SD) LANDSCAPES OF MOBILITY Culture, Politics and Placemaking Edited by Arijit Sen and Jennifer Johung (MEMPHIS.TN CHICAGO. IL INDIANAPOLIS, IN r NEWARK,NJ FORT WORTH.TX 8 ANCHORAGE, AK PARIS, FRANCE SUBICBAY,PHILUIPINES = * = |Landscapes of Mobility Culture, Politics, and Placemaking Edited by Arijit Sen Associate Professor, Architecture, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee Jennifer Johung Associate Professor, Art History, Buildings-Landscapes- Cultures, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee ASHGATEContents List of Iilustrations List of Tables Notes on Contributors Introduction: Landscapes of Mobility: Culture, Politics, and Placemaking Arijt Sen and Jennifer Johung PARTI OBJECTS 1 Replaceable Skins: Clothing as Mobile Home Jennifer Johung 2 Container Ecology Douglas Hecker 3 Zombie Housing for the Displaced in the Aftermath of Disaster Stephen Verderber 4 Guerrilla Planning: James Rojas’ Urban Planning Initiatives James Rojas PARTI CONTACTS 5 Crossing the Milwaukee River: A Case Study in Mapping Mobility and Class Geographies Sarah Fayen Scarlett 6 _ Re-Inventing the Center: Urban Memory, Political Travel and the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, Romania Andreea Mihalache vil iti xv 2 37 47 73 87 105vi LANDSCAPES OF MOBILITY 7 Mobility and Property: Japanese Americans and African Americans ‘Coming and Going in San Francisco's Japantown Lynne Horiuchi 8 Roads of Joy, Pathways of Anger: Emotional Responses to Landscapes of Mobility Marcus Filippelio. PART Ill FLOWS. 9 Out of Place: Postcolonial Traces of Dynamic Urbanism ‘Anoma Pieris 10 Map, Mother and Militant: Visualizing India in Diaspora u index Arijit Sen Infrastructural Cartography: Drawing the Space of Flows Glare Lyster 133 165 185 207 239 2556 Re-Inventing the Center: Urban Memory, Political Travel and the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, Romania Andreea Mihalache The form in which we think of the past is increasingly memory without borders rather than national history within borders. Andreas Huyssen Begun in 1984 in the aftermath of a demolition campaign that had erased several neighborhoods in the Romanian capital, the House of the Republic (Casa Republicii) = a gigantic building meant to be the center of the political and administrative power of the communist party - has been gradually appropriated by the post- communist establishment and is known today as the Palace of the Parliament (Palatul Parlamentului). Partially opened to the public, it has become a highlight of political travel and embodies the memory of a troubled past. This chapter investigates the intersections of architecture, ideology and travel practices in order to illuminate larger questions related to the construction of urban memory in an increasingly mobile world where the movement of people and information requires a re-examination of conventional definitions of center and periphery. On a local scale, erstwhile marginal places gain visibility through political narratives that have been brought to light following radical changes in political regimes. On a global scale, mobility brings forth countries and regions that have long stayed in the shadow of the Western world. This process of spatial negotiation between center and periphery is concurrent with a process of interpreting the past as an ideological vehicle to legitimate the present. Inadvertently turning into an icon of the Romanian capital, the Palace of the Parliament has become the privileged tourist destination of the city, a commodity that embodies the spectacle of a distorted past, troubled and dangerous, and therefore more intriguing. The narratives associated with it are woven into a fabric that brings together the spatial strategies of communist propaganda, post-communist aspirations of constructing the national identity and the gaze of thousands of tourists eager to contemplate the remnants of a bygone era. BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE ‘Twenty years after the collapse of the communist regime, in an effort to legitimize a national identity perceived as marginal in relation to other European countries, the Romanian Palace of the Parliament glorifies a past rendered innocent and un- problematic. After the fall of the Iron Curtain and the expansion of the European Union, the communist ideology has often been replaced by a political discourse emphasizing a national ethos intertwined with a European identity. Aspiring to6.1 Map of Bucharest showing in dark grey shading the demolitions operated in the 1980s by the ‘communist regime (from Harhoiu 1997)REINVENTING THE CENTER 107 surmount certain periphery complex, this attempts paralleled by a narrative that reinforces the association of architectural grandeur with political power and tends to erase an inconvenient history fabricating, instead, conflict-free pasts. The significance of the House of the Republic for the inhabitants of the Romanian capital has changed over the last two decades: a universally despised symbol of the defunct communist regime at the beginning of the 1990s, it has been appropriated by the new political establishment and is presented today as an iconic image of the city, It has generated a body of scholarship ranging from the urban and social traumas of communist cities to questions of monumentality, ideology and urban memory. The House of the Republic was envisioned to be the core of the new Civic Center of the capital, begun in the 1980s, which also included smaller administrative buildings, the national library and high-rise housing for party members. Situated in the context of similar urban reconstructions developed under autocratic regimes such as Napoleon I's Paris, Stalin’s Moscow, Hitler’s Berlin and Mussolini's Rome, the Romanian case was characterized by a lack of visionary urban planning and disinterest in the future of the city (Cavalcanti 1997). Operating in an environment isolated from main-stream architectural movements and willing to embrace otherwise off-limits trends and theories, local architects have seen the Civic Center as an opportunity to advance a yet-to-be-theorized Romanian Post-Modernism 