Anamnesis. Museum of Communism, Bucharest

Authors’ Comment

On Sfinții Apostoli Street, the site of the former Brâncovenesc Establishments bears the marks of an urban restructuring that erased streets, buildings, and communities, transforming what remained into an isolated fabric, hidden behind apartment blocks. Domnița Bălașa Church survives today as an enclave, while the grounds of the former Brâncovenesc Hospital became a residual space. The intervention starts from this rupture and proposes architecture as an instrument of recovery.
The urban strategy is built around the concept of "urban suture". The apartment front, which today acts as a barrier between the boulevard and the rear fabric, is transformed into a permeable filter by reopening the passageways and expanding pedestrian circuits. The precinct thus becomes an active urban node, capable of reconnecting with the Historical Center.
The museum is conceived as an operation on the ground. The project recovers the courtyard footprint of the former Brâncovenesc Establishments through an artificial excavation. The museum retreats into the ground as an anti-object, transforming absence into a space of memory and simultaneously recovering the lost perspective toward the Domnița Bălașa Church. From this lower level, the church dome projects onto the sky once again, freed from the pressure of the curtain of blocks. The green roofs become an ethical gesture toward the surrounding residents, while the site's tension is absorbed and redirected into the memorial experience.
The museum's program is organized into three components: educational, narrative, and memorial. These correspond to the three stages of the route: understanding the context, confronting history, and internalizing memory.
The narrative component of the museum builds a chronological path through the history of Romanian communism, from the regime's establishment until the rupture of 1989. The exhibition refuses the aestheticization of trauma, retro scenography, and the fetishization of communist objects, thus becoming the historical backbone of the museum.
The memorial component is materialized through the "Rooms of Memory", directly linked to the information on the exhibition route and marking the transitions between different historical periods. They function as spaces for pausing, internalization, and reflection, aiming neither to re-traumatize the visitor nor to literally reconstruct suffering, but rather to create the conditions for a calm, conscious, and empathetic confrontation with the memory of the past. Phenomenologically, light, silence, materiality, and proportion transform the accumulation of information into contemplation and assumption.
The church becomes an "exhibit" of the museum, present in different hypostases along the route. Outside, the memorial corridor of communism's victims connects two forms of remembrance: spiritual remembrance, specific to the sacred space, and commemoration, specific to the memorial. In the Establishments' courtyard, the lowering of the ground recovers the lost perspective toward the church. Following the presentation of the early years' repression, a flattened dome becomes a space for recollection, where, through an oculus, the Domnița Bălașa Church appears as a fragile presence. Later, the blocked perspective and ascension toward the Domnița Bălașa Church and the Palace of Justice allude to religious freedom and justice, rights whose exercise was suspended and controlled during the regime.
The museum does not seek a triumphal reconciliation or an immediate healing, but proposes a space where history remains open and necessary to interrogate. Architecture thus becomes a form of spatial justice: a way to give consistency to absence and to transform the trauma of communism into a responsibility of the present.