When we speak of the City of Lights, we are so moved to tears of admiration that we tend to turn a blind eye on the empirical reality of its illegitimate child, who can only rebut the comparison, so dear to the dreamers. I do not deny that, at the end of the too long 19^th century, the will would have been to draw up a Bucharest ? la française: architects of all degrees of competence came from there to find shelter and work here. They disfigured, by way of ?reconstruction?, age-long monasteries. They brushed off inns (caravanserais) in order to make room for the small palaces and boulevards ? la mani?re de Napoleon III and Hausmann. Certainly the CEC building is a worthy piece in comparison with the wretched freak that is now bossing around (1); yet, except the glass dome, it can pride itself on nothing else. And even if the intention did exist one hundred years ago, the only ambition of the 20th century was to sabotage the model. The Neo-Romanian style was anti-eclectic, too little given to the beaux-arts, and therefore, anti-Parisian. The inter-war period, in its modernizing passion, came with the block-haus and the Ford industry buildings, with the ?Moorish-Florentine architecture? (or ?Romanian architecture of Spanish denomination?, as the times called it, with its sophisticated anti-Semitic taste for derision). The only French flavorthere ever was came with the short episode of late Corbusierianism of the ?70s, which gave us the Intercontinental Hotel and the National Theatre House. But next came the demolishing era that raised the edifices of that thing called ?our Versailles? (the House of the People), where one had better avoid comparisons with the Hausmann style, if only for fear of sounding ridiculous. The project presented at the UAR contest (1991), which suggested a ?grand pyramid of little Paris? that would cover/bury in glass the House of the Republic, is already the dead service of the Parisian model as far as Bucharest is concerned. To put it bluntly, there is no ?little Paris? (any more) and there is no predictable future for it, no matter the solutions for (desired) development, or (actual) stagnation. The Parisian model has exhausted both its sources of inspiration and the reservoir of involuntary humor that the comparison with Romanian reality on either bank of Dîmboviţa has too easily fuelled for so many decades now. We have now to find another model. What will that be?

            The model of Constantinople-Istanbul ? as a model with entirely negative connotations, which would be responsible for Bucharest?s slackness ? is a construct of our collective imaginary, promoted particularly by those who have never been in Istanbul, yet know Paris by heart. If I were to say here that the ideal ? which, because an ideal, will never be attained as long as we live ? for Bucharest would be to reach at least the standard of today?s Istanbul, all those people who are blinded today by the (now aberrant) term of ?little Paris? would probably feel instantaneously offended. (2) The preferred stance, therefore, which goes against all empirical data of yesterday and particularly of the present day, is to believe in an improbable ideal foundation of the town, rather than to acknowledge the fact that the Bucharest urbanscape feeds on an undecidable form of urbanism, that of the Byzantine, and eventually Turkish, ?City?. Here is an example to the point: the bilingual volume entitled Bucureşti, un oraş între Orient şi Occident /Bucharest, a City Between Orient and Occident/, the doctoral thesis of late researcher Dana Harhoiu, recently published in a second edition (2001) by Simetria Publishing House. The book, which I reviewed when it was first published (and I?m afraid I was the only one who noticed more that the attractive graphical presentation), tries not only to give an account of the state of urbanistic research on Bucharest, but, most importantly, to promote a new understanding of the capital?s development. I will not dwell here on the impressive and well-structured amount of information the author used, nor will I insist on the scientific quality of the images: maps, period documents, photographs of different historical stages of monuments that still exist or of others that have been engulfed by the mess around. This has been done, more or less skillfully, by the reviewers who preceded me, in the Arhitext journal, for instance. (Incidentally, I would make a note of the quasi-total lack of serious commentaries on books of architecture in Romanian mass media. The art critics will not take such books into consideration, God knows why, and among the architects, unfortunately, there are no serious reviewers who know how to write and do not engage in personal arguments with the authors?)