62 The Palace of the Parliament (formerly known as the House of the Republic or the House of the People), fenced out and separated from the city108 LANDSCAPES OF MOBILITY (loan 1999).' The dismembering of the city fabric in order to make room for the subsequent construction of the House has been interpreted as a reenactment of the destruction and reconstruction of the Romanian family. The urban interventions were mirroring at a larger scale the communist policies of control over the female body viewed as a reproductive machine in the service of creating the “new man’ (Barris 2001). Symbol of a controversial regime, the House raises questions about the notion of historic monument and the politics of memory (losa 2006). Critical scholarship is still to be complemented by first-hand testimonies and memoires. An exception is a short 2009 autobiographical volume that brings together personal memories and period photographs, documenting in a passionate, but uncritical voice, some key moments in the history of the House: the demolitions preceding its construction, the lack of coordination in the design process, designers’ blind obedience to Ceausescu's aberrant directives, or the working climate of terror and uncertainty (Pandele 2009). While the book provides valuable information, it fails to weave a consistent narrative that goes beyond a series of fragmented anecdotes. ‘An emblem of one of the most hermetic regimes behind the Iron Curtain, the House has fuelled the imagination of foreign writers who have seen in it the unsolved puzzle of a complicated era. Caryl Churchill play “The Mad Forest” was written in the aftermath of a field research that the author had conducted in Bucharest at the beginning of 1990. Never named explicitly, the House daunts the private life of one of the characters, Mihai Antonescu, an architect among the hundreds working on the project, who brings home obsessive memories about ‘him’ (Ceausescu) constantly changing ‘it’ (the House) (Churchill 1992; 18-19). A metaphor for the communist regime of surveillance and terror, the House is a mysterious specter that daunts those who dare to approach it. In Andrea Bajani’s 2007 short novel “Se consideri le colpe,’ a son traveling to Bucharest from his native Italy to attend his mother’s funeral, discovers a metropolis haunted by the House of the People: a powerful silhouette in the city, glimpsed at from the upper floors of high-rise buildings, painted on ashtray souvenirs and recommended to visitors as the only worthwhile sight / site in Bucharest (Bajani 2011: 39-41, 94-96, 135-136). Defying interpretations, visible, yet un-seen, it embodies all the contradictions and enigmas of an alien place that the main character can neither grasp, nor understand. Churchill and Bajani accurately acknowledge the insinuating presence of the House in the private lives, of the people as it stands for an intricate political apparatus, a Big Brother that transgresses the boundaries between public and private. Largely ignored in the scholarship on the House of the Republic, the question of understanding the role of mobility and travel practices for the more recent ideological construction of urban memory and national identity is an important ‘one. With the fall of communism in 1990 and Romania's inclusion in the European Union in 2007, not only did the country open its borders to travel, but in a fluid and mobile world it became key to project a particular image of the Romanian people: resilient through a rough history, consistent in its identity, yet remaining all along an essential member of the larger European family. The House of the Republic,RE-INVENTING THE CENTER 109 renamed the Palace of the Parliament, came to materialize the aspirations of the new political establishment who began to identify the history of the House with that of the Romanian people. In this process, inconvenient memories are often being erased in favor of a past that emerges clear and unquestionable, while spatial relations between center and periphery are re-negotiated. This local arbitration between center and periphery mirrors, at a smaller scale, the ideal position of the country as a main player on the geo-political map of Europe. While the House has gradually become one of the main destinations for political travel in Bucharest, it has also re-configured the mental map of the city, instituting, despite its rather peripheral location in relation with the traditional city center, the presence of anew centre of gravity. The notion of political travel employed here is different from the meaning that Maureen Moynagh has proposed in her 2008 book “Political Tourism and Its Texts” Moynagh defines the political tourist as “one who seeks to participate in or manifest solidarity with a political struggle taking place ‘elsewhere’ in the world” and who practices akind of ‘world citizenship" that is about imagining a different kind of belonging, a different kind of human relationship, and a different practice of the self than are typically afforded through exclusively national, ethnic, or gendered forms of belonging. (Moynagh 2008: 3) This chapter proposes, instead, political travel as a practice detached from, and happening in the aftermath of the conflict, which frames and acknowledges architecture as an object of gaze, and eventually of consumption. Itselfa destination for political travel, the Romanian Palace of the Parliament has become the set of staged memories manipulated toward the construction of a past that suits the ideologies of the present. The history of its making illuminates the narratives built around the relationship between architecture and communist ideology. STORIES AND HISTORIES: On June 26, 1984, the headlines of the two major Romanian newspapers Scintela and Romdnia Liberd made it official that Nicolae Ceausescu, the leader of the Romanian communist party since 1965, and his wife, Elena, had inaugurated the construction of the House of the Republic (Casa Republicii) and the Victory of Socialism Boulevard (Bulevardul Victoria Socialismului), “monumental architectural works, representative for the most glorious era in the history