Also, the House of the Republic has been breeding by scissiparity. We are witnesses to a boom: Bucharest is practically invaded by its charming sons: it takes only a tour (but you cannot getoff the car, the hounds threaten to tear you apart and the bodyguards to shoot you dead if you at least try to take a picture) through areas like Zoo/Pipera/Iancu Nicolae or even Baneasa, on the north side of the city, or anywhere around the Snagov Lake,to grasp the dimensions of the drama. The aborted morons of the central project for a ?new civic center? are now object of the West?s dazzled admiration for what is called ? by a name that wrongly sets ethnic boundaries ? ?Gypsy architecture?. The July 2001 issue of Architecture d?Aujourd?hui, for instance, publishes an impressively long (as compared to the usual brevity encouraged by the journal) cover-up by Mariana Celac on the said phenomenon, which speaks of both the author?s and the editor?s fascination with it.

The pseudo-monumental style of architecture ? of complicate, because bastard, extraction ? which has assailed Romania after 1989 is equally the product of instantaneous globalization and of the lack of any concern for educating young people in school in the domain of architecture and monuments. Given the absence of any term for comparison, this lack makes it possible for such a malign edifice as the House of the Republic to pass for the acme of architecture and an arbiter of taste. Yet, if thereis one thing that can be safely stated as to such a geometrically unstable phenomenon, it?s that it is NOT an exclusively Rroma product. The example of the Certeze village (Oaş county), built up by Romanian emigrants on the Paris-Romania route is revealing. That indignation swells up only when it comes to the villages of the Rroma ethnic groups is, I believe, part of the same incapacity of assuming things, which managed to play down the meydane as well. It is always the?Other?, the stranger, and, if possible, the stranger who is our ?inferior?, who is to blame altogether for our errors. The public and vehement demand that the president of the Romanian Academy passed at a conference of the Architects? Society (1999), for studying ways of counteracting (why not exterminating?) the?venom called Gypsy architecture? is, I believe, a telling instance of the same attitude.

In Romania, a ?maidan? (vacant ground) is the name some people use for that piece of bare, residual, often derelict land, left over after a mahala (slum) has drawn a space for itself along such lines as will forever elude Western understanding of urbanism. I believe that our inability to assume our errors or our incapacity to have a common administration of a public space are largely proved by this Turkish word we have adopted as an umbrella term for all the ?civic spaces? we fail ? the only ones we have. I find this linguistic withdrawal from, and therefore dismissal of, our failures characteristic of the way we, as a people, think the space of dwelling together. Moreover, the common sincere belief is that maidan necessarily has a pejorative ?field? reference, sometimes denoting a piece of downright urbanistic trash. Elaborate theories are put forward to demonstrate that the degraded meaning of the word is not our doing, but Istanbul?s fault. It is precisely against this pejorative appropriation of the Turkish term that this text will argue, since nowhere else but here meydane has come to mean something bad. In the Turkish language, it means square, agora or commercial fair. So, let us not find excuses for our incapacity to articulate public spaces by advancing toponymic expedients of the cheapest sort.