Juliana Maxim Microraion

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Mass housing and collective experience: onthe notion of microraion in Romania in the1950s and 1960sJuliana Maxim aa Department of Art, College of Arts and Sciences, University of San Diego,California, USAVersion of record first published: 17 Mar 2009.

To cite this article: Juliana Maxim (2009): Mass housing and collective experience: on the notion ofmicroraion in Romania in the 1950s and 1960s, The Journal of Architecture, 14:1, 7-26

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Mass housing and collectiveexperience: on the notionof microraion in Romaniain the 1950s and 1960s

Juliana Maxim Department of Art, College of Arts and Sciences,

University of San Diego, California, USA

IntroductionThe striking history of Romania’s postwar architec-

ture is often told in numbers: 6,000 dwelling units

were built in the year 1950, 30,000 in 1960,

120,000 in 1970 and 150,000 in 1975;1 340,000

dwelling units between 1956 and 1960;2 and

between 1960 and 1975, the figure stood at 1.12

million flats.3 The numbers are staggering, and

powerfully suggestive of masses in motion, millions

of lives neatly tucked into white flats, streaming in

and out of factories, pouring into parks and stadia.

To Western readers, the Orwellian ring is unmistak-

able, and, unsurprisingly, anonymity, monotony and

crushing homogenisation have been the tropes that

have driven up to now examinations of the architec-

ture of postwar socialist regimes. And although it is

easy to suspect that socialist architectural reality was

more complex than the one obsessively tallied by the

official literature, there have been very few efforts

towards a more nuanced understanding of socialist

architecture’s tasks, goals and overall ethos.

Using Romania as a case study, I will attempt to

colour socialist urban planning’s terse image by

tracing architects’ efforts to reconcile mass

housing with softer notions of neighbourhood and

collectivity. I hope thus to complicate a series of

assumptions about the purely utilitarian and ration-

alist character of mass housing inside the Soviet

bloc. I will do so by showing that the relentless

pursuit of efficiency and industrialisation was

always combined with experiential and expressive

concerns, a dual architectural enterprise that I wish

to relate, ultimately, to one of the favourite terms

of the politically charged language of socialist

regimes, ‘realism.’

Much of socialist architecture’s reputation as

impersonal, and as lacking a sense of community,

stems, in part, from socialist regimes’ own modes

of self-representation. Discussions of the 1950s

and 1960s in Romania, as well as in most of the

Soviet Bloc, often assessed the architecture of the

time in terms of cost and speed of production and

assemblage. Good architecture was that which

best answered the pressing housing needs of a

rapidly swelling urban population, and thus was

bound to favour, for instance, prefabricated panels

over detailed craftsmanship, or to express tremen-

dous concern for the number of square metres of

housing for each inhabitant, but only minimal inter-

est in the treatments of the facade. In other words,

the emphasis on norms and quantitative advance-

ment determined at once architectural practice,

and its frames of representation.

The misreading of socialist architecture as unidi-

mensionally oppressive has been amplified also by

its perceived foreignness. Difference, or at least

singularity, has been an obdurate trope of studies

of the art and architecture of the Soviet Bloc, and

an over-simplified reflection of its political isolation

from the West. The separation, within the history

of twentieth century architecture, of the Soviet

world from its European counterpart, is due, in no

small measure, to the socialist regimes’ own desire

for specificity, for an architecture that would

7

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# 2009 The Journal of Architecture 1360-2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360802705155

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convey a radically different political, social and econ-

omic construct. Sources of the time insist on archi-

tecture’s unprecedented qualities: ‘Within world

architecture, soviet architecture is essentially a new

phenomenon, that develops according to laws that

are proper to socialist society. It is absolutely

normal that the construction of large ensembles

has, in soviet times, its own specific features, its

original character, its own criteria.’4

A shift in scale: from house to housingThe ‘newness’ of architecture under socialism

derived primarily from a radical shift in the scale of

the architectural object. From the early 1950s

onwards, socialist architects successfully redefined

the act of inhabitation by replacing the individual

house with collective mass housing, thus transform-

ing architectural design into urban planning. This

new paradigm could only occur alongside a trans-

formation of architectural practice: the socialist

state became the main, if not the sole, commis-

sioner of construction work; architectural con-

ception was no longer an individual pursuit and

instead occurred in design collectives composed of

large numbers of architects; and the object of archi-

tecture was no longer the single building, but was

always formulated at the level of the neighbour-

hood, the district and even the city. In Romania,

one of the first pieces of legislation of the newly

installed socialist regime concerned the positioning

of all design-related activities at the city level.

