Heterotopia and Heritage Preservation

The Urban Book Series
Smaranda Spanu
Heterotopia
and Heritage
Preservation
The Heterotopic Tool as a Means of
Heritage Assessment
Editorial Board
Fatemeh Farnaz Arefian, Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College
London, London, UK
Michael Batty, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London,
London, UK
Simin Davoudi, Planning & Landscape Department GURU, Newcastle University,
Newcastle, UK
Geoffrey DeVerteuil, School of Planning and Geography, Cardiff University,
Cardiff, UK
Andrew Kirby, New College, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA
Karl Kropf, Department of Planning, Headington Campus, Oxford Brookes
University, Oxford, UK
Karen Lucas, Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
Marco Maretto, DICATeA, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
University of Parma, Parma, Italy
Fabian Neuhaus, Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary, Calgary,
AB, Canada
Vitor Manuel Aráujo de Oliveira, Porto University, Porto, Portugal
Christopher Silver, College of Design, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
Giuseppe Strappa, Facoltà di Architettura, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome,
Roma, Italy
Igor Vojnovic, Department of Geography, Michigan State University, East Lansing,
MI, USA
Jeremy W. R. Whitehand, Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of
Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
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Smaranda Spanu
Heterotopia and Heritage

Preservation
The Heterotopic Tool as a Means of Heritage
Assessment
123
Smaranda Spanu
Cluj-Napoca, Cluj, Romania
ISSN 2365-757X ISSN 2365-7588 (electronic)

ISBN 978-3-030-18258-8 ISBN 978-3-030-18259-5 (eBook)
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Contents
1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2 Heterotopia and the Utopian Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 5
2.1 The History of Utopian Thinking: Theories, Ramifications,
Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.2 Utopia and the Heterotopic Reading of the Ideal . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.2.1 Architecture as “Effectively Realized Utopias” . . . . . . . . 12
2.2.2 The Archetype City: Between Divine and Laic . . . . . . . 15
2.3 The Ideal City of the Renaissance According to Alberti,
Filarete et al. The Revanchist Character . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 18
2.3.1 The Baroque Utopia: Transition to the Functional
City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 30
2.3.2 The Ideal City’s Expression in the Romanian Space . ... 33
2.4 The Metamorphoses of the Ideal City. The Utopian Project
and the Transition to Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 48
2.5 The Perspective of Boullée and Ledoux: Sublime
V. Pragmatic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
2.5.1 Utopia as a Social Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
2.5.2 Utopian Projections After Fourier: The Phalanstery . . . . 68
2.5.3 The Industrial Ordering and the Company Town . . . . . . 72
2.5.4 The Ruskinian Utopia: Art and Moral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
2.5.5 The Culturalist Model in a Heterotopian
Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 92
2.5.6 Progressive Model as an Official Ordering.
Plan Voisin and Plan Obus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 97
2.5.7 The Hybridization of the Progressive Model:
The Usonian Model and the Futurist Model . . . . . . . . . . 104
2.5.8 The Interwar Period: The Architecture Project
as a Social and National Shaping Device . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
vii
viii Contents
2.5.9 The Total Institution and the Dystopian

Metamorphosis. The Fascist Utopia and the Labour
Camp as a Heterotopian Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
2.5.10 Ecologist Utopia and Consumerist Utopia . . . . . . . . . . . 123
2.6 Refocusing the Utopian Projection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
2.7 Utopia and Heterotopia. Heterotopia as an Applied Utopia.
Heritage as Alterity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
2.7.1 Materialized Utopias: Heterotopian Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . 136
2.7.2 Materialized Utopia and the Alterity of Heritage . . . . . . 139
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
3 The Heterotopic Character and the Function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
3.1 Instances of the Heterotopic Space in the Urban Space.
Dehaene and De Cauter, Boyer and Cenzatti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
3.2 Heterotopic Space—Tertiary Space—Space of Mediation . . . . . . 162
3.3 Performativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
3.3.1 Performativity and Urban Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
3.3.2 Performativity and Museum Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
3.3.3 Performativity and Patrimonial Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
3.3.4 The Museum, Patrimonial Space—Between
Two Temporary Instances. Performativity
of the Heritage Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
3.3.5 The Ritual as Practice of the Patrimonial Space . . . . . . . 178
3.4 Heterotopia of Crisis. The Cemetery—The City in a City . . . . . . 180
3.4.1 Petersson—The Cemetery Between Mnemonic
Device, Leisure and Social Hierarchization . . . . . . . . . . 182
3.4.2 Brossat—The Graveyard and the Activation
of the Heterotopic Character Through Practice . . . . . . . . 187
3.5 Heritage Space, Crisis, and Transgressive Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
3.6 Sacred Space as the Space of Mediation: The Temple . . . . . . . . . 194
3.6.1 Sacred Space and the Ideal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
3.6.2 A Heterotopic Reading of Sacred Space . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
3.6.3 The Sacred Space as a Mnemonic Device . . . . . . . . . . . 199
3.6.4 Heterotopic Coordinates of the Sacred Space . . . . . . . . . 201
3.6.5 The Fortified Church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
3.6.6 Variations on the Use of the Sacred Space:
Dealu Frumos, Arcalia, Viscri . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
3.6.7 Sacred Space as Heterochronia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
3.6.8 The Compensatory Role of Sacred Space . . . . . . . . . . . 212
3.6.9 The Sacred as an Enclave—The Monastery Cloister . . . . 214
Contents ix
3.7 Mediated Space: Between Public and the Private . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

3.8 The Cultural Economy and Its Effects on Heritage. Between
Public and Private . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
3.8.1 Conservation Versus Economic Neo-liberalism . . . . . . . 222
3.9 The Political Function of Heritage—The Mediator Character
of Heterotopia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
3.10 The UNESCO Selection Mechanisms—Between Preservation,
the Economic, and the Political . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
4 Architecture and the Heterotopic Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
4.1 The Heterotopic Character as an Architectural Blueprint . . . . . . . 240
4.2 The Impact of Gentrification on the Other Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . 243
4.3 Intentional Alterity: The Architectural Object as Other
and the Recurrence of the Postmodern Architecture
as a Heterotopic Profile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
4.4 The Historicist Language of the Postmodern Object—The
Hybridization of Architecture as Alterity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
4.4.1 The American Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
4.4.2 The European Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
4.4.3 The Postmodern Historicist Language and the
Movement for the Reconstruction of the European
City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
4.4.4 New Urbanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
4.5 The Present-Past Relationship in the Postmodern Perspective.
Three Levels of Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266
4.6 The Postmodern Perspective and the Problem
of Conservation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270
4.6.1 The Postmodern Perspective and the Deciphering
of the Historical City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
4.7 The Interest for the Historical Object and the Commodification
Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280
4.8 The Construction of Alterity. The Case of Industrial Heritage . . . 284
4.8.1 The Industrial Object in Romania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
4.9 The Threshold of Heritage Perception and the Gradual
Objectivation Tendency of the Perception on the Past . . . . . . . . . 291
4.10 The Issue of Authenticity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
4.11 The Objectivation Tendency Toward the Heritage Object
and the Outlines of a Philosophy of Conservation . . . . . . . . . . . 310
4.11.1 The Objectivation of the Heritage Object
and the Romanian Situation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
4.12 The Heterotopian Character of the Heritage Space as Mediated
by the Restoration Intervention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
x Contents
4.13 Objectivation—The Multiplication of Values

