundation Romania developed in partnership with Habitat for Humanity
Romania (HfH). In the communities in Bleti (Prahova) and Vntori
(Neam), the selection of the families to benefit of dwelling was done by
HfH according to the internal methodology. The selection decision is still
disputed inside the communities because of the lack of transparency of the
decisional process.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arnstein, Sherry R. A Ladder of Citizen Participation. JAIP, 35, no.4,
1969: 216-224.
Bell, Bryan and Katie Wakeford. Expanding Architecture. Design as
Activism. New York: Metropolil Books, 2008.
Berescu, Ctlin and Mariana Celac. Housing and the Extreme Poverty. The
Case of Roma Communities. Bucharest: Ion Mincu University Press,
2006.
Fiere, Paulo. Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Continuum
International Publishing Group, 2005.
Hamdi, Nabeel. The Placemakers Guide to Building Community. 2011:
Earthscan, London.
Hatch, Richard C. The Scope of Social Architecture. New York: Van
Nostrand, 1984.
Istrate, Ion. Comuniti n Micare: Programe i intervenii sociale.
Fondul Naional pentru Dezvoltare Comunitar. 14 January 2004.
http://www.fndc.ro/comunitate/evaluarea_programelor_sociale.
html.
Lefebvre, Henri. Espace et Politique. Paris: Anthropos, 1972.
. Le Droit la Ville. Paris: Anthropos, 1968.
45
Klaske Maria Havik (The

Netherlands,
1975)
is assistant professor TRANSCRIPTIONS
at Delft University of
Technology. She studied
architecture in Delft and Helsinki, and literary writing
in Amsterdam.As an architect and critic, she has been
involved in a number of harbour redevelopment
projects in Amsterdam, The Hague, Helsinki and
Tallinn.Havik writes regularly for various magazines
in the Netherlands and Nordic countries and is editor
of the Dutch-Belgian peer reviewed architecture
journal OASE. Her architectural and written work
combines an experiential reading of the city with
an academic and theoretical approach. At Delft
University of Technology, she teaches the master
diplomas studio Public Realm and Border Conditions
alongside courses in architectural theory and
literature. She co-edited the anthologyArchitectural
Positions: Architecture, Modernity and the Public
Sphere, SUN Publishers 2009. Her PhD researchUrban
Literacy. A Scriptive Approach to the Experience,
Use and Imagination of Place (TU Delft, 2012)
developed a literary approach to architecture and
urban regeneration, proposing the three notions
description, transcription and prescription.
TRANSCRIPTIONS
Klaske Havik
This lecture addresses the social dimension of architecture and

stresses the gap between the design of urban spaces and their
use. It argues that the interactivity between writer and reader
in literature, in the sense that the reader co-produces the
text, also counts for the designer and the user (or perceiver)
of architectural space. I propose the notion Transcription as an
approach connecting this interactivity to the role of activities,
movements and events in the experience and the making of urban
space.
TRANSCRIPTION: THE SOCIAL

ARCHITECTURAL SPACES1
AND
EXPERIMENTAL
IN
LITERARY
AND
I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving,

intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deeprooted; places that might be points of reference of departure, of
origin [...] Such places dont exist, and its because they dont
exist that space becomes a question, ceases to be self-evident...
Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it.
Its never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it. (Perec
2008, 91)
As the French-Polish writer Georges Perec suggests, the relationship

between architecture and the activities of the people who use and
inhabit it is not neutral. This paper departs from the observation
47
Klaske Havik
that architecture is influenced by social practices and that even

so, architecture, by giving shape to peoples environment, has its
influence on social behaviour. The dynamic relationship between
people and places is the key focus of this text, and I introduce
transcription as a conceptual tool to address this interactivity.
The word Transcription implies a directional way of writing: trans
is the Latin preposition across or through. The etymological
dictionary notes: to write across, i.e. to transfer in writing.
(Partridge 1983)2 The directional and experimental character that
the word transcription implies, is crucial in that transcription
can be understood as a dynamic notion.
First, aspects of movement and activity in literary writings are
closely connected to the spaces in which they take place, and often
point at social practices; offering information about the way
people move through, use and appropriate space. In literary works,
spatial metaphors often have to do with direction and movement.
Indeed, in writing about spaces, the aspect of action implied by
the space: a passage, a pathway, a threshold, a door, an opening
to another space, can play a part in the narrative. Space can
encourage characters to move, pass through, undertake action. In
literary reflections about changes in society, architectural and
urban scenes not only serve as the decor against which narratives
of activity can unfold, these scenes also play an important part in
depicting social practices. As Marilyn Chandler argues, our built
environment and the way we live in it has a good deal to do with
the way we tell our stories[...] both architecture and literature
are simultaneously reflective and formative social forces. In both,
implicit issues of gender and class lie behind the politics of
style (Chandler 1991, 6). Indeed, literature both reflects the
social codes and the use of the city, while it may also take part
in its process of change. Literary texts on how people behave in
the city shine a light on power relations in society, showing
how the social codes of different user groups relate to specific
urban places. In their own ways, both architecture and literature
represent, reflect on and produce societal behaviour. Therefore,
literary urban portraits are of interest for sociologists,
cultural philosophers and others concerned with social and spatial
practices. A second aspect of transcription has to do with its
potential as an experimental practice: it searches the boundaries
of the discipline by writing through. Literary examples are the
experimental practices of the literary movement Oulipo, or the
spatial literature of James Joyce. These authors experiment
within the use of language, or within the production of text,
but also experiment regarding the structure of the novel, and
its content. They explore the possibility for confrontations and
conflicts, openings to include the unexpected. In these writings
space, even the space of the novel itself, is constantly questioned,
designated, marked or conquered. Here, issues of transgression and
violation within the space of literature are at stake. Third, the
TRANSCRIPTIONS
commonly used meaning of transcription is to write a version of

something, or to write in a different medium; transliterate.3
When looking for direct transcriptions into other media, the
transcriptions of literary scenes in film or theatre are probably
most common. Writing another version of a text, however, can also
happen within literature itself, namely through the reader, who can
take on the role of an active participant. Indeed, one can speak
of the interactivity between writer and reader as producers of the
text. If transcribing indeed implies an active role of the reader
as a producer, a maker of the text, architectural transcription
might direct us to a similar role for the user of space.
NARRATIVES AND SOCIAL PRACTICE.
Thus, in literature, space is never neutral: it is the stage
for social activities. Therefore, literature has the capacity
to offer precise accounts of social processes, not only as vivid
portraits of urban life, but also as symptomatology of social
illness, to speak with Deleuze4. Literature can provide a cure
in the sense that it can offer alternatives, new directions for
society. The field of tension between the reader and writer (or
the designer and user) of a work come to the fore as important
issue: the reader, by his very act of reading, has a role in
the production of the text. Likewise, the role of the user of
architecture can be brought into play when addressing the social
dimensions of architecture. In the continuation of this text, I
will bring to the fore how these aspects of transcription can
be transcribed to architecture. One of the key arguments that
Henri Lefebvre made in his conceptualization of lived space was
indeed that such space is by definition socially produced. Like
the reader, who has a role in producing the (experience of) the
text, it is the user, the inhabitant, the passer-by, who has a
role in producing the lived experience of space. In other words,
lived space exists precisely through the actions of its users,
inhabitants and passers-by, it is dynamic and subject to change.
It has ability to speak, as it were, to address the visitor, user
or inhabitant: Representational space [lived space] is alive: it
speaks. (Lefebvre, The Production of Space 1991, 42)
For Lefebvre, society produces its own space, through its own
means of production. Social practices and structures of power thus
play a role in this production of social space, and become visible
in the streets and public spaces of everyday life. By analysing the
behaviour of people in public urban spaces, social patterns can
be found. In this way, Lefebvre argues, [...] social space works
as a tool for the analysis of society (Lefebvre, The Production
of Space 1991, 33-34), or even, space is social morphology
(Lefebvre, The Production of Space 1991, 94). In his earlier
book The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre focuses specifically on urban
society, claiming that the city is inextricably linked with social
49
Klaske Havik
practices of everyday life (Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution 2003).

His hypothesis is that society will become completely urbanized.
He believes that the transformations he perceives in the society
of Western Europe in the late 1960s will lead to an ultimately
urban society: a dominance of the city over the country. This urban
society will lead to a new practice: the urban practice (Lefebvre,
The Urban Revolution 2003, 5). By this, he hints at a new mode
of production: the citizen participating in the production of
space. This production can also entail transgression of spatial
and legal borders, as well as spatial violation, by means of which
new rules, new spaces and new forms of social life are initiated.
Here, Lefebvre foresees a change in power structures: it is not
the institutions, the formal bodies of power, that write the laws
and rules of society; rather, urban society is produced by people,
in the streets. The street is seen by Lefebvre as the place where
changes in society become apparent, society becomes produced and
inscribed in the streets, and this has to do with the function
of the street as a space for social interaction:
Revolutionary events generally take place in the street[...] .
The urban space of the street is a space for talk, given over as
much to the exchange of words and signs as it is for the exchange
of things. A place where speech becomes writing. A place where
speech becomes savage, and, by escaping rules and institutions,
inscribes itself on the walls. (Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution
2003, 19)
Clearly, this interest in the streets as the place where societal
changes are enforced by citizens, derived from the momentum in
which Lefebvres argument should be placed: The Urban Revolution
was published in France two years after the social events in Paris
of 1968, when indeed the streets were the locus for social and
political change. The Right to the City that Lefebvre advocates
(Lefebvre, Right to the City 2006) may be read as the right to
the participant to transcribe and thereby to produce new urban
practices.
Similarly, Jane Jacobs referred to the power of the citizens in her
critical comments on urban planning and economy in the 1960s and
1970s.5 She pointed out the importance of diversity in city life
and stated that planners and politicians should pay more attention
to everyday practices that give shape to public life in the city,
because: The bureaucratized, simplified cities so dear to our
present-day city planners and urban designers[...] run counter to
the processes of city growth and economic development. (Jacobs,
The Economy of Cities 1972, 97)
Even though their contributions to the urban debate date from a
specific period, their insights are far from outdated. Referring
to both Henri Lefebvre and Jane Jacobs, the contemporary urban
TRANSCRIPTIONS
theorist Edward Soja argues that they were right: the twenty-first
century has indeed become the era of urban society, and therefore
it is necessary to acknowledge and study the productive capacity
of users. (Soja 1999)
In this respect, a reflection on the work of Michel de Certeau
is appropriate. This French theorist in social sciences and
literature has proposed a shift in thinking about everydayness:
seeing everyday practices as valuable aspects of culture. Like
Lefebvre, De Certeau is interested in the role of users, or
consumers, the word De Certeau employs for the dominated groups
(Certeau 1988, xi), in the production of culture. First, he makes
a distinction between the strategies that those in power develop
in order to organize and dominate society, and tactics, the
ways of operating of the dominated groups. Such tactics can use,
manipulate, and divert (Certeau 1988, 30) the spaces that are
produced and imposed by means of strategies. Everyday practices
such as talking, reading, cooking and walking are, in his view,
tactical. De Certeau argues that such practices have a much larger
role in the production of society than is generally accounted for.
It is through walking in the city, through the repetition of routes
and rituals, through daily meetings, chats with neighbours or shop
owners, that inhabitants live and produce the urban life:
The ordinary practitioners of the city[...] walk an elementary
form of this experience of the city; they are walkers[...] whose
bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban text they write
without being able to read it[...] . The networks of these moving,
intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither
author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and
alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains
daily and indefinitely other [...] a migrational or metaphorical
city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable
city. (Certeau 1988, 93)
De Certeau sets this urban life, generated by the patterns of
its praxis, against the conceptual city as seen from above. As
a model for the rational Concept-City, imposed by the ones in
power, visible from above, De Certeau uses the view of Manhattan
seen from the top of the former towers of the World Trade Centre.
In contrast to that birds-eye view, De Certeau points at the
city as experienced from below: a complex and barely visible
conglomeration of the patterns of its users, full of turns, rituals
and narratives. He recognizes in this city a different kind of
spatiality, which is not a geometrical, but an anthropological
space in which poetic experience plays a part. Similar to the
productive role of the reader in appropriating and inhabiting
a text, De Certeau argues that the consumer actually produces
through his everyday practices: Spatial practices[...] secure the
determining conditions of social life. (Certeau 1988, 96)
51
Klaske Havik
In order to analyse this neglected aspect of urban practices, De

Certeau suggests we turn to stories. He argues that literature
provides an extensive source for research, and states that the novel
has become the zoo of everyday practices since the establishment
of modern science (Certeau 1988 , 78).
Of course, Michel de Certeau is not the first to enter the field of
social spatial practices, though for my argument he is the most
relevant, because he investigates this field through literary means,
as I will soon discuss in more detail. Indeed, De Certeau suggests
that narrative can be of great scientific value for research on
social spatial practices:
Shouldnt we recognize [the narratives] scientific legitimacy by
assuming that[...] it cannot be, or has not been, eliminated from
discourse, narrativity has a necessary function in it, and that a
theory of narration is indissociable from a theory of practices,
as its condition as well as its production? To do that would be
to recognize the theoretical value of the novel[...] (Certeau
1988, 78)6
The concept of narrative could be of great value if we are to
see how a form of architectural transcription could come about.
This is not only because literary narratives frequently describe
spatial practices, but also because of the role that stories play
in the delimitation of space, in defining its boundaries. A story
makes people identify with a place, just as the absence of stories
leaves a space to neutrality.7
De Certeau distinguishes two roles for the story. First, it founds:
it sets a field, it creates a stage on which actions can unfold.
This field is by no means fixed and neutral. On the contrary,
it can be fragmented, allowing different social groups to act
upon it; miniaturized, offering not only an account of a large
community but also individual stories or stories related to only
small groups; and polyvalent, with many different voices and
allowing multiple stories to coexist (Certeau 1988, 123-125).
Second, a story functions as a bridge and a frontier: it defines
borders, delineates the field. By articulating the frontier, it
can also be appropriated, connections are made between one side
and the other. In this way it functions as a bridge, or again, as
a passage (Certeau 1988, 126). A story establishes an itinerary
(it guides) and it passes through (it transgresses) (Certeau
1988, 129). It can thus be seen as a journey, a transport from one
place to the other, transgressing borders. De Certeau refers to the
ancient Greek metaphorai, means of transportation. Indeed, if we
look at the etymological origin of the word metaphor, we find that
the first meaning is to bring across, indeed, a transportation,
be it physically, in space, or figuratively, in speech. The current
TRANSCRIPTIONS
meaning of metaphor, a figure of speech in which a certain concept

or idea is explained by its analogy with another, is thus also
a form of transportation. Stories, says De Certeau, whether
everyday or literary, serve us as a means of mass transportation,
as metaphorai (Certeau 1988, 155). Space is thus part of a
narration, but if indeed a story makes the reader transport from
one place to another, movement is also part of a narration.
This aspect of movement is of crucial importance if we want to
connect the notion of narrative to architecture, because it means
that narrative is spatial, but also temporal. The events in a story
unfold in space and time. In architectural practice, the temporal
aspect is often forgotten. Strangely enough, the architects
involvement in a project does not reach much further than the day
of the opening, while the life of the building or urban site starts
after that: it changes in time, through use, activities, events.
Spatial practices imply activity and movement, and thus time;
lived experience is experience in time. According to Lefebvre,
the contemporary focus on image has shifted the attention of
architects and planners away from temporal experience, as the image
detaches the pure forms from its impure content from lived time,
everyday time[...] (Lefebvre, The Production of Space 1991, 95).
As Lefebvre has explained, lived space embraces loci of passion,
of action and of lived situations, and thus immediately implies
time. Consequently, it may be qualified in various ways: it may be
directional, situational or relational, because it is essentially
qualitative, fluid and dynamic (Lefebvre, The Production of Space
1991, 42). Indeed, space changes, it is used, appropriated and
transformed by everyday life. Space is thus not a thing but rather
a set of relations between things (Lefebvre, The Production of
Space 1991, 83). This relational aspect is important for our
account of spaces and the role of the architect-writer. If space
is indeed relational, we cannot define the task of architecture as
to design a fixed space, in which all actions are pre-programmed.
Rather, the task could be, as in a story, to found a field upon
which actions and transformations can take place in time.
If we follow De Certeaus ideas on the role of the story, we
can transcribe some characteristics of these literary concepts
to the field of architecture. If we indeed see architecture as
dynamic, rather than static, as social, rather than formal, and
as participatory, rather than imposing, a narrative approach
to architecture can offer a passage to explore its relation to
human action and temporality. If the role of the story, according
to De Certeau, is to set a field for human action and to function
as a bridge and frontier, we might state that the task of a
narrative architecture would be to offer a spatial field that
invites human actions to take place, and that through this field,
borders can be defined as well as transgressed. Can architecture,
like narrative, bring together past, future and presence in a
53
Klaske Havik
moment of architectural experience? Can architecture be designed

to give space to different temporal experiences, and simultaneously
generate memories and evoke imaginations? Also, the architectural
project mediates between the parts and the whole, between its
details and the totality of its appearance. Like the narrative,
it mediates between a large number of heterogeneous factors, such
as its programmatic and functional demands, structure, climate,
materiality, aesthetics and so forth. And, it mediates between
writer and reader. Likewise, in architecture, the participation
of the user, inhabitant or perceiver is at stake. Architectural
design, then, does not offer one single narrative, but allows for
different stories to happen, it allows for confrontations between
spaces, users and events. Transcribing in architecture, then,
could be a socially engaged form of experimentation, ultimately
aimed at provoking new or other uses of space, at challenging the
unexpected, at transgressing boundaries of the commonly accepted.
In this view, transcription provokes, rather than offering comfort,
it searches the sublime, rather than the beautiful, and it points
at difference, asking for an active participation of its reader
or user.
TRANSCRIPTION: ARCHITECTURAL PERSPECTIVES.
How, then, can architects take into account these aspects of
transcription? How can they provide a spatial setting for multiple
events and narratives to unfold? How can architecture, which
generally speaking puts physical material in place, thus solidifying
rather than generating movement, play a part in the dynamics of
city life? How can an architect define space and simultaneously
provide possibilities for the users to co-produce? And how can
transcription as an experimental practice help to explore the
potentiality of architectural design? If transcription is an
essentially dynamic notion, a dynamic definition of architecture
should address aspects of use and activity. Such concerns have
indeed been important for a number of architects, especially since
the late 1960s. Around 1960, an international group of young
architects known as Team 10, including Alison and Peter Smithson,
Aldo van Eyck and Georges Candilis, reclaimed attention for the
social practices of everyday life (Avermaete, Havik and Teerds
2009, 38-39).8 Their designs made use of studies of behavioural
patterns of everyday life. Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger and
Danish architect and planner Jan Gehl were among those arguing for
more attention to be paid to the behavioural aspects in design,
bringing knowledge from the fields of cognitive and behavioural
psychology into the architectural debate. Likewise, Christopher
Alexander considered the relation between architectural spaces
and practices of everyday life in his architectural theory of
behavioural patterns (Alexander 1977)9. In the Netherlands,
architects and urban planners searched for new models in which the
social aspect of the urban environment was emphasized, in reaction
TRANSCRIPTIONS
to rationalized modern planning. Dutch architects such as Herman

