Meta-landscape: Commun(ist) industrial heritage - MEFIN Sinaia

Authors’ Comment

It has been 36 years since the Revolution, and paradoxically, although the post-communist transition theoretically ended with integration into the U.E. – the way architectural production under communism is evaluated remains confusing. The post-war built heritage is all the more difficult to assess, especially from a patrimonial perspective, when viewed in relation to architectural production of earlier periods. If assuming the official architecture of the regime is (of course) problematic, since it was one of the physical materializations of political power, the question opens – how can industrial architecture be assumed – „the second home” of the people? Communism tried to create the middle class that had been missing from Eastern Europe, an unattainable ideal on Romania's social structure. However, in its form of “attempt”, this class is numerically real and disappeared from public discourse after 1989. The social polarization created by the market economy has emphasized the gap, beyond the void of which the others are. The research approaches the complex landscape of Sinaia through a deconstruction process, as an illustrative example of the urban paradox created. The analysis seeks to go beyond the visual dominant of the conventional idea of landscape, towards a META-landscape, as an entity extending its limits beyond material form, into the collective imagination.

Therefore, the theoretical approach begins with understanding the phenomena associated with the communist era, such as industrialization as a method of urbanization and how political, economic, and social structures were translated into urban form. The proposal pursues a cause-and-effect perspective to correlate the phenomenon in time and space with the post-communist transition period. With an important impact in the social sphere, the phenomenon is also followed at the level of city identity, the built form having a direct correspondent in collective memory. The project explores attitudes of intervention on industrial communist heritage – as a practical demonstration of the theoretical study. Following the question – If we keep, what do we keep from industrial communist heritage? – a value analysis is outlined, applied directly to the proposed case study: the industrial site of Sinaia.

The entire intervention appears as a necessary stage, grounded in understanding the wider landscape that forms the basis of design decisions. After selecting the elements with architectural value, the functional conversion, and introducing the natural landscape as a neutral element, the process of assumption is mediated through changing the limits of perception in which the communist industrial heritage is situated. The project aims, beyond opening a new debate, to formulate a possible operational framework at the level of principles – each illustrated through suggestive examples of intervention as part of the assumption process – acknowledging the absence of a universal solution regarding interventions in any existing built framework. Once the conflict is mediated, architecture becomes free to add a new layer over the existing instances of the building – a writing over.