and of the Involved Actors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324
4.14 The Community as Actor—A Decision Factor
in the Conservation Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
4.15 Heritage Practices. The Meaning-Assigning Process.
Constructing the Alterity of the Object . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
4.16 The Heterotopic Character—Beyond Formal Alterity . . . . . . . . . 334
4.17 Alterity and the Historical Object. The Cumulation
of Meanings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338
4.18 The Heterotopic Potential of the Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341
4.19 The Heterotopic Character and the Marginal. Heritage
Potential . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342
4.19.1 The Temporal Development of Status. From
Marginality to Protection. The Case of the Gothic . . . . . 344
4.20 The Heterotopic Character and the Protected Status—The
Official Ordering and the Establishment Process of Alterity . . . . . 348
4.21 The Lascaux Cave—Vézère, France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
4.22 Wieliczka and Bochnia Mines—Poland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354
4.23 The Seto Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
4.24 The Swayambhunath (Swayambhu) Religious
Complex—Kathmandu, Nepal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 362
4.25 The Issue of Reconstruction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
5 Heritage as a Heterotopic Space. The Tertiary Character
and the Hybrid Characteristic as Arguments of Its Heterotopic
Character . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387
5.1 Tertiary Character Coordinates for Heritage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 388
5.2 Heritage as a Heterotopic Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 402
5.3 Heterotopic Coordinates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 406
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417
6 Case Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421
6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423
6.2 Identifying the Heterotopic Features—The Basic Heterotopic
Profile. The Foucaultian Example and Its Coordinates . . . . . . . . . 424
6.2.1 The Temporal Coordinate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 424
6.3 The Spatial Coordinate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 430
6.4 The Romanian Case. The Black-Sea Coastal Development
as a Heterotopic Enclave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 445
6.5 The Heritage Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 461
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 468
7 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 471
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 479
Chapter 1
Introduction
Abstract The chapter offers a brief description of the subject of the volume. It
introduces the hypothesis of heritage through the heterotopic lens, of heritage as
heterotopia, and identifies the main arguments of this approach, along with the
main perspectives involved—heritage theory, conservation and restoration theory,
and urban and architectural theory—in order to identify the coordinates and func-
tioning algorithms that can create, shape or condition the heterotopic character of
the heritage object.
Keywords Heterotopia · Heritage as heterotopia · Built heritage object ·

Heterotopic lens · Heritage
The present volume approaches the field of built heritage and its practices by means of
an unusual, albeit familiar tool: the concept of heterotopia, as defined by the French
philosopher Michel Foucault.1 Although both themes have rich research histories
in the academic field, having produced abundant literature, so far they have not
been considered jointly. Both themes have notorious interdisciplinary characters,
constructing their identity via other disciplines and in turn, contributing to their
configuration. The concept of heterotopia has, and still is eliciting a plethora of
responses and interpretations mainly due to its so called malleability—a paradoxical
feature considering its apparent structured and straightforward definition sketched
by Foucault in his Of Other Spaces essay. In its turn, heritage is continuously re-
examined, defined and interpreted—as a simultaneous, tripartite projection: towards
the past, in order to better understand it, in the present, in order to manage it and
towards the future, in order to steer it and adapt to it—2 or, in short, to assemble
a continuous understanding of the self, as a society. This ‘identitary’ encoding of
heritage is somewhat shared by the concept of heterotopia—as a tool to identify and
understand identities.
1 Among the multiple existing translations of Michel Foucault’s 1967 essay, this research has
employed the variant offered by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter in their volume Heterotopia
and the City: public space in a postcivil society, Routledge, 2008.
2 Holtorf, Cornelius (2018) Conservation and heritage as future-making. ICOMOS University
Forum. pp. 1–13. ISSN 2616-6968, http://openarchive.icomos.org/1857/1/6_Holtorf.pdf, accessed

November 2018.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 1
S. Spanu, Heterotopia and Heritage Preservation,
The Urban Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18259-5_1
2 1 Introduction
Beyond these common features of the two themes, if observed more closely,
the fundamental understanding of heritage, its evolution and practices all reveal
heterotopic features; its mirror function, its utopic drive or its enclave-like nature call
for a more in-depth analysis and are at the core of this research. Considering a very
condensed definition of heritage—as the sum of traditions and material objects (both
movable and immovable) bearing an inherited cultural value—its two preeminent
heterotopic characteristics can be outlined: its temporal otherness—its heterochronic
character—and its spatial otherness—either read as a space reserved for the other or
other in itself, as a different kind of space.
Yet, heritage, and especially listed, protected and acknowledged heritage, is com-
monly understood as an appendage of the official ordering, and almost never as
subordinate, marginal or other. This approach offers an alternative, more analytical
and ‘soft’ reading of its exceptionality. By shifting this conventionally accepted rap-
port, I argue that heritage can and should be read as heterotopic—as an enclave of
otherness within the everyday defined by and informing its context—as a means of
revealing its internal functionings, explaining its paradoxes as well as our relationship
with it, as a society.
The volume explores previous interpretations of heterotopia from tangent domains
(urban planning, architecture, anthropology, etc.) considered to be relevant for the
presented hypostasis; by correlation, the reading of heritage as heterotopia is outlined.
Given the existing considerable explorations and interpretations of heterotopia,
this volume proposes a different approach: the concept is mapped and critically anal-
ysed through its materializations. Based on the expressions and functioning of its
principles, as identified by Foucault, the text aims to assemble an apparatus or, in
other words, to translate the theoretical excursus into a potential tool for analysis.
Themes such as heterotopia as materialized utopia, the ideal city, the authenticity-
ideal-heritage articulation, are discussed in order to identify the main heterotopic
coordinates (context, practice, form and event), their functioning and their set of
relationships among themselves and with their context. Interpretations of the het-
erotopia concept have been in turn analysed from the perspective of heritage theory,
conservation and restoration theory and urban and architectural theory, in order to
identify the coordinates and functionings’, or functioning algorithms, that can pro-
duce, influence of designate the heterotopic features of heritage and the heritage
object.
As this explorations advance, a more in-depth reading of heritage as heterotopia
is modelled. By observing how different heritage mechanisms (such as heritage
selection and conservation, listing and protection practices, heritage as mnemonic
device, etc.,) operate, the heterotopic nature of heritage is revealed.
The heritage objects value is strongly connected with the message it conveys;
interpreted as an isolated fragment, the heritage object conveys specific cultural and
spiritual meanings belonging to the society, the phase and the social ordering that
had generated it, as a specific creation of a certain spatial and temporal context.
Thereby, these fragments can be understood as repositories fulfilling the role of
mnemonic agents; they are conserved explicitly for their potential within the process
of (re)discovery, decoding and in the case of the built object, the specific capacity to
1 Introduction 3
accumulate, alternate and juxtapose multiple layers of meaning. The time-fragment

character, along with the other coordinates that define the notion of heritage—such as
its multitude of instances, the enclave-like crystallization and operation, its multiple
roles assumed (compensatory, idealized, illusory, etc.) are explored.
Finally, based on the mechanisms and manifestations of heterotopia in relation
to heritage, a reworking of the six heterotopic principles as an analysis grid is pro-
posed, followed by its concrete demonstration via a case study. This analysis system
aims to facilitate the understanding of the problems regarding the built heritage, to
outline potential interventions methods, and given the contextual nature of the pro-
posed concept, to suggest the optimal solution for such interventions. As the case
study presented here illustrates, along with the other previous explorations of this
hypothesis, the concept of heterotopia can be employed in yet a new manner, other
than the identification of isolated ‘heterotopian’ spaces. It can be systemized and
fashioned into an ‘analysis tool’. The concept allows a more comprehensive insight
into the mechanisms of heritage construction and functioning, on the process of value
endowment, as well as on its potential vulnerabilities. The proposed grid identifies
the otherness of a built object within its context: it can either dissect and define par-
ticular internal functionings of a heritage object or it can signal a heritage potential
of a yet unlisted built object, manifesting as a heterotopic functioning.
Guided through this theoretical itinerary, the reader (re)discovers the heterotopic
lens as a minor yet promising device in Foucault’s ‘tool box’, allowing a better
understanding of the workings of heritage and the way we perceive, occupy and
practice it in everyday life.
Chapter 2
Heterotopia and the Utopian Project
Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the
thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their
perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
Italo Calvino
Abstract Utopias and their architectural embodiment. The ‘Heritage Utopia’. The
chapter focuses on one of the main identifying features of heterotopia: its utopian cod-
ing. The utopian vision is able to ‘describe’ the social ordering in which it emerges,
encapsulating its features—the good, the bad and the desired. As Foucault explains,
heterotopias and heterotopic spaces are the materialized instances of such utopian
impulses, projections and ideals. Several architectural materializations of utopias
and their orderings are explored (Boullée, Ledoux, Fourier, Buckingham, Godin,
Owen, Howard, Sitte and Unwin, Wright, Sant’Elia, Soleri), along with their inher-
ent derivatives or hybrids—the spaces that inherit the coding of the model and with
it its heterotopic coordinates. Although utopian projections gradually become more
focused on the built form, imagining various ‘functionings’ of the tripartite mecha-
nism (community, built form, production), they remain incapable to solve the issues
addressed and to initiate new orderings. More than often these imperfectly materi-
alized utopias remain one of a kind “laboratories” of unfulfilled idealized orderings,
and in time become the subjects of heritage listing. Assessing these materialized
utopias from a heritage perspective, heritage itself reveals its utopian encoding. Cul-
tural heritage-as-utopian-projection is explored along with its potential heterotopic
features, its translation into material manifestations entailing a heterotopic function-
ing. Focusing the analysis on the built heritage object, the impact of heritage listing
is addressed as the main trigger of heterotopic functioning.
Keywords Heterotopic spaces · Function of heterotopia · Enclave spaces ·