Hertzberger, Piet Blom and Aldo van Eyck strived for a more social
approach to housing and urban space. New housing areas with a
strong focus on collective, pedestrian space and neighbourhood
structures were for example the Cul-de-Sac housing estates in
the Netherlands10. John Habraken provided a theoretical framework
with his differentiation between support and infill (Habraken
1962). In his view, architects and planners were first and foremost
responsible for providing a supportive built structure, flexible
enough to allow different infills by inhabitants. His was a bottomup approach in which inhabitants would have a say in the design of
their living environment. Professor of architecture Lars Lerup was
also interested in the influence of users practices on the built
environment. He has studied the interactions between the social
and the physical world, stating that people are active individuals
who in their approach to things produce meaning (Lerup 1977, 19).
The interactive relationship between writer and reader, or:
between architect and user/perceiver has also been investigated
by a number of architects such as Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman
and Daniel Libeskind, who were interested in an experimental
approach to architecture, in which the process itself plays an
important role. Their work relates to the experimental aspect of
transcription I have discussed earlier in this text. They criticize
mainstream architecture for its formality and its affirmative
attitude concerning functional and aesthetic demands. Instead of
comfort, stability and stylistic clarity, these architects set
out to search for the dynamic in architecture, looking for spaces
that can take up various, even contradicting programmes. They
search for the dynamic in architecture and aim for spaces that
can take up various programmes. They search for an architecture
that provokes social interactions, events, intense experiences.
They are interested in time, change and instability, and consider
architecture as a process rather than as a fixed object. Their work
is trans-disciplinary, in that they employ literary references, but
also explore other fields such as philosophy, the social sciences
and cinema. Indeed, the transcriptive approach, as I call it,
is without exception trans-disciplinary. This seems self-evident,
considering the context of this research, but I wish to stress this
point here, because precisely the concept of transcription offers
the possibility to link up with other disciplines and use their
instruments to involved lived practices in architecture. Architects
explicitly search for connections with other fields, and not only
the literary. Both Bernard Tschumi and Raoul Bunschoten turn, for
example, to cinema to find techniques of framing and sequences for
their design works. Dutch architect Raoul Bunschoten, with his
London-based practice CHORA, defines scenarios as narratives of
urban possibilities, alternative realities, alternative practices
(Binet, Bunschoten and Hoshino 2001). In the view of Bunschoten,
scenarios can be generated by the use of literary elements such
55
Klaske Havik
as authors, actors, agents and angels. It is through interaction

and conflict that such elements can evoke new uses of space.
Peter Eisenman has drawn close connections with philosophers to
find new ways in architecture, while illustrating his ideas about
dislocation through examples from cinema.11 Indeed, in the work of
these architects, the borders between disciplines seem to merge.
In this text, I have highlighted how architecture is connected
to social practices, stressing the role of the user of space in
its production and experience. Then I have given an, admittedly,
very short overview, of how different architects have used
transcriptive experiments as a means to address social issues
in architecture.
Some architects, like John Habraken and the
architects of Team 10 have searched for ways to give space for
inhabitants to appropriate and change their living environment.
Others, such as Daniel Libeskind and Bernard Tschumi, have taken on
an experimental attitude to provoke confrontations between spaces,
people and activities. Indeed, it is by a consciousness of the
social dimension of architecture, and finding new (transcriptive)
tools to address such issues, that architecture can offer a passage
to new ways of living.
NOTES
1
This text is an excerpt from the chapter Transcription of my

dissertation, Klaske Havik, Urban Literacy, a Scriptive Approach to the
Experience, Use and Imagination of Place, 94-149 (Delft: TU Delft Library,
2012)
2
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces (London: Penguin Classics,

2008), 598
3
The Penguin Pocket English Dictionary (London: Penguin Group,

1990), s.v. transcribe
Ronald Bogue has in detail discussed Deleuzes use of literature

throughout his philosophical works. Borgue frequently refers to Deleuzes
metaphor of health: literary writers as symptomatologists of sickness
in society, and as the ones capable offering new possibilities. See for
symptomatology especially chapter one, Ronald Bogue, Sickness, Signs, and
Sense, Deleuze on Literature, 9-20 (New York/London: Routledge, 2003)
5
The most influential of her books is: Jane Jacobs, The Death and
Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). Original
work published in New York: Random House, 1961.
6
Original italics
TRANSCRIPTIONS
I need to stress here, that I use another definition of space

and place than De Certeau. De Certeau regards place (lieu) as something
stable, which can be geometrically defined, and space (espace) as a
practiced place... composed of intersections of elements, thus, made
by practices, activity of users (Certeau 1988, 117). I would argues
precisely otherwise. Space, to me, is rather neutral and can be described
by its spatial properties, whereas place is connected to identity: place
consists not only of spatial properties, but also of social practices,
stories, memories, etc. In that sense, I follow Edward S. Caseys account
of place in The Fate of Place, as discussed in this work, and Marc
Augs antropological account of place as defined by history, identity
and relations. Marc Aug, Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of
Supermodernity (London/New York: Verso, 1995). Original work Non-lieux,
introduction une anthropologie de la surmodernit (Paris: Seuil, 1992)
8
For a closer discussion of this paradigm shift in architectural

thinking, see also Max Risselada and Dirk van den Heuvel, Team10, 19531981. In Search of a Utopia of the Present (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers,
2005).
9
See also: Tom Avermaete, Klaske Havik and Hans Teerds,

Architectural Positions. Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere
(Amsterdam: SUN Publishers, 2009)
10
For a Dutch perspective on social urban planning concepts, see

Martien Vletter, The Critical Seventies, Architecture and Urban Planning
in the Netherlands in 1968-1982 (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2004). The
publication coincided with the exhibition Cul-de-Sacs and conservation
Pits. The Critical Seventies, in the Netherlands Architecture Institute in
Rotterdam in 2004.
11
For example, Eisenman speaks of the different time-frames

which are superimposed in David Lynch film Blue Velvet. Peter Eisenman,
Architecture as a second language: the texts of between, Peter Eisenman,
INSIDE OUT. Selected Writings 1963-1988 (New Haven/London: Yale University
Press, 2004), 229
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, Christopher. A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1977.
Aug, Marc. Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity.
London/New York: Verso, 1995. Original work Non-lieux,
Introduction une Anthropologie de la Surmodernit. Paris:
Seuil, 1992).
Avermaete, Tom, Klaske Havik and Hans Teerds. Architectural Positions.
Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere. Amsterdam: SUN
Publishers, 2009.
Binet, Hlne, Raoul Bunschoten and Takuro Hoshino. Urban Flotsam:
Stirring the City: Chora. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2001.
Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Literature. New York/London: Routledge, 2003.
Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988. Original work published in 1984.
Chandler, Marilyn R. Dwelling in the Text. Houses in American fiction,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
57
Klaske Havik
Eisenman, Peter. INSIDE OUT. Selected Writings 1963-1988. New Haven/

London: Yale University Press, 2004.
Habraken, John. De Dragers en de Mensen, Het Einde van de Massawoningbouw.
Amsterdam: Scheltema en Holkema, 1962.
Havik, Klaske. Urban Literacy, a Scriptive Approach to the Experience, Use
and Imagination of Place. Delft: TU Delft Library , 2012.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York:
Vintage Books, 1992. Original work published in New York: Random
House, 1961.
. The Economy of Cities. London: Penguin edition, 1972. Original work
published in 1969.
Lefebvre, Henri. Right to the City. In Writings on Cities, by Henri
Lefebvre, Eleonore (ed.) Kofman and Elizabeth (ed.) Lebas, 63184. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
. The Production of Space. London: Blackwell Publishing, 1991. Original
work La Production dEspace (Paris: Editions Antropos, 1974).
. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003. Original work La Rvolution urbaine (Paris:
Editions Gallimard, 1970).
Lerup, Lars. Building the Unfinished. Architecture and Human Actions.
Beverly Hills/London: Sage Publications, 1977.
Partridge, Eric. Origins. A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern
English. New York: Greenwich House, 1983. Original work
published in London: Routledge&Kegan Paul Ltd, 1958.
Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces. London: Penguin Classics, 2008.
Original work Espces d Espace (Paris: Editions Galile, 1974)
Risselada, Max and Dirk van den Heuvel. Team10, 1953-1981. In Search of a
Utopia of the Present. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005.
Soja, Edward. Thirdspace, Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Original work
published in Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996.
The Penguin Pocket English Dictionary. London: Penguin Group, 1990.
Original work published in London: Penguin Group, 1985.
Vletter, Martien. The Critical Seventies, Architecture and Urban Planning
in the Netherlands in 1968-1982. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers,
2004.
TRANSCRIPTIONS
59
Sebastiaan Veldhuisen MScA (The Netherlands,

1971) is a Dutch architect/urbanist, specialized
in sustainable design. He is educated at
the University of Technology Delft, Faculty
of Architecture (1991-1998) and the
Arkitektenskolen Aarhus, Denmark (1996-1997).
With his design office <terristories>, Sebastiaan
is involved in projects on a wide range of scales:
from product and interior design to building
renovation and urban projects. He was guest
lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft,
Hogeschool Rotterdam and the Academy for
Architecture and Urbanism Tilburg. He currently
works as senior consultant sustainability at the
Energy Design Centre, Rockwool International.
Sebas searches for connections between the
different scales in spatial design. He is both
experienced in the skills of the making and the
theoretical approach
of an integrated design CRITICAL DETAIL
process that is rooted in
place and time.
CRITICAL DETAIL
Sebastiaan Veldhuisen
Many of the current planning officials and architects are raised

during the oil crisis in the early seventies. The notion of
depleting resources made them accustomed to a feeling of guilt for
consuming excessively. By living a life of less, the planet would
still be able to produce energy, water and food to serve future
human need. But the feared future of dried up oil wells and rising
sea levels came sooner than we expected. But all saving attempts
with suspended ceilings, high efficiency boilers and water saving
taps have not brought salvation.
Also architects and engineers have contributed to make ever more
efficient buildings.
But a design attitude of limitation upon limitation has proved to
be contra-productive to innovation. What alternatives are there for
the architect if the solutions for more efficiency are insufficient?
What is needed to achieve a design attitude that challenges
inventiveness to create innovative future proof buildings?
61
Spatial development plans, urban strategies and building briefs

are larded with ambitions to reduce carbon emissions, using a
rich vocabulary of green goals. Beside all good intentions, these
ambitions do not guarantee good design.
Methods to assess the sustainability of buildings like BREEAM
or LEED have become popular amongst both public and private
developers and investors. Their incentive is to make the property
more valuable to cover the extra investments. Lower energy bills
and a green image justify a higher rent or price for the property.
Building parts can be measured on their footprint and the energy
concept on its expected performance. But every architect should
know that a building is not just the sum of the different parts
and a house not just a machine with improved efficiency. And most
importantly, it is a misconception that these schemes can be
used as the sustainable design tool for architects. Moreover, the
schemes are made to assess current building tradition, meaning
that design innovations can often not be assessed on their real
impact. Therefore the architect is hardly challenged to innovate.
Which position fits the contemporary architect best, now his role to
play in the design process is reduced in favor of process managers,
developers and consultants? It becomes increasingly difficult for
the architect to be inventive in a process where value is given
to measurable performance only. And how can sustainability lead
to groundbreaking ideas if the design process is reduced to a
checklist with boxes to be ticked?
Successful future proof buildings are often praised for their
inventiveness. Design challenges are solved in an integrated way.
One new idea may be so effective that it serves multiple aspects
in the use of the building, the structure as well as the climate
design. If daylight, acoustics, indoor air quality and energy
efficiency are looked at separately, opportunities are missed. To
achieve an integrated design, the architect needs to start each
project with an open scope and to collect as much information as
possible about the site and all parameters that are of influence
to the design. The architect is the generalist who specializes in
relevant content for each different design. Assisted by experts
and by self education he becomes a multi-specialist over and
over again. Subsequently it is just a matter of common sense and
good design skills to make buildings that matter and that are
appreciated for their quality. This sounds evidently simple, but
in practice it takes a lot of effort to find all the perspectives.
What are the relevant interactions between the building and its
surroundings here and now? What impact will the building have
on the larger territory and the future? How can the architect
effectively make better plans in which he sometimes needs to
propose not to build at all?
CRITICAL DETAIL
First and foremost the architect needs to broaden his scope to find
local and regional points of departure. In the end it depends fully
on the architect if innovative and effective ideas are proposed
for the most sustainable use of resources. Whether it is called
adaptive design, biomimicry or cradle to cradle, the designers
need to find the synergy and optimize systems. The investor/
developer only needs to facilitate a longer term investment. Not
only with the incentive of future financial profit, but also with
future use and social valuation and benefit in mind. The architect
designs for people, he works on cities with future significance,
cities that sustain, with buildings that enrich the natural and
social surroundings instead of depleting it. This does not only
imply spacious green suburbs. High dense urban structures can be
sustainable, as long as they offer safety and a rich diversity in
space, use and ecosystems.
The Faculty of Architecture in Delft has a long and admirable
tradition in sustainable research and methodology, starting with
the SAR (foundation architects research), in the late eighties
and nineties, the Integrated Sustainable Design methods (Prof.
J. Kristinsson) and the DCBA method (Prof. C. Duijvestein), and
on urban level the Synergy in Stream Management (S. Tjallingii).
Even in recent years research has been done on Climate Design and
Adaptation (Prof. A van den Dobbelsteen). These methods proved to
be very relevant and useful. Nevertheless they have not yet managed
to establish the needed revolution in design methodology amongst
contemporary architects. Even after 30 years, sustainability is
considered to be a mere choice in the design process, while it
should have been as essential to the design as gravity is to a built
structure. Just like nobody needs to explain gravity to understand
the firmness of a structural design, it should be evident not to
design buildings that consume excessive energy, destroy ecosystems
and that use polluting materials.
A good example of future oriented and smart design without using
the usual green vocabulary, is the Masters Studio MADD at the
architecture school in Delft. In this studio students work on a
design for a large urban building. Simultaneously the students
start to design the facade in detail and make the urban plan
in a way that the two scales will intensively interact. The
building detail gets an urban significance and the urban plan is
well connected to the use of the building. By challenging both
extreme ends early in the design, it is more likely to arrive at
surprisingly innovative solutions, for example in how the daylight
penetrates the building. The building seems to have a natural
obviousness in every aspect. It is well anchored and it attempts
to use every possible opportunity the surroundings have to offer.
63
This way of designing will most likely offer a different knowledge

of the situation in which the building is created, thus giving the
architect the necessary impulse to become more eager, to learn and
to improve. Such a process demands more time and more research
as well as intensive cooperation with everybody involved. Future
architects will have to reinvent themselves continuously and never
lean back in assumptions coming from past designs. Yes, experience
is a necessary driver, but not if used in a repetitive sense.
It is clear now that a handbook for good design can never exist,
nor can rating schemes replace the creative design process.
Nevertheless innovative design is the key to future proof cities.
We need to make buildings way more intelligent. That does not
necessarily imply high tech solutions. It does however ask for
inventive solutions and a more thorough and critical design process.
The MADD studio is a good start to offer students such a different
approach. The success of future cities is mainly in the hands of
open minded designers eagerly searching for new perspectives.
CRITICAL DETAIL
65
Alexandru Clin is lecturer in the Basics

of Architectural Design Department
at the University of Architecture and
Urbanism Ion Mincu (U.A.U.I.M.)
where he has been a member since
2006. He is founding member of Zebra
3 Architecture Studio and where has
been designing since 2004. Alexandru
Clin is a Ph.D candidate at U.A.U.I.M.
He completed his postgraduate studies
in Sacred Space and Vernacular
Architecture at U.A.U.I.M. in 2006 after
receiving his Bachelor in Architecture
from U.A.U.I.M. in 2004. His research
interests lie in the area of architectural
theory,
more
LECTURES ON VERNACULAR precisely, focussed
ARCHITECTURE
on
vernacular
architecture.
LECTURES ON VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE
Alexandru Clin
TO LEARN FROM THE VERNACULAR

During 2004 2006 I attended a Master program at the Ion Mincu
University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest regarding
Sacred Space and Vernacular Architecture. My two lectures are
based on the studies and the research from that period and the
years that came after on the field of vernacular studies and the way
that contemporary architecture relates to vernacular experience.
What I propose is a path that starts with the lessons that one
can get from understanding the vernacular experience and goes
further with a few case studies that show the way one can deal with
vernacular as starting point for todays architecture.
Vernacular architecture as a concept is a nineteenth century
invention. At that time it was a subject of exploration from a
number of disciplines, wether it was seen as an important issue in
the search of the national architectural language, an object of
curiosity as the Europeans narrated stories about the places they
have visited or as a subject on the colonial agenda proving the
inferiority of the indigenous native buildings. (Arboleda 2012)
67
Alexandru Clin
The study of vernacular architecture as we know it today begun in

the second half of the XXth century with the works of Paul Oliver,
Amos Rapoport or Bernard Rudofsky1. What the XXth century defines as
vernacular architecture is a certain type of architecture based on
local needs and local materials, reflecting local traditions. It now
tends to evolve reflecting the cultural, historical, technological
and environmental context in which it exists.
Ronald Brunskill has defined the fundamental in vernacular
architecture as:
...a building designed by an amateur without any training in design;
the individual will have been guided by a series of conventions built
up in his locality, paying little attention to what may be fashionable.
The function of the building would be the dominant factor, aesthetic
considerations, though present to some small degree, being quite minimal.
Local materials would be used as a matter of course, other materials
being chosen and imported quite exceptionally. (Brunskill 2000, 28)
The simplest way to understand vernacular architecture is to

look at it as architecture without architect, a pure and simple
response to a particular persons basic building needs. One of the
most important characteristics of this type of architecture is the
simple, low-tech method of which a building is created and adapted
to local context and the buildings users.
What is to learn from that experience is to prevent something
that we, the architects, are often tempted to do: sacrificing the
comfort, function or environmental friendly approach searching for
some aesthetical qualities or egotistical approaches.
Gourna Village. arch. Hassan Fathy