Starting with the ‘Decision Concerning the

Construction and Reconstruction of Cities and the

Organisation of Activities in the Architectural

Domain’ of 1952, and continuing through a series

of decrees, the Central Committee of the Romanian

Communist Party mandated that the planning and

design of all housing projects be coordinated nation-

ally, through the State Committee for Architecture

and Constructions (CSAC), and at the city level,

through the newly-created position of municipal

architect-in-chief. The legislation also called upon

newly organised planning collectives to put in prac-

tice the principle of complex housing estates, also

termed ‘cvartals’; finally, it defined the planning

and construction of residential ensembles as the

main goal of the architectural profession.5

In 1964, in what amounts to an alternative

‘Charter of Athens’ of the socialist approach to the

city, Horia Maicu, then the chief architect of the

city of Bucharest, recapitulates the standards of

what had become, by then, current practice. His

‘Principles of urban development of the capital’

state as the first goal ‘[t]he realisation of a unified

territory, developed through structural units, with

large ensembles of dwellings and facilities.’ Third

in the list of priorities comes ‘[t]he creation of a par-

ticular life within the residential ensembles, achiev-

able through the total satisfaction of the needs of

a complex existence and of advanced comfort, in

correspondence with the structure of the cities of

our socialist society.’ (emphasis added)6

Such commitment to design on the scale of the

multiple and the collective, apparent from the early

1950s onward, did not come easy to Romania’s

architects, who, mostly trained in a Beaux-Arts

system before the socialist regime’s ascent to power

in 1947, had no experience, so to speak, of collective

housing. Prewar publications on urban planning

repeatedly spoke against collective housing,

8

Mass housing andcollective experience:

RomaniaJuliana Maxim

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thought to foster dangerous communist tendencies,

and to be unfit overall for the Romanian workers’

mentality and habits, which were considered quin-

tessentially rural.7 In an exceptionally candid 1954

article describing the planning and construction of

Vatra Luminoasa, one of the earliest residential

ensembles commissioned by the new regime, the

authors explain that their initial preference for indi-

vidual housing had been sternly contradicted by

the State Committee for Architecture and Construc-

tion (CSAC), which had decided instead in favour of

four-storey buildings of 40–50 flats each. The same

article reveals that the architects of the time saw

mass housing superseding the single-family home

not only as a political act, but as project with import-

ant consequences on the city form: ‘It is not longer

relevant to design in two dimensions – that is, in

height and width – but also, necessarily, in the

third dimension, depth. Whatever we say, we have

to acknowledge that, until now, the third dimension

was still just in reference to facade elements.’8

Emblematic of a practice in a state of flux, the

article announces a design principle that will

underlie much of the 1960s’ developments: a pro-

gressive abandonment of a directional, street-

oriented understanding of residential buildings in

favour of a newly-found urban ‘third-dimension’,

and a condemnation of the traditional preoccupation

with facades as narrowly decorative and outmoded.

The microraionmicroraionContemporary architecture has moved away from

the building – modest or significant – that was

considered not too long ago as a self-sufficient

object and thus relatively independent from its

surroundings, and on to more complex problems,

concerning large residential ensembles, urban

structures, or territorial organisms. It is now

seeking to solve increasingly ample problems

with a deep social content. A building today is

considered an organic component of a totality,

the two being mutually dependent. [. . .] At the

centre of architectural concerns, holding a princi-

pal place – internationally – are large housing

ensembles.9

Each architectural object should be designed

not only as a comfortable, durable, and beautiful

construction, but also as a component of the

architectural complex.10

In thinking about housing, the shift that occurs in

Romania in the 1950s consists not only in transform-

ing the individual dwelling into collective blocks of

flats; but also, and more importantly, in abandoning

a traditional conception of the city as an accumu-

lation of individual parcels containing single build-

ings in favour of larger, state-owned land units

shared by several, and perhaps dozens of buildings.

These two principles, the block of flats and the

appearance of much larger land units that could

accommodate an ensemble of buildings, coalesce,

in 1960, in the notion of microraion, which

becomes the official modus operandi not only in

Romania, but also in all states of the Soviet bloc.

Publications of the time contain numerous and

intense discussions of the notion of microraion,

but its definition is perhaps best summarised in the

architect Marcel Locar’s (1902–1983) article on

socialist urbanism, published in 1960. In Locar’s

words, themicroraion is a residential ensemble con-

ceived so as to constitute an organic unity, aimed at

9


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connecting its inhabitants through the everyday use

of shared social and cultural institutions, a point

always reiterated in all writings. The microraion

was intended to occupy a clearly defined territory,

delimited by streets with intense traffic or by other

strong dividing elements, such as waterways, or rail-

ways. To achieve a certain functional and experien-

tial cohesion, its territory was not to be crossed by

important streets, and pedestrian and car traffic

were to be, preferably, separated inside the micro-

raion. The maximum distance between any dwelling

and public transportation should not be more than

500 metres. Locar suggests that the size of the

microraion should not go beyond 10–12, 000

inhabitants, although there seems to be, in the pub-

lications of the time, little consensus over this

figure.11

The microraion shared many of its principles (and

origins) with the western notion of the neighbour-

hood unit, which had been developed in the

context of the large capitalist city; in the context

of postwar Romania, however, the discourse sur-

rounding the notion tended to foreground the

microraion’s ability to overcome the capitalist div-

ision of the city’s surface into small, fragmented

units, and the repetitive logic of the row and of

the urban grid. The emergence, in the late 1950s,

of the microraion as the basic planning unit of the

socialist city testifies, indeed, to a search for urban

expression and a thinking about the city in ways

that cannot be solely translated into numbers.