Heritage narratives · Materialized heterotopia

6 2 Heterotopia and the Utopian Project
2.1 The History of Utopian Thinking: Theories,

Ramifications, Analysis
The history of utopian thinking is strongly ramified, according to some critics even
accompanying the history of humanity. Its extensive analysis has been the subject
of a great number of papers and continues to reclaim new approaches; this chapter
proposes a selective journey, focused on its manifestations in architecture. The built
expression of utopia has three manifestations: the imagined architecture, expressed
in written form; the graphic representation, as architectural project, with plans and
models, or as diagram; and finally, the concrete materialization, as architectural
object, profoundly set into time and space.
One of the preferred mechanisms of utopian theories is the built form—either as
an individual construction (object), a settlement (ensemble), but most of all as the
complex structure of the city. The architectural project is thus used as a medium for the
expression of the utopian principles. Due to the vastness of the subject—utopia and
architecture—this chapter proposes a condensed, selective overview of the utopian
theories and their reverberations into the field of architecture and urbanism, with an
emphasis on the main moments of inflection for the built embodiments of utopia.
The source of utopian thinking is attributed to the initial visions of better yet imag-
ined worlds, or in the form of a “golden age of some kind set in the distant past or
a more contemporary earthly paradise akin to the Garden of Eden.”1 The fulfilment
of the ideal appears in three different time stances: in the contemporary time, yet in
a space radically detached and inaccessible; in the past—automatically becoming a
model impossible to fully recover; or in a vaguely determined future. Claeys identi-
fies all of these three temporal stances of utopia in Christianity: the “utopia past or
Eden; [the] utopia future, or the millennium; and utopia outside of time, or heaven”.2
Technological advances modify the perspective, and as the world becomes known
and space becomes geographically more defined, the utopian perspective resorts to
the exotic (re)localization of its loci,3 and the break between the real and the imag-
ined becomes both a spatial and temporal feature; the utopian ideal is projected in
a more or less distant future, nevertheless preserving the present or the idealized
past as a critical foundation. In a similar manner, the intangible, purely imagined
utopia, as it is defined through the insurmountable break from reality,4 gradually
transitions to the achievable utopia (through society’s common effort, technological
evolution, or the irrefutable materialized example, etc.); utopia becomes tangible,
1 Segal, Howard P., Utopias: A Brief History from Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities, First
Edition, Chap. 3, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2012, 47.
2 Claeys, Gregory, Sargent, Lyman Tower, The Utopia Reader, Introduction, eds. Gregory Claeys,
Lyman Tower Sargent. NYU Press, 1999, 6.

3 Segal, Howard P., Utopias: A Brief History…, 13; also Claeys, G., Sargent, L. T., The Utopia
Reader…, 6.
4 As seen in Hesiod, Works and Days—700 B.C., in De Civitate Dei contra paganos by Augustin de
Hipona—fifth century A.D.., where the ideal is the promised afterlife, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses—8
d.Hr.
2.1 The History of Utopian Thinking: Theories, Ramifications, Analysis 7
remaining, however, conditioned by time and/or completion of a rite of passage.

Thus, the first category of utopias imagines either a mythical past of humankind or
the afterlife—the golden age, a lost Arcadia, the earthly paradise, The Islands of the
Blest (Hesiod, Pindar) or the Fortunate Isles, Eden, the Elysian Plain, Prester John’s
kingdom, etc. According to Claeys and Sargent the coveted ideal of these worlds
is the “simplicity, security, immortality or an easy death, unity among the people;
unity between the people and God or the gods, abundance without labour, and no
enmity between human beings and the other animals.”5 These utopian projections
appear in one form or another in most cultures, which is sometimes explained6 as
the lost paradise nostalgia (fuelled by the hope of regaining the divine condition,
“the fundamental impulse of human figments”),7 an ineluctable feature of the human
condition. Yet, the materialized expression of these utopias (eutopias) is most often
a nature of divine origin (both vegetal and animal) and more rarely to a man-made
architecture. Another category is represented by utopias of “perpetual sensual grat-
ification”, which, according to Clayes, remain conditioned by the completion of a
rite of passage,8 yet accessible through the will of the individual and not exclusively
through that of the divinity; these place more emphasis on materiality, although not
focused on a specific architectural formula/expression, but rather selecting an exist-
ing idealized one, in accord to their epoch. In the third category of utopias (Plato’s
Republic, 360 B.C. and De Legibus), the access control to the ideal world passes
from divinity to the individual: “every aspect of social order can be susceptible to
human control, thus creating an entirely new tradition - utopias of human contrivance,
often cast in the form of the imaginary city”.9 This last category persists, producing
numerous versions with different constructed expressions. These utopian projections
almost organically reach for the built form as the means to achieve the desired ideal:
it is accessible and it already is experienced as background, medium and receptacle
for human life, demonstrating its capacity to improve, contain, determine and order
it.
The written expression precedes the materialized expression of utopian principles.
The main figures of utopian thinking—Thomas More (1478–1535) with Utopia,10
1516–17), Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) with The City of the Sun (La città
del Sole 1623) namely Francis Bacon (1561–1626) with New Atlantis, 1629; the lat-
ter approaches the issue of utopian civilization (based on scientific knowledge) from
the cultural, social and moral perspective and too little from the built/architectural
perspective. In all three works, the delimitation from reality is a mainly territo-
5 Claeys, Gregory, Sargent, Lyman Tower, The Utopia Reader, Introduction, Gregory Claeys, Lyman
Tower Sargent. NYU Press, 1999, 2.

6 For Nichifor Crainic it is explained by the orthodox argument, and for Eliade, by the philosophical
argument.
7 Rusti,Doina, Dictionar de simboluri din opera lui Mircea Eliade, ed. Dana Poenaru, CORESI
,
Publishing House, Bucharest, 1998, 36.
8 Claeys, Sargent, The Utopia Reader, 2–3.
9 Claeys, Sargent, The Utopia Reader, 3.
10 “Libellus vere aureus nec minus salutaris quam festivius de optimo reip[ublicae] statu, deq[ue]
nova Insula Vtopia”, published in Louvain.