Source: http://www.hassanfathy.webs.com/gourna-e.html, www.hassanfathy.webs.com
A possible approach in terms of architectural theory and practice

is given by the collection of studies edited by Linsday Asquith
and Marcel Velinga, Vernacular Architecture in the Twenty-First
Century. Theory, Education and Practice (Asquith and Velinga
2006). It is a reading that I highly recommend to those who are
interested in the subject of vernacular architecture and the way
it responds to the needs of modern society. The second part, with
contributions from Suha zkan, Roderick Lawrence, Linsday Asquith,
Ian Davis and Geoffrey Payne provides us with interesting points
of view regarding the lessons one might take from the vernacular
heritage.
Suha zkan2 provides a concise history of the discourse on the
inclusion of vernacular traditions in contemporary architectural
practice, calling it the traditionalist approach to architectural
study. He focuses on the various reactions that came as a response to
the domination of Modernism and notes that one of the most influential
reactions is the traditionalist response. Traditionalism seeks
to integrate the traditional knowledge and skills in contemporary
building. Discussing how this movement relates to the other
Modernism responses zkan proposes the study of the works of
Hassan Fathy, Paul Oliver, The Development Workshop and CRATerre.
Their work show how vernacular technologies and materials may be
applied in contemporary design. In a world that deals with fast
ecological degradation, globalisation and the destruction of the
vernacular architectural heritage, the concern for local cultural
identities and
the awareness of sustainable built environment
raise the interest in the local vernacular traditions. One of the
most important principles in the new environmental ethics of the
XX and XXI century is the principle of sustainability.
This is now a major criterion in the judgement of any planning
practice. Vernacular architecture is, perhaps, the highest form of
sustainable building as it uses the most accessible materials and
employs the widest available technologies.
Roderick Lawrence3 proposes a discussion on the way in which
principles deduced from the vernacular could provide lessons to
those involved in the contemporary planning of sustainable human
settlements. The vernacular is a result of the active and dialectic
interrelation between cultural and ecological factors. Lawrences
approach acknowledges that sustaining human settlement involves
human practices and processes that ought to adapt to the dynamics
of the world in both local and global levels. His contribution
presents basic principles for the architects and urban planners in
order to improve living conditions and sustain human settlements.
He uses for that the case study of the villages in the Alpine region
of Switzerland that had to adapt to living with the constraints
provided by their habitat.
69
Alexandru Clin
Lawrence proposes a set of basic principles for the professional

practice:

Compact human settlements

Building adaptability for reuse
Patterns and principles from history
Interrelated scales from a web
Ecological and cultural diversity
Participatory approaches
Communication, information and public awareness
An ecological approach applied to the study of vernacular

architecture reminds that construction and use of human habitats
stem from the interaction between different factors. The impact
on the layout and construction of the built environment, the
consumption of materials and energy increased as the local cultural
knowledge of traditional construction methods declined. Today,
one has to choose between traditional materials and methods, and
new technologies and synthetic materials. The first choice allows
the reuse of renewable resources while the other requires energy
consumption, specialized expertise and produces an important
amount of non-recyclable waste products.
Linsday Asquith4 brings together the fields of vernacular architecture
and housing. Her text notes how the vernacular approach, based on
intimate relationships between buildings and the inhabitants may
contribute to the design of the future homes that will be needed
to house the growing world population. She argues that the use of
vernacular knowledge combined with tools from various disciplines
such as anthropology, sociology or behavioural sciences should
be an important topic of new housing development discussion.
She proposes a unique and innovative combination of qualitative
and quantitative research methods, integrating interviews, time
diaries, spatial mapping and spatial configuration diagrams,
showing how gender, age and time influence the use of space and how
interesting and unexpected conclusions may be drawn from regarding
the way in which modern families claim and use space in their homes.
These conclusions can and should be incorporated into contemporary
housing design in a manner that newly built homes will be more
acceptable and appropriate to their inhabitants, avoiding the
problems associated with mass housing during the XX century.
Ian Davis5 provides another example of how vernacular architectural
principles may be successfully applied in provision of postdisaster housing practices. Presenting some examples of postdisaster shelters he argues that those have more to do with the
needs of those who generate the concepts and little with the needs
of the survivors of disasters. Davis shows how housing, anywhere
in the world, has a variety of functions, including physical
protection, the storage of belongings and property, the provision
of emotional security and privacy, a starting point for future

action or an address for the receipt of services. He suggested
an approach who would let survivors participate in the process
of decision-making and reconstruction, allowing them to use their
skills and knowledge, while at the same time providing them with
training to create safer buildings. Davis stresses the needs for a
process rather than a product approach to post-disaster housing,
in which participants take the leading role in the efforts to
reconstruct a built environment that will remain meaningful through
being rooted in tradition and place.
Geoffrey Payne6 gives a number of examples of how vernacular
conceptions of space or systems of governance and land management
can be successfully integrated in the planning or upgrading of
human settlements. He shows that in cases where local requirements
and needs have been taken into account, the results have been
successful. Payne speaks of the fact that, by studying vernacular
traditions, it is important to focus on the way in which the
settlements as a whole are organized and conceptualized, rather
than on individual buildings. The main challenge for everybody
that is involved in the planning and building of low-income housing
in the XXI century is to find ways to integrate the vernacular
spatial language and forms into the new development. He calls
for a multi-disciplinary approach to housing that is aware of
the perspectives and approaches from different disciplines like
planning, architecture, anthropology and economics, and emphasizes
the importance of local participation. He identifies an important
role in education which, in contrast to current practices, should
seek to loosen academic and professional boundaries rather than
reinforce them. Finding ways in which vernacular architecture may
be integrated into contemporary planning and practice is one of the
main challenges for those involved in the research of vernacular
architecture studies.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, then, faced with
unprecedented cultural and environmental challenges, it is only by
adopting a processual, integrative and critical approach that it will
be possible to rid the vernacular of its thatched cottage and mud
hut image. It is also only by taking such a perspective that it
may be possible to provide the vernacular with the more prominent
position in architectural research, education and practice that it
obviously deserves, and to answer the question is there still a place
for vernacular architecture in the twenty-first century? with a confident
yes. (Asquith and Velinga 2006, 20)
71
Alexandru Clin
TO WORK WITH THE VERNACULAR

The first lecture was meant to understand the paths one can follow
by learning the lessons of vernacular architecture. The second
part will be focusing on a few case studies showing possible
manners of working and developing housing programs starting from
the lessons of vernacular architecture.
During the Master program of Sacred Space and Vernacular
Architecture I was involved in a research team along with people
working in the fields of architecture, fine arts, sociology and
theology. The program produced a number of studies regarding
housing programs, post-disaster and emergency housing or sacred
and memorial architecture.
CASE STUDY NO. 1 refers to youth housing programs and involves
participatory architecture. The program studied the possibility
of affordable, short and middle term living, low-resource housing
for small groups of young college graduates. The team members were
two architects, Alexandru Clin and Mihai Duescu and a young Fine
Arts graduate, Andreea Doroftei. The scheme proposed both private
and common spaces, based on ones needs and way of living based on
local, low-tech materials and technologies. The method consisted
of time diaries, spatial mapping, researches on gender, age and
time that are thought of influencing the use of space. The path was
a multi-criterial analysis and a research on local materials. The
result consisted of three independent units joined together by a
common living space.
House for Ourselves. arch. Alexandru Clin, Mihai Duescu, artist Andreea Doroftei
Alexandru Clin, Mihai Duescu
CASE STUDY NO.2 refers to emergency housing in the Dobrogea county

as a result of flood. The design team consisted of architects
Alexandru Clin, Mihai Duescu, Irina Tulbure and theologist
George Apostol. The scheme is based on the study of vernacular
houses of old Turkish population living in the area. The aim was
to create a simple, easy to work with, modular structure with the
possibility to evolve in time according to users needs, using
local techniques and materials.
Emergency houses in Dobrogea. arch. Alexandru Clin, Mihai Duescu, Irina Tulbure
and theologist George Apostol
Alexandru Clin, Mihai Duescu
CASE STUDY NO.3 refers to housing for elderly population in

suburban area near Bucharest. The design team consisted of
architects Alexandru Clin and Cosmin Caciuc. The aim was to create
participatory architecture for people who want to retire and get
out of the city to a more calm and green area. The proposal consists
of modular structures with the possibility to grow according to
users needs, having as a reference rural architecture from South
Romania.
Houses for elderly people. arch. Alexandru Clin, Cosmin Caciuc
Alexandru Clin
73
Lorin Niculae
NOTES
1
see Paul Oliver, Shelter And Society (London: F.A. Praeger, 1969),
Amos Rapoport, House Form and Culture (Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin,
1969) or the groundbreaking exhibition organized by Bernard Rudofsky and
held at MOMA in 1964, Architecture without architects
2
Suha zkan, Traditionalism and Vernacular Architecture in the

TwentyFirst Century in Vernacular Architecture in the TwentyFirst
Century. Theory, Education and Practice, ed. Asquith, Linsday and Marcel
Velinga, 97-109 (London: Taylor&Francis, 2006 )
Roderick J.Lawrence, Basic Principles for Sustaining Human

Habitats in Vernacular Architecture in the TwentyFirst Century. Theory,
Education and Practice, ed. Asquith, Linsday and Marcel Velinga, 110-127
(London: Taylor&Francis, 2006)
Linsday Asquith, Integrated Approaches and New Methods for Housing
Research in Vernacular Architecture in the TwentyFirst Century. Theory,
Education and Practice, ed. Asquith, Linsday and Marcel Velinga, 128-144
(London: Taylor&Francis, 2006)
Ian Davis, Sheltering from Extreme Hazards in Vernacular

Architecture in the TwentyFirst Century. Theory, Education and Practice,
ed. Asquith, Linsday and Marcel Velinga, 145-154 (London: Taylor&Francis,
2006)
Geoffrey Payne, A Journey Through Space. Cultural Diversity in

Urban Planning in Vernacular Architecture in the TwentyFirst Century.
Theory, Education and Practice, ed. Asquith, Linsday and Marcel Velinga,
155-176 (London: Taylor&Francis, 2006)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arboleda, Gabriel. What Is Vernacular Architecture? Vernacular

Architecture. July 10, 2012. http://www.vernaculararchitecture.
com.
Asquith, Linsday and Marcel Velinga. Vernacular Architecture in the
TwentyFirst Century. Theory, Education and Practice. London:
Taylor&Francis, 2006.
Brunskill, Ronald. Illustrated Handbook of Vernacular Architecture.
London: Faber&Faber, 2000.
Oliver, Paul. Built to Meet Needs. Cultural Issues in Vernacular
Architecture. Oxford: Architectural Press, 2006.
75
Augustin Ioan is a professor at

the University of Architecture
and Planning in Bucharest and
a former Junior and Senior
Fulbright Scholar at University
of Cincinnati, OH. He holds two
MA degrees, an MSArch with
honors (Cincinnati, 1994), and
two PhD degrees (architecture
1998 and philosophy 2002).
He is also a licentiate Honoris
Causa in Orthodox theology
of the Center for Traditional
Orthodox
A FEW THINGS ON
ARCHITECTURE FOR THE
Studies in Etna,
POOR
CA (2007).
A FEW THINGS ON ARCHITECTURE FOR THE POOR
Augustin Ioan
trans. Anca Creu
All of a sudden, poverty is in style again. Moreover, natural

disasters, that we are experiencing this year in a state of
surprise, as well as migrations, make us face situations that
seemed inconceivable or that could not possibly happen to us.
Inhabiting a type of minimalism lacking social function, centred
rather on the autistic nature of an expression that is devoid of
aesthetics (i.e. a form of extreme modernism), the architecture
dedicated to those social segments that escape the architects
attention (an architect which is paid with a percentage of the cost
of the designed work), has suddenly became fashionable. Of course,
flirting in a certain degree with the people, Marxist pieces of
wisdom of the kind preached by some that buy even their Porsche in
a red hue, the way a very valued communist scholar, with a critical
pointed towards capitalism (Fredric Jameson) does, all these
are constant issues of the American intellectual resistance,
especially in universities.
What is now beginning to become visible is the fact that nonprofit organizations, foundations and other forms of employed
volunteering exist in the field of residential architecture; in
addition, the product of their labor, so modest after all, tends
to be seized by mainstream architecture, that, as we can obviously
notice in volumes like The Next House, encompasses a similar
kind of architectural expression, proposing it as a model worth
following in the future.
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Augustin Ioan
Today, the issue of social activism in the developed Western

countries concerns perhaps marginal aspects of this problem:
shelters temporary or not for homeless people, but there is
a field that brings together those in the West (including Japan)
as well as the ones from the East: the emergency dwelling, which
becomes necessary at once, in large quantities, as a result of a
cataclysm or a war. Earthquakes in Turkey and Greece, for example,
allowed the tragedy of losing ones home to gain the proportions
of a major crisis. The solution: shelters spread across dozens
of hectares1, with no preoccupation other than that of providing
the most basic shelter. This is why preventive and prospective
thinking is necessary; the state should finance the research and
request the construction of a large number of house kits, enough
to cover such situations2. Architects like Gans and Jelacic (N.Y.)
work on an even more elementary level than emergency dwelling
destined for the survivors of a catastrophe. Based perhaps on the
assumption that people who lost their houses are not always in this
situation against their will, they designed such a shelter whose
temporary nature is even more strongly emphasized than in the case
of a proper house. The name of extreme housing refers to a kind
of shelter that is less than a house and this is due to the fact
that, it is, maybe, much more immediately-urgent than a house.
Emergency architecture must be subjected to the requirements of
speed (related either to the on-site manufacture or to the assembly
of prefabricated components), portability and on the other hand
evanescence, for reasons related to its own ontological status.
Moreover, portability and mobility are most often in a relationship
of inverse proportionality with sustainability3. See also, for
example, the medical structures designed for events such as those
on 11th September 2001, which use military trucks as structural
elements (Verderber 2003).
In other words, inflatable, foldable architecture can be thought of
in terms of the persistence or the durability of its components,
of the materials from which these are made of. Conversely, the
architecture designed to stay in one place is thought, under the
rule of emergency, in terms of perishability. Materials and the
modality of design in such situations, which emergency architecture
is subject to, talk about transience, about disappearing. If we
add to this status its favourite materials wood, clay - we will
see that contemporary architecture privileges a level even more
perishable than this.
Architects that investigate the limits of perishability do not
have always at hand the argument of their own tradition, as it
is the case with Shigeru Ban who adopsts the line of thought of
his Metabolist predecessors, at least in the sense of thinking as
potential of a temporary or moving architecture. The Japanese
are placed in the horizon of the contemporary period, to which
they address themselves, as well as in that of the archaeology
of the local precedents. Still, the temple at Ise and the paper
walls are to be found among these precedents easy to refer to.
This kind of manner of use places the Japanese architects of
temporality in a retro-futurist horizon or at the conjunction
of archaism with Postmodernity. According to Newsweek (Newsweek
2003) magazine, a new typhoon-proof roof material was created
by two professors from the University of Delaware: soy straws,
bird feathers, newspapers and waterproof glue. The use of straw
bales, wattle and other provisional materials is consistent
even in the Romanian countryside, with the difference that they
are used for constructions and shelters - household annexes - and
not for dwellings. Basically, the modernization warded off the
natural/local materials and the adjacent techniques from the rural
dwelling architecture and replaced them with concrete, iron plates
and insulated windows. The strange combinations that I have seen
and that were used in the 1990s, such as the concrete structure
with walls of adobe, or the proud church in Urziceni (designed by
me), hastily covered with tar paper because they ran out of money
too soon, explain this confusion in the use of materials and it is
the architects duty to clear it up.
In this (re)architecture (the term was imposed by erban Cantacuzino,
as a book title, in connection to conversions) there is a highly
contemporary element, addable to sustainable development, which
actually coexists with an archaic, lasting one. The terminal stage
of architecture is often seen as an auroral opportunity for
another. A city or a building can serve as a site (even if it is
not flat) for a new foundation (usually post-catastrophic) or as
an extraction site of reusable materials for another settlement
or edifice. Sometimes, a more or less innocent efficiency regards
the dismemberment of abandoned buildings (one of the most common
sights of Bucharest during the nineties, and one of the favourite
sources of brick for new residential architecture of the same
period, in the terms of the absurd prices of the construction
materials). I myself have used perfectly preserved brick, still
bearing the stamp of the inter-war manufacturers name, a proud
and testamentary time capsule. I recycled it from a previous/
neighbouring demolition, and I used in a house, too, because it
was free and obviously superior to the partially shattered brick,
passing as new, that was available on the market at that time.
There is nothing triumphal in the spatial redistribution of the
relics of the one who has defeated himself: here, the issue is
about the edifices of modernity, especially those of industrial
nature. This should not prevent the creative use of any natural or
artificial building material, new or recycled, regardless of its
previous function . We have entire mines of such materials at
our disposal, as the project in Clrai demonstrated in a way that
I do not hesitate to call - nostalgically, given his exile from
the city remarkable.
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Augustin Ioan
One of the most serious problems of the contemporary Romanian

society is the lack of any concern for social housing in the
true sense of the word, namely that destined to those assisted
by the community - be it at a large / national level or rather
at a local one. Also, in a country menaced by the spectre of
devastating earthquakes, there is no concern for the investigation
of the housing field in connection with the catastrophes. That
is why, from time to time, any cataclysmic phenomenon finds the
government or the local mayors unprepared and the answer given
by them is deplorable: long-term, expensive and, needless to say,
ugly dwellings, are made for those unfortunate victims. In a case
where there should be a strategic concern for any responsible
administration, the situation is resolved using compromise, smallmindedness and lack of perspective. While the disaster victims
are waiting outside, competitions require as a criterion local
color. There is a single course dedicated to extreme housing and
emergency architecture that I teach at the Ion Mincu University
of Architecture and Town Planning. I do not have knowledge of
any organized effort made by the state or the local authorities
in order to identify those that could provide solutions - from
architects and builders to possible donors and the army. Recently,
the President of the Romanian Order of Architects shared with me
his concern regarding this terrible, irresponsible form of autism.
We are not living times of generosity or of Christian (or at least
Social-Democratic) self-giving. It is the time when wolves and
eagles are working while there is still something to capture or
to consume in the country. But when cataclysms will come one by
one and we will be in need of such places, we would like people
to know that we did not stand still when we should have worked,
the way others did, that we did not build houses for the newly
rich when those in extreme poverty were living in indescribable
conditions; in other words, that we were not partakers to the
general indifference, be it on the left or the right side of
politics.