The shift from the efficiency and economy of the

grid to the formal playfulness of the microraion is

visible in Romania’s break away from the early

Soviet-inspired model of the cvartal, such as

Floreasca (1956–58), which organised identical

buildings into regular patterns orthogonally

aligned with the street grid (Figs 1, 2), in favour of

more picturesque, less predictable and entirely un-

geometric arrangements of buildings of various

heights and footprints that characterise the large

housing estates from 1960 onwards (Figs 3, 4).

That the spread of the microraion as a norm for

urban development functioned as an open criticism

of the grid’s uniformity and monotony is an argu-

ment often encountered in architects’ writings of

the 1960s: ‘The simplicity with which [the Floreasca

district] was conceived, the uniformity in height, the

positioning of the housing blocks, the lack of

concern for facilities, and the use of a restricted

range of block types, led the almost 3,500 flats to

seem monotonous and without personality.’12

Although mostly composed of mute, abstract

buildings, the microraion is shaped by a search for

formal effect. Unlike the grid, it does not proceed

through the systematic repetition of a single build-

ing type, and instead reads as a collection of

forms; if a building type is repeated, it is as a

short, rhythmic series, each element of the series dif-

ferentiated either by staggering, or by varying its

orientation (Figs 5, 6, 7). The grid was formed by

the addition of identical elements and therefore

could be endlessly extended (Fig. 8); by contrast,

the microraion is a fully constituted, unbreakable,

organic and finite entity inside of which each

housing block stands as an irreplaceable com-

ponent.

Two new neighbourhoods in Bucharest, Balta

Alba (a district built on the site of dilapidated quar-

ries and brick kilns, and developed at lightening

10



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speed between 1961 and 1966, during which

36,000 flats, or 1,087,000 square metres of built

surface, housing 100,000 inhabitants, were con-

structed) and Drumul Taberei (1965–early 1970s),

show how the disappearance of orthogonal circula-

tion axes, now replaced by sinuous, intricate paths,

prevent the organisation of buildings into rectangu-

lar city blocks (see Figs 5, 6 below). The repetitive

city block of regular size and formed by a regular

street grid is abandoned; instead, the settlements

occur according to a system in which progressively

smaller urban units nest inside each other (Figs 9,

10). Fully-formed urban units incompatible with

expansion, both Balta Alba and Drumul Taberei

occupy territories that are clearly bordered on all

sides by arteries of rapid circulation. When those

arteries don’t exist yet (as in Balta Alba’s south-

east corner, Fig. 11 below), the district implies such

strong boundaries in the orientation and positioning

of its buildings. The larger territory of the district is

subdivided into clearly individualised microraions

(marked by the dotted lines in the map of Drumul

11


Figure 1. Aerial view of

the Floreasca housing

district (1956-58),

Bucharest. Published in

Arhitectura RPR, 6

(1964).

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Miruna Paula Stroe

Taberei (see Figure 9 below), where the neighbour-

hood unit or microraion is designated, in the

caption, as ‘housing complex’).

Balta Alba, for instance, contained six residential

neighbourhoods (cartiere), each subdivided into

two neighbourhood units (microraion), all of

them served by a cultural and administrative centre

and a large recreation area around two central

lakes (see Figures 10, 11 below). Although hier-

archically related to the whole, each subdivision

enjoyed a significant amount of functional auton-

omy, and contained at least one commercial

centre, medical centre, nurseries, schools, sport

and recreation facilities, and administration build-

ings. Differences in size and plan between micro-

raions suggest a search for a distinct character,

and a clear stance against visual monotony,

mostly attempted through the variation of building

types, their position and rhythm. For instance, in

Balta Alba, in some microraions the buildings

obey an orthogonal arrangement (while the

streets connecting them loop and wind free of geo-

metric logic); in some others, buildings are distrib-

uted, fan-like, in a progressively rotating series

(see Figure 11 below). Finally, within eachmicrorar-

ion, smaller residential groups of 4–5 blocks of

flats are formed. These units of decreasing com-

plexity and size corresponded to a similar hierarchy

of social relationships, so that the city provides the

stage for a range of encounters, from the most inti-

mate and everyday, to those in a larger, less familiar

community.

The building no longer stands in relationshipto a street, but to the neighbourhood

The characteristics of these large ensembles are

their organisation in complex structural units

(in decreasing order of size and complexity,

these are the district (sector) – neighbourhood

(cartier) – neighbourhood unit (microraion) –

residential groups), the mixing of spaces for

dwellings and facilities, and the spreading out of

the buildings, with important effects upon the

architecture of the street.13

12



Figure 2. Early phase of

the Floreasca district,

planned according to

the cvartal notion.