of the country” (Scinteia 1984; 1)? It was one of the most important foundational ceremonies in the year-long series of celebrations glorifying four decades of communist rule that were to culminate with the re-election of the same leader at the 13" convention of the Romanian communist party in November 1984. In addition to new residential neighborhoods and a metro system, several institutional buildings were expected to change the architecture of the capital. Among them, the House of the Republic was the largest and most prominent construction, designed to accommodate the63 Headlines of Scinteia and Roménia Liberé from June 26, 1984 110. LANDSCAPES OF MOBILITY central structures of the political apparatus. According to the organs of communist propaganda initiated and conceived under the direct supervision of the leader of the country, the future buildings represent a crucial phase in the process of urban modernization and systematization of the Romanian capital. (Scinteia 1984: 2) Throughout the entire year, printed media from newspapers and magazines to Arhitectura, the journal of the Romanian Union of Architects (the national professional organization) glorified the “40 years of great architectural and urban achievements’ The so-callled “urban modernization’ of Bucharest has started after a disastrous earthquake that in 1977 left the city in ruins; with the excuse that many of the remaining buildings were no longer safe, an urban planning campaign was launched under the direct leadership of Ceausescu, endorsed at the beginning by the Romanian Union of Architects (losa 2006: 51). Although several teams presented their urban planning proposals in the fall of 1977, no formal competition was organized, and, without any transparency in the decision-making process, at the end of 1979 the project was commissioned toa team of young professionals led by the architect Anca Petrescu. In 1981, the same architect won the competition for the House of the Republic, the central building of the envisioned urban complex (losa 2006; 52-54). Without a coherent urban vision for the city and without consulting with or listening to specialists and professionals, the destruction and ) Scinteiaae ca CTA Bec oS ME TAAOCARAT LOCKABLE BE COASTRCTE UA CASK PORE 51 ANLVRRMGL TOR SOCALGOMUET CEAMSCSCU, WPREUMA C) TOVARASA CEMA CAEN WAUGURAT JERI LUCRARILE DE CONSTRUCTIE A CASE) REPURLICH SUBULEVARDULU! VICTORIA SOCIALISWULULRE-INVENTING THE CENTER 111 reconstruction of Bucharest were launched under the direct supervision of Nicolae Ceausescu who personally approved or disapproved of urban and architectural interventions. According to demolition statistics from the Institutul Proiect Bucuresti, one of the major centralized design institutes in Bucharest, in the year 1981, 272 074 sq, meters of urban fabric were destroyed and 7278 people were displaced in order to make room for the new construction (Cavalcanti 1997:92). While these numbers represent only a partial estimate, the total razed area in central Bucharest has been approximated to 100 hectares (Cavalcanti 1997: 92) Under a regime based on fear and repression, with virtually no public opposition to the extreme measures imposed onto the city, protests were often disguised as apparently innocent topics. However, they concealed hidden meanings meant to be understood by, and circulated among a selected few. The mass-destruction of the capital was thus discreetly denounced in the professional journal Arhitectura whose January-February issue from 1984 was dedicated to the concept of architectural heritage, to its economic and cultural values, to conservation strategies and proposals for the revitalization of the historic center of Bucharest (Arhitectura 1984). During the last years of the regime, some of the cartoons published in Arhitectura attempted a disguised form of resistance to the continuous degradation of the status of the profession and the destruction of the city; among them, a 1985 drawing featured a blind architect whose hands were guided by benevolent ‘comrades’ — a bitter commentary on the design decisions imposed top-down by political leaders (Arhitectura 2/1985: 34); a 1987 cartoon showing houses thrown in large trash bins commemorated the loss of the city’s, architectural legacy (Arhitectura 6/1987: 49); a 1988 sketch depicted an eclectic castle on top of a hill - an allusion to the House of the Republic, its hodge-podge architectural language and its location on an artificial mound; stooped under the heavy burden of their drawing rolls, two architects were approaching the castle, themselves contemporary reflections of the mythological Sisyphus, doomed to carry forever the burden of their futile work (Arhitectura 4/1988: 42), In 1989 when the communist regime toppled, the envisioned civic center was still under construction. The House of the Republic has been completed in the meantime, and since 1995, first the Chambers of Deputies, later the Senate, the Constitutional Court and an International Conference Center have functioned uninterruptedly in the building, It is still surrounded by an urban void that has been made the object of two architectural and urban planning competitions. In 1991, a national competition open to architects and non-professionals alike was seeking ideas rather than concrete proposals for the future of the House and its neighboring urban void, Shrouded in mystery since its very inception, the House of the People, as it was also called, had never been transparent to the people. In this context of extreme secrecy, the first competition for ideas was primarily a means of opening it up to the public as a restorative way of coming to terms with its inevitable presence. This first attempt at making sense of the communist civic center was followed in 1995 by the international urban planning competition Bucuresti 2000. The winning entry by the German architect Meinhard von Gerkhan and his team has never been implemented (Bucuresti 2000: 1997).Fark cuvinee 6.4 Arhitectura 2/1985 yranuany 2420 J[eY 15y 34 UI IBHOIDIA EDIE _6°96.10 1934map of downtown Bucharest (from Bucuresti: Ghid Oficial 1934) 120. LANDSCAPES OF MOBILITY