EXTREME HOUSING A GOAL OF MEDIUM HOUSING?
The term of extreme housing (used by architects Gans & Jelacic for
their shelter project in Kosovo, see www.architectureforhumanity.
com) is among those destined to become a statement in the theoretical
language of architecture. Lets try therefore in what follows to
unfold its meaning and possible fields of significance, and to add
others during the process.
The name extreme housing refers to a kind of dwelling that is
less than a house and this is, perhaps, because it is much
more immediately-urgent than a house. In other words, the extreme
nature addresses the need, and not, in the first instance, the
modality in which it is dealt with.
Temporary shelter as a radical form of housing questions the very

definition of housing. If shelter the origin, or the minimal form
of housing, which actually requires only minimal previous training
before it is initiated - is seen as an extremity, then such a phrase,
of course, is an invitation to meditate on what is in the centre
of things. In other words, unlike a definition of architecture of
housing that would contain the proximate component (the shelter)
and something more (for example, symbol decoration, as Robert
Venturi proposes), in the cited phrase cited we are dealing with
an inversion: it is assumed that we already know what housing
is, in order to be able to talk about a radical form of it. And
what does extreme really mean? It is in fact about reducing to
a minimum the housing data so as to talk only about crisis
housing and therefore a temporary one, or is there something more
to the phrase, namely the proposal of a different way of living?
If we are to speculate the gerundive - because the issue is not
about a house, but about extreme living - we could say, perhaps,
that the question here is the process, the form of living, and not
necessarily its shell. In that case, extreme housing may not be a
shelter from the crisis, but the process of inhabiting the crisis,
of living together with it. There is no point in dissimulating the
crisis in an environment that may protect, to soothe, to divert
the attention from the emergency situation; on the contrary, the
issue is represented by an anguished housing, in which the shelter
no longer protects, but is itself crossed by the force lines of
extreme circumstances.
Years ago, in a debate with Christopher Alexander, Peter Eisenman
requested of architecture destined for residential use to resist the
status that seems to be its destiny, that of a territory of evasion
from social anxieties in which it is placed. If architecture is an
accurate image of society, why should housing represent an exception,
by withdrawing itself from society and by refusing to reflect its
good and weak points altogether? In other words, extrapolating
this request, one might require housing to be active rather than
reactive / passive. Retreat, concealment, transformation, rest all terms traditionally and almost uncontroversially associated
with tasks related to the house are probably questioned by that
active character of dwelling, postulated by Heidegger in Building,
dwelling, thinking. The territory of the Heideggerian dwelling is
an active one, which works on the being - in an agricultural way;
the author mentions this by evoking the Latin terms (choleric,
cultura), which, through its inhabitation and construction bearing
in mind this kind of dwelling, develops towards the full settlement
of its essence. (Heidegger, 2001, 145-6).
It is hard to imagine a greater distance between the way in which
Heidegger sees the problem of dwelling and the one that Eisenman
proposes in that debate. However, there is something profound that
links the two perspectives: the idea that dwelling involves action,
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Augustin Ioan
implication (even of a corporal nature), and openness and not

passivity, detachment, introversion. However, in this respect, is
there the possibility that extreme housing may be a phrase used
as a goal belonging to contemporary dwelling? The residential
tower proposed by Santiago Calatrava for South-downtown Manhattan
is a kind of rise against, similar to the one practiced by
Nehemiah in rebuilding Jerusalem. Living at such a height and in
such proximity (Ground Zero) will be a radical gesture, almost a
manifesto on dwelling. The radical aspect of the dwelling engaged
in the complex socio-economic network involves participation,
involvement in the community issues - from the vicinity unit to
the settlement as a whole - but at the same time, it requires
a territory of fertile interrogations, of introspection and of
ontological redefinition both in the process of dwelling and in
using dwelling as an instrument. In extreme housing, the house
becomes a nodal place, where a series of openings are united: the
Self and the Other (from the mild other to the radical otherness
which the sacred involves); the self and the world, a relation that
the house revises when, by its central position and by revealing
the divine, it testifies the notion of self-similarity (by being a
part of the whole, the house is the fractal image of the world);
one person and the others and, conversely, the community and the
individual.
The shelter proposed by Gans&Jelacic does not solve the problem
of the people who lost their homes, no more than any charity night
shelters does. On the contrary, it instantiates this state of
things, draws attention on it as if it were a state of dwelling,
not a personal or a collective drama, that must be treated and
cured out of charity or guilt. By itself, such a dwelling can
bring fame to its authors who display it in a gallery or on the
internet, but it does not solve the problem of the lack of shelter.
This is probably because, in the sense given here to the notion of
extreme housing, people need not anything less than a permanent
home, but something more earthly than a spaceless place for
one night.
On the contrary, the term I propose here is hyper-housing, where
the dwelling is more than a house, including its localization on
the trajectories of socio-economical significance and, especially,
on those of the spiritual nature of the neighbourhood unit inside
the community, of the community in the settlement and of the
centre of the neighbourhood unit, making it universal through its
ecumenical dimension. Home is then the centre of my world; as an
analogy, the public space is the centre of our world, located in
open space. The shelter is not only a) individual, in the way and
in the forms described so far, but it also exists as b) a community/
collective shelter (in the care of the community, the church, not
of the states social services); as a right of sanctuary and as a
right for comfort in the sacred place. When we started the pilot
project together with the HAR Foundation in Bujoreni / Vlcea we

thought it was important, for instance, to propose not only a home
for crisis situations, but also a spiritual space, a church. As
a privileged space to host the individual and collective psychodrama, the healing (or just soothing, in such cases) prayer, the
presence of a different kind of space rather than simply a
shelter on the territory of extreme habitation in togetherness
can, by recognizing the trauma, confront it rather than ignore it.
EXTREME ARCHITECTURE IN ROMANIA
The technology with which we build today should not prevent us
from thinking architecture in terms of designing in accordance
with the environment. The world is full of prestigious images that
push the limits of materials, sacrificing comfort on the altars
of the image of power. Of course one can build glass towers in
Dubai and it is a fact that the performances of glass have reached
the proximity of those materials with good endurance to thermal
variations. But never will glass behave in the same as materials
that, from the very beginning, have provided a suitable thermal
behaviour appropriate for the compact wall. We already know that
our energy resources are limited and, where they still exist, they
come together with burdening political agendas. Only a few days
ago the Ministry of Environment discovered that renewable energy
resources are at hand and the next step is to propose programs that
will encourage their use. It is not the Ministry of Environment
alone that should support this unavoidable process, but also the
Ministry of Finance, because good policies are implemented not
just by seeking available investors or by force, but by applying
intelligent tax systems. For example, the obligation to use at
least one source of alternative energy must be adopted as legally
binding for any construction in Romania, or at least for those above
a certain size (and for all the public ones). A tax cut for those
who obey this stipulation should also accompany another obligation
in the business plan: the use of this green technology should
be able to be compared, in terms of costs, with the traditional
energy-consuming methods (because we do have ill traditions, which
destroyed the autonomous thinking in the architecture of the premodern period). On the contrary, there should be an additional
charge on the already prohibitive prices of gas and electricity
in order to hasten the conversion processes regarding the use
alternative energies. Outside our borders, solar energy and heat
pumps are the questions of the day. Houses which do not use a
drop of energy from the networks are becoming to be designed more
and more frequently and impeccably; finally, we are beginning to
receive, even as a lifestyle model, the house (or the household,
to be more accurate) that not only consumes but also generates some
energy. It is unacceptable to burn fuel oil in industrial plants
in order to produce heat in places that have been blessed by God
with good exposure, with sun and wind.
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Augustin Ioan
We also know that in our country as well, the climate tends to

reach extreme forms and experiences sudden changes. The south is
turning into a desert. Woods no longer regenerate, maybe only
through political will (that is still missing), because it is a
long time since we surpassed the limit of natural renewal of this
living resource. Therefore, architects themselves should rethink
their design models. The argument of the Western image is no longer
working: analyze, if you will, the present Western architecture
and you will see that in our country the new buildings are still
the copy of the images, often poorly assimilated, of interwar
and immediate postwar architecture, from high office buildings to
residential houses.
Smart faades, which accumulate and stock the daily sun energy,
double the total or partial insertion in the site. We should
probably refer to the architecture of the bordei (mud hut), not
simply as to a primitive form of architecture (which it really was,
in the forms found at The Village Museum, for example), but as to
a contemporary form of ecotecture, because the absence of walls
transforms a dwelling of this sort into a crucible that stocks the
internal energy of the building.
We need shade and coolness. The solution we are seeking for
is not represented by air-conditioning devices, the ventilation
plants that use a lot of extremely expensive electric energy. A
well - designed house does not need artificial chillness (which
is highly unhealthy, as we are constantly warned), even if it is
located in the climatic conditions of a desert. So, it is the
form of volumetric articulation of the building that must be
changed. It seems obvious that terraces must not be used anymore
just for the modern look (which is stylistically out-of-date,
if another argument is not appropriate) and that the eaves of the
houses must be designed in such a way as to provide a level of
shading in accordance with the diagrams of maximum sun exposure,
in addition to what is appropriate to the Romanian space. A simple
look over the borders, at the vernacular architecture in Bulgaria,
Greece or Turkey, will show us how an extended wood-console eave
can be designed and how expressive these consoles can become.
If we climatically shift towards south we must architecturally
follow the modalities of endurance regarding the conditions of
extreme weather already found in these areas, conditions that the
vernacular architecture still remembers.
The compact surface functions better as a preserver than the hollow
surface. A well-balanced proportion must be maintained between the
glazing and the opaque wall surfaces. And, above all, we should
use courtyards. Good indoor ventilation is made by orienting the
building and all its autonomous units (the apartments, for example)
towards at least two cardinal points. In the Middle East there are
other forms of air ventilation which use the upward movement of the
air through ventilation shafts from the space between the basement,
which can also contain a water surface, and the levels above. Even
now, the sunlit courtyards of our interwar buildings have, with
good consideration, a beneficial role. In any case, gathering up in
the form of built massifs, a principle opposing the isolation of
the house with four faades conserves energy better. On one hand,
interior courtyards provide shade and coolness inside the housing
or the neighbourhood units, but they also give privacy in relation
to public space. Maybe we should give up on the idea, through the
urban plans that we propose, of an isolated house on increasingly
small lots and give a chance to an introverted enclosure-house,
or to the complex with interior garden and shading. The Roman villa
used all these principles and there is no shame to admit that it
is right, whereas present architecture is not.
We need verdure. If we still use terraces, it is good to do so in
order to use them as green areas, surfaces that should spread across
faades that need to be shaded. If we mourn the disappearance of
green areas, we must take action not by prohibiting construction,
but by using in an intelligent way the surfaces destined for
them. Including interior gardens has long become a tool in office
architecture (yes, multi-storey vertical buildings!), only that
we consult old architecture books, not the latest appropriate
examples! However, a viable garden is not only a garden located
on the ground and therefore its area should not be automatically
reduced. The gardens can be green vertical surfaces (faades and
fences, even multi-level structures, interior passageways as an
architectural promenade). Plants can be cultivated on the existing
surfaces, any kind of built and currently unused areas can be
recovered for the city as unconventional parks. The block faades
can turn from radiant surfaces into lungs of the city. The
viaducts near the Bastille Opera in Paris offer such a solution to
us and another one is represented by the idea found by the city of
Bonn, namely its policy of the deliberate planting of green spaces
on the block terraces.
The building materials, their textures and colours can also be
instruments used by the architect in order to create a cooling
music. Natural materials first of all clay, ranging from the
unburned variety to ceramics, but also stone or the living
wood - are already here, waiting for us to come to our senses.
They are waiting for us architects to stop being the agents of a
decerebrated sales industry that soils places in order to make
cement and concrete, from which we cannot escape afterwards. Why
should we bury the Danube Delta under concrete, when one can build
suitable houses on piles and stone foundations, as always? Why
pour concrete on the mountains, when stone and wood are right
there before our eyes that are burned by the light of a defunct
modernity? The latter are rhetorical questions elsewhere other
than in Romania and in other similar countries. Being in the
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Augustin Ioan
position of someone who wrote the architectural standards for the

Danube Delta, I know the kind of resistance encountered by anyone
who questions an ill-formed tradition based on an ideology of
modernization, the same system that led to the extreme form
of moral destruction represented by communism. I also know the
degree of surprise expressed by my colleagues when they discover
the modelling virtues of clay and the way in which the proximity
of a citadel, like the one in Argamum (Cape Doloman, Jurilofca)
which, after two thousand years of proud resistance, raises the
same questions I am raising here. Somehow, this text is also an
indirect tribute brought to Habitat and Art in Romania Foundation
and to all those who, for several summers now, have been teaching
us slowly, almost against the will of those whom this type of
experiments bring their own traditions closer, that architecture
must change here as well in order to fit - and fight when necessary location and climate. If the place and the weather become extreme,
then our built environment should rethink itself in the same way.
If critical thinking has expired, killed by the fascination with
useless technological manufacturing, then it has to be reinvented.
NOTES
1
The never-ending forest of houses formed a post-apocalyptic

landscape between Istanbul and Ankara in the eyes of the students and the
professors at the Ion Mincu University of Architecture in Bucharest,
among whom I numbered, and who were travelling on this route in 2001. I
do not know to what extent did the landscape change for the better in the
meantime.
2
In Romania, not only such thinking does not exist at an official

level, but, from my experience in working with Habitat and Art Foundation
in Romania, I could see the anger with which the local authorities in
Valcea (county and city alike) approached such a project the very day
of the varnishing in the fall of 2002, on the pretext that it sheds a
bad light on the governments efforts to discuss a similar problem in
the county - the collapse of a locality situated on the premises of an
abandoned salt mine- and having as a result buildings exceeding the
cost obtained by HAR. On the other hand, the wooden church accompanying
the pilot house in Bujoreni had already been promised by Senator Adrian
Punescu to a community in Serbia that had awarded him and that, for an
unexplained reason, had forgot to build an Orthodox church in an Orthodox
country, a situation in which a project financed with European money
would have turned into one of those cases presented in press regarding
the embezzlement of EU funds. At the varnishing, the opposition of the
PUR (The Romanian Humanist Party) prefect concerning the announced
donation was vehemently denied by Alexander Nancu and me, and this was
the reason why the rest of the varnishing consisted in the denigration
of the inaugurated project by the frightened employees working at the
prefecture and municipality, led in battle by the prefect and the
mayor. They talked to us about cosmopolitanism, false orthodoxism and
other allegations coming from the fifties. For details on this incredible
episode, see Ianus magazine from 2002. Of course, not even the publishing
of this project in the mainstream media had any effect on MLPTL (The
Ministry of Public Works, Transport and Housing), the institution that

builds social dwellings- block apartments with nothing different from
those before 1989 at much higher purchase prices than those of similar
apartments on the open market!
3
For details, see Robert Kronenburg, Portable Architecture, 3rd

ed. (Oxford: Elsevier, 2003)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kronenburg, Robert. Portable Architecture, 3rd ed. Oxford: Elsevier, 2003.
Newsweek. October 27, 2003: 63.
Verderber, Stephen. Compassionism and the Design Studio in the Aftermath
of 9/11. Journal of Architectural Education 56, no.3, February
2003: 48-62.
87
FOR A POSTAPOCALYPTIC
ARCHITECTURE
FOR A POST-APOCALYPTIC ARCHITECTURE
Augustin Ioan
Its time to think again, after the loop opened by the Industrial
Revolution and closed by the collapse of communist regimes that
transformed the industry, especially the heavy one, into a sort of
a failed climax of their economical policy. Each time I discuss
this issue with my students, I notice how hard it is for them to
understand the bad aspect of concrete and steel and why I seem
to be so firmly against them in particular. There are more aspects
that have to be discussed here, mentioning from the beginning that
being (indeed) a defender of the natural materials for reasons
cited beneath I believe that this should be only preferred to the
industrial ones, and not applied as a general rule:
1)
For invoked reasons, even explicitly argued ones, since
Hrusciovs speech in December 19541, the concrete became the
preferred building material of the post-war communism for three
reasons: it was the obvious outcome of the heavy industry, it
was gray (the working class colour, according to Sciusev, the
creator of Lenins Mausoleum) and it permitted a type of production
industrialisation that eliminated the craftsman, the artisan from
the game and replaced him with the building worker.
2)
For the contemporary needs of Romania, any possibility
of shortening the complicated systems of the industry, that is
already dying, represents a success, first of all because of the
price, secondly as an exercise of purifying the site of huge non-
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Augustin Ioan
perishable concrete storages and finally, but not less important,