rial attribute, utopia being placed in “remote geographic sites”—11 the island. This
technique of space-time detachment is doubled by the technique of the third-part
account, both emphasizing inaccessibility and masking the critical intention. Behind
the narrative of “tales heard from fictional others”,12 the recounted travel journal—an
innocent un-assumed account and an established literary device—the author, who
is deprived of freedom of expression in the real world, can express his opinions
critically and freely, thus absolved from the responsibility of a direct attack with
subversive potential.
In the case of More’s Utopia, the author assumes the simple position of the
one recounting the narration of others—and constructs an alternative, critical image,
contradictory to the realities of his own society13 ; the distancing and the unassuming
are additionally emphasized through the fuelling of ambiguity14 : the use of the story
within a story technique and the direct asserting of the author’s own doubt. Thus, “the
distancing of a utopian world from reality separates the ideal from the real, and this
in time becomes a convention in which the utopian world is viewed as unattainable
except in literary texts or visionary dreams”.15 The utopian space is represented as
an isolated, inaccessible island, but realistically defined from a geographic and urban
point of view: Utopia’s overall plan comprises 54 towns “distributed […] all to the
same pattern and looking alike”.16 Ownership of the lands, their use patterns and
even the layout of the capital-city17 are defined and governed by the principle of
equality.18 The description of its society highlights the social ordering and the norms
governing it, in turn reflected in the built form: “streets are wide, protected from the
wind and symmetrically laid out with the needs of traffic in mind; the houses, which
have three storeys and flat roofs, are grouped in large blocks, the courtyards taking
the form of gardens”.19 Functioning, urban planning, architectural expression are all
fashioned to illustrate the ideal state,20 the ordering of natural and/or divine origin
which governs the community of the island; however, in describing the functioning of
society, “oppressive, alienating elements coexist with liberating, humanizing ones”,21
11 Miles, Malcolm, Urban Utopias: The Built and Social Architectures of Alternative Settlements,
Routledge, 2007, 7.
12 Miles, Urban…, 7.
15 Miles, Urban…, 7
16 Kruft, Hanno-Walter, History of Architectural Theory, Princeton Architectural Press, 1994, 229.
17 Amaurot—“castle in the air”; Anydrus, main river—“no water” Miles, Urban Utopias…, 13.
18 “There is no private ownership of land, and the people are constantly moving from the town to
farmsteads and vice versa; no private life is permitted, and town dwellings are exchanged by lot
every ten years. Amaurotum itself is described as lying on a gentle slope, with an almost square
layout…” Kruft, History of…, 229.
19 Apud. Kruft, History of…, 229.
20 Idem.
21 Markus, T. A., ‘Is There a Built Form for Non-Patriarchal Utopias?’, în Bingaman et al. (2002)
pp. 15–3, apud. Miles, Malcolm, Urban Utopias: The Built and Social Architectures of Alternative
Settlements, ed. Routledge, 2007, 15.
thus revealing the author’s critical, not corrective intention: “[b]ut Utopia is a made-
up place, either serious or a joke, either prescriptive or provocative in the degree to
which what it describes differs from the conditions in which its readers know they
dwell.”22 Nevertheless, despite being concealed—and thus accessible only to those
who want to see it—the critical intention almost inevitably sparks a reaction, and
“utopian ideals ironically become the reassuring foil to social rupture”.23 The built
form thus becomes a motive and instrument for the critical intention.
In The City of the Sun, Tommaso Campanella uses the same mechanism of
distancing reality from imaginary through geographic distance and narration. From
a territorial scale down to the constructive detail, Campanella builds a much more
detailed picture, both architecturally and from an urban point of view. In short,
the territory of the imagined state (Taprobana) is controlled by a “network of vil-
las”/establishments designed for production, using the marginal individual—convicts
and prisoners—for labour. At the centre of the state lies the sole-capital city, “radial,
divided into seven rings named after the seven known planets and intersected by four
gated streets aligned to the points of the compass”.24 The entire structure appears
as an ideal, impenetrable defence system—with various devices such as earthworks,
moats, towers and cannons centre of the state lies the sole-capital citymeant to pro-
tect the city itself from the outside; however, its internal structure also protects it
from itself: the seven enclosures simultaneously work as a mechanism of social seg-
regation, physically delimiting the space devised for different social classes. In this
“centrally planned world”,25 the more diffuse, less-urban territory is destined to the
marginalized, and the city is to be exclusively occupied by the elites (the leaned,
the craftsmen). The constructed components are hierarchically ordered: the centre
is reserved for the temple, the core of knowledge, at the intersection of the two
main roads (cardo, decumanum); the rest of the buildings are symmetrically dis-
tributed in the seven circular enclosures, and act as both a defensive system and as
elements of systemic organization of interaction between individuals and dwellings.
A secondary traffic network, arranged in a radial and concentric manner, ensures
flow distribution and efficient movement; the traffic is also hierarchical (by speed,
direction, accessibility/destination, etc.). The additional didactic role of the circular
enclosures is revealed as one progresses through the city: the walls are designed as
large-scale manuals with “the depiction of all knowledge for [the purpose of] public
education”,26 in a hierarchical order,27 of astrological inspiration. Publicly owned,
all buildings are common spaces, separated on four levels, each with well-defined
22 Miles, Urban Utopias…, 16.

25 Miles, M., Urban…, 18.
27 The outer enclosure has an exclusively defensive role; thus the first enclosure illustrates mathe-
matical figures and the Earth; the second one, minerals, metals and geographic areas, liquids and
potions, and their properties; the third one, flora and fish; the fourth one, birds and creeping animals,
reptiles and insects; the fifth one, walking terrestrial animals on both sides; the sixth one, crafts,
mechanical arts and related tools, and figures such as Moses, Osiris, Jupiter, Mercury, Lycurgus,
and hierarchical functions.28 At the centre of the smallest circular enclosure, in the
epicentre of the city and in the highest position lies the temple—an open colon-
nade covered by a monumental dome. It functions both as a sacred space and as a
dwelling place for the sacred ruling caste (priests, monks). Spatial norming appears
as the support and tool for social norming. The built fabric is and expresses the social
ordering governing this imagined world. Despite the obvious segregation embedded
in the urban planning, the intent of the architectural form is openness and egalitarian
accessibility. The strict and thorough hierarchies, the formal geometry, the centrality,
symmetry and continuous fractal-like proportions, the functional determination, as
well as the direct references to the solar system contribute to illustrating a paragon,
a “model of abundance, a finite society and its complete knowledge”.29 A common
feature of most Renaissance utopias, also present in Campanella’s City of the Sun,
the built fabric plays a crucial role in the social and political structure of the city: it is
used as a tool for ordering its society in all aspects of its life, for the common good of
all. As we shall see further on, this ordering role of architecture was already intuited
and enforced in the constructed reality in a manner quite similar to the prescriptions
of Campanella’s City, written at the end of the Renaissance era; thus it can be argued
that it already had a materialized precedent.
Campanella’s intention, although concealed behind the detached dialogue-
narration and the metaphor—similar to More’s Utopia—is more inclined towards
a prescriptive model, rather than towards the cautioning, the interrogation and the
critical view of More. The architecture and the urban structuring give up their sec-
ondary role as supporting backdrop of the prescriptive ordering, and acquire a more
active role, that of enforcing it. Although Utopia will remain for a long time the most
quoted source and starting point (Rousseau, Owen, Marx), there is a change of tone
in the subsequent approaches to the idea of utopia:
The temper of the original Christian humanist utopia in More, Erasmus, and Rabelais was
gay, playful, tolerant, sceptical, amusing in varying degrees; by the seventeenth century the
utopian tradition that stemmed from it became grave, absolutist, self-righteous, assured of
its truth, apocalyptic, vehement.30
Utopian projection turns towards prescription or method, the description of a

solution, where the architecture and urban layout are relatively accessible means for
its translation into reality. In the same process, the religious encoding is gradually
diluted and hybridized with more or less success, its remnants sometimes identifiable
Pompilius, Pythagoras, Zamolxis, Solon, Charondas, Phoroneus, inventors, scientists, philosophers,

etc.
28 All housing related activities are carried out in common spaces (bedrooms, canteens, public
baths). The ground floor is dominantly occupied by residential areas and workshops, the basement
by production-related functions (factories, workshops, warehouses); the first floor is designed for
the arts—painting, sculpture, music; the second floor—for the speculative arts: rhetoric, philosophy,
and other related disciplines.
30 Manuel, Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, Belknap Press; New edition (September
15, 1982), 149.

as compositional principles such as the fractal-like disposition of spaces or as the

