But this is only the first generation ? the child of primal, devastating violence. But he will breed in his turn: the mutants of the second generation are an already aggressive species that moves dynamically on. They either take possession of the derelict facades of their ?grandfathers? or, like Woods? ?meta-institutes?, climb up on their ?stilts? and step over them, leaving ? like in a children?s crusade ? the place of the natal disaster. Dis-figured, diseased, aberrant, the new symbiotic organisms ? host and virus become one ? or cyborgs will point to the long-term consequences of our present acts. Do you not feel that this urban metaphor proposed by Woods already describes today?s adolescents, the second or third generation who grew up in the communist ghettoes?

            What lies behind Woods? projects is not only a radical construction, but also a radical deconstruction. The virus invoked in Mark Wigley?s deconstructivist manifesto finds in the all-infected post-communist space the proper work field. The project for Sarajevo is a dramatic method of making people think, a remarkable intellectual construction. On comparison, it makes von Gerkhan?s?Bucharest 2000? winner project ? which goes in the opposite direction both in terms of depth and actualization ? look ridiculous. What in Woods is introspection and critical discourse, a branding and cathartic surgery for the collective psyche, dwindles into petty bourgeois conformism and cheap opera in von Gerkhan (6). And do not make the mistake to imagine that the cathedrals of consumerism von Gerkhan saw rising around a House of the Republic that remains intact and continues as the center of ultimate state power are more feasible than Woods? ?meta-institutes?. The former are economically unavailing, and no sane investor will come to put in the money for the fantastic buildings imagined by von Gerkhan and appraised by the ?Bucharest 2000? jury and the people who?ve taken a fancy to this model. The latter are, frankly speaking, an eye sore, although some of the deconstructivist works seem, in the long run, rather picturesque than truly critical or subversive. The two proposals for cyborg-buildings in Sarajevo seem to me quite modest, if we are to compare them with the war ruins they once were. Still, even if equally unlikely to become reality, the Sarajevo-Woods model is one of intellectual altitude, whereas the Bucharest-von Gerkhan model is one of incredible platitude. To conclude, I will maintain the following: realistically speaking, Bucharest is closer to Istanbul than to Paris, but not for the reasons invoked by ?experts? lost in reverie. Paris and Istanbul are not ? either positively or negatively ? the cities we still believe they are.

            As an anti-nostalgic treatment, there are three types of possible cure: 1) study visits to contemporary Istanbul, a live, developing city with a coherent personality and well-preserved monuments of a value which we, living in the province of the province of any empire that ever chose to toss us in or out, cannot even dream of; 2) detoxification visits to Paris, in order to realize that this dusty town on Dîmboviţa?s banks does not even come close to the African or Magrebian ghettoes surrounding the City of Lights, not to speak of its center; 3) a serious study of the post-traumatic approach on urban violence taken up by Lebbeus Woods. He is the only one who, probably unconcerned with Bucharest, offers us a plausible investigation of the long-term moral and urban consequences of our collective acts in the, alas, so recent past?

1.      The Bancorex building, raised between 1995-1997, was designed as the shell of a pearl oyster (Bancorex: the biggest state bank at the time); but when the construction was completed, the fake oyster imploded and the empty shell remained. The vacuity of the project is not only hard to administer today, but also essentially anti-urban.