for deliberately and symbolically passing the communist period
into oblivion. Since the communist regime assumed the concrete
as its favourite material, its a good opportunity to disclaim
it through the refusal of the material that eternizes it, too.
A similar exercise can be made for steel and aluminium; as for
plastic materials, infected by the rhetorics of the communist
regime in a similar manner, they had an insignificant destiny for
the post-war buildings; but its also a healthy exercise to avoid
them too, at least for a while.
3)
Because otherwise there existed a huge potential of reusing
the metal as we find it executed in industrial architecture, in
unused pipelines, in useless statues or in abandoned cranes. At
the contest for eradicating poverty in 1998 in Bucharest, there was
a proposal to use these structures for emergency social housing,
but as far as I know, they were also used as funeral monuments
located in downtown Bucharest. I will have the opportunity to
speak again about the projects for reusing this material in new
spatial structures, as its the case of the iron industry platform
in Clrai and its reassembly in town as works of art, or the
HAR program. I mention here just the young Finnish architect Matti
Sanaksenaho, who made a series of temporary installations on the
roads of Helsinki, including a rusty metal wall recovered from
the docks of the town: a rewriting after collapse, using even the
materials of the apocalypse a (re)building of the world with
remains resulted from the sacrifice of an impossible giant, that
was given birth in the same crooked way that represented it before
its collapse. Besides, Matti Sanaksenaho started with the pavilion
of his country in 1992, which follows the tradition of using wood
imposed by his compatriot Alvar Aalto on his pre-war pavilions
designed for the international exhibitions (Paris 1937, New York
1939).
The reinsertion of natural materials after the modern episode is
even more possible as a third generation of high-tech architects
(after the first one, representing steel, followed by the second,
representing glass) creates an extremely complicated architecture
with natural materials stone, wood, brick with the precision
provided by the latest technology. An entire contemporary French
architecture had already been structured based on this sensitive
approach to the environment.
There are also examples of atypical building materials: bamboo
(Kengo Kuma) or paper and cardboard tubes (Shigeru Ban). Kengo
Kuma proposes serial production for vibrating bamboo surfaces in
order to become walls, bowers for his deep porches and in this
way, intellectualizes, upgrades the expression of local Japanese
vernacular architecture; to remember that this apparent immobility
to escape from a premodern vernacular expression is what moderns
reproach to natural materials. But Kengo Kumas works not only

infirm this prejudice, but also show how a weak material may
become the ingredient for a strikingly contemporary scale and
urban expression architecture.
The old modernist Shigeru Ban, who admires Mies van der Rohes
glass houses as he had achieved a complete continuity between
inside and outside through a completely glass facade ii, improves
the miesian house design at his house so that the compact wall
can be added or removed if the visibility or the climate necessity
requires. But he is also a post-modernist in the sense that he
celebrates in his recent works these weak materials which rather
seem a recycling result than a heroic industry one. Shigeru Ban
designs paper tube houses: a pavilion, temporary shelters for
recent conflicts or disaster refugees and he is the creator of the
Japanese pavilion at Expo 2000 Hannover that was entirely recycled
after the end of the exhibition.
At Hannover a testing field had been configured for an impressive number
of pavilions, lets say in rear-guard. A soft architecture,
but not in terms of using false organic metaphors (curved steel
or plastic shapes), but in the sense of natural materials, even
in the nature itself: the Romanian pavilion, with an interesting
architecture for the first time in the post-war period, seems to be
nothing more than vegetation grown on a metallic structure.
4)
My argument is that an affordable architecture that can
support itself, with a contemporary expression, both appropriate to
the urban and the rural area, can be entirely designed today with
natural materials (except of course skyscrapers and monumental
architecture). From unburned clay and natural (or recomposed)
stone, listing the entire field of burned clays, from brick to
pottery on the one hand and from wood to glass on the other hand,
the full range of materials, each one with its own contemporary
expression that is not only possible, but also highly suggestive,
it is available for the architects that have forgotten it. According
to the needs of the architectural program and depending on what
the site provides, these materials can be successfully used for
an architecture that reclaims the spirit of tradition much better
than any log joinery or wooden spoon made of monumental concrete
(lyrical functionalism) on the the communist party headquarters
of N. Porumbescus schools between 1967 and 1987.
Of course that, considering at least the dramatic situation of the
lack of social housing, a pilot program based exclusively on local
materials and resources (clay, brick, stone, wood, water wells,
chemical toilets) can be organized extremely fast. These would
have immediate results also by the involvement of the directly
interested people in raising those houses. In addition, these would
be temporary and, without irretrievably modifying the soil, we can
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imagine a situation in which, in time, given the disappearance

of the need of immediate shelter, sites can be quickly released.
But such projects dont exist even as simulation for disaster
situations, in a country facing annual floods (because of the
stupidity of communism and the residents neglect) and over which
hovers the imminence of a large-scale earthquake.
ARCHITECTURE WITH HANDY MATERIALS

Why a pledge for certain materials inside in this poverty manifesto?
Identity may occur at the site, or region. But identity is present
in a community through its connection with religion. If little
American rural utopia, from Amish to quacks communities, evince
till today their founding principles in the houses they have
built2, an additional element of meaning is projected on Christian
architecture by favouring certain materials over others. Not any
building made of wood, clay and stone is Christian. But within
the poverty discourse drawn here, a severe Christian architecture
oriented to the community, will want to favour wood, clays and
stone, without excluding any other material or edifying handy
circumstance. Practically its possible to build with anything,
(re)using even the buildings themselves, as in conversions.
In the order of the objectives of this text, the first Christian
material is wood.
Living material, the wood and the wood works are Christian in
a distinct way and, meanwhile, founders for architecture. The
tectonic is claimed in woodworking, in the Indo-European people
and in the work of the carpenter, in the crafted log joinery of
parts throughout, so together all by hand, part of the whole
to account the transmission of gravity and of all the other
forces that afflict the combined and polished object to the ground.
I think we should still meditate on this material as a defining
ingredient of architecture, after Kenneth Framptons monumental
work on tectonic culture3.
If so, what does wood bring into a Christian architecture, except
for the living after death and the growth? First of all, wood is,
together with stone, the wall material that is the most celebrated
in the Bible. Joseph was a carpenter and, as it seems, the craft
passed to his son, before the beginning of the missionary party
of Jesus life. In Acts, crucifixion is called hanging on wood.
Using wood in the construction of the temple to the point when the
price of this important material decreased dramatically, and the
price of the shrine, actually an arche of the church, on the way
of its deposit in the Holy of Holies in the temple of Jerusalem,
was not perhaps sufficiently investigated. The housing and the

churches certainly in the European forest from Scandinavia to the
Carpathians are the woods favourite programs. The wooden church
is seen today by the Romanian emigration and a few fellows from the
country as an archetype of the Orthodox Church or conversely. If it
belonged with certainty to the site, the reconstructions after the
Uniatism and the last Tatar invasion would have rather transformed
the Transylvanian wooden church into a Greek-Catholic place of
worship; besides, the stone wall churches from Transylvania,
inspired by the urban Gothic originals are Orthodox by no means.
Nevertheless, the domesticity of wood, the extraordinary warmth
of the notched churches, polished with the axe into the trunk of a
felled tree, all these contribute to the process of assuming the
wood as the favourite material for domestic and Christian spaces
(that are sometimes confused).
Nevertheless, tradition today is overcome by using wood in situations
that didnt seem specific for it: as an external finishing element,
regardless of program, as universal material (see J. Perraudins
non-residential works in stone and wood from the south of France),
in programs rather related to monumentality or state authority.
Wood is a constant presence in furniture, but the works of Frank
Gehry or Humberto and Fernando Campana brothers add a dimension
less known to it. The Favela chairs made by Campana, despite the
exorbitant price (no doubt due to transforming even poverty into
marketing), give an account of the Brazilian peripheries and of
recycling every piece of wood that is available.
Using softwood, the preferred building material for Favela, as
furniture material, also reminds us of Bernard Cachs furnishing
territories, a phrase that puts in brackets the median term
architecture. The French designers book, which is said to have
radically influenced Gilles Deleuzes views on space and architecture,
does not intend to suspend the architecture as we know it, but,
as the title suggests also, to transform it into a consequence of
the two design gestures (urbanism and interior architecture), both
causes. The wood itself is a median regarding the attributes of
building materials. It is, on the one hand, malleable enough to
serve as an indoor material tangible material, the interior and
exterior tegument of the things and of the house too; on the other
hand, it is structurally resistant enough for any architectural
program: forms processed with contemporary technologies, composite
forms (stratified wood, recomposed wood), wood tends to achieve the
resistance, stability and durability of the superior building
materials (steel and concrete).
Of course, the pillar of Apollodorus of Damascus bridge in Drobeta
Turnu-Severin, also kept under the Danube water for two thousand
years, the Byzantine wooden boat, discovered intact in the mud
of the same river almost drying in the summer of 2003, are both
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evidence of impeccable behaviour of wood under stable conditions

of temperature and humidity. Recently, I myself had the evidence
of the diamantine resistance (as superior form of carbon) of the
wood kept under water. Restoring a house in Sulina, ashore the
Danube River at mouth, it was proved that the foundation sat on a
number of oak pillars with an average length of 8 meters, beaten
on the sandy shore cliff. After one hundred years, the oak became
as strong as the very consistent concrete foundation that I had
poured nearby.
Now is the moment I can speak about the wooden house and church4
designed together with Alexandru Nancu, the director of Habitat and
Art Foundation in Romania, and with my colleagues contribution,
Ctlin Berescu, in the 2002 edition of the Tradition and
Postmodernity Program5, with the support of Ion Mincu University
of Architecture Bucharest, of the Centre for Traditional Orthodox
Studies in Etna, CA and the Institute of Wood Architecture in
Sweden, with the funding of UE Culture 2000. We considered
important, for example when we made the pilot project, to propose
not only a home for crisis situations, but also a spiritual
space, a church. Privileged space for hosting an individual and
collective psychodrama, place of healing prayer (or just comforting
in such situations), the presence of a different type of space
other than the shelter itself on the extreme housing territory
together, recognizing the trauma, can face it rather than ignore
it. Although free of aesthetics, for the wooden house, as for
the church too, I proposed the easiest material in the field, for
expressing thus the location of its site. This is not a settlement,
but a Village Museum in Vlcea. Enough houses and some churches
serve as background. As I was saying, this is not a settlement,
but a collection of places and so, our house did not want to be an
exponent of a particular one, but the exponent of circumstances of
a rapid construction from industrialized parts. The church itself
is modulated so that it can extend on any of the three directions
with at least one more module, in order to accommodate different
circumstances. In addition, our house wants to be also lowtech in its final formula, constructible with a minimum of tools
and knowledge, most probable by the recipient of such a kit, in
record time, under the pressure of unfortunate cataclysmic events.
Because any other criteria than those of cheapness and common sense
in design (modulation, proportioning, scaling and the potential of
the used material) are not relevant, we do not want to be judged
on more than we proposed. We did not intend to resolve here and
now the present vernacular tradition dilemma, however interesting
may this issue be. We did not propose to flatter the local spirits,
any of them it is no time to fuss in crisis. We simply made a
wooden prefab four squares of 3.63 x 3.63 m, describing four cubes
with these sides and we made with them a house and a church. Thats
all. Therefore, lowly and we believe wisely, we offer viable,
cheap and, most of all, spiritually plausible solutions to those
interested.
The clays (burned or unburned) are privileged materials in the
Middle East and appear as a reference in the Old Testament: in
Egypt, making adobe was a craft almost exclusively reserved for
the Jews. Experiments have been made for updating these materials,
for improving the durability and sustainability of the unburned
clays, as for example using artificial binder instead of manure,
or fibreglass instead of straw. Moreover, additional treatments
as whitewashing add stability and, in this way, improve time
behaviour for the unburned clays. The question remains: why would
the material as it is be refused in contexts which allow the
use (as for example those with minimal humidity and temperature
variations)? After all, the adobe pyramids from Central America
last long enough to dispel the questions about durability.
Regarding the weak public visibility of clay architecture, maybe
we should remind the unburned clay architecture made by Hassan
Fathy, the Egyptian architect who produced a consistent revisiting
and reinterpretation of tradition, from the same point of view as
the poverty shares and that we have explained here; it was this
that made him famous and not copying hi-tech materials imported
from the West.
Brick, often alternating with stone, is also a birth area
material and subsequently the one belonging to the irradiation
of Christianity in the East (later Orthodox). Brick vaults are
impressive even today, especially for their seismic behaviour.
The rows of brick and stone that the restoration of the twentieth
century has turned off to plaster, changing the structural status,
in order to assign the visible surface quality, behaved remarkably
both under compression and dynamic loads, in the same way the
reinforced concrete took both compression and stretching and
also dynamic loads (e.g. torsions). Delimiting the white fields
(stone) by horizontal and vertical red fields (brick and binder)
represents, indeed, a decorative motif that individualized the
Christian construction of the East. Unlike wood work with brick or
clay (the civilian Gothic Fachtwerk), where the fields are much
larger, sedimentation impression is more evident here and brings
into context the vertical, archaeological section image by land.
Sometimes, to look at such a church is like the state of the earth
archive (geological layers upon layers of habitation interrupted
by violence and disasters, geology and then, again, settlement and
so on) is absorbed by the church too, that rises it to the sky as
an offering.
INFRAWOOD AND UNDERGROUND
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If we place next to this temporary status its favourite materials

wood and clays we will notice that a certain contemporary
architecture favours an even more perishable level than theirs.
Contemporary architecture uses unconventional materials, as
straw vaults (see the absolutely exceptional work of the Rural
Studio group from Alabama, USA, or Architecture for Humanity), the
agglomeration of river stones in wire mesh (Herzog & De Meuron,
California vineyard). Japanese architect Shigeru Bans wood and
cardboard tubes (some of them placed on foundations made of beer
cans), also for emergencies, brought him international recognition.
But Shigeru Ban designs not only for emergency situations, as
his church (for details, see Octagon magazine no.1/2002) and the
Japan pavilion at Hanover in 2000 prove. Besides, incidentally,
the national architecture pavilions at international exhibitions,
especially pre-war ones, are examples of deviation from the
evanescence rule, while they were often made not only of permanent
and subsequently demolished materials, but sometimes even of
materials credited by the extreme duration and precious aura,
like marble and alabaster6 in USSR and the Nazi German pavilions
in Paris 1937, when the game had bigger stakes than the housing
exhibits. Today, architects of the national pavilions discovered
the taste for suggestive transience, as shown by the Hanover
Expo 2000 (see Swiss pavilion, a wooden removable logo; even the
Romanian one, consisting of a metal grid on which ivy was growing).
Architects investigating the limits of perishability, do not have
always at hand the argument of their own traditions, as it happens
with Shigeru Ban, and with the members of the Metabolism Movement
(whose predecessor he claims to be), at least in the sense of
thinking of the possibility of a temporary or moving architecture.
The Japanese are placed both in the contemporary horizon that they
address and in that of the previous local archaeology. Or, the temple
of Ise and paper walls are found among those precedents possible to
be cited. Such uses place the Japanese architects of temporarity
in a retro futuristic horizon or on one placed at the conjunction
of archaic with post-modernity. According to Newsweek Magazine
(Newsweek 2003, 63), a new roof material, resistant to typhoon,
was created by two professors from the University of Delaware:
soybean straw, feathers, newspapers and waterproof binder. Using
straw bales, wattle and other temporary materials is consistent
even in the Romanian rural area, except for the fact that here
they are used for construction and shelter (household annexes),
and not for housing. Basically, the modernization banished the
natural/local materials and adjacent techniques from rural house
architecture and replaced them with concrete, metal sheet and
double glazed windows. Given the strange combinations that we
have seen used in the 1990, for example, the concrete structure
with adobe walls, or the proud church in Urziceni (designed by
me), hastily covered with tar paper because money were over long
ago, I acknowledge this confusion about the use of materials that
architects have the duty to clear.