godlike will to create an autonomous perfect world.
Francis Bacon and Gerrard Winstanley31 put forward descriptions of a different
nature; if with More or Campanella the utopian ordering shaping of the individual is
both a social and a material-architectural manifestation, with Bacon and Winstanley
the focus is on a hierarchy of functions. For them, utopia is attained via a social-
political coding, a moral norming, while its built manifestation is only suggested,32
subordinated, automatically resulting from the social component and pushed into
the background. Although the architectural reference of utopia gradually disappears,
there is a turn towards a material and a more concrete expression, which Manuel also
notes: “Posterity often turned Utopia into its opposite; no place became some place
very specific, and the utopian who was going there knew precisely where it was, how
to get there, and what he would find when he landed.”33 Utopia loses its imagined,
fantastic nature, in favour of a prescriptionary one, becoming a blueprint. According
to Rowe and Koetter classical utopia, originating from Antiquity −1500, is offered
as an object of contemplation, warns and criticizes, and the architectural formula is
rather an “emblem of the universal and supreme good”, imagined as an “educational
tool” more than a norming one. The difference stems from the utopian intent. After
1500, utopia receives an intentional active character—where both the social and the
constructed ideal become prescriptionary—a transition timidly illustrated by Bacon
and Winstanley and progressively stronger in utopias increasingly focused on the
built form. I argue that this periodization proposed by Rowe and Koetter allows for
more nuance, because it ignores precisely the relatively limited temporal segment in
31 In The Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652); Gerrard Winstanley—English Protestant religious
reformer, founder of a socialist-agrarian sect—knows as the “Diggers” (to dig). The principle
argued and applied by Winstanley was the abolition of property and payments in money, following
the biblical example of equality between individual and the common good; the Diggers community
founded by Winstanley was one of the first colonies of this nature.
32 For example, for Winstanley (The Law of Freedom in a Platform) there is a segregation of the
spaces for production/commerce according to the specifics of the main material: “In every town and
city shall be appointed store-houses for flax, wool, leather, cloth and for all such commodities as
come from beyond seas, and these shall be called general store-houses. […]Every particular house
and shop in a town or city shall be a particular store-house or shop, as now they be; and these shops
shall either be furnished by the particular labour of that family according to the trade that family is
of […]”; in the New Atlantis, Bacon’s description of Salomon’s House, an institution-like entity, is
more architecturally detailed, comprising both natural elements and anthropic structures—“artificial
wells and fountains, made in imitation of the natural sources and baths”, “great and spacious
houses where we imitate and demonstrate meteors”, “parks and enclosures of all sorts of beasts and
birds”, towers used “according to their several heights, and situations, for insolation, refrigeration,
conservation; and for the view of divers meteors […]. And upon them, in some places, are dwellings
of hermits, whom we visit sometimes, and instruct what to observe”, “health rooms”, curative baths,
orchards and gardens, parks, houses dedicated to the sciences of vision, hearing, taste and smell,
etc., illustrating a cosmic-like structure, complete and autonomous. Winstanley, G., The works of
Gerrard Winstanley with an appendix of documents relating to the digger movement, ed. George
H. Sabine, New York, Russell & Russell Inc., 1965, e-book format; Bacon, F., The New Atlantis,
Project Gutenberg, release #2434, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2434.
33 Manuel, Manuel, Utopian Thought…, 149.
which the transformation of utopian thinking occurs; manifesting from the beginning
of the 1400s, (and extended to 1500s), this segment is defined by transformation: the
utopian schemes already assume, even if only partially, the active formula, and begin
to impregnate and influence the built reality, yet at this stage still eluding recognition
as the fully heterotopic mechanisms they will eventually become.
2.2 Utopia and the Heterotopic Reading of the Ideal
2.2.1 Architecture as “Effectively Realized Utopias”34
“Utopias are emplacements with no real place. They are emplacements that have
a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of society. It is
society itself perfected, or else it is society turned upside down, but in any case, these
utopias essentially are fundamentally unreal spaces.
“There are also, and this probably in all culture, in all civilization, real places,
effective places, places that are written into the institution of society itself, and that
are a sort of counter-emplacements, a sort of effectively realized utopias in which
the real emplacements, all the other real emplacements that can be found within
culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted; a kind of places that
are outside all places, even though they are actually localizable. Since these places
are absolutely other than all the emplacements that they reflect, and of which they
speak, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.”35 (Foucault,
M., Of Other Spaces)
For Foucault, utopia is manifested in a material form as heterotopia, inherit-
ing its traits and translating them into reality. If the written utopias describe an
ideal often coded into a distant and intangible imaginary, in contrast the applied
utopias propose the reshaping of reality according to their ideal, and the built for-
m—both architecture and urban planning—organically reveals itself as the main
medium and tool of this action. The intention to order, structure and (re)shape soci-
ety and the individual, the demiurgic charge considered for a long time intrinsically
linked to architectural creation, the architect’s role as a saviour, the parallel between
the divine or natural order (ideal) and the terrestrial-material one (architecture as
microcosm, reproduction of divine creation, the nature of human ideal—the mod-
ernist modulator), the encoding of moral values in the material form, the ineluctable
need for ordering expressed through architecture, are themes often approached by
theorists—Kahn, Norberg-Schultz, Taut, Alexander, Bataille, Le Corbusier,
etc.—and have been extensively debated. Architecture is endowed with the role
of ordering and shaping of both reality and the individual; if the written utopia
signals and criticizes an imbalance, the deviation from the norm (either by counter-
34 Foucault, M., of Other Spaces, Apud. Dehaene, M., de Cauter, L., Heterotopia and the City,
Routledge, 2008, 17.
35 Foucault, M., Of Other Spaces, apud. Dehaene, M., De Cauter, L., Heterotopia…, 17.
2.2 Utopia and the Heterotopic Reading of the Ideal 13
illustrating the perfect model or depicting the exaggerated anomaly), the applied
utopia assumes without mediation the criticism and proposes the solution, assuming
the ordering role. The vaguely imagined object of classical utopia calls for contem-
plation and thus to the discovery of reality’s failings; this gradually mutates into the
concrete and achievable model of the militant utopia.36
One of the most cited theories (Arbore, Coleman, Antohi, Ioan, Manuel, etc.)
belongs to Mannheim, who discusses the utopia-ideology relation. For him, utopian
are the approaches which, when “put into practice tend to partially or totally break
the prevalent order”,37 and ideological 38 the ones which are “integrated with the
prevalent vision of their time and do not (suggest) revolutionary possibilities”.39
The analysis is necessarily a contextual one (historical and social), in order to avoid
fragmentation between content and “its intellectual charge”.40 Mannheim also deter-
mines the difference between the relative utopia and the absolute utopia, a distinction
that is similar to the previously discussed binomial pairing, the active and the passive
utopia. The relative utopia/absolute utopia dyad would correspond to the constructed
object/city or universe pairing; the individual object is potentially achievable, because
of its the controllable dimension (similar, in this manner, to the active utopia), while
large-scale, sweeping or “universal” project “stubbornly resist realization”,41 (Cole-
man) especially because of their absolute nature. Although seemingly condemned
to complete passivity, and with an exclusively imaginary outlet, the absolute utopia
still has the capacity to permeate into reality as limited versions of itself (Coleman),
engendering relative, applicable utopias.
According to Coleman, even from an etymological point of view, fiction (fingere,
fictio—to form, to shape) contains the potential of its materialization.42 From this
point of view, it’s precisely the architecture project—as an imagined ideal and abso-
lute will to mould—that appears as a utopian construct, and the attached built project
as the never entirely perfect materialization of the imagined idea. For Coleman, this
argument lies within the very architectural creative process: “architectural invention
is akin to utopian projection and that utopia harbours the potential to rescue archi-
tecture from aimlessness, obsessive matter-of-factness, or a non-critical embrace of
global capitalism”,43 and furthermore “[u]topia is an almost inescapable companion
of architectural invention. Architectural projections and utopias are close relations:
both argue against inadequate existing conditions while drawing upon the past to
36 Rowe, C., Koetter, F., Collage city, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1978, 13.
37 Mannheim, Karl, Ideologie und Utopie, Bonn, 1929, apud. Arbore, Grigore, Cetatea ideală în
viziunea Renas, terii, Meridiane Publishing House, Bucharest, 1978, 61–2.
38 Where ideology is defined as the ideational paradigm that structures the perception of the indi-
vidual and the community of their own environment. More in Mannheim, K., Ideologie und Utopie,
Bonn, 1929.
39 Mannheim, Karl, Ideologie und Utopie, Bonn, 1929, apud. Arbore, Grigore, Cetatea ideală în
viziunea Renas, terii, Meridiane Publishing House, Bucharest, 1978, 62.

40 Arbore, Cetatea Ideală, 64.
41 Coleman, N., Utopias…, 23.
43 Coleman, Nathaniel, Utopias and Architecture, Routledge, 2007, 6.
augur a transformed future envisioned as superior to the present.”44 Moreover, Cole-

man recommends ‘utopian thinking’ as an architectural design algorithm, utopia
emerging as “a place from which it is possible to consider and invent wholes (utopias
of sort) even though these are not intended for total realization.”45 Therefore, the
utopian potential of architecture—with both its positive and its negative dimensions,
as Coleman notes—remains imprinted in the basis of the architectural creative pro-
cess. This is also the starting point of the debate regarding the separation between
ideal and utopia. Arbore argues that the ideal city is not fundamentally utopia, but
the “manifold” sum of architectural and urban considerations, restored, theorized
and idealized: “elements taken from different sources, usually ancient writings com-
monly used to justify the validity of one’s own thinking on an erudite basis, [elements
that] become excessively crowded and end up endowing the discourse with a sense
of drifting into vagueness.”46 Arbore demonstrates Renaissance architecture’s lack
of utopian character through the relation of the model, the mythical golden age
(Antiquity) with the actual architecture practice of the Quattrocento: Antiquity is
appreciated, but not idealized; it explains, motivates and “scientifically substantiates
the approaches”47 of Renaissance architects, yet it is not seen as the supreme ideal
or the golden age which needs to be recovered, in Arbore’s opinion. On the other
hand, Coleman argues that this very reference to a past, idealized or not, is the ele-
ment that crystallizes the utopian character in general, as well as specifically that of
the architectural project: “utopia and exemplary architecture are ever the result of a
belief that what could be, or ought to be, is superior to what is. What may surprise
is how frequently visions of potential have their roots in an exemplary past (distant
in time and space).”48 Moreover, Coleman argues that “there can be no utopia, and
no exemplary architecture for that matter, without some golden age to draw upon for
ideas about transfiguring the future”.49 In conclusion, I argue that utopia implies the
framing of the present within a set of absolute principles, regardless of their prove-
nance or the formula chosen to embody the ideal (the past, a yet inexistent imagined
future, or an immaterial absolute).
44 Coleman, Nathaniel, Utopias and Architecture, Routledge, 2007, 48.