(1956–58, architect

Corneliu Radulescu and

associates) ‘The new

neighborhood (cartier),

which is by itself a small

town able to

accommodate 11,000

inhabitants, consists of

5 main groups in which

the residential buildings

are oriented linearly,

along the pre-existing

streets of the old

parcels. Most of the 84

buildings are built from

standardised elements,

have uniform height

(ground level!3), and

occupy 30% of the

land, which results in a

net density of 450

inhabitants per hectare.

Collective services –

most of which have

been located in the

central garden – consist

of 2 schools, 4

preschools, a public

bath, a laundry, a

cultural centre with club

and library, a film

theatre, and a general

store.’ From Grigore

Ionescu, Arhitectura

RPR 1944–69, pp. 66

and 68.

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Miruna Paula Stroe

Much of the microraion’s character is determined

by the demise of the street as a place of urban

experience; instead, large, collective green spaces

that occupy most of the unbuilt-up surface come

to constitute the places of social interaction.

Indeed, along with the street itself, the traditional

opposition between the public nature of the street

and the private nature of the individual residential

plot is abolished, and the land surrounding the resi-

dential buildings is now neither private nor public,

but uniformly collective. Along with the street, the

small private gardens that had previously defined

the experience of private dwelling in Bucharest,

disappear in favour of common lawns and green

spaces. (The balconies or loggia, which become

systematic features of the socialist flat, can be

seen as a compensation for this loss of private

exterior space.)

The streets that remain are of two very different

categories: inside the microraion, pedestrian paths

meander through green spaces, and narrow

winding lanes, having fulfilled their sole function

13


Figure 3. Aerial view of

the Balta Alba housing

district (1961–66),


Arhitectura RPR, 6

(1964).

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of delivering motor traffic to a single building, dead-

end at its doorstep; around the microraions, large

thoroughfares or boulevards that traverse the

entire housing estates as corridors of rapid transit,

and with which intersections are kept to a

minimum. These lines of heavy traffic act also as

boundaries between microraions, as markers of

inside and outside. The life of the population is to

occur away from them, in the green interstitial

spaces and along the secondary paths inside the

microraion (Fig. 12).

Such a decoupling of dwelling and rapid circula-

tion is clearly seen, for instance, in the planning of

Drumul Taberei, where the choice of a circular

thoroughfare is aimed at reducing the number of

high-traffic intersections (see Figure 9 below). The

thoroughfare loops without interruption, as

narrow lanes peel off to the side to penetrate each

subdivision (microraion) of the district. Although

buildings are arranged orthogonally within each

microraion, the circulation pattern does not

conform to a grid, but turns this way and that, is

interrupted, and progresses sinuously, looking

more like park trails than places of efficient, rapid

and economic motion (see Figure 4). Buildings,

rather than streets, are what provide order, struc-

ture, and visual identity to the microraion.

The abandonment of the linked notions of street

grid and city block deeply transformed the relation-

ship between street and building by interrupting

their traditional connection – an act of severance

that further explains the socialist attacks on the

idea of an architecture of facades. The street-corri-

dor, with its double function of urban transit and

dense housing, framed on both sides by a tight

14



Figure 4. Partial plan of

the Drumul Taberei

housing district,

illustrating the

subdivision of the

district into microraion

or superblocks, each of

them bordered by

important axes of

circulation, and

following a different

internal organisation.

Pedestrian paths are

visible, as is the

predominance of green

spaces.

From Grigore Ionescu,

Arhitectura 1944–69,

pp. 134–5.

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succession of facades, was considered particularly

inadequate:

Because of the way in which buildings are dis-

posed on the land, the microraion transforms

the traditional physiognomy of the street,

which used to be fragmented in parcels and

flanked on both sides by buildings that

formed a closed edge. Thus, the street-corridor

constituted an artery that had circulation as

its principal function. Instead, buildings are

now freely distributed throughout the territory

of the microraion and thus can achieve

optimal orientation.14

Thus, another consequence of the emphasis on

large residential ensembles and the corresponding

criticism of an architecture concerned with individ-

ual buildings, is a radically diminished importance

of the street front and therefore of the building’s

facade. Indeed, once detached from the street and

situated in a large, collective, park, the building’s

four sides become equally important, and only

15


Figures 5, 6. Plans of

two microraions inside

the Drumul Taberei

housing district,


Lazarescu, Urbanismul

ın Romania.

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16



Figure 7. Model of the

Balta Alba housing

district. Published in

Arhitectura RPR, 6

(1964), p. 17.


Floreasca housing

district, 1957. Published

in Arhitectura RPR, 7

(1957).