Let us remember that there is nothing wrong in the use of
natural materials, as the modernism wanted to indoctrinate us into
believing; we have to claim in our turn such a local tradition (at
least for Dobrogea and Brgan), on the use of adobe, straw mixed
with unburned clay and manure applied on vertical structures of
twigs, as on reed roofs. We also have to claim a masterly use of
wood for contemporaneousness.
THE CORNERSTONE, WHICH STONEMASONS HAVE FORGOTTEN

Built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself
being the cornerstone, in Whom the whole structure, being joined together,
grows into a holy temple in the Lord, In him you also are being built together
into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. (Ephesians, 2:20-2)
Stone is also a Christian material. The cornerstone, the house

on the rock and the rock which the church is based on, are all
metaphorical and allegorical references to stone in the text of
the New Testament. If the manger and the cross wood were the first
touchable instances that accompanied and supported Jesus birth
and death, the cave stone and the virgin tomb stone of Joseph
of Arimathea (where no one was ever put), have imagined the
background material for the same events boundaries between which
the human episode of the Son was held, rock preceding and following
wood as shelter and grave. Using high technology for cutting
stone we see at work in Gilles Perraudins building for his own
architectural studio and wine storage from Vauvert7, next to the
career where the stone for Pont Du Gard was excavated. At the same
time archaic and technologically advanced, simple and strange at
the same time, Gilles Perraudins building realizes a contemporary
use of the material, which digs tradition so much for outstanding
one of its enough forgotten aspect to appear futuristic after it
had been brought to the surface and re-contextualized in todays
circumstances. In the context of contemporary use of stone as a
building material, we should also speak about E.Souto Mouras
works, the Portuguese architect who grew in Alvaro Sizas glory.
In a paper dedicated to him (and to stone) (Blaser 2003, 21, 22),
Werner Blaser summarizes the qualities of stone, which I reproduce
here: stone creates order and is characterized by mass (21),
weight and power (27), and also ease, naturalness and elegance,
beauty and simplicity (39), unlike wood, which generates form
and is characterized by texture. Stone expresses, like the other
natural materials, a close relationship with nature; stone is used
for its ability to put into practice a magic exercise and a sign
in a symbolic language both ancient and modern (21). Alternating
with glass, it creates stability and dependence (27). As a
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building material, stone is an autonomous subject of the house,

which tells long stories (including his own creation, that it
saves (39), but also imposes order and backgrounds/networks on
which the other architectural elements of the designed space can
be freely created (33, 39), requires perfection of execution and
therefore places great weight on the shoulders of the designers,
with their disciplined desire for expressiveness) 39).
But this is Blasers most important observation about stone:
Stone exemplifies urban culture (39). Indeed, it is the material
for fortresses, defence walls and permanent structures, for
sustainability over time and archived events related to this
permanence; at this point, the stone is reunited with Christianity,
with its appearance geography, with the culture of the empire that
served as a propagation space (remember that Augustinian peace not
only made possible the advent of Christianity, but also, according
to Vitruvius dedication to Octavian Augustus, the shift from a
Rome of marble to a brick one) and with the urban nature of its
dissemination.
It is worth mentioning in this context Mircea Eliades observation
about the special relationship that Brancusi had with stone. In his
diary (undated record, 1966) (Eliade 1973, 292), Eliade describes
the tough, impenetrable material that Brancusi would have
approached with the sensitivity and the reverence of a prehistoric
man. This state of bliss induced by indefinitely prolonged privacy
with the crystalline material is, according to Eliade, a
certain archaic form of religion, making the sculptors desire
of abolishing the own nature of the stone and, above all, the
weight, to show us how it ascends and flies. Therefore, the tactile
versatility of the stone makes it very expressive in suggesting
either the return of the house to earth (Cyclopean masonry, opus
incertum), or, on the contrary, the ascension through regular
faceting geometry and polishing.
(RE) SOURCES OF MATERIALS

A further step is made in the investigation of artificial materials,
proper to the post-industrial era, available to developers
researching a site or locality. Habitat and Arts Program in Romania
has made the recycling, the use of materials and even buildings or
their remains, as found / on site, part of his manifesto. So did,
undoing and re-assembling the steel mill in Clrai (Siderca)
as art objects in the city, the cultural program with similar
targets conducted by the local authorities at the end of the
nineties, program expelled from the city after 2000 on the grounds
of the superficiality and ugliness of the sculptures.
Such materials are often unexpected: abandoned in warehouses,

carpet remnants were transformed by Rural Studio8 into house walls
with a remarkable thermal behaviour and with a strange tactile
beauty. Also, Rural Studio in Alabama made a very vibrant glass
surface windshields recovered from car cemeteries and discarded
tires, coated in unburned clay (stuck as they say in Dobrogea)
and whitewashed an outdoor chapel wall.
Containers used in shipping operations are already successfully
used for several years as bricks to build houses and also schools
(UK) or cultural centres (Spain, project Jean Nouvel). Containers
have some features of the raw material: they can be exploited
especially in ports, or on the major lines of surface container
transport (important stations, cities) and practically represent
an inexhaustible resource (a large number of such containers
are annually abandoned). They also have some not inconsiderable
advantages: self-supporting capacity and storage, modularity close
to a normal room. There are no limits regarding the inventiveness
of (re) architecture. Abandoned cranes on construction sites in
downtown Bucharest were proposed by a participant in the contest
Architecture and poverty eradication (1999) as (self) supporting
structures for shelter. Their section permits a special use, though
perhaps the sustainability of these cranes that were kept outdoors
for fifteen years should be viewed with caution.
Sometimes a more or less innocent efficiency regards the dismantling
of abandoned buildings (one of the most common sights of Bucharest
in the nineties, and one of the favourite sources of brick for
new residential architecture from the same period9, in terms of
aberrant prices of the building materials). A forefront architect
of contemporary architecture, Eduardo Souto Moura, built the house
in Porto Boavista Avenue with stone taken from a dilapidated
convent school and a ruin in the area known as the Sleeping
Beauty (Souto Moura, 1997, 63).
There exists in (re)architecture (the term, highly expressive,
was imposed as a title of a book regarding conversion, written
by erban Cantacuzino) a highly contemporary element, that can
be added to sustainable development, which coexists with an
archaic one, evergreen. The terminal stage of architecture is
often regarded as a new opportunity for another. A city or a
building can serve as a site (even overhung, so not only as a
foundation area, but also as distribution of material in space,
that can serve as shelter, as pre-existing walls, as in church
baths in Rome) for a new foundation (usually post-catastrophic),
as extraction career for reusable materials for another settlement
or edifice. Housing in Theatre of Marcellus in Rome, the components
of the church from Densu, obviously recycled, or the columns of
St. Sophia in Constantinople are standard examples. A photo from
the Romanian Peasant Museum in Bucharest best illustrates this
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process. It accompanies the subject exposed and demonstrates its

origin. The exposed object is an altar table from a village church.
Extracted from the soil and rotated, it proves to be in the
photo a substantial portion of a Roman monument. Maybe for the
last examples above and so many others, recycling is also about
some kind of triumphalism of the former opponents cannibal
engrossing approach (especially when it comes to a temple consuming
or occupying another temple). Consuming the other, the defeated
one, subsuming it in the triumphal chariot and its decline into
an ontological status before building (for example exploitable
career) are all contained in such gestures. We should not see the
term cannibalism here with the negative weight that the Oriental
civilization had invested it with when they discovered it (or
they thought they did) at the colonized primitives. Consuming the
other also results in assuming his role into a new configuration
of matter. Deliberate reuse implies also an assumption detailed
again of the old meaning. Consuming the old temple might also
encompass an eagerness to venerate the new temple. The reuse of
the basilica requires a certain kind of ritual and majesty to the
church legality. This is how I see, for example, the episode of the
shrine deposit with the tablets of the law in the Holy of Holies
of the Temple in Jerusalem. Due to the spatial taboo, they were
thus swallowed by the new temple in order to invest venerability
in it again and again. The object that has disappeared by means
of consumption, mounts by embedding the new stance, represents a
bail, serves as a pledge and, melted into a new configuration,
is deposited as a significant sediment, choir or as the background
for further exposure. The previous serves as witness and guarantor
of the new.
There is nothing triumphal in the spatial redistribution of the
relics of the one who defeated himself: here, the issue is about
the buildings that are relics of modernity, especially those of
the industry; this should not prevent creative use of any natural
or artificial building material, new or recycled, whatever it was
its previous function. We provide entire quarries of such
material, as the project from Clrai demonstrated in a way that
I do not hesitate to name with nostalgia, as given its exile
of the city - remarkable. The only concern is the use of handy
materials, in order to emphasize the naturalness of gesture and the
local resources; the materials must not be brought from anywhere
a precious, neat gesture in order to be significant by themselves
and by their strange location in an improper place. For example,
it is self-evident to use handy materials like trodden stone in
Constanta, according to the purpose, and in Saint Andrew, clays and
containers, in order to convert the ports and the useless silos,
to creatively use cranes for the future houses structures. I would
certainly do the same in Tulcea, adding swamp materials, maybe
building on the water domestic reeds of floating pontoons. But
for sure I would not bring concrete in my home state (Dorobanu,
Tulcea district) as long as there, everywhere you look you can see
clay and chalk, oaks and not far away, acacia and the chalk
quarry is also a source of lime. These are materials at hand,
materials the old houses and churches have been made of. This was
until the 1980s, when a prefabricated block of flats appeared, and
after the 1990s, when new houses emerged, and a church, all big,
plastered, coated with zinc, maybe a sign of a doubtful prosperity,
or the local priests faithful desire in the household meaning of
the term. Probably I would not bring containers for a home in the
Delta, although there are many ports nearby, but I do not see what
would prevent me from recycling barges carcasses and pontoons.
THE GUEST-MATERIAL
Well, as a reply, ones will say that oaks beaten in the mud of
cosmopolitan and eclectic foundations of houses in Sulina are
not exactly belonging to the place, being brought from great
distances. And yet, they certainly become more handy (when you
should choose between natural materials that are not in the site
anyway) than the communist concrete. There are circumstances
when the use of a strange material in the given situation
of the site, even with the effort of bringing it, or through
the intrinsic preciousness, is likely to invest with meaning the
object this material will be designed to. The wood for the Temple
in Jerusalem was brought from Lebanon and not without effort. Of
course, precious materials were retained to describe absolute
greatness, and also the strangeness at all architectural of
heavenly Jerusalem, where are they are a part of the foundations
and walls. Sometimes, bringing a material from a long distance is
the sign of snobbery and, depending on the circumstances of use,
of bad taste10. In contemporary architecture (but especially in the
interior architecture and furniture) there are found circumstances
where the guest material is used alone or in conjunction with a
handy, indigenous one. When we look at the combination of bamboo and
bronze, used by Francine Houben (Mecanoo), we are rather shocked
by the difference in durability between the two materials, than by
the fact that bamboo is an exotic material, despite the fact that
Ikea blindly turned it into a common one. The guest materials
should remain what they are, namely precious details, caught in
the rig of the handy ones. Therefore, by their very parsimony of
use, they draw attention once again to the familiarity of the handy
materials.
NOTES
1
See reference in my comment on this text : http://e-lib.rss.cz
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Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, a community of American shakers shows us

some religious precepts transferred to architecture: separation by gender
interiors (hence the separate stairways for men as for women), an incredible
austerity, but not without an aesthetic extensive use of the materials at
hand, wood and stone, a remarkable dexterity in handicraft processing wood
furniture, the maximum interior efficiency.
The fact that the subject is a current one is proven by its

condemnation in cyberspace, with all the consequences, see Neil Leach,
David Turnbull and Chris Williams. Digital Techtonics (London: Academy
Editions, 2004), a resume of a similar seminar in Bath, 2002.
4
Ctlin Berescu, Emergency Architecture ... ergo ... The theme

that we proposed was that of a house to use for families in need: either
a family of modest means, or a family of refugees. In technical terms
they are called social housing - for those who can not afford to pay rent
on the open market - or emergency housing - for victims of disasters and
refugees. Wishing to test a project that may be reproduced on a large
scale, I have followed the rules established by law regarding livable
dwelling area in the first version of the project. The house created is
less of a classic house, rather a building that will serve the museum
and foundation for a variety of events. We imposed two commandments:
that it should be cheap, the cheapest possible, and modulated. About
investment value (in its final stage it should not exceed EUR 10,000 if
executed by the user) it can be said with certainty that it may decrease
impressively if the product is industrialized and made in the production
conditions and construction materials in Romania. We can say even more
about Modulation: working with standardized elements lead to uniformity
even with combinations of modules. Re-encountering the same type of space,
the same proportion is not likely to provide an emotional bond that is
created when the ones that live there shape their own space. Therefore we
chose a small module, easily manipulated and poor in terms of typology,
whose industrialization can be replaced without loss by the semiskilled
labour of the beneficiary. Low structural constraints and the ability to
break the outer layer, the cover of space, repeatedly, often leaves
room for adaptation of the shape of the building depending on the site,
creativity, budget, execution time etc. The resulted constructive module
is based on the chosen finishing and mediates between standard gypsum
board, insulation board and standard size timber, the most common and
the cheapest possible. The sheets of plasterboard are not wasted because
you only need cuts across the width of the plate. The same happens with
insulation, it is even possible to realize a version where all the wood
that makes up the skeleton has the same length. It is the result of an
effort to use minimal technology (low-tech would involve aesthetics and
these buildings are free of aesthetics). You can build the whole house
with a hand saw, a drill and a hammer. Apart from a few steps and some
joints of the upper level modules, all cuts are at right angles. All
materials used have dimensions chosen so as to fit in a Dacia utility
vehicle. We can thus imagine that a group of 100 volunteers may produce in
makeshift locations in various places modules for 100 houses that they can
carry and assemble on a disaster site in a maximum of 100 days period.
It is not about an architecture exercise in all that weve done or a very
rigorous test of economic efficiency but the testing of the formula of
work marked by honesty. Honesty is the one that led us in such a program.
Equally, it should be manifest when choosing materials, techniques and
resources. More competent and less fortunate people tell us that you can
not build with less than 220 euro / sqm in Romania today. If, nevertheless
..., Ctlin Berescu, Arhitectura de Urgen. in Ianus, 2002.

5
Augustin Ioan, Arhitectur pentru Sraci: One of the most

serious problems of contemporary Romanian society is lack of preoccupation
for building social housing in the true sense, meaning, for those
community assisted be it as large/national or rather local. Moreover, in
a country threatened by destructive earthquakes, there is no concern for
research in the emergency housing domain. This is why, from time to time,
every cataclysmic phenomenon takes mayors and governors by surprise, and
their response is always deplorable: long lasting, expensive, useless and,
not to mention, hideous dwellings are being built to those dealing with a
calamity. When it should be a strategic concern of all responsible public
administration, it ends up being solved as a bargain, meagre and lacking
an overall perspective. Does it really need an earthquake as large as that
in Turkey and Greece in order to realise why such a research is needed?
Here you are, we did it, the HAR Foundation. In fact, its not that much:
a pilot meant for showing that one can honestly build for those truly
suffering, not only extremely decent dwellings but houses of worship as
well, that hopeless souls, coping with poverty or trauma, can hang on to.
These moments do not only require forests of emergency houses, as those
in the mentioned above countries, struck by similar catastrophes, but
also aggregation points for the small communities ()We are not living in
times of generosity or Christian devotion (or at least social-democratic
times). For now, wolves and bold eagles will be working, for as long as
there is something to catch or to phagocyte in this country. And when
cataclysm after cataclysm will come and those holly places will come in
need, we want everybody to know that we did not tarry when we had to work,
as the others did, that we did not design houses for the newly enriched
when those living under the poverty line were struggling with ineffable
conditions, that we did not partake to the prevailing go-by, be it left
oriented or right, Augustin Ioan, Arhitectur pentru Sraci in Ianus,
2002.
For details on Paris 1937, see Augustin Ioan, Cellalt Modernist

(Bucharest: IAIM, 1995)
7
Die hohen Materialkosten der Konstruktion aus massiven, 52

cm starken Kalksteinblcken wurden kompensiert durch die einfache
Struktur des archaischen Gebudes und den schnellen Bauablauf. Die
groe Speichermasse der Konstruktion ist in der Lage, die fr den Wein
problematischen Temperaturschwankungen auszugleichen., http://www.
archinform.net/projekte/8538.html
8
For more works on the same subject, see Andrea Oppenheimer Dean
and Timothy Hursley. Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture
of Decency (New York: Architectural Press, 2002); Samuel Mockbee, David
Moos and Gail Trechsel. Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio: Community
Architecture (Birmingham: Birmingham Museum of Art, 2003).
9
As well, I used perfectly preserved brick, still bearing just

as proud and testamentary - its interwar manufacturers stamp. I recycled
it from a previous/neighbouring demolition by using it likewise, for a
dwelling, because it was free and, obviously, it was superior to the
available brick, divided by quarter, that was passing as new.
10
The teak or ebony floors of some houses of the new wealthy people
in Bucharest, the red wood used in the Bancorex Centre (now the COR) from
103
Augustin Ioan
Izvorani by arh.Constantin Ciurea - all show the mere possession of

goods in excess, without meaningfully investing in the building (or at
least not in the direction desired by authors and customers). For what
purpose, other than a hilarious one, can we speak of Bancorex, which had
the training centre in red wood, but not the resources to survive as an
institution long after the work was finished?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berescu, Ctlin. Arhitectura de Urgen. Ianus, 2002.
Blaser, Werner. Eduardo Souto de Moura: Stein Element Stone. Basel:
Birkhauser, 2003.
Dean, Andrea Oppenheimer and Timothy Hursley. Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee
and an Architecture of Decency. New York: Architectural Press,
2002.
Eliade, Mircea. Journal II, 1957-1969. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1973.
Ioan, Augustin. Cellalt Modernist. Bucharest: IAIM, 1995.
. Arhitectur pentru Sraci. Ianus, 2002.
Leach, Neil, David Turnbull and Chris Williams. Digital Techtonics.
London: Academy Editions, 2004.
Mockbee, Samuel, David Moos and Gail Trechsel. Samuel Mockbee and the
Rural Studio: Community Architecture. Birmingham: Birmingham
Museum of Art, 2003.
Newsweek. October 27, 2003.
105
Vintil
Mihilescu
Licentiate and PhD
THE NEW VERNACULAR from
the University
of Bucharest, I am at
present professor of
anthropology at the National School of Political
Studies and Administration in Bucharest, head
of the Department of Sociology and director of
the Doctoral School on Roma policies. I have
conducted personal and collective fieldworks
in rural and urban settings in Romania for more
then 30 years, and have been involved as project
manager in 16 national and international research
projects. I have been visiting professor at the
universities of: Provence, Lyon II, Montpellier,
Bordeaux, EHESS (France), Neuchtel (Suisse),
Humboldt (Germany), Pecs (Hungary), UQAM
(Canada), Perugia (Italy); senior fellow of Center
for Advanced Studies (Sofia), visiting fellow at
Institut fr die Wiessenschaften von Menschen
(Vienna) and Max Planck Institute for Anthropology
(Hale). At present I am editing a volume on Roma
Ethnographies, the first of this kind in Romania.
THE NEW VERNACULAR
Vintil Mihilescu
trans. Alecsandru Vasiliu
Beyond the historical or doctrinaire disputes, the most useful

operational definition of the vernacular is still, more or less,
that privative one of an architecture without architects, stated
by Bernard Rudofsky. Historically speaking, in this category
of architecture without a pedigree fall edifices that showed
themselves to the modern urban dweller in different complementary
privative forms: non-modern (meaning archaic or traditional), nonurban (meaning, usually, from the country-side), more or less
concluded (thus belonging more to the past than present), usually
unelaborated, and, as others added, without a specific concern
towards aesthetics. All give away a common evolutionist reference
which ideologically separates the individualist and rational
modernity from a traditional, anonymous, elementary, one might
say archaic pre-modernity. More recently this type of structural
dichotomy (Upton, 1993), and also, those retrospective visions
that exile the vernacular in a distant or not so distant past
as Vellinga stated (2007) were given up and have to be renounced
107
Vintil Mihilescu
entirely. Both field observation and the history of architecture