Similar renditions of the city center appear in local guidebooks from the first half of the twentieth century that identify the downtown with the area loosely defined by the Cismigiu Park, Dambovita River, Calea Mosilor and |.C. Bratianu Boulevard, with Calea Victoriei running through the middle of this district (Bucuresti: GhidOficial cu 20 harti pentru orientare: 1934). In a 1938 historic and artistic guidebook of Bucharest, the architect Grigore lonescu proposes a series of twelve itineraries through the city, the first of which begins with Calea Victoriei, “the main artery of the capital’ gauged not as the most beautiful, but the busiest, liveliest and most elegant street of the capital."”RE-INVENTING THE CENTER 121 Despite the presence of the Arsenal Hill in the plans that architects designed for the future of the city, itis significant that the hill is altogether missing from these representations of the capital in travel accounts and guidebooks from the first decades of the twentieth century. Still undevelopea, it had the potential of being integrated with the city center. With the opening of the East-West axis of the Victory of Socialism Avenue (perpendicular on Calea Victoriei) and the development of the new civic center in the 1980s, the Arsenal Hill is paradoxically made present through its very destruction. Leveling the natural topography and the city fabric, and re-constructing an artificial mound was part of the communist strategy to relocate the political and administrative center in the Western part of the capital. Previously imagined by architects and politicians as an extension of the center, the Arsenal Hill has become an entirely new center whose connections with the former one were brutally severed. In the Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau makes the distinction between strategy and tactic: the former is a way of exercising power and control over space, and the latter is an art of time, belonging to the weak, the ‘other; the powerless, that takes advantage of opportunities, “cross-cuts, fragments, cracks and lucky hits” (Certeau 1984: 35-39). While pre-communist proposals have explored tactics to gradually integrate the Arsenal Hill into the urban fabric and bring it into presence as part of the city center, communist strategies propose not a complement, but an alternative to the existing center, its demise and eventual replacement with a brand new administrative complex that represents the new order, distinct and entirely separated from the previous one. These operations of massive spatial surgery function, in fact, as lobotomies that aim to remove the memory of times past. Post-communist strategies exploit the identification of the Palace of the Parliament with the nation, reinforcing its relevance as the quintessential Romanian building that brings together the creativity, resilience, spirit of sacrifice and endurance of the people. The Palace is the nation, and if Bucharest is the symbolic center of Romania, then the Palace is the symbolic center of the city. Underlying this discourse there is an aspiration to gain global visibility as a praised architectural object, vibrant city and heroic country. Three main strategies are unfolded in this process: an emphasis on’bigness’(size, weight and numbers), the local provenance of building materials and work force, and a sense of openness and transparency expected from the operations of adaptive reuse. Translating the desire for centrality into an ambition to reach the extra-ordinary, recent discourses capitalize on the large scale of the building and present it almost as a sublime manifestation of the genius of the people. Indigenous materials, local designers and native workers strengthen the sense of ‘Romanianess' that is essential for the construction of a distinct and powerful national identity. In opposition with the politics of concealment of the communist regime, a sense of transparency is supposedly promoted through architectural interventions of adaptive reuse: two glass elevators on the Western facade invite the visitors to discover and explore the building which is now exposed to the scrutiny of the public gaze.6.11. The Palace of the Parliament (from hetp:// www.metrolic com/travel- guides-bucharest- part-2-154957/) 122 LANDSCAPES OF MOBILITY RE-INVENTING THE CENTER Bigness The Palace of the Parliament is big. So big that it enters the domain of what Rem Koolhaas has called bigness - an architectural typology defined exclusively by its size, whose impact no longer depends on its architectural qualities and which thus becomes amoral, moving beyond the notions of “good” and “bad” (Koolhaas et al 1995). Generally referred to as ‘monumental; the Palace of the Parliament is very different, in fact, from the architectural monument as it has been defined throughout ages. (While the etymology of the word monument derives from the Latin term denoting an act of remembrance and recollection, the association between monumentality and size is relatively new, dating only from the 18th century France.") Discussing the question of monumentality in modernist architecture, Alan Colquhoun has identified two directions in the development of post-war monumental architecture: the new monumentality proposed by American Modernists as a way of associating the architectural monument with democratic ideals, andthe visionary megastructures of the 1960s proposed by Archigram, Cedric Price or Yona Friedman (Colquhoun 2002: 212-229). While most of these proposalsRE-INVENTING THE CENTER 123 remain theoretical explorations, Koolhaas sees bigness taking shape at the end of the twentieth century as a form of anti-architecture that defies not only traditional definitions and classifications, but the very nature of the city. Bigness is therefore different from monumentality conceived as memory aid and large institutional building because it severs any possible connections between architecture and memory and becomes self-referential. The potential of architecture to generate images and knowledge is no longer envisioned as a desirable design goal. Bigness is an object of consumption to be devoured over and