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subtly different. In one of the several Soviet writings

on planning that were regularly translated in the

pages of Romania’s official architectural publication

Arhitectura RPR, we read a similar analysis of this

transformation:

Our architects don’t need to dealwith a front and a

back facade, but instead, inmost cases,with build-

ing parts of equal importance, where each side is a

principal side, each is a facade. It is easy to imagine

the new compositional problems that arise, when

confronted with an architecture that wrenched

itself away from the conventional framework of

the frontal plane, [and inserted itself] in the real

space of the city, in the space of life itself.15

Socialist planning thus revises the traditional relation-

ship between architecture and city, as buildings no

longer encounter the city one-on-one, and immedi-

ately, through street facades, but only through the

mediation of a group or neighbourhood. It also

follows that in a socialistmicroraion, a single building

has little capacity to accrue meaning by itself, but

signifies only as part of an ensemble; the ultimate

outcome being that a building, in this conception,

is never understood (or represented) by itself. The

weakening of the differentiation between the four

facades and the abandonment of a street front,

two aspects that have directly contributed to the

reading of socialist housing districts as anonymous,

were thus initially seen as away to direct signification

towards larger spatial units. It is tempting to find

in such ‘collectivisation’ of buildings a spatial meta-

phor for their inhabitants’ own overcoming of

individualism.

Balta Alba and Drumul Taberei – the demise ofthe urban streetIn the new housing districts and their microraions,

blocks of flats are moved away from the street,

17


Figure 9. Map of the

Drumul Taberei housing

district. The dotted line

indicates the limits of

the microraions (here

called ‘housing

complexes’). The black

triangles indicate

schools, the white

triangles, nurseries. The

circles designate

commercial centres.

Published in Lazarescu,

Urbanismul ın Romania,

p. 62.

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18



Figure 10. Map of the

Balta Alba housing

district. The dotted line

indicates the limits of

the microraions (here

called ‘housing

complexes’). The black

triangles indicate

schools, the white

triangles, nurseries.

The circles designate

commercial centres.

Published in Lazarescu,

Urbanismul ın Romania,

p. 47.

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and towards the interior of the plot; they are also

released from the orientation of the street, and

positioned according to other factors, such as sun

orientation, winds, views, or overall visual effect.

The diminishing role of the street in giving shape

to urban life can be documented in the design

process for the Balta Alba district. Although the

first steps of the project traced the major circulation

roads (the four thoroughfares that limit the district

to the north, south, west and east), the interior cir-

culation arteries remain fluid until the very last

stage. It is the positioning of buildings, their

spacing, their orientation and their number, as well

as their dimensions in plan and height, that take pre-

cedence over the tracing of the interior streets,

which clearly come after-the-fact.

In 1963, with less than a third of the district com-

pleted, the buildings of Area 1 (upper North-West

19



Balta Alba housing

district, 1965. Design

collective: Nicolae

Kepes, Nicolae

Porumbescu, Aurel

Caciula, Sully Bercovici,

Margareta Dımboianu,

Victoria Gılca, Ana

Keszeg. Published in

Arhitectura RPR, 4

(1966).

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corner of the district, and designated in the

literature as Balta Alba – Institutul de Inframicro-

biologie) are firmly in place, with detailed flat

plans, while the interior street that moves

through the microraion’s centre keeps changing

its course, first stopping abruptly (Fig. 13), then

becoming a loop (Fig. 14), eventually meeting

another east-west interior street, to emerge into

one of the main north-south boulevards (see

Figure 11 above). Throughout the final design

stages, the buildings are firmly positioned, but

the street comes and goes, hugs the buildings,

then distances itself from them; the architects

seem to consider its exact location almost a

matter of decorative concern.

The microraion is clearly a pedestrian realm,

with transiting motor traffic severely curtailed

(see Figure 12). At first sight, this radical decoupling

of pedestrian traffic from motor circulation – which

is expelled to the edges of themicroraion – seems a

direct application of the functionalist doctrine of the

Charter of Athens, which divided the city according

to functions and separated rapid car circulation

from residential areas. But the resemblance to

functionalist planning stops there. It is the mixing,

rather than the segregation of functions that deter-

mines the microraion’s unity and organisation. Each

unit contains at least one primary school, several

nurseries, playgrounds and several local commercial

centres. Often, one can find a small medical unit,

or a cinema, or a post office, or another facility

of local utility. Much like the residential buildings,

most elements of daily use are not lined up along

the main transit corridors, but instead scattered

within the microraion, their independence from

the street reinforcing the inward convergence of

neighbourhood life. In Drumul Taberei, for instance,

schools and nurseries are placed at the centre of

each microraion. Only commercial centres stand in

close proximity to the large boulevard, but they

are not addressing the street exclusively; instead,

they offer access from all sides, and can be

equally reached on foot from the heart of the

neighbourhood unit and by car from the main

road. In other words, they, too, lack a clear front

and back (Fig 15; see also Figure 9 above). The

reduced porosity of the urban unit, added to a

relative functional autonomy, concur to make life

inside the microraion one single, uninterrupted

experience.