show us that vernacular and professional architecture can coexist and blend. Moreover, the traditional was often a mean of
promoting modernization, as Carmen Popescu (2004) exemplifies with
the neo-Romanian style. Complementary, one must avoid passing
a judgment that often attributes authentic housing to the
vernacular by erasing or neglecting the initiatives, the changes,
the evolutions as being unrepresentative deviations. From the
communist, urban balcony extension system to the pride houses of
the post-communist rural environment, the vernacular is very much
at its home no matter the place. More so, it infiltrates even in
the private dwellings designed by architects, which pass through
unpredictable metamorphoses under the pressure of rambunctious
masters of the house. So one might reach the other extreme, in
which the vernacular is ubiquitous. It is, approximately, what
Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach suggested in the introduction
to an encyclopedia dedicated to the vernacular, namely a matter
of degree, of measure, in which an artificial set represents its
inhabitants (Upton, Vlach, 1986). But what kind of human edifice
does not represent, at least to some extent, its inhabitants? a
number of critics replied.
This problem seems no longer to be of any interest in Romania,
with the exception of a few conservation projects. More so,
insofar as the research area in Romania is concerned, this subject
is almost inexistent notices Andrei erbnescu (2011) in an
excellent doctorate thesis dedicated to the theme. On the contrary,
it remains a topic for human geography and seems to attract more
and more the attention of anthropology, which starts to turn
back towards the village on the detoured paths of migration and
tourism and pay increasingly more attention to material culture.
A better and more structured collaboration between architects/
city planners on one hand and anthropologists/ sociologists and
geographers on the other would be more than useful in trying to
identify and analyze not only the locative structures, but the
house as a process, in and through which the space of habitation
permanently interacts with the space inhabited by the concrete
and particular social subjects that (re)configure both the lived
space of the dwelling in particular as well as its surroundings.
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE HOUSE
The classic work of Amos Rapoport (architect converted to
anthropology), House form and culture, published in 1969 and
dedicated entirely to the popular, vernacular, anonymous in a
word - ordinary house, passed as a pioneer book. Leaving behind
all the descriptions, typologies and classifications, rendering
relative all determinisms one by one (be they ecological, technical,
economic, social etc.), Rapoport reaches the conclusion that the
shape of the house is, more than anything else, cultural an idea,
THE NEW VERNACULAR
a forma mentis: the determinist point of point of view fails to

take into account the idea of the house; the simple fact that one
is capable of doing something does not mean that he will do it.
Briefly, with a given climate, a given possibility to acquire
certain materials, the given means of certain technical skills,
the idea that accounts for the final form of the habitat and that
models the spaces and relations between them is the vision of
a people about ideal life. For Rapoport, the house is such an
institution and not only a simple (or complex) construction whose
passive purpose is that of providing shelter, but with an active
purpose of creating the environment that is most adapted for the
lifestyle of a people in other words, a social space unit. Thus,
beyond need, the house is also a choice of Man, one that fully
represents him.
In a subsequent synthesis published in 1994, Rapoport goes further,
developing the complex relations between space, environment,
construction, cultural and private representations of space etc.
The central concept which he proposes is that of setting, inspired
both from Barkers notion of behavior setting and Goffmans role
setting. A setting is, in this case, a relational concept that
combines one environment with a system of activities, in which the
environment and the activities are bound together through rules
referring to what is adequate and expected to happen in that
setting. In such a setting, its physical elements act as mnemonic
signs, reminding actors what is acceptable and what is not in that
space. Settings form systems, organized in space in terms of
boundaries, surroundings, etc. as well as in time, as a sequential
order of activities. Settings cover all space from rooms or parts
of them to the entire cultural landscape in its whole. When
speaking about an expansion of Rapoports original view of home it
is essential that the concept of setting has in view the way space
is organized, represented and used and not (just) its material built
or visible expressions. A boulevard in the United States and one in
India, for example, might be identically built but their settings
differ, there are different rules that bind the streetscape and
the activities considered proper for this environment. In the same
way, similar dwellings from two different cultures, even if they
have identical forms, can be organized in extremely different
settings and thus their cultural meaning will be different. More
so, even sharing the same settings, a lived space can differ from
another through the succession of different settings at one time
or another, the sets of activities taking place in different
moments in time or in another order. Furthermore, there can be very
little or simple the built environment can be an extremely reduced
and/or simple one, as it is the case of Australian aborigines or
of the inhabitants of the Land of Fire, who organize the space in
a conceptual manner, but building very little. If all these are
not taken into account, the trans-cultural comparison of buildings
can be profoundly mystifying concludes Rapoport.
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Vintil Mihilescu
Using the distinctions of the Romanian vocabulary we could

reformulate this universe of the habitat in the terms belonging to
the relationship between loc (place), locuin (house) and locuire
(housing). Through loc, the house is inscribed in the Universe;
through housing it is inscribed in the Human being; locuina is
integrated in Society and is, in a manner of speaking, the
society itself.
Place has nothing to do with the neutrality and homogeneity of
the Newtonian space. In their way, all peasants know this as they
assume their land. I heard of space a peasant living in
Poiana Mrului answered, a while ago, to Ernest Berneas educated
enquires but what is that, space? In books they call it space,
but we know it as place; thats how its called. Ok, then what
is place (loc)? Bernea went on. You ask: what is a place? A
place is a world and the world is what God gave us. The man comes,
finds things and orders them to fit his measure. And another one
adds: where there is no thing, theres no place; what kind of
place is that without a thing!? Place comes at the same time as
the thing does.1
Thus the house has its place just like anything else. In the
yard of the house everything grows better. The place of the
house is a good place, it is a safe place; anything you plant,
it grows, anything you do becomes beautiful. Thats just the way
it goes, it comes out of the ancestors spirits2. In these few
words some of the essential characteristics of place are included:
first of all, its distinctive quality of being a good place, its
ability to provide shelter, a safe place, its fertility, its
establishment through the aid of the ancestors, and at last,
but not least, its axiological essence that is tributary to the
concept of kalokagathon: everything grows better, anything you do
is beautiful. A peasant woman, also from Poiana Mrului, adds: the
village is, just like that, in the middle of the world; everywhere
you look, it is the world. We say that here is the axis of the
earth and sky; everything in the world has an order of its own and
this is the order3. We can add to the above-mentioned shortlist
the centrality of place as another characteristic, precisely the
centrality of the settlement of man in a place, so dear to Mircea
Eliade. Through place, the house is anthropically placed in the
world, in a fertile correspondence with it or it disappears, it
is marginalized and ostracized: he died of block of flats!...4
- as a few locals from Snagov had explained to me in the early
90s speaking about their fellow villagers that died after being
forcedly moved into new apartment buildings.
On the other side, housing enlivens the house; it adds soul to
it changing it in its very essence and in its deep meaning.
THE NEW VERNACULAR
Complementary, through housing we are being lived and we

identify ourselves with our house that becomes a home, and we
gain a purpose, a meaning. Not all this happens consciously as
representations, feelings or memories: the body also takes part in
the housing process; the house is thus em-bodied in what we become
by embodying it. Through housing the house is not just a reverie
of the soul, but a placement of the body, a network of routes and a
palimpsest of sensations. Bachelard admits this even though he is
less interested in bodily reveries: beyond memories, the home is
physically inscribed in our being. It is a set of organic habits.
But further on, Bachelard considers that the term habit is too
overused to speak about this passionate bond of our body that does
not forget the unforgettable home.
In Romanian, the richest and most appropriate term to explain
housing is a ngriji (to tend). Adam Drazin states this as
detailed and convincingly as possible as he went on the trail
of the moth hunt in a communist apartment in Suceava in order
to emphasize the entire universe of worries and concerns of the
women of the house and of the entire family related to the
imperative need to tend over the house. From moths he went on to
carpets then to polished furniture, then to decorative knick-knack
and trinket cases, in the end going out of the flat to the public
space, perceived as bad because it is unkempt.
Tending, then, becomes the cultural way of housing which is the
true appropriation of the house. It is only through tending or
more generally, through housing- that the house really becomes a
house, meaning home, my house, the house in which I am myself.
Housing seems to have its own central axis tended, unkempt
through which inhabited space is em-bodied and ordered as lived
space.
I will not ask myself where housing starts. The need for housing
is, I believe, universal and it precedes and exceeds the house. A
cave or a hole of good-will can be inhabited, tended, adopted.
Even more so, a lived space is given by society and not by nature.
I take into account the communist flats, so uniform on the outside
but never the same on the inside: the settings of each block, of
each apartment in each block, if not that of every room in each
apartment, could have been different Rapoport would have probably
said. A place imposed upon everyone, an ideological image of the
totalitarian regime, the block of flats was and still is lived
differently by each person, its tending being extended to material
interventions: from replacing and immediately personalizing the
entrance door, something that almost all families used to do, to
the balconies, walls, niches that reconfigured this given space;
outside, there were modifications of the stairwell, the entrances
to the block of flats and particularly to the spaces in between
them (Figure 1). A spontaneous vernacular undermined, consciously
or not, the oeuvre of the communist city planner. The interior
111
Vintil Mihilescu
decorations and furnishing followed. No object was truly innocent

or just functional. Sometimes an object could change function, as
in the case of Lux or Rexona soaps placed among the laundry in
the closets so that they smell nice or laid out in the glass
case as a sign of status. Housing can follow fashion trends and
markets but it is reserved when it comes to ideologies. Sometimes
to architects as well
Between place and housing, the house is no longer a built space,
somewhat given and stable neither is it just a lived space
(Lefebvre, 2000) but it is a process of multiple formings and
transformings through domestic activities. The house is still only
in the typologies used by ethnographers or, maybe, architects
or when it becomes a museum item. Also, every house continues to
be a micro-cosmos, Daniel Miller argues: some street in London
must be viewed as fieldwork and granted the same respect as
New Guinea: a collection of societies, every one of them having
to be respected as a cosmological order by itself. As we have
traditionally learned by studying different societies, we could
learn from the diversity of these microuniverses. But, for this
we must respect their authenticity and not disregard them as being
superficial (Miller, 2008).
We must not fall in the symbolic pitfall either, neglecting the
fact that any house satisfies, more than anything else, a function
of shelter, and recently, of comfort. It is a utilitarian space,
bound to norms and fashion trends which are also utilitarian.
Between axiological and functional, modernity chose more of the
latter, as Augustin Ioan reminds us. Crossed by consumerism, the
house, that has been commodified, still keeps its trait of complete
social object, only this time, mostly through its secondary game
of infinite choices and arrangements of the housing process.
THE POPULAR HOUSE IN COMMUNISM
The elements of modernization of the Romanian village appear
initially out of administrative purposes of the empires, for
example the famous tragere la linie (dragging to the line) in the
times of Maria Thereza, but gain a more structured nature only at
the end of the 19th century. The relative wellbeing that followed
the successive agrarian reforms opens the gates to the cities
for the peasants: The villages grew bigger. A relatively large
number of better houses were erected everywhere. The peasants
started to become good clients of the cities: furniture, clothing,
were brought to the countryside. An outburst of civilization was
manifesting itself. Although, most time inappropriate, it proved a
change of the economic situation5. (Garoflid, 1938)
After the Second World War and the overcoming of its immediate
consequences, the change takes a new course and speeds up its pace.
THE NEW VERNACULAR
Primarily the coerced co-operativization of the land doubled by the

attraction towards industrialization and rapid urbanization lead
to the coveted break up and exodus of the peasantry. The effects
are multiple and profound. Consequently the households domestic
unity fragments, often generating a diffused household with part
of the family remaining in the village while the other settles
in town. Between the two parts exchange of goods and services
that allow an evenly balanced redistribution of resources within
these familial networks, continued and even expanded. (Mihilescu
i Nicolau, 1995; Mihilescu, 2000). Therefore the house must
answer to different social and economic needs. As David Kideckel
notes, the locals in ara Fgraului develop different household
strategies that are visible in their houses as well: imposing
households, mobile households, integrated households, transitory
or marginal household (Kideckel, 2007). To put it short, there
were centripetal strategies that reconfigured and strengthened
the household and centrifugal strategies directed mostly toward
different social and symbolic spaces than those offered by the natal
village community; and there were, of course, cases of a failure of
the household. All in all, although it intended a liquidation of
the peasant class following the orthodox Leninist Stalinist path,
the communist regime ended up by paradoxically strengthening sui
generis the households and their domestic networks.
Finally (and yet again paradoxically), the extreme measures
adopted by the Party after 1970 regarding the rural environment,
relatively and selectively strengthen, yet again, the symbolical
importance of the household, and in particular that of the house.
Following the National Conference of the Romanian Communist Party
in 1972 and the 9th Congress in 1974, the no. 58/1974 law begins the
vast program of systematization. Although it did not have the
expected effect, especially in the villages, forcing the Party to
keep undertaking newer measures until its fall in 1989 (Mihilescu
et al, 1993), the systematization plan marked the rural habitat
mostly through the compulsory building of houses with two storeys,
according to standardized plans imposed on the locals by the
urbanism departments of the town halls.
These were not something necessarily new everywhere. In Oltenia,
for example, the villagers houses were often two-storey high due
to the influence of the local magnates houses (cule boiereti)
(Stahl, 1964). On the other hand, the replacement of wood with
brick, that started in the late 19th century mostly in the areas of
German influence, spread and made possible the construction there
where there were the means of houses with two storeys (idem.).
More so, the erecting of a house and, maybe, its decoration with
the new available materials was also proof of a good master of the
house and a reason for pride: So, the house, the foundation as
you call it, the basis, is built of cement, concrete, brick and the
roof is on a metallic framework and covered with metal sheets. So
113
Vintil Mihilescu
it is not I didnt make it out of materials, adobe or things like

that I made a sturdy building; I said it should be sturdy6 (apud.
Coro, 2000). On the other hand the law was often eluded: many
people dont respect and start building and say: forget about
it, Ill do the design!7. And the house was built by a master
artisan who knows his craft, his brick laying all the moves ()
educated people, not like that8 not with the architect: well, he
wasnt really involved in this, he just showed us the plans, he made
the designs, the building plans that we had, we worked according
to it with some skilful workers that knew their job9 (apud. Coro,
op. cit.). To put it short, although devastating in the cities, in
the villages the systematization law only managed to keep people
under a constant threat without profoundly affecting the texture
of the rural settlements. On the other hand, it permitted and
even stimulated in a more informal rather than official manner the
development of a new rural architecture, that is no longer that of
the peasants but one diffusely popular (Petrescu, 1975). The
Romanian village enters socialist modernity (Figure 2).
THE POST-SOCIALIST PRIDE HOUSES
In the countryside the fall of communism meant, primarily the
(chaotic) de-co-operativization and a come-back of the private
property over the land (sufficient in most cases only for the
traditional sustenance) and secondarily for the de-industrialization
that rapidly created the first wave of unemployment and it overturned
for the first time in Romanias modern history, after 1996, the
migration flux between rural and urban settlements. For teens in
rural environment that lacked education, were badly taken on staff
and devalued, emigration became the only solution to gain access to
the benefits of the consumerist society in which they were supposed
and in which they desired to live and to define themselves.
Relatively stable after 2000, the migration fluxes lead to a peak of
approximately 2.8 million Romanians abroad in 2008 more than one
quarter of the countrys active population. The expats generated a
total volume of remittances of 6.307 billion euros (Sandu, 2010),
placing Romania on the 7th place worldwide (World Bank, 2007). All
the polls indicate the fact that a great majority (90%) of the
total sum was invested in the household: in the house, consumer
goods and maintenance. To that, over two thirds of all internal
loans should be added as they were used for goods of long term use
(55.6%) or to buy a house (11.4%)10.
Taking all these in to account the material and symbolic investment
in the household becomes a pursuit with the value of a total social
phenomenon that changes profoundly the look and meaning of the
village11. Of course that you as an owner it is one thing to own
a 4X4 Mercedes and another to own a Trabant! It is the same with
this. It is one thing to have a proper house, like a Mercedes, and
another to have a house out of adobe or half-timbered house or
THE NEW VERNACULAR
other things12. (I. B., 48, apud Coro, op. cit.)

In the early 90 the villagers would only try to tune their old
Dacias, building how they could some amenities for their old
household. The strategies remained mostly communitarian, relying
on relatives and friends but also on the market: about 20,
25 people came, neighbours, cousins all the people we decided
to call and wanted to help came. Cause we needed hard labour. We
paid money to some of them; some had to come because we had helped
them too. We also gave money to some of them 13(A. P., 49, apud
Coro, op. cit.). As the wave of emigration spreads, more and
more dream only of a Mercedes. Thus appears the phenomenon of the
pride houses that replaces the old houses with completely new
ones, their main purpose being that of showing off social success.
They were supposed to be, most of all, visible: So, he wanted
something, to be, how should I say to strike the eye (L.R.,
25). Thus the exterior and the faade were essential: People
should see how nice it is, cause inside not anyone may come. So,
the faade should be nice, the back the world should see it!
(E.I., 40). The aim was foremost the artistic appearance and not
utility or functionality: no but... it gives it a nice look if
he has something nicer, it gives it a look () For the aesthetic,
not for use!(I.P., 42). This (relative) ignorance towards the
functional is avenged by frequent constructive dysfunctions about
which the inhabitants often complain (fungal growths because of
badly installed thermal insulation is just one of these problems).
More so, these houses oftentimes remained either uninhabited or
under used: A man builds 3, 4, 10 rooms or builds the house and
keeps it there like a museum and he builds himself another 2 or 3
rooms and lives in those (D.D. 66). It was like this that in Oa
started what was explicitly called house fight (lupta n ci)
(Moisa, 2010): This ambition one more than the other build more
beautiful house, a more beautiful fence and as closest to the
street as possible (D.D. 66); there was an ambition, mostly the
wifes, cause her brothers also got a big house in the valley.
() I want to build a slightly bigger house than him! It is a
family ambition, so to say. (I.P. 42). On the other hand, a pride
house was always a proof of worthiness in the village: Cause
one doesnt have a good financial situation, he doesnt make a
good impression and you cant expect something good out of him.
Or, one that has a nice house, and so a nice household, you have
a different impression about him. And, you always expect though
something good. I mean a man you can talk to. A different kind of
man than the other (P.B. 39). Not in the least, once started,
this phenomenon acts with tremendous pressure on the parents that
feel obliged to build for each child one house, even though
the children have already settled abroad. So it becomes harder
and harder to keep away, to avoid this wave of modernization
that constitutes the new identity card for the master of the
house. Thus the new buildings and domestic amenities follow an
epidemiological model extending rapidly in the surroundings of
115
Vintil Mihilescu
different, more or less arbitrary, sources. The spreading areas

of certain decorative elements, fences, gates etc. and, with a
certain approximation, the centre can be, in this way, spatially
observed and identified. One can even encounter villages with a
large number of pride houses while a few kilometres apart in
other villages the phenomenon is scarcely present or inexistent.
For a while, in some cases, the pride house keeps its ties
with the household and its outbuildings. Annexes are also built,
sometimes smaller, other times proud as well. Usually they end
up becoming garages or outbuildings as well or they end up being
inhabited. The household chores hide more and more towards the
back of the building and are left to the elders; while the faade
is exposed, visible and aggressive, the back of the house is hidden
to the beholder Daniela Moisa states. As you go along towards
the back, you go back in time because it is not only a material
pathway but a generational one as well. With the pride house
the interest towards the domestic animals lessens and that for
flowers grows: We dont have animals like cattle, cows, horses or
no () I dont like it; I like to work in the countryside, but I
dont like Im sure of it too much dirt. I have here a piece of
town (E.I., 40, Pucheni).
What all these houses have in common is excess: in terms of volume,
rooms, visibility, influences (Figure 3). They are experiments of
modernity subject to randomness and opportunities. Most of them
are built by village craftsmen and some are literally housesby-phone, erected through long distance calls between the owner,
who is in Italy, and the local craftsmen. Usually there is no
initial plan and if there is one it can be modified anytime during
the build. How many rooms do you have here? I asked once one
of these owners. I dont know, count them he replied. Another
gave us the exact number of rooms but he added : for the time
being, cause I want to change some things!14
Socially, the pride houses represent, in an accepted and
ostentatious manner, a break from the peasant local character
and past (Figure 4): practically the household disappears to make
way for a new modern type of housing and contemporary to the wide
world to which the locals finally have access. Productive labour
is step by step removed from the domestic space, carrying out the
separation between enterprise and household which Max Weber
considered a structural condition of modern capitalism (Weber,
1993). After centuries in which it was the object of different
forms of top-down modernization, the rural inhabitant has, for
the first time, the opportunity to be or at least to consider
himself the subject of modernization. The house is the means of
this emancipation and not its purpose: a means of searching for a
social position and a purpose of much more than mere shelter. The
house is thus separated from place and estranged from housing
THE NEW VERNACULAR
The rustic, a come-back of the rural?