over again by the flows of people that use it, without ever inhabiting it. It is this bigness of the Palace that is overplayed in the official discourses designed for local and foreign tourists. While numbers are presented as qualitative properties, the Palace and the past that it supposedly embodies become products that tourists absorb uncritically, lured by the strange’otherness‘of the building and its political narratives. Described as “the grandest administrative construction in Europe,’ it has hundreds of offices, halls for scientific, cultural, social-political reunions, dozens of conference rooms. It covers 265,000 square meters of interior surface, being the second largest building in the world after the Pentagon. Volume wise, it is the third in the world after the Cape Canaveral building and the Quetzalcoat! pyramid in Mexico. (The Travel Guide of Romania 2007: 396) Birnbaum’s 1995 Eastern Europe travel guidebook advises its readers that the House of the Republic is worth a visit. ... This monstrosity with thousands of rooms ... intended as Ceausescu’s personal headquarters, is said to be the second-largest edifice in the world, second only to the Pentagon. (Birnbaum 1995) The official website of the Palace points to similar highlights (http://www. cdep.ro/pls/cic/site.genprez?ids=2id!=RO), while the guided tours offer precise numeric descriptions of the building: over 200,000 chandeliers, 1 million cubic meter of marble or 60 chairs around a table."* However, the objectivity of numbers cannot be contested and therefore the worth of the Palace is hypothetically beyond subjective interpretations. Numbers, in fact, become relative and lose their meaning as they vary greatly according to different sources." The world of bigness is one of otherness and as John Urry has remarked there must be certain aspects of the place to be visited which distinguish it from what is conventionally encountered in everyday life. (Urry 2002: 12) In the case of the Palace, quantities and dimensions bring the aura of extra- ordinary. Numbers, however, render the building incomprehensible and the extra- ordinary is a combination of facts and myths projected on the background of a troubled political history. This extra-ordinary is experienced through a corporeal and temporal distance that occurs between the visitors and the building. Tourists6.12. The Palace of the Parliament, interiors 124 LANDSCAPES OF MOBILITY are distanced from the edifice first through the physical space they have to travel in the city before they can actually reach it, then through the long distances covered within the building itself and the meaningless numbers associated with it. Ironically, it is through the extraordinarily imprecise numbers that the building attempts to gain recognition and centrality in local and global histories. it becomes, instead, an object of consumption that highlights an estranged otherness increasingly remote from the reality of the city and its history. Locality The nationalistic propaganda of the communist party resonates with the contemporary aspiration to affirm Romanian national identity in the expanded field of the European Union. The claim that all the building materials, as well as the architects, engineers, artists and workers that have contributed to its construction are Romanian, emphasizes local achievements, technological sophistication and economic independence.'* These features, crucial in the 1980s for the communist gospel that was preaching the re-birth of the nation and the “new man’ under the rule of Nicolae Ceausescu, continue to servethecurrentpolitical goals that negotiate the position of the country in Europe. Tourists learn that in addition to a so-called ‘Romanian style’ (that lacks any solid historical reference), different halls exhibitRE-INVENTING THE CENTER 125 influences of the ‘Greek style’ [sic], French style’ [sic], baroque and Renaissance." In other words, not only does the building embody the essence of the Romanian character, but its also part of the larger landscape of European history, culture and traditions. Alongside with Romanian marble, wood, crystal, and textiles, tourists are, in fact, invited to admire the consistency and resilience of the Romanian nation. An erstwhile contested edifice has ironically been turned into an identity symbol of the people that it was originally meant to overpower and control. While foreign tourists come to visit the Palace precisely because it is ‘Ceausescu's Palace; all the inevitable associations between the building and the Ceausescu couple are, paradoxically, carefully obliterated in the official discourses, as are the names of the communist leaders and the history of senseless demolitions that have preceded its construction. Foreign observers have remarked this paradox: after a guided tour of the Palace, the main character in Andrea Bajani's 2007 novel notices: The guide has shown us one floor and then walked us out. But more importantly, hhe never mentioned Ceausescu. Not even once. We had come there to find out about him, what he's been doing, but instead he was the void around which the guide has built up his discourse about tons, meters and numbers. As if between pain and pride, chastity has found a place, as ifevil could have been exposed only ifit had never been mentioned. (Bajani 2011: 96 - my translation) ‘An exhibition on display in the basement of the Palace, titled “From the House of the Republic to the Palace of the Parliament” (De Ja Casa Poporului la Palatul Parlamentului) presents some key moments of the epic enterprise of constructing “one of the seven wonders of modern world.” Ceausescu's name is never mentioned and only once is he ceremoniously referred to as the President who in 1984 put the foundation stone of the edifice. Ignoring the history of urban destructions, the narrative begins with the heroic ‘remodeling’ of the Arsenal Hill and ends with a sentence written in bold fonts that echoes the tone of former political discourses: The provenance of all these materials is exclusively Romanian, they are made by Romanians and prove the creative force of the Romanian people. 