20



Figure 12. Circulation

diagram for a

microraion, showing

the differentiation

between vehicular and

pedestrian paths.

Transiting car traffic

occurs on the

microraion’s edges.

Published in Arhitectura

RPR, 6 (1960).

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The agenda of social integrationIf the Romanian socialist city discards the tra-

ditional notion of the city block in favour of the

microraion, it is not solely for the sake of effi-

ciency and a rational densification of land;

although these two aspects are certainly part of

the reasons why the microraion replaced a more

traditional urban fabric, the success of the micro-

raion in the 1960s came primarily from its pur-

ported ability to function as a tool of social

integration and of the abolition of class divisions.

The microraion’s organisation was meant to be

21


Figure 13. Plan of the

Balta Alba district in

1963. Area 1 (Balta

Alba – Institutul de

Inframicrobiologie) is

the N-W corner of the

district (on this plan, the

upper left corner).


RPR, 4 (1963).

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homogeneous enough to prevent architecture

from introducing economic and social differen-

tiation, while still providing a sense of neighbourly

intimacy and belonging. One of the main figures

of the architectural profession in socialist

Romania, the architect Cezar Lazarescu formu-

lates clearly this agenda of integration:

The residents of the new ensembles generally

come from different backgrounds, have diverse

professional profiles, and, as an age group,

occupy the base or the middle of the population

pyramid. Once settled in their new location (as a

result of being assigned to their new flat, or

because of new jobs) they try doubly to adapt at

once to the other newcomers, as well as to the

pre-existing collectivity.16

The desire for togetherness that undergirds the

planning of the socialist city is revealed in the

many statements that lament its lack: ‘What was

not fully successful, despite the programmatic prin-

ciples, was the constitution of a physical framework

favourable to social cohesion and to human inter-

relationships’, Lazarescu wrote about the urban pro-

jects of the 1950s.17

The terminology used in the publications of the

time to designate these new spatial units of urban

life reflects the desire to promote the microraion

as an instrument of social cohesion. Although a

vast range of scientific-sounding terms was avail-

able (such as microraion, raion, sector, complex

housing unit, etc), the new housing developments

were consistently referred to as neighbourhoods

– cartier – a much softer term with almost

bourgeois (and certainly Western) connotations.18

The sediment of such understanding of the city by

neighbourhoods is still perceptible today in the

22



Figure 14. Detail of

Area 1 (Balta Alba –

Institutul de

Inframicrobiologie) of

the Balta Alba housing

district, 1963. Published

in Arhitectura RPR, 4

(1963).

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language of Bucharest’s inhabitants, who will

often mention their (socialist) district as a mark of

identity.

The search for spatial frameworks that would

intensify and transform social interactions, and

counter the alienation of the big city, which

turned out to be the defining project of socialist

planning, was also the principle behind urban sol-

utions developed contemporaneously in the radi-

cally different political context of a democratic

Western Europe. The self-sufficient neighbourhood

unit, with its de-centralised and shared institutions,

and its accent on parks, was receiving significant

attention in the postwar period throughout

Europe. Many West European countries built ver-

sions of the microraion in the 1960s, but it is the

urban projects undertaken in the Netherlands

in the late 1950s by architects such as Lotte

Stam-Beese (1903–1988) and Jakob Bakema

(1914–1981) that I would like briefly to invoke in

order to show the striking parallels that existed,

for a decade or so, between Western European

and socialist planning ideas.

In the case of Stam-Beese and Bakema, such proxi-

mity is not surprising: Lotte Stam-Beese and her

husband Mart Stam (1899–1986) had been active,

and influential, in the Soviet planning brigades of

the early 1930s, where they had been in charge of

planning new residential districts and industrial

towns (such as the development of the city of Orsk).

Mart Stam, upon the couple’s return to Amsterdam

in 1934, became Jakob Bakema’s architecture pro-

fessor, and Lotte Stam-Beese and Bakema worked

together on at least one urban project, the plan for

the Rotterdam suburb of Pendrecht.

There is significant overlap between a project

such as Balta Alba and Pendrecht. Both establish

the neighbourhood unit as a basic module of

urban design. Both decentralise everyday insti-

tutions, such as schools, medical facilities, parks,

shopping facilities and even utilities, such as

heating plant and electricity plant, which they distri-

bute throughout the modules of the district. Both

produce an urban environment that substitutes the

collectivity of the neighbourhood for the traditional

publicness of the street or the plaza. Both projects

imagine the city as composed of increasingly

23


Figure 15. Diagram of

functions inside the

microraion. At the

centre of themicroraion

stand the green spaces,

immediately

surrounded by

education facilities

(schools, nurseries.)

Commercial facilities

are on the outer edges

of the microraion. The

thin diagonal lines

signify housing.


RPR, 6 (1960).