The rustic is a recent phenomenon in the Romanian rural
environment. It is, not so much an architectural style, as it is
a statement about taste, an identity marker: We wanted to make
something nice! 15 state most of the subjects we interviewed on
this matter. There is not, at least at this time, a type of house
that could be called rustic, but there are series of elements that
follow recent buildings or that are tiled both literally and
figuratively - on the old ones to differentiate the owners through an
esthetical effect sui generis. Analysing, for example, the choices
the subjects made on a questionnaire regarding housing, the option
for a rustic house came along with different other elements that
have nothing in common with such a style: Lindab metal roof sheets
or ceramic tiles (over two thirds of the interviewees, less than
10% choosing wood), BCA bricks (over one third, and only about a
quarter choosing wood), double glazed windows with PVC frame, and
so on. One could speak about a rustification in different degrees
and manners, using more or less a common repertoire available on
the market and the market did not lag behind in improving its
rustic offer, including here the emergence of village workshops
that build pavilions, gazebos, swings, wooden chairs and wooden
tables, etc.
During communism the rustic was only export merchandise,
shipwrecked in souvenir shops and restaurants such as ura
Dacilor and others similar to it, designed for foreign tourists
and that staged a local and exotic rurality. After 1989 the
rustic style quickly aligned itself to new trends on the global
market, the offers and commercials of different designers and firms
specialized on this style in Romania being linked with others
that can be found in so many other countries in the world. Bed &
breakfasts and restaurants use more and more a rustic ambiance
that promises an unforgettable experience (Figure 5), that can
be encompassed in that type of economy of experience that Pine
and Gilmore (2010) speak about. Mayors started competing in rustic
urban furniture as well, from simple street amenities to the
largest painted egg in the world created in Suceava (and smaller
ones in Gura Humorului or Snagov)16 (Figure 6). Accentuating either
natural or national, all these discourses have in common the
framing of a rural reference. As in most cases of rusticism
all these are discourses of an urban elite that usually targets
an urban audience that has to be seduced. What differentiates
the relatively recent phenomenon of the rustic house from the
Romanian village is that in this case the rustic becomes a
self-referenced simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1981). Using props and
different sources of inspiration readily available on the market
this rustic is created in the countryside, by peasants so that
they can express themselves and also to be admired by the peasant
neighbours: starting as a reference to some, the rural becomes a
simulation of ones self.
117
Vintil Mihilescu
We will try to illustrate this rustic taste that seems to grasp the
Romanian village through the answers received at a questionnaire
randomly applied to subjects with ages between 20 and 70 in Cacica
and Pucheni in 2009 and 2010.
The spread of rustic elements is still relatively scarce in both
settlements, except for the flower arrangements which can be found
in 58% of the households in Cacica and 50% of the households
in Pucheni. Besides that, the gazebo is present in 5% of the
households in Cacica and 21% of those in Pucheni, the swing in
12% and 24% and different other rustic furnishings in 15% and
20%. On the other hand 43% of the inhabitants of Cacica and 61%
of those living in Pucheni no longer have a cow. The choices seem
to be pretty clearly divided as only 7% and 6% have both a cow
and a swing, and only approximately 1% has all household animals
(horse, cow and pig) and elements of rustification such as the
gazebo or swing. Some express clearly this incompatibility: The
people today dont build chicken coops anymore, they dont want
to be grind down by raising animals. Theyd rather make something
rustic. (woman from Pucheni, apud Cimpoieru, 2010)17.
The attraction towards rustic is much more present. Rustic elements
are considered important in the household as it follows: the flower
arrangements: 82% in Cacica and 77% in Pucheni, the gazebos:
44% and 70%; the swing: 43% and 59%; rustic furniture and other
amenities: 50% and 70%. Garden gnomes no longer represent more
than 27% and 39% of the choices.
The most important element is the house. From this point of view we
presented eight pictures of houses of different sizes and styles,
one being identified as rustic. Asked how they would like their
house to look if they had the means to build any of them, the
rustic one was chosen by 59% in Cacica and 39% in Pucheni.
More important is the fact that the rustic taste seems to be in
full rise, being comparatively more present at respondents under
40 than at those over 40. Complementary, this taste seems to be
more coherent, a fact suggested by the definitely lower dispersion
of answers regarding rustic preferences of the young compared
to the elder. Also, the importance attributed to decoration is
slightly bigger for the younger group. Relatively, the gazebo
which maintains something out of the rural sociability is more
popular for those over 40 while the swing an image symbolizing
the loisir is preferred by those under 40. The flower garden,
although slightly less important for the young, is a strong transgenerational aspiration, especially for the women: The yard I
have an ambition for the yard. I felt I was dying when the cow
passed and ate the flowers, I was dying when I had to take her out
through here, through the garden. Flowers everywhere I have a
lawn-mower, one of those ones that costs a million, I do the lawn,
THE NEW VERNACULAR
and I always clean so that the yard is nice Well, yeah, thats
it, that is our level, thats how we want it to be, to be nice, no
dung and other stuff like that. Its over, thats enough dung!
18
(A.H., 39 Pucheni).
There are a few differences when it comes to the colour of the
faade. After the trend (still persistent) of strong colours, the
taste seems to be oriented towards pastel colours. Almost half
of the people over 40 and three quarters of those under 40 chose
mellow nuances of cream or yellow. The diversity of the fences is
much bigger. Still, a medium tall fence out of stone and wood was
chosen by 43% of the young in Cacica and 52% of those in Pucheni.
Finally, as it was expected, the wood is the star of these
preferences. Many times, in the interviews that were enclosed
in the questionnaire, people felt the need to specify that wood
is a local custom and by using it they return to tradition. The
same discourse justified the use of stone, sometimes used for the
foundation and/or as decoration. More often wood and stone were
only lacquered and applied to the walls for a natural artistic
effect as opposed to the rustic houses designed by architects
for wealthy amateurs, where materials are always unpolished and
massive.
A simulation of the rural, a distinctive esthetization, the rustic
may be, first of all, a comeback home, a search for an authentic
expression of existence here and now, in a local tradition but
also in an embodied modernity: We are in fashion and we look back
towards our old tradition. We copy everything that was in the past.
We have turned back to wood stated a local from Pucheni (apud
Cimpoieru), and a young man from Cacica concluded: the rustic is
modern and traditional at the same time19. Some of our subjects
declared themselves deeply anchored in authenticity, defining
rustic as something more peasant-like, of the kind they used to
do in museums.
This type of discourse, more or less concise, is abundant in the
interviews taken in the two villages, suggesting a sui generis
form of hybridity and globalization. Compared to the pride
house that wanted an ostentatious break from place and past,
the distinctive mark of these houses is exactly the effort to be
symbolically anchored in tradition and modernity, of a noncontradictory synthesis between new and old times, a space that is
both at our place, in the country and anywhere in the civilized
world. The aggressive break with place, local custom and locals
through pride houses stirred, apparently, a form of alienation and
the rustic seems to be a form of finding and recouping identity,
even if a fictive one.
We cannot end without mentioning a paradoxical fact: in the
119
Vintil Mihilescu
majority of cases the rustic house is designed by a specialist.

They are contracted in 75% of the cases for designing the house
and almost two thirds of the cases for execution, relatives and
neighbours participating secondarily. Could the return to local
and traditional be the attribute of the architect? It is hard to
say but we can speak, in this context as well, of the responsibility
of the architect, not only in designing shelter but also in
giving purpose to housing. Statements like those above impose a
series of questions regarding the status of the local, and thus
contextualized arranged space be it landscape, agricultural, rural,
urban - stated Fracoise Choay. In other words, it is legitimate
to ask ourselves if being part of a certain local horizon is not
one of the necessary conditions of the edification of what make us
human.(Choay, 2011)20.
The house is inhabited and through dwelling man tries to find his
place namely a meaning, a purpose. When the house is imposed
upon him, he will try to appropriate it through housing, through
care, changing as much as possible in order to transform it into
his home. When he builds his own house he will experiment the
possibilities of housing before living in it and sometimes
after. In all of these, the vernacular gesture is ever present.
As an intrinsic dimension of the process of housing, it cannot be
removed from architecture or construction because it will always
find its own means of expression in and through housing. Maybe it
shouldnt be localized, placed in certain buildings and excluded
from others. As a type of architecture, it might even be a false
problem.
NOTES
1
Am auzit i eu de spaiu rspundea un localnic din Poiana
Mrului, n urm cu ceva vreme, ntrebrilor culte ale lui Ernest Bernea
- da ce e spaiu? In carte i spune spaiu, da noi tim loc; aa i
zice. Bine, atunci ce-nseamn loc? persevereaz Bernea. Zici, ce-i
un loc? Un loc e lume i lumea e ce-a dat Dumnezeu. Omu vine, le afl i
le rnduiete pe msura lui. i altul precizeaz: Unde nu e lucru, nu-i
loc; ce fel de loc e la fr nimic!? Locu vine odat cu lucru.
2
n bttura casei toate se fac parc mai bine. Locu casei e

loc bun, e loc ferit; orice-ai pune rodete, orice-ai face e frumos. Asta
vine aa din duhu strmoilor
3
Satu e aa n mijlocu lumii; e aa c-n toate prile e tot

lume. Noi aa zicem c aici e osia pmntului i a cerului; toate-n lume
au o rnduial i rnduiala asta e.
4
5
a murit de bloc !...
Satele s-au mrit. Case mai bune n numr destul de mare

s-au ridicat peste tot. ranii ncepuser s devie clieni buni ai
oraelor: mobile, lucruri de mbrcminte, se aduceau la ar. Un avnt
THE NEW VERNACULAR
de civilizare se manifesta. Dei de multe ori nepotrivit, el arta totui

o schimbare a situaiei economice, Garoflid, Constantin. Regimul Agrar
n Romnia. In Enciclopedia Romniei, vol. I, pp. 577-585 (Bucureti:
Imprimeria Naional, 1938).
6
Casa e construit, deci, fundaia cum se spune, temelia, din

ciment, beton, crmid i acoperiul este pe schelet metalic i nvelit
cu tabl. Deci nu este...n-am fcut-o din materiale, din pmnt sau tiu
eu din alte Am fcut o cldire trainic, am zis s fie trainic
7
Mult lume nu respecta i muli se apuca de construcie i zice

las c fac eu proiectul!
8
cunoate meserie, zidrie, cunoate...toate micrile astea ()

oameni citii, nu aa...
9
Pi, el nu, dect ne-a artat planul, ne-a fcut proiectul,

planul care l-am avut n fa i dup el am lucrat cu nite meseriai care
oricum cunotea
10
According to the Rural Barometer, 2007
11
In the last five years, for example, one out of five was involved
in building a house and one out of ten in landscaping work.
12
Bineneles c i tu ca proprietar, una e s fii proprietar de

Mercedes 4X4 i alta e s fii de Trabant! Aa i cu asta. Una e s ai casa
fcut ca lumea, aa, cum arat un Mercedes i alta e s ai o cas n
paiant sau fcut din pmnt, din alea.
13
Au venit 20, 25 de oameni, fie vecini, fie veriori, fie

am considerat noi c i chemm i vrea s ne ajute, au venit. C
nevoie de munc brut. Pe unii i-am pltit cu bani, unii au avut
pentru c la rndul nostru am ajutat i noi, am mai pltit i cu
pe cine
a fost
obligaie
bani...
14
Cte camere avei aici? am ntrebat o dat pe un astfel de

proprietar. Nu tiu, numrai i dumenavoastra... ne-a rspuns acesta.
Altul ne-a dat numrul exact de camere, dar a adugat: deocamdat, c
vreau s mai schimb cte ceva!
15
Am vrut s facem ceva frumos!
16
Realitatea Tv reported that even in the virtual world of Second

Life the first 100% romanian village was created. In this village one can
visit houses in a rustic style and there are a lot of peasant feasts
organized.
17
Lumea nu mai face azi cotee, nu mai vrea s se asupreasc s

creasc animale. Mai degrab face ceva rustic (femeie din Pucheni, apud
Cimpoieru, 2010).
18
Curtea... am o ambiie pe curte. Muream cnd trecea vaca imi mnca florile, muream c trebuia s-o scot pe-aici, pe-aici prin curte.
Flori peste tot... Am cositoare d-aia de-un milion, fac gazon, o cur
mereu ca s fie curtea frumoas... Pi da asta e, sta e nivelu nostru,
aa s fim s fie frumos, nu bligar i astea. Gata, s-a dus cu bligaru!
121
Vintil Mihilescu
(A.H., 39 ani, Pucheni).

19 Sntem n pas cu moda i n urm la veche tradiie. Tot ce a
fost n trecut copiem. Ne-am ntors tot la lemn declar un localnic
din Pucheni (apud Cimpoieru, op. cit.), iar un tnr din Cacica rezum:
rusticul e modern i e tradiional n acelai timp
20
ne impun o serie de ntrebri privind statutul spaiului

amenajat (peisager, agricol, rural, urban) local, deci contextualizat
afirm Franoise Choay. Cu alte cuvinte, este legitim s ne ntrebm
dac apartenena la un orizont local nu este una din condiiile necesare
edificrii a ceea ce ne constituie ca oameni
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Figure 1
THE NEW VERNACULAR
Fugure 2
Fugure 3
125
Vintil Mihilescu
Figure 4
Figure 5
THE NEW VERNACULAR
Figure 6
Figure 7
127
Figure 8
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A R H I P E R A

International Summer School

AN INTRODUCTION TO PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE | Lorin Niculae

TRANSCRIPTIONS | Klaske Havik

CRITICAL DETAIL | Sebastiaan Veldhuisen

LECTURES ON VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE | Alexandru Clin

A FEW THINGS ON ARCHITECTURE FOR THE POOR | Augustin Ioan

FOR A POST-APOCALYPTIC ARCHITECTURE | Augustin Ioan

THE NEW VERNACULAR | Vintil Mihilescu

Lorin Niculae is teacher at the Basics of Architectural

AN INTRODUCTION TO PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE

trans. Silvia Gigoi

What if you cant prove you had a house?

AN INTRODUCTION TO PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE

Vntori, Neam county, 2010

Given this political, social and economic environment, it becomes

Bleti, Ursrie, Prahova county, 2007

A fundamental characteristic of the social housing is that it

AN INTRODUCTION TO PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE

On the other hand, social participatory architecture suggests in

the C.I.A.M. II4 (Arnstein 1969), by the conceptualization of

ARHIPERA concept for an evolutive social house in Sruleti (Clrai county)

AN INTRODUCTION TO PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE

The social house in extreme poverty is a living organism; its birth

role is not impossible as long as the opposition of the parties

Using Saul Alinskys words.

The example provided by Mayor Mazre was taken over in 2012 by

Budgets are always low relating to the issues scale. (authors

The critics of the congress can be found in Giancarlo De Carlos

AN INTRODUCTION TO PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE

. The Placemakers Guide to Building Community. London: Earthscan, 2011.

THE EMERGENCE OF PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE.

trans. Silvia Gigoi

Since its appearance in 1960, starting with Habrakens manifesto

tried to obtain social equality by means of industrialization and

THE EMERGENCE OF PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE. CONTEXT

Modernism. Disappointed by the functional segregation in Housing,

The housing problem explicitly formulated by theorists of social

International interest for social housing appeared in the last years

THE EMERGENCE OF PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE. CONTEXT

emergence of homogeneous or discontinuous settlements in extreme

Jrgen Habermas, Modernity: An Incomplete Project, essay first

CIAM. The Athens Charter, art.22. Modern Architecture - A

THE EMERGENCE OF PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE. CONTEXT

THE METHODOLOGY OF COMMUNITY BUILDING

trans. Silvia Gigoi

Houses are expensive. However, it is

For the presentation of the methodology I will appeal to examples

The scheme of relation

Community building represents a recent concept promoted in

THE METHODOLOGY OF COMMUNITY BUILDING

sustainability. Community building integrates housing, employment,

Selection of the site

Establishing the function

Supervision of the construction

Form and structure

Elimination and replacing

In relation with this traditional structure, in the case of

Establishing the function

Owner + architect + user

Supervision of the construction

Form and structure

Elimination and replacing

We see therefore, that the architects role, far from being