6.13 Exhibition in the basement of the Palace of the Parliament. Right: the Palace as one of the“seven wonders of the modern world”126 LANDSCAPES OF MOBILITY ‘A new, but not essentially different, ideology replaces old communist propaganda in an effort to fabricate an un-problematic past where conflicts are avoided and therefore never confronted nor solved. Ceausescu's idea of building a. communist Gesamtkunstwerk that would have brought together the best of all Romanian arts, crafts and technologies has survived him and is employed today as, a commodification strategy for the Palace of the Parliament. Transparency ‘Two decades after the fall of communism, the halls opened to the public have been preserved almost intact in an effort to maintain unaltered testimonies of allegedly grand accomplishments. The rationale for this attitude is debatable as it encourages an ambiguous notion of architectural preservation understood as frozen past. The original carpets, chandeliers, furniture, curtains and pavements intend to keep alive the ‘authenticity’ of the place and the memory of a bygone era represented as conflict-free. Part of the building has undergone a process of adaptive reuse and has been functioning since 2004 as the National Museum of Contemporary Art. Its presence, marked on the South elevation by two glass elevators, aims to de-monumentalize the Palace and offer a friendlier interface to the public. This project brings to mind the interventions on the Reichstag in Berlin, another symbol of a complex and troubled history, with its 1995 wrapping by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and the subsequent addition of Norman Foster's dome. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's installation has been interpreted as "a monument to democratic culture rather than a demonstration of state power” as an event that, paradoxically, made the veiled Reichstag more visible than the unveiled one. This occurred when, shortly after the German reunification, questions on German identity and reconciliation with the past were the subject of intense public debates (Huyseen 1996: 186-187). Reinterpreting Paul Wallot’s earlier dome designs from 1882 and 1889, Foster's cupola, on the other hand, wants to direct the museal gaze both at and away from an architectural structure; it presents itself as a spectacle, but as importantly it also functions as a viewing machine, as a prosthetic apparatus enabling the visitor to experience, not the building and its various layers of historical substance, but the surrounding city as the primary thrill.(Koepnick 2001: 308) The glass elevators inscribed on the facade of the Romanian Palace of the Parliament, however, haveneither the rich ambiguity of Christoand Jeanne-Claude's wrapping, nor the complexity of Foster's dome. Unlike Christo and Jeanne-Claude'’s installation that emphasized the dissolution of power, the play between visible and invisible, and a distortion of the monumental, the glass elevators reinforce the paradigms of control over, and surveillance of the city. Like the Romanian National Museum of Contemporary Art, Foster's dome is largely a mechanism for the tourist gaze which allows visitors to gradually relate to the structure itself and, at a larger scale, to the entire city in the process of moving along a gentleREINVENTING THE CENTER 127 ramp. Unlike Foster's intervention, the glass elevators of the Romanian museum fail to engage the human body in the spatial experience of the building and rely exclusively on mechanical devices that transform the practice of passing through, carefully orchestrated in the Reichstag, into a mere shortcut between different levels. A direct engagement of the visitors with the Palace could have presented the opportunity of a redemptive architectural tactic to undermine and subvert its overpowering effect. Instead, the traveler continues to be remote from the building, moving parallel with, and passively observing it froma distance, rather than actively interacting with it. Foster's glass dome symbolically brings the light inside and “wants to generate through the use of very specific construction materials political transparency, openness, and unity” (Koepnick 2001: 311). The glass elevators, on the other hand, do not slice through the body of the Palace to cut it open to the gaze and understanding of the viewer, but remain exterior objects, detached from the main structure which is still opaque and incomprehensible. More than mere mechanical devices, the elevators problematize the architectural choreography of movement and interaction in a world dominated by simulacra and replacements. Fredric Jameson has identified this condition as the“autoreferentiality of all modern culture” and described it in relation to the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles: the narrative stroll has been underscored, symbolized, reified and replaced by 4 transportation machine which becomes the allegorical signifier of that older promenade we are no longer allowed to conduct on our own: and this is @ dialectical intensification of the autoreferentiality ofall modern culture, which tends to turn upon itself and designate its own cultural production as its content. (Uameson 1997: 244) The glass elevators introduce another layer that distances the visitor from the building, thus compromising a potential reconciliation between the two. Taking advantage of the empty site surrounding the Palace, the Cathedral of the Nation will be built in front of the Western facade of the Parliament. A national cathedral is a project that goes back to the second half of the nineteenth century when Romania is declared a free-standing kingdom in 1881, and the Romanian Orthodox Church becomes autocephalous in 1885. The cathedral is a matter of 6.14 The glass elevators marking the insertion of the Museum of Contemporary Art6.15 Thesite of the future Patriarchal Cathedral seen from the Palace of the Parliament 128 LANDSCAPES OF MOBILITY celebrating both political and religious achievements, and from now on will be associated with intertwined issues of national and religious identity. Among the numerous sites and proposals that