46 Arbore, Cetatea ideală, 38.
47 Idem.
48 Coleman, Utopias…, 11.
49 Idem.
2.2.2 The Archetype City: Between Divine and Laic
One of the first concepts shaping the built form is the Heavenly Jerusalem. This is
the “archetype city, the model of absolute beauty”.50 This heavenly paradise is the
civitas imaginalis (Antohi) or the utopia of philosophy (Liiceanu),51 the ideal citadel
“cannot be conceived in any way as [an affixed] topos”, for it is not a social-political
experiment, but rather the representation of a model.52 For Antohi utopia is utterly
distinct from the imaginary citadel, for it belongs “neither to the intellect, nor to the
sensible perception, presenting itself only to the imaginative cognition”.53 Neverthe-
less the heavenly Jerusalem, the imagined paradise, precisely as representation and
as model, is sought and calls to be sought after within the realm of the real. Built real-
ity assumes the shape of the imagined ideal, inevitably assembled from real, known
fragments. As Assunto demonstrates, the ideal citadel is a receptacle-concept for suc-
ceeding aesthetic expressions of society: it manifests as an “apotheosis of the taste
that has always been dominant”,54 varying according to the historical timeframe:
the heavenly Jerusalem emerges as a Byzantine, a Roman or a Gothic city, where
the number of spires, enclosures and gates, of sheltered souls, its dimensions and
configuration describe the absolute in known terms. In order to be understood and
promised, the ideal is narrated and/or translated in a known language. The supreme
ideal, the Heavenly Jerusalem is the mirrored counter-part of the earthly Jerusalem, or
of “all the cities in the world”,55 expressed both spiritually and aesthetically. Assunto
argues that the mediaeval city attempted (almost blasphemously) to “anticipate on
Earth the absolute beauty of celestial Jerusalem”,56 through certain devices. Firstly,
there is the limitation of its expansion by means of the enclosure, the citadel’s
walls; beyond its basic defensive role, appertaining to the known reality, it allows
“its inhabitant to traverse its space in the timeframe of a single day”,57 the citadel
thus becoming the subject of an uninterrupted contemplation. The second device
is the arithmetic and geometric encoding—or the theory of numbers and perfect
proportions applied to the layout of the built fabric, its dimensions and divisions, its
orientation and its manner in which it would be perceived, etc.,58 aiming to mirror
50 Assunto, Rosario, Scrieri despre artă, Vol 3: Oras, ul lui Amfion s, i oras, ul lui Prometeu. Idei s, i
poetici despre oras, , translated by S, tefan Nicolae, Meridiane Publishing House, Bucharest, 1988,
33.
51 Antohi, Sorin, Civitas Imaginalis: istorie si utopie în cultura română, ed.a 2-a, rev., Polirom, Iasi,
, ,
1999, 16.
52 Antohi, Civitas.., 16.
53 Idem.
54 Assunto, Rosario, Orasul lui Amfion…, 33.
,
55 Assunto, Orasul…, 34.
,
56 Idem.
57 Assunto, Orasul…, 34–35.
,
58 Lilley cites a series o mediaeval towns, built in the 17th century—Berne, Kenzingen,
Breisach-am-Rheim,
√ with rectangular planimetrics, defined by “harmonic proportions” (3:5, 1:2,
1: 2)—especially employed for the plotting and the street grid; the author notes the presence of
nothing else but the very perfection, the hierarchical structures of the divine order.
And finally, the marking of the centre: the coordinates of the archetype are mirrored
in the object, in perfect symmetry and coordination (the same ordering principle is
applied from country, to city, market, cathedral, and altar, etc., ad infinitum),59 all
pinpointing towards a single nucleus and ordered in a fractal manner. Tradition-
ally, the centre is occupied by a single edifice—the cathedral—a reiteration of the
heavenly order and quintessence of the aesthetic ideal. For Assunto, the cathedral
embodied “the archetype of all beauties spread throughout the city: the simultaneous
presence […] of multiple and varied beauty”,60 amassed in a single object, which, in
its limited space managed to concentrate “the multiple-varied nature of its beauty”.61
In short, the cathedral concentrates at a smaller scale de orders and spaces of celestial
Jerusalem, thus becoming its allegory.62
According to Lilley, in Latin Christian texts, “the city was not simply seen as a set
of buildings and people, but rather a map of Christian beliefs about the wider world,
about cosmology and cosmogony”.63 This manner of conceptualizing the world con-
nects “local and global, earthly and spiritual worlds, and universal and particular,
material and imagined cities”, and “through them the city itself was understood as a
microcosm of the wider world as well as a macrocosm of the human form”.64 Sim-
ilarly, the faithful individual identifies his position with ease and unequivocally, as
he exists within and (re)cognizes the same set of known coordinates. The mediaeval
city is profoundly infused with this idea (Lilley), “both through its spatial forms, for
example in the ordered geometries it shared with the cosmos, and in its functions, as
a “body” made up of hierarchically arranged parts mirroring the moral topography
of the Christian universe as a whole, all created to God’s divine plan.”65 Moreover,
the “reading” of the city is mediated by a similar encoding. An example is offered by
Assunto: the urban structure of the city of Pisa imposed a simultaneous perception,
from its main access point, “through which the image of that terrestrial Jerusalem
the 2:1 ratio in several regions and successive stages—in the bastides of Monpazier, Monflanquin,
Miramont de Guyenne, in France, or in the fourteenth-century Florentine cities and projects. Lilley,
Keith D., City and Cosmos: The Medieval World in Urban Form, Reaktion Books, 2009, 67.
59 As it can be easily deduced from the illustrations of Medieval manuscripts, which repeat the
structures of divine nature—centralities and hierarchies—to miniature scale, almost refused to the
naked eye and thus demonstrating the existence of supreme order.
60 Assunto, Orasul…, 37.
,
61 Idem.
62 Such an example is the cathedral (792, d.Hr.) of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle, North Rhine-
Westphalia, Germany) The town had been chosen by Charlemagne as the capital of the Carolingian
Empire; the encodings are multiple, of both arithmetic and geometrical nature: the number 8, repre-
sentation of perfection, is constantly repeated—the octagonal dome, the hexadecagon-shaped plan
of the ambulatory, the eight arches and pillars supporting the dome, etc.; the representations support
this encoding: the ornamental mosaics depict the archetypal model, the civitate dei.
63 Lilley, Keith D., City and Cosmos: The Medieval World in Urban Form, Reaktion Books, 2009,
12.
64 Lilley, City and Cosmos…, 12.
65 Lilley, City and Cosmos…, 12.
appeared in a condensed space”,66 to the three dominants—the Campanile, the Dome

and the Baptistery; they revealed themselves to the viewer as the centre of the uni-
verse, telling the visitor and reminding the inhabitants of the order that defined and
governed the city. The principle is reiterated symmetrically and hierarchically—the
citadel, the city centre, the church and its components, when considered in part,
they all echo the same divine ordering in different built languages—suggesting unity
through diversity. The church appears as an “umbilicus mundus”, both a contact
and a crossing point, a simultaneously material and immaterial connection between
“the real and the extra sensorial space”—67 an attribute that essentially emphasizes
its representativeness 68 to the detriment of the functional. Through this allegoric
encoding, this space is that absolute “other”, material and palpable yet belonging to
an immaterial world, a reality “which transcends the nature of the object in itself”.69
The constitutive transformation of utopia is manifested in a unitary manner after
the sixteenth century; the Heavenly Jerusalem, the civitas imaginalis, the ideal city, all
overlap; the utopian projection, unidirectional up to that point (ideal-real), becomes
hybridized. In one of these stances of the utopian projection, the critical perspective,
and even the prescriptive character, come to be replaced by eulogy; automatically,
the utopian non-space becomes real, with a precise “address”—such as Florence (in
Leonardo Bruni’s works) and later Venice,70 (for Gasparo Contarini)—an “em-
bodiment and illustration of human rationality”.71 This hybrid-utopia, although man-
ifested during the phase of active utopias, is more similar to the contemplative utopia,
although not entirely. In Venice’s case, this “utopization” of reality through deforma-
tion, selective appreciation and idealization of an actually deficient set of conditions
—has a strong impact and a long-term effect; considered a crystallization of Plato’s
republic, sixteenth-century Venice,72 becomes a mythical city. This process-anomaly
is an inversion of the traditional utopian projection: imagined utopia and discourse
no longer create and shape reality, rather truncated reality creates utopian projection
and sustains its discourse. A similar phenomenon focusing on Paris can be observed
in the pre-war Romanian space. The hybrid-utopia is embodied by an idealized Paris,
66 Assunto, Oras, ul…, 39.

