Tour

Little Pariah

June 1, 2008 was election day for the local administration in Romania. The candidates for Bucharest City Hall and the six, relatively independent, “sector” mayoralties fought desperate wars to win. Many people have a lousy opinion about Bucharest, formerly known as

The History Of Nothing: Contemporary Architecture And Public Space In Romania

Richard Rogers Partnership proposal, 1996People's House (Parliament) After 1989: Methods of researching the built environmentResearching Communist architecture is a tricky endeavor in contemporary Romania, where some major actors of that era are still alive, some even

The Friend From Abroad

Clockwise from top left: People's House, wood church in Romanian Peasant Museum yard, Opera House, Stavropoleos Church, Athenaeum, Caru cu bere pub. Every time I have to recommend some sightseeing in our town to the friend/ acquaintance/ work colleague coming from

Perdition, Old-Style

When on the 20th of September, 1459, the throne of Wallachia moved from Târgovişte to Bucharest, the new settlement, which was lying along Dâmboviţa River, was a picturesque settlement, with slow hills, lakes and boundless orchards and especially with venerable forests.

Bucharest And Its Paradoxes

O Moft! Thou art the watchword and motto of our times. Vast syllable of unbounded content, in thee there is such comfortable room for countless meanings: joys and misfortunes, merit and infamy, guilt and misadventure, right, duty, sentiments, interests, convictions, politics,

Cioranescu, De Vuelta A La Universidad

Filólogos e historiadores de la Universidad de La Laguna glosaron a finales de febrero la figura del profesor Alejandro Cioranescu, doctor honoris causa del centro docente, fallecido en noviembre de 1999. Unos y otros alabaron la extensa obra del escritor rumano afincado

The Difficult Beginnings Of A Superstar

An ancient symbol of war, because of its reddish color, Mars started with a low profile in the gallery of inhabited worlds. Up till the 19th century, it could bear no comparison with the Moon. In his Itinerarium exstaticum (1656), Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680) proposed

The Myth Of The Different Man From The Antiquity To The Present

The different man exhibits both what is permanent in the human spirit and the changes occurring throughout History. Tell me who your different man is and I will tell you who you are. I A DESCRIPTION OF THE DIFFERENT MAN A Key Concept: Radical Otherness Man does not move

A History Of The Imaginary. The Truth Of The Myths

CHAPTER I Structures and Methods An Ambiguous Condition What if the history of the imaginary did not exist? Beyond all paradox, the question deserves to be raised. Following a hectic and contorted history, this discipline is hindered by theoretical and ideological difficulties.

Yesterday Will Be Another Day

I wonder if nature always plays the same game (Einstein) Of course I was coming from sleep, how else is a day supposed to start? However, I didn't know much about the world I was coming from. On the other hand, the world I had landed in should have been very familiar

The Impossible Oasis

The wire that I had failed to see hit me below my knees. The earth turned, the boles propped against the stars somersaulted and I no longer heard the whistles. The red bells started to toll. Whipped up by the rain, the smell of weed and death that had simply been the breath

Remember

Ceci est un fait-divers atroce. Les Mémoires du Bal-Mabille There are dreams we seem to have lived sometime long ago, somewhere, as well as things we lived about which we ask whether they were not a dream. That's what I was thinking of yesterday evening when, rummaging