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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

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.

A Century Of Our Past And Our European Identity Are Being Destroyed

Armenian Church; St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Cathedral; Stirbey house on Calea Victoriei excerpts from the debate organized by Ileana Foundation for Contemporary Fine Arts and Modern Architecture in Romania, hosted at UNA Gallery on May 12th 2008 Nowadays, the oldest

La Locura

Como a menudo suele pasar con las obras geniales que van revistiendo sombras y penumbras para luego por su interpretación acabar por adquirir dimensiones colosales y planos infinitos, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha[1],por Cervantes, es objeto de numerosos

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

Playing With The Past

A Word with Two Meanings We invent words, then let ourselves be subjugated by them. There would be no knowledge without words, but it is words again that grow into independent entities, obstacles that come between us and the real world. They move us closer to and at the

The New Man

An Individual without Individualism To a new society – a new man. Naturally, one would not fancy a communist world inhabited by middle-class people in disguise. That was the most delicate problem raised by transformist mythology. One could not rebuild the economy and

The End Of The World. History Without an End

The 1900 Crisis The Break By 1900, no more bets. Pessimism. Denial of progress, return of the cyclic history. Social conflicts. Revolutions. Decline of the West and the yellow peril. Anti-utopia. The Great War. Abstract art. Earthquakes. Halley's comet. The end of the

1924

One cannot overestimate the contribution of modernist research to literature and art. Over the last five years, the whole baggage of melancholy boarding-school girls romance has been gradually forgotten in suburban stations in the oh! sacramental sound of barrel organ. Now,

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