have been studied before and after the fall of communism, the latest choice is to locate the cathedral in the close proximity of the Palace of the Parliament. Accommodating pilgrimage as a form of religious travel is expected to be one of the central functions of the future church. Both the National Museum of Contemporary Art and the Romanian Orthodox Church uncritically embrace the proximity with the Palace and capitalize, in fact, on the narratives associated with it, thus inadvertently reinforcing the original paradigms of power and control. Paradoxically fulfilling its original mission of centralized authority, the site might eventually become a center of political, cultural and religious activities. Since the eighteenth century the site currently occupied by the Palace of the Parliament has embodied the‘other within’ another pole of the physical center lived and experienced elsewhere in the city: first, Alexandru Ipsilanti, the Greek prince imposed by the Ottoman Porte, moved the court from its traditional location in the Lipscani area, to the Uranus Hill in order to assert the authority of his new rule; a never materialized civic center was envisioned by architects and planners at the turn of the twentieth century as part of a desired emancipation of the Romanian capital from a past governed by spontaneous and uncontrolled developments; when the construction of the civic center began during the last years of the communist regime, its thoughtlessness and brutality severed the ties with the rest of the capital, and the House of the People with its surrounding buildings truly became ‘the other’ city, soon to be off-limits for regular citizens and accessible only to party officials. The post-communist establishment has appropriated the House without recognizing its complex legacy, and rather embraced it as a mark of Romanian national identity. Throughout its history, the site has provided the physical and imaginative resources for the expansion of the city, it has embodied the thrill of yet unknown possibilities, and the difference between past and a desired future.RE-INVENTING THE CENTER 129 While the Palace of the Parliament has become the agency that negotiates this distorted relation between past, present and future, travel practices of the post- communist decades reflect its transformation into an object of consumption, a large-scale souvenir of glorified past. This chapter has suggested that architectures of political travel often become the set of manipulated memories that tend to construct an ideologically convenient past. Political travel might raise awareness of marginal histories of provinces or peripheries that have often been overlooked, but at the same time it might obliterate or trivialize the very narratives it celebrates, in a process of commodification of history. It is worth wondering whose past these architecture of conflict commemorate: is it the troubled past of a people whose voice has been silenced? Is it the past fabricated by a political establishment that was crafting its ideology? Or is it the past imagined by travelers enthralled by stories of repression that belong to bygone eras, safely distant in time and space? REFERENCES Ashitectura 2/1985. Arhitectura 6/1987 Arhitectura 4/1988. Arbitectura. 1/1984. Bajani, A. 2011. De vel lua aminte fa gregeli, Bucuresti: Humanitas. Barris, R. 2001. Contested mythologies: the architectural deconstruction of a totalitarian culture. Journal of Architectural Education, 54(4), 229-237. Birnbaum, A.M. 1995. Eastern Europe. New York: Harper Perennial. Blau, E. 2010. Reinventing practice: architecture and the city after socialism, in A Peripheral ‘Moment: Experiments in Architectural Agency: Croatia 1990-2010, edited by |. Rupnik. Barcelona: Actar, 4-5. Bucuresti ~ Monografie. 1985. Bucuresti: Editura Sport-Turism, Bucuresti 2000. 1997. Bucuresti imetria, Bucuresti: Ghid Oficial cu 20 harti pentru orientare. 1934. Bucuresti: Imprimeria Fundatiei Culturale Regale. Cavalcanti, M. 1997. Urban reconstruction and autocratic regime: Ceausescu's Bucharest in its historic context. Planning Perspectives, 12, 71-109. Certeau, M. de, 1984, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press. Churchill, C, 1992. The Mad Forest. New York: Samuel French, Inc. Colquhoun, A. 2002. Modern Architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harhoiu, D. 1997, Bucuresti intre Orient si Occident. Bucuresti: Uniunea Arhitectilor din Romania. Huyssen, A. 1996. Monumental seduction. New German Critique, 69, 181-200. Huyssen, A. 2003. Present Pasts. Stanford: Stanford University Press.130 LANDSCAPES OF MOBILITY loan, A. 1999, Power, Play and National identity. Bucharest: The Romanian Cultural Fundation, lonescu, G. 1938. Bucuresti: ghid istoric si artistic. Bucuresti: Fundatia pentru literatura si arta “Regele Carol I” losa, I. 2006. ’Heritage Urbain de Ceausescu: fardeau ou saut en avant? Paris: LHarmattan, Jameson, F. 1997. The cultural logic of late capitalism, in Rethinking Architecture; A Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by N. Leach. London: Routledge. Koepnick, L. 2001, Redeeming history? Foster’s dome and the political aesthetic of the Berlin Republic. German Studies Review, 24(2), 303-323, Koolhaas, R., Mau, B. 1995. $ ML XL. New York: Monacelli Press. Le Corbusier. 1987. Journey to the East. Cambridge, Mass. The MIT Press. Manning, 0. 2009, The Balkan Trilogy. New York: New York Review Books. Moynagh, M.A. 2008, Political Tourism and its Texts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pandele. A. 2009. Casa Poporului:un sfarsit in marmura, Bucuresti: Editura Compania. Plan intergat de dezvoltare urbana ~ zona centvala Bucuresti (PIDU) 2011. http://www.pmb. 10/servicii/urbanism/proiecte/proiecte_1.php?catid=19&stad=18. Accessed on Nov. 24, 2011. Planul director de sistematizare al Municipiului Bucuresti. 1935. Bucuresti: Editura Institutului Urbanistic al Roméniei. Romania Libera. 1984. XLII (12332), June 26. Rupnik, |. 2010. A Peripheral Moment: Experiments in Architectural Agency: Croatia 1990-2010. Barcelona: Actar. Scinteia, 1984. Lil (13.013), June 26. Sfingescu, C. 1932. Estetica Bucurestiului, Urbanismul, 11-12, 385-424. Sitwell, S. 1938. Rourmanian Journey. