The vernacular of the slum emphasizes dimensions and unbalances its own architecture by disfiguring proportions: tours become too tall or too many. It imitates ?expensive? materials ? molding or, more recently, plastic wall paper instead of marble, granite or gritstone: Ersatz. If it uses the originals, it does it improperly. Inadequacy is actually the defining feature of this type of architectural discourse. Always careful to give an emphatic proof of some denied belonging, always ready to show off, this vernacular wants to be acknowledged yet knowingly manages to miss this chance. The solution to the inferiority complex is, in this case, a severe superiority complex.

In the modern period, source circulation is no longer unidirectional ? from the center of power to the masses. It is often the case that leaders who made their way up out of non-noble strata by means of force or popular vote, set the tune of imitation ? not of originals but of the copies and interpretations of the original made by this lousy vernacular. Inferior models are thus brought from the periphery of culture and authentic art into the architecture of power. The House of the People is such an expression of slum eclecticism, a huge tawdry insult. Hitler was fascinated not with imperial Rome, but with the buildings on Ringstrasse, from nineteenth-century Vienna. The same goes for Stalinist architecture, which often copies ?Russified? variants of consecrated styles, and refuses the high-class classical-oriented ideas of a Joltovski or Fomin.

As a matter of fact, this kinship line linking the vernacular and the kitsch, the official architecture of the Ceauşescu regime and the style of the Lipscani neighborhood might have been the salutary urban combination for the ensemble of the ?new civic center?. Scale aside, the Lipscani street, the main comercial route of the historic district of downtown  Bucharest, and the ?Victory of Socialism? boulevard are of the same nature[i]. Today, the balconies roofed up by the new owners, the parabolic aerials, the huge, dynamic, flickering adverts and firms are a still timid sketch of my project. This is, ultimately, a cynical project ? but cynicism here regards a hybristic architecture, growing on the ruins of the real center. The vernacular resurrection already adds a human touch to this cardboard architecture ? an unreal species of the breed invented elsewhere by Peter Eisenmanand other deconstructivist architects - a type of architecture that ?freezes at design stage?, and it is only a scale model, not yet actually built. Even the attempts the officials made to make solemn use of the place are subject to ridicule, since the place itself is rather idiotic. Had it not been built on crime, but on some outside city waste ground, the place would have been no more than a midget. Or, the solution is to push the kitsch beyond the limit of its intrinsic aggressiveness into the space where it becomes inoffensive Disneyland, a kind of architecture that exhibits the Down syndrome.

As a comparison, the recent project of the America?s Partners group to build a Transylvania/Dracula Theme Park on one side of the House of the People (financed by Michael Jackson), casinos and commercial galleries (financed by some American tribes) is less radical than the idea of turning the House into an enormous casino: the former variant keeps the dome of national disgrace intact, it even preserves its presumably solemn function, as it has it now. Few of those who listened to the representative of America?s Partners (who received considerable support from the representatives of the embassies of Israel and America) seem to realize that one cannot, really (despite the actual state of things) perform legislative acts in the very middle of the circus arena. I do appreciate the postmodern cast of mind of the chosen of the nation. In a way, when I saw my 1991 proposal[ii] to turn the boulevard into a gigantic Communist Disneylandabout to become real, even if in a sensibly different form, I rather tend to believe that we might well resuscitate urban life in that dead place. Yet there are, even at the heart of postmodernism, and of the derision that is in-built in its genes, limits of common sense. At least the appearances of a state life need to be still preserved. Or do they?