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Miruna Paula Stroe

complex, telescoping units of collective life, which

would start from the smallest form of association

– such as, in Romania, the stairwell (the flats

served by the same staircase formed a unity) –

and progress towards larger ones: the building,

the sub-neighbourhood, the neighbourhood, the

urban sector, and finally, the city itself. Both install,

within the city, layers of increasing size and com-

plexity in terms of their facilities and political

weight.19

Despite extensive formal similarities, and despite a

shared reading of the neighbourhood unit as an

incubator of collective feeling, the emphasis put

on the residential estate as the basic sphere of

urban life acquired different connotations under

socialism. While both Dutch and Romanian archi-

tects counted on the neighbourhood to enhance

collective life and to function as a transformative

device, the aim and content of that transformation

was formulated differently. In the Dutch case, it

meant an amplification of a long-standing tradition

of civic involvement, and aimed at recovering indi-

vidual characteristics within conditions of mass

living and a neighbourly sense that would combat

the anonymity of modern life in the city.20 In the

Romanian case, it was not as much individuality

that was promoted, as the demise of the traditional

social structures of the extended family, and their

replacement by an entirely new form of collective

life, based neither on family nor class, but on

shared urban spaces.

The novelty of life inside the socialist microraion

was conceived at once in pragmatic terms (access

to basic facilities, sewer, running water, etc.), and

in ideological ones, in the undoing of old social net-

works based on the extended family. Lazarescu, for

instance, expressed the social novelty of the micro-

raion in terms of improved material housing con-

ditions that would ultimately transform life itself:

The new residential ensembles received real inter-

est from the population, even amongst those

groups not urgently in need of lodging. What

proved to be most attractive was the quality of

the flat, its salubrious character, all its modern

sanitary fittings, and the proximity of basic facili-

ties. Thus the new ensembles came to constitute

a different mode of life from that of the old neigh-

bourhoods.21

Themicroraion actively determined such ‘a different

mode of life:’ from the importance of pedestrian

paths, to the shared institutional resources, to the

size of the flats, to the extensive provisions for

childcare outside of the family, its physical structure

promoted participation in the abstract collectivity

achieved through multiplied urban encounters.

The small size of the flats, for instance, most of

which had only one or two bedrooms, made it

clear that urban life was to be lived in small, mono-

nuclear families of parents and two children, and

was antagonistic to the co-habitation of the

extended family and its forms of socialisation.

Accordingly, domesticity was de-emphasised, and

women were expected to integrate with the work

force, as the modest kitchens and the numerous

provisions made for nurseries and pre-schools

within each microraion testify.

The city as work of artThe examination of some of the ideas associated

with the microraion – the shift in the scale of

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Miruna Paula Stroe

architectural intervention in the city, the demise of

the street in favour of the organic unity of the

neighbourhood, the agenda of social transform-

ation and integration – has shown that the micro-

raion was in part a search to enrich, even

transcend, the much-advertised efficiency of stan-

dardised mass housing. Therefore, the attempt to

discuss socialist planning as more than grim regi-

mentation of life is perhaps best concluded by

pointing at a circumscribed but intense effort, in

the theoretical writings on architecture of the

1950s, to give the socialist housing district the

status of a work of art.

Far from being considered a purely scientific

product, mass housing was also, in the late 1950s,

one of the most cherished demonstrations of the

artistic notion of ‘realism’ in architecture. Trying to

counter the assumption that architecture, unlike

the artistic image, could not reflect reality and there-

fore could not be truly art, the magazine Arhitectura

RPR published, throughout the 1950s, an impas-

sioned discussion of architecture’s own claim to

realism and, through it, to artistic status. The main

argument stated that, while architecture’s principal

aim was to satisfy practical needs rather than

procure ‘aesthetic moments’, it was able to

surpass a merely utilitarian definition and reach

into the ‘ideological and artistic realm’ through

compositions at the city scale.

The abstraction of facades, their lack of decora-

tion and differentiation, the austerity of standar-

dised construction that mark the buildings of the

1960s, are easily, and often, perceived as a refusal

to signify. But while each residential building, taken

individually, might be devoid of artistic qualities,

it was seen as acquiring expressive attributes

collectively. Much like in a Lego construction, aes-

thetic and ideological content was shifted away

from the standardised component, and towards

the result of their complex combination. The Soviet

essays of aesthetic theory that filled the pages of

Arhitectura RPR throughout the 1950s, bore titles

that militantly stated this idea: ‘The housing district

– a superior step of architectural artfulness’, or ‘On

the aesthetic qualities of mass construction’. Their

content is equally clear: ‘In mass constructions, the

dialectical unity between the utilitarian side and

the ideological-artistic one manifests itself not in

each single construction – which, taken separately,

might not be a work of art – but in the comprehen-

sive solution to urbanistic problems.’22

Among solutions for mass housing, themicroraion

embodied particularly well the notion of ‘realism,’

thus ensuring it a particularly strong claim to artistic

status. The microraion was ‘realist’ because it corre-

sponded closely to the needs of its inhabitants, and

provided conditions of living and dwelling that were

‘of their own time,’ and in step with the material

and cultural life of the present.23 But more impor-

tantly, ‘realism’ required an architecture able to

offer its inhabitants an experience that went

beyond the mechanical satisfaction of material, tan-

gible needs. Striving to access the realms of the aes-

thetic and the affective, socialist planning in Romania

counted on the microraion actively to create a new

social order and to arouse a sense of collectivity.