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. The Travel Guide of Romania. 2009. Bucure: Todorova, M. 1994. The Balkans: from discovery to invention. Slavic Review, 53(2), 453-482. Urbanismmul. 1112/1932. Urry, J.2002. The Tourist Gaze. 2 Edition. London: Sage Publications. Waldeck, R.G. 1942. Athene Palace, New York: Robert M. McBride and Company. Wolff, L. 1994. Imagining Eastern Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press. NOTES 1 In 1993, Augustin loan made the documentary “Architecture and Power" (Arhitectura si puterea) that looked at the destruction and reconstruction of Bucharest in the area of, its projected communist civic center. 2 "Mihai: He came today. ... Radu: Did he make you change it? Mihai: He had a very interesting recommendation. The arch should be this much higher. ... Radu: So is that the third time he’s made you change it?" (Churchill 192: 18-19). While the design of the House of the Republic was the exclusive domain of Nicolae Ceausescu who10 un RE-INVENTING THE CENTER 131 personally overlooked every decision made in the process, the role of the architects was that of mere executants of his orders While Scinteia (“The Sparkle") was the main propaganda newspaper of the Romanian Communist Party, its content was largely identical with that of Romania Libera ("Free Romania’), the other major national newspaper. The fourth issue of Arhitectura from 1984 covered the four decades of communist architectural accomplishments and, in addition to the founding ceremony of the House of the Republic it featured the architectural topics of main interest for the communist establishment: industrial architecture, collective housing, civic centers and new technologies. A 1985 monograph of Bucharest emphasized the role of the new civic center and the House of the Republic in the projected grandeur of the city. (Bucuresti- Monografie 1985: 142-144). ‘The numbers vary according to different sources. Other statistics list that from 1984 to 1987, 1,000 acres of urban inhabited territory have been erased, 40,000 people have been displaced, and 9,000 historic buildings have been demolished. (losa 2006: '55) Provided that the information is correct, the difference between 1984 and 1987 is significant. The PIDU states that 485 hectares of traditional urban fabric have been demolished (PIDU 2011: 22) “Bucharest is full of Paris; but there is so much more here. ... The architecture is paltry, like life itself in these parts. The Beaux-Arts style is pervasive because only architects who have graduated from Paris work here. It may be trite, but it is not ugly. Because of its unity of conception, Bucharest isn't as heterogeneous and ugly ike German cities.” (Le Corbusier 1987: 54-55). "During the long promenade along via Victorii, upon their return from the races, they would recline gracefully in the carriages, in their Parisian dresses made of sumptuous but sober fabrics, their big hats, black, gray, or blue w enormous floppy feathers, or tiny toques placed over overgrown hair, and their eye makeup and lipstick always of a muted color, as aristocratic in appearance as the beautiful bodies beneath the caress of the fabrics - all these things urged us to notice and to admire them - and with the ‘same sentiment we recalled seductive visions of fashionable Paris” (Le Corbusier 1987: 54) *... Calea Victoriei, the main street of the capital, is as long as Oxford Street and Regent Street put together: (Sitwell 1938: 35). “The Athene Palace lined the width of the Piazza Atheneului, Bucharest’s magic square that opens on the most glamorous artery of the Near East, the Calea Victoriei Imagine the White House, the Waldorf Astoria, Carnegie Hall, Colony Restaurant, and the Lincoln Memorial, all standing together around a smallish square blossoming out on an avenue which is a cross between Broadway and Pennsylvania and Fifth Avenue, and you understand what Piazza Atheneului means to Rumania, Here was the heart of Bucharest topographically artistically, intellectually, politically - and, if you like, ‘morally. (Waldeck 1942: 11-12) "although begun in 1692, Calea Victoriei, the main artery of the capital, in its current shape and length is a street only half a century old. With its irregular and sometimes bizarre path, Calea Victoriei is not the most beautiful street in Bucharest. But itis the liveliest, the most varied, the most elegant with respect to its retail stores - and the most circulated. *(lonescu 1938: 9) Etymology: classical Latin monumentum, monimentum commemorative statue or building, tomb, reminder, written record, literary work monére to remind; .. French:132 LANDSCAPES OF MOBILITY 12 13 4 15 18th cent. denoting edifices which are imposing by virtue of their grandeur or antiquity’: (Oxford English Dictionary, 2" edition). Information provided by a tour guide during a visit on 01/10/2011 For reference, a guided tour taken in January 2010 advances the figure of 365 000m? as the total built surface of the Palace which supposedly has a length of 270m, a width ‘of 240m and a height of 84m, According to Pandele 2009, the maximum length is 276.2 m, the maximum width is 227.3m and the maximum height is 94.6m. (Pandele 2009: 36) losa publishes the transcripts of two guided tours from 2005 that mention a length of 270m and a width of 240m. (losa 2006: 156) The exhibition on display in the basement of the building that illustrates the key moments in the construction of the House with photographs from the personal archive of Anca Petrescu, the leading architect of the project, gives the following measures: 350 000 m?, 270 m (length), 240, ‘m (width) and 84 m (height). Finally, the official web site lists the following number 365 000 m?, 275m (length), 235m (width) and 84m (height). http://www.cdep.0/pls/ cic/site.genprez?ids=28id!=RO According to the official website http://www.cdep.r0/pls/cic/site. genprez?ids=28idI=RO and notes from a guided tour taken on 01/10/11. Notes from a guided tour taken on 01/10/11; also see the official website http://www. cdep.ro/pls/cic/site.genprez?ids=28idl=RO