67 Assunto, Oras, ul…, 40.
68 According to Assunto, it becomes a “purely representative edifice” compared to the others, whose
representativeness remains tied to their functionality; the façade of the Florentine church, cited by
Assunto, marks this detachment from functionality—“finding rest in contemplation”. The discourse
stored in the expression of the edifice’s façade makes it transcend architecture, its materiality; the
church becomes absolute contemplation, escape from everyday life and materiality.
69 Guidoni, Enrico, Il Campo di Siena, 48, apud. Assunto, Orasul…, 42.
,
70 Manuel, Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, Belknap Press; New edition (Septem-
ber 15, 1982), 153; Arbore, G., Cetatea Ideală, Curente s, i sinteze/Currents and Synthesis Series,
Meridiane Publishing House, Bucharest, 1978, 32.
the pinnacle of culture, whose existence conditions the very existence of the entire
world.73
If More’s Utopia criticized a defective reality and described the idealized opposite,
then Paris, Florence or Venice–the ideal republic are all simply assumed as the perfect
and palpable realities. Yet, if reality actually becomes this “complacent utopia”,
tangible and fulfilled, then what is its discourse? If the intangible ideal, the supreme
object of aspirations no longer exists, then how else can the perfectly constructed
form, the perfect social structure, or the happy city (la città felice) of the eternal
existence can be regarded if not as models to pursue and replicate, in short social,
material and moral prescriptions.
However, divine-inspired orderings had already operated on the fabric of the
city before any such processes of inverse utopization had developed, mediated by
prominent figures of the sixteenth century, such as Bruni or Contarini. If these cities
had already been-shaped and adapted, if not even imagined and built de novo as
exact (albeit incomplete) renditions of a heavenly Jerusalem, the process of inverse
utopization of the sixteenth century acts only as a fulfilment of their heterotopic
nature. For Bruni and Contarini essentially recognize in the built fabric of Florence
or Venice those utopian orderings and merely accomplish through discourse the
initial intention of the aedı̄les.
2.3 The Ideal City of the Renaissance According to Alberti,

Filarete et al. The Revanchist Character
The expression of utopia in built form, explicit and materialized, appears indepen-
dently of More’s ideas;74 and between late fifteenth and late sixteenth century, in
the Italian space, it appears as the numerous treatises on the ideal city. If More was
seeking the ideal in an exotic and intangible unknown, the Renaissance identifies it
as the classical past. The recovery of lost values,75 understood as perfection (Plato,
Aristotle, Vitruvius) becomes essential. The Renaissance ideal is often read as a
simple reflection of Antiquity (Arbore), devoid of a utopian encoding. Despite the
recourse to the classical sources or the admiration for the ancient experience, the
Quattrocentist project is not aimed at identifying an ideal, but seeks the validation
73 The ‘condition’ of ‘Acute francophilia’: every man has two homelands, France and his own,
and people who “cannot conceive a world without France, France without Paris, Paris without
the Louvre and the Louvre without the Mona Lisa” Gh. Eminescu, Memorii/Memoires, Bucures, ti,
Floare albastră Publishing House, 1995, 38, apud. Stănescu, Dorin, Un neam s, i două istorii: Românii
din Regat se bat cu flori, cei din Ardeal, Bucovina şi Basarabia luptă în trans, ee [One nation and two
histories: The Romanians in the Old Kingdom fight with flowers, those in Transilvania, Bukovina
and Bessarabia fight in the trenches], in HISTORIA, No. 149, June 2014, 152.
74 And even in parallel with it, as Manuel notes, due to the dates when Utopia was published in the
Italian space.
2.3 The Ideal City of the Renaissance According to Alberti, Filarete et al. … 19
of its own approach through an established reference.76 In contrast, Manuel sees in

the Quattrocentist architects’ language an idealization of the Antiquity’s very esthet-
ical principles and proportions, “born of nostalgia for the strength, simplicity, and
harmony of what was conceived to be antiquity.”77 Form would thus be a mere medi-
ator for recovering an ideal universe. The built environment truly becomes a tool in
shaping the individual and society “in the patrician fantasies of Italian Renaissance”
where “beauty becomes identified with the very meaning of existence.”78 Coleman
captures most accurately the problematic of the utopian encoding in the Renaissance
project: the ideal city was not a direct replica of an idealized past—‘recipe chart’ of
forms and prescriptions—nor a reflection of a precious inheritance; what the Renais-
sance project intends to recover is precisely the immutable pattern or ‘the code’ that
resists materialization as well as the passage of time. These patterns—essential prin-
ciples unchanged with time—are imperfectly expressed in the architectural form and
are not equivalent to it. Replicating them is not possible, yet returning or revisiting
them always is, although only as reservoirs of ideas about the ‘good life’”.79
The representatives—Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), Antonio di
Pietro Averlino Filarete (1400–1469) and Francesco di Giorgio Martini
(1439–1501)—resume principles elaborated in Antiquity (by Plato, Hipodamus, Vit-
ruvius—“guilty” of designing the perfect geometric shapes, suggesting the radial
pattern,80 and the model of the architectural treatise), and assemble schemas for
the ideal city. Manuel observes two major influences which have shaped the ideal
city of Italian Renaissance: that of the church—the powerful mecena—and that of
the ancient rational spirit impregnating the thought of the Quattrocento architects.
The result lies at the intersection of the commissioner’s shaping and moralizing will
with the designer’s creative input and vision and is, in Manuel’s opinion, “the eter-
nal city of God embodied in stone”.81 The principles of centrality, symmetry and
geometric purity return, mirroring More’s and Campanella’s utopias and the ancient
philosophers’ proposals (Plato’s ideal city, in Laws, 360 B.C.; the recommendation
of Spartan king Lycurgus, quoted by Xenophon; the plan described by Meton of
Athens, quoted by Aristophanes in The Birds, 414 B.C.)—as formal manifestations,
as well as environments for the moulding of the individual’s moral virtues.
The ideal city of the Italian Renaissance is governed by the principle of beauty,
the “essence of good living” and “purpose of existence”.82 For Alberti beauty is
equal to a perfect unity, or the perfect balance between parts, the harmonious living
76 Arbore, Cetatea…, 38.

