DADA Houses & Bucharest Strip

When I walked for the first time down a boulevard in Bucharest, I was deeply impressed by the great density of modernist buildings. But I didn’t manage to find any of the usual elements by which to decode the urban context unfolding before my very eyes. What was obvious was that the Bucharest I saw seemed to be intertwined (in a radical way) with architectural vestiges of previous eras and also to mirror these ones. 

DADA House, Bucharest 2006

[…] Coming from Zürich, where I have lived until a few years ago, I was familiar with the Dada movement and its protagonists. The fact that one of its initiators was also active as an architect in Bucharest propelled my curiosity to visit and take photos of the buildings that have been preserved until today. 

DADA House, Bucharest 2006

A series of photographic documents emerged from another route – made on the occasion of the same visit – in which I started with the old centre (this time by car) and ended in Bucharest’s suburbs. These photographs pointing out the excrescences and the rising and the falling of the second half of the 20th century, documenting the transformation and at the same time a transition through the city. 

Bucharest Strip, 2006

[…] All of Iancu’s buildings are characterized by a confrontation and also an intense preoccupation with each of the clients. The lay-outs of the construction parcels required individual solutions at times, that didn’t submit at all to the doctrine of modern functionalism. On the contrary, these buildings represented the Dada spirit (“Life is the meaning of art”, see Hans Arp) and also Iancu’s constructivist genius. 

Bucharest Strip, 2006

[…] The full-colour pictures from DADA Houses of unusual buildings – buildings that were influenced by the multi-talented Marcel Iancu’s Dadaist spirit – form a counterpoint to the black-and-white images from Bucharest Strip. These speak of failed utopias of a generation of town-planners who submitted to ideology. As we know, Iancu himself was forced to emigrate to Palestine, as a result of political events in the 1940s. The photographs present the route from Bucharest Strip in a way similar to the sequences of a film and they tell small or big stories, they reflect and document the changes of past and present eras – eras that have exerted their influence upon Bucharest, marking considerably the city’s image. 

Bucharest Strip, 2006

In the renowned study made by Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour on Las Vegas (see MIT, 1978) a high-speed world, centered completely on automobiles was described. According to their analysis, the spatial subtleties of architectur lose part of their effect and thus “sign-in-space” ends up dominating “form-in-space”. 

DADA House, 2006

Since we learned from Las Vegas, we know that the façade, interface of the built structure – formerly disclaimed by the modernists – has become an autonomous symbol individualized in relation to the building. Form (its symbolic aspect) has regained supremacy over functionalism. Architecture thus becomes pure medium, freed of form and function, in order to redefine itself on the playground of plurality and individuality – emancipated and disengaged from a dissolving reality.

Text and photographs by Erik Dettwiler, Bucharest/Berlin 2006-08 

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