Notes and references1. C. Lazarescu, Urbanismul ın Romania (Bucharest,

Editura Tehnica, 1977), p. 44.

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2. G. Ionescu, Arhitectura ın Romania ın perioada anilor

1944–1969 (Bucharest, Editura Academiei Republicii

Socialiste Romania, 1969), p. 57.

3. C. Lazarescu, Urbanismul ın Romania, op. cit., p. 52.

4. N. Colli, ‘Despre unele particularitati ale constructiei de

ansamblu a oraselor’ in, Trapeznikov, K., ed., Problema

ansamblia v sovetscoi literatura (Moscow, State Pub-

lishing House for Construction and Architecture,

1952), pp. 29–34; quoted in Sistematizarea, construc-

tia si reconstructia oraselor si a centrelor populate.

Material documentar (Bucharest, Institutul de Docu-

mentare tehnica, 1954), p. 22.

5. Hotarırea Comitetului Central al P.M.R. si a Consiliului

de Ministri al R.P.R. cu privire la constructia si recon-

structia oraselor si organizarea activitatii din domeniul

arhitecturii (Bucharest, Editura pentru literatura

politica, 1952). See also G. Ionescu, Arhitectura ın

Romania ın perioada anilor 1944–1969, op. cit.,

p. 66.

6. Horia Maicu, ‘Probleme de sistematizare a capitalei’,

Arhitectura RPR, 6 (1964), pp. 8–13; 10.

7. D. Marcu, G.M. Cantacuzino, R. Bolomey, et al, Planul

Director de Sistematizare. Rezumat at memoriului

colectiv (1935).

8. N. Sburcu, ‘Locuinte noi ın cartierul Vatra Luminoasa’,


9. Gustav Gusti, speech at the 9th Congress of the IUA

(International Union of Architects), Prague, July, 1967:

published in Arhitectura RPR, 6 (1967), pp. 2–8; 2.

10. G. Minervin and M. Fedorov, ‘Despre calitatile estetice

ale constructiei de masa’, Arhitectura RPR, 5, 48

(1958), pp. 23–25, first published in Architecture

USSR, 2 (1958).

11. M. Locar, ‘Pentru dezvoltarea urbanismului socialist’,


12. Traian Stanescu, ‘Noi ansambluri de locuinte ın capi-

tala’, Arhitectura RPR, 6 (1964), pp. 14–22; 15.

13. Cezar Lazarescu, Urbanismul ın Romania, op. cit.,

p. 47.

14. G. Ionescu, op. cit., p. 75.

15. Archin, D., ‘Ansamblul – treapta superioara a maes-

triei ın arhitectura’, in, Trapeznikov, K., ed., Problema

ansamblia v sovetscoi literatura (Moscow, State Pub-

lishing House for Construction and Architecture,

1952), pp. 35–44; translated in Sistematizarea, con-

structia si reconstructia oraselor si a centrelor popu-

late. Material documentar (Bucharest, Institutul de

Documentare tehnica, 1954), p. 31.

16. C. Lazarescu, op. cit., p. 57.

17. Ibid., p. 50.

18. Cartier, from the French quartier, progressively replaces

the much older ottoman term of mahala in the late

nineteenth century, as part of Romania’s project of

modernisation of language and culture.

19. For a good discussion of the Stam-Beese/Bakema

project, see Cornelis Wagenaar, ‘Jaap Bakema and

the Fight for Freedom’, in S. Williams Goldhagen and

R. Legault, eds, Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation

in Postwar Architectural Culture (Cambridge, MA., The

MIT Press, 2001), pp. 261–277.

20. Ibid., p. 269.

21. C. Lazarescu, op. cit., p. 50.

22. G. Minervin and M. Fedorov, ‘Despre calitatile estetice

ale constructiei de masa’, op. cit.

23. For what is, to my knowledge, the best discussion

of the notion of ‘realism’ in architecture (although

in a non-Soviet context), see Stanford Anderson,

‘Sachlichkeit and Modernity, or Realist Architecture’,

in, Harry Mallgrave, ed., Otto Wagner: Reflections

on the Raiment of Modernity, proceedings of the

Otto Wagner Symposium, Santa Monica, November,

1988 (Santa Monica, CA, The Getty Center for

the History of Art and the Humanities, 1993),:

pp. 322–360.

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Juliana Maxim Microraion

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