2001 Bachelor of Architecture
Anca Vasiliu

The problem of constructing an itinerary for such a project is a difficult one, which touches upon many areas of knowledge and experience both as an architect and as an individual. It is necessary to know enough about a place to build a thesis, while at the same time leaving room for discovery. The proposed place must be one with enough depth and complexity to sustain a long-term architectural study. It must also be reasonably accessible, open enough to allow the participant to enter into a foreign culture and a foreign language. Ideally, the itinerary should be concise, yet open-ended; it should propose questions but remain flexible, able to adjust to circumstances that are different from those imagined, able to deal with the potential dearth of available contacts and resources, the inaccessibility of crucial sites, or the possibility that what is encountered is ultimately more interesting than what was expected.

Writing teachers often advise their students to write about what they know best. Following this rationale, the inquiry behind this trip began as a straightforward exploration of the sites of personal memory. I was born in Brasov, Romania in 1975, and entered the United States in 1983. Whatever memory I retain of the intervening years is somewhat problematic, since it is of a place that no longer exists. The cities are still there, as are the streets, and even many of the buildings. But as anyone intuitively knows, it takes much more than physical presence to make a place a place. Change is, of course, inevitable, and the terrain of memory is by nature shaky ground. The part of the world in which I was born, however, did not succumb to the usual, slow weathering of time. Instead, it suffered several ruptures of tremendous magnitude, breaks in the very fabric of reality, which left much of its vast population stranded in an unfamiliar landscape. One of the peculiarities of the process of emigration is the equivalent discontinuity of a personal history, the severance of a natural lineage. The emigrant carries within him that other place, and finds traces of it at strange and unexpected moments. It is a place, however, which he no longer knows and understands, a place to which it is impossible to return. The emigrant, then, is most accurately a citizen of his memory, of a unique landscape cobbled together from the components of his singular experience, which has collapsed and warped real time and space.

On a personal level, I was interested in visiting the cities of Eastern Europe for two reasons. The first was an attempt to understand as much as possible of this rapidly changing landscape, before it disappears in the inevitable process of assimilation into a larger Europe. The second, and perhaps more important, was to see how much of it I had retained, how much I intuitively recognized or understood. This was not in any way a “homecoming”, as I feel little connection to the places of my past, and harbor no nostalgic feelings for the difficult conditions into which I was born. I look upon many of the changes in this part of the world as being fundamentally positive and necessary, and hope that the Eastern European nations will weather this transitional period smoothly, without further upheaval and bloodshed, and without forsaking the useful and productive aspects of their individual cultures.

As an architect, however, I was interested in seeing how these transitions have played out in the built environment, how the city has negotiated the upheavals and the ruptures of this unique period in history, how it functions as the site on which we project the desires and the objectives of our collective being and collective memory. Starting with the premise that something built is naturally a projection of something human, I went in search of the unique physical and architectural conditions resulting from this period, with the intention of learning something about the nature of cities and the nature of the discipline of building. I was also interested in the sites of intersection of personal and collective memory, as a way of understanding the world that might turn out to be useful at a time in which migration, displacement, and the increasing mobility of individuals is creating urban conditions of unprecedented complexity and cultural interchange.

Conclusion

When I composed the initial itinerary for this trip in May, 2001, I had no idea that my investigation would take on a far deeper significance. At the time, I wished to put together a straightforward study of the architectural conditions of the post-Communist urban landscape, an environment I had known in a far different incarnation as a child. I was interested in the mutability of meaning of built objects, and the conditions that result from periods of upheaval and change. In the year that passed between the original proposal and my departure, several events helped fine-tune my objectives, most notably the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. I noticed that as I was traveling through Eastern Europe’s landscapes of fragmentation and reconstruction, there were certain recurrent themes that surfaced in my inquiries. The architectural problems of destruction, reconstruction, and memorialization began to affect my perceptions and analyses, and ended up as one of the focal points of my study.

The lessons I have learned on this trip are many, as travel at this scale is a transformative and multifaceted experience. My initial expectations were invariably met and exceeded, and the study grew into something far more complex and coherent. This report is an attempt to consolidate the most important of these insights into a form I can refer to in future projects and endeavors throughout my professional career. It is, however, only a part of the vast body of knowledge which such a trip offers. The greatest surprise was perhaps an awareness of how much the revelation of new places and ideas offers reciprocal insights into the familiar, and how conditions observed on a small scale can form and influence ideas about the world at large.

The unparalleled gift of this kind of fellowship is the ability to truly take the time to look at the surrounding world, something increasingly rare in an age in which technologies make short work of time and distance. The freedom to think and evaluate, free of the constraints of daily life, is extremely valuable, as it helps shape the process by which an architect learns to contribute back into the world. I feel extremely fortunate to have had this opportunity, and it will certainly prove to be one of the formative experiences of my professional life.

Austria, Czech Republic, and Hungary

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croacia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Turkey

Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine

Germany and Poland

Romania