77 Manuel, Manuel, Utopian Thought..., 154.
78 Idem.
80 As Kostof notes, this “proposal” is in fact a subjective interpretation of the Vitruvian text: Vit-
ruvius’ network layout designed to avoid channeling the dominant winds is interpreted by Cesare
Cesarino in 1521 as a radial network, and becomes “the ancient foundation” of the Renaissance
architects in their approaches to the ideal radial city. Kostof, Spiro, The City Shaped, Thames &
Hudson, Limited, 1999, 185.
82 Manuel, Utopian…, 154.
entity within which the individual occupies a central place; perfection-beauty stem
from balance, unity, and the interconnection between the macro-components (indi-
viduals, buildings, society, nature and the universe) and the micro-components, in
a harmonious synchronization. According to Alberti, it is this very completeness,
seldom granted to Nature itself, which introduces the utopian nature. Moreover, in
his proposals for the ideal city Alberti captures another aspect, which supports this
Foucaultian approach: these materialized attempts, unattainable in reality and never
fully achievable, remain imperfect utopias, or according to Foucault’s definition,
heterotopias; nevertheless, the utopian cities should remain the main objective for
architects, in an attempt to draw nearer to the ideal.83
In De Re Aedificatoria (1450)—treatise inspired by the Vitruvian model,84 Alberti
establishes both the theoretical and the practical coordinates of architecture,85 illus-
trating the ideal manner in which it should be built. The treatise, in both its intent and
approach, is presented as exhaustive. Although it essentially doesn’t put forward a
unique model for an ideal city, Alberti systematically assembles the ideal of the art
of edification.86 The constructed form is in agreement with the social dimension: the
ideal city’s community is equalitarian, it uniformly takes part in its functioning; social
equality replaces social stratification, the status quo of the Renaissance city-republic.
The ordering principle, the harmony between the parties, is the central theme of the
treatise and, at the same time, the source of its exhaustiveness. For Alberti, a harmo-
niously ordered society will function accordingly, and the built form should reiterate
similar characteristics. By reversing the mechanism—since the harmonious system’s
relations are never univocal—an (exhaustive) planning will shape the individual and
the society (morally, ethically and politically). The utopian character of the ideal
city derives mainly from this binomial pairing of the material form with the social
and the moral ordering, but also from the imagining the two as a system of inter-
relations. Nevertheless, Alberti’s De Re Aedificatoria has brought forth numerous
interpretations, and not necessarily in the form of the ideal city. In Tafuri’s analy-
sis, (focused on Alberti’s larger body of works)87 Alberti’s ‘ideal’ formula appears
as neither normative, nor eulogizing of the Renaissance architecture and cities, yet

84 The Vitruvian model is picked up at a structural level—De Re Aedificatoria being composed,
like Vitruvius’ treatise, of ten distinct volumes, and also at a thematic level–Alberti discussing
the theoretical and practical issues according to the three essential values of architecture, utilitas,
venustas and firmitas.
85 The ten books have general themes, as follows: 1. location, 2. materials, 3. construction, 4.
public works, 5. private works (noble or common residences) and functions, 6. about ornaments, 7.
about ornaments in worship edifices, 8. about ornaments in public and secular buildings, 9. about
ornaments in private buildings, 10. restoration of buildings.
86 A. discusses issues and situations of urban space—of the individual (public and private) con-
struction, of the public space, of the functions (public and private), but also their organization and
functioning—from the micro-level (constructive systems), meso (of the individual building) and
macro (of the fortress/ city), of the latter in particular.
87 Momus—1450; I Libri della famiglia—publ.1843.
neither a projection of the ideal citadel.88 Another perspective, also supported in

this research, focuses more on the treatise: for Choay “Alberti does not provide an
ideal city in De re… but is rather more interested in generative rules [understood as
principles] for the entire built environment.”89 Contemporary criticism ‘withdrew’
Alberti’s contribution to the concept of ideal city, even to the entire period of the
fifteenth century,90 arguing that his treatise (with or without the context of his works)
is not concerned with “unobtainable ideals but in what might truly be achieved”91 ;
I argue that this very concern for reality, observed through essential and immutable
principles (social, architectural, constructive, etc.), places Alberti within the field of
the utopian thought, and implicitly in that of heterotopias. Similarly, Pietro di Gia-
como Cataneo, in I Quattro Primi Libri di Architettura (1554) refashions, through
the same formula of the treatise, the ideal urban organization (military, architectural);
in Cataneo, the same formula is preserved, with minor formal adjustments, as the
radial pattern is replaced by an orthogonal one. In his treatise of military architecture
(1545–1565), Francesco De Marchi (1504–76), pleads for a mediation in the spirit
of Alberti’s work, midway between the aesthetic and the utilitarian-military aspect
of the citadels.
Filarete combines the utopian and the pragmatic approaches. He openly and
straightforwardly proposes and illustrates the ideal city in its architectural mate-
rialization, yet focuses most of all on its urban structuring and its functioning or
ordering. The now-famous Sforzinda (1460) is a patronage project (Francesco
Sforza); the inherited utopian en-framing method (story within a story) is used
only for dramatic purposes to convey to its patron “the actual building operations
of the ideal city”.92 Filarete creates an unconventional and ingenious mechanism
“of introducing in an architecture treatise the detailed description of an entire
city […] with digressions about the functioning of schools, courts, brothels, and
prisons”—93 symbolic and material expressions which demarcate the ‘ideal’
structure and functioning of the ‘ideal’ network of power—while also validating
the architect’s position (and power) within the design-construction demarche. The
new Sforzinda—Filarete’s proposal—reassumes the principles of an old, extinct
Sforzinda, (of king Zogalia) rediscovered through a text, using the technique of the
‘link to the past’ (even if an imagined one) as a legitimizing pretext for the architect’s
own principles. This entire artifice candidly and quite unambiguously offers the
88 Leach, Andrew, Imitating Critique or the Problematic Legacy of the Venice School, în The
Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture, ed. Nadir Lahiji, Bloomsbury Pub-
lishing, 2014, 104, and http://www.psupress.org/books/samplechapters/978-0-271-04855-0sc.html,
accessed June 2014.
89 Pearson, Casper, Humanism and the Urban World. Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance
City, Penn State University Press, 2011, http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-04855-0.

html, accessed in June 2014.
90 Pearson, http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-04855-0.html, accessed in June 2014.
91 Idem.
92 Manuel, Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, Belknap Press; New edition (September
15, 1982) 156.

93 Idem.
‘recipe’: the past rehashed or merely invoked as a means to legitimation. The ideal
is reclaimed from the ancient past (Arbore), which becomes the foundation that
legitimizes both the creation and the author-architect’s own principles. Besides this
device of temporal distancing—where the ideal other is found in the past—Filarete
employs another utopian mechanism—the geographical distancing, by placing this
ideal other in India—94 at the finis mundi, an eminently exotic territory juxtaposing
multiple tropes such as the earthly paradise and the country of Prester John. The
references are multiple: the city is located on the “Sforzindo river (a passage refers
to the river as Indo), in Inda Valley, at the foot of Mount Indo”.95
The ideal translates in geometric perfection, symmetry, mathematical proportion
and centrality—all quoting Antiquity. The formula proposed by Filarete is a multi-
layered construct: the first encoding of the concentric space invokes a cosmological,
mystical and religious ordering (the divine power), subsequently projected onto the
earthly manifestation of divine power (the semi-divine power). The encoding is
then modelled as a representation of political power, attaching to it the argument
of accessibility (the transit arteries) in service of maintaining the official power and
order (military control). Kostof believes that this encoding—material ordering as a
manifestation of political power—explains most pertinently this type of urban struc-
turing: “the composite [concentric] diagram was a strong visual projection of the
all-pervasive nature of absolute power, while the radiating streets might also play
a secondary role as dividers of some intermediary organization.”96 This proposed
social stratification differs too little from the author’s contemporary one. Filarete
resumes the very social stratification and legitimizes it through the architectural
expression.97 However, when examining the proposed algorithm—with the domi-
nant power occupying the centre—the variation of the “institution” that occupies the
centre can be easily observed (Kostof). The centre of the Sforzinda citadel—occupied
by the House of Vice and Virtue—decisively places the proposal within the realm of
the utopian ideal, as Filarete thus suggests the pivotal ordering principle—morality.
Thus, the project proposed by Filarete is defined through its double-stand: it
reassumes the antique-inspired formal expression (stellate layout), combining the
magical-astrological encoding and the religious one, mirroring in the internal layout
94 India appears as the synonym for the unknown and remote other, the Far East (and not in the
contemporary sense), agglutinating a larger area: China (India Interior or Ulterior) and Africa
(India Tertia, India Aegypti or I. Aethiopia)—as well as incorrectly delineated, where Africa and
India are featured as a single continent, a “misconception that was eventually corrected towards in
late 15th century”. Hub, Berthold, Filarete and the East: The Renaissance of a Prisca Architectura
Source, 18–37, în Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 70, no. 1, Martie 2011,
24, accesat Iulie 2014.
95 Hub, B., Filarete and the East…, 24.
96 Kostof, Spiro, The City Shaped, Thames & Hudson, Limited, 1999, 184.
97 For example, Filarete proposes standardized dwellings for different social classes, each with a
different expression—using Doric order for the noble class, the Corinthian for merchant class and
the Ionic for the artisan class, each with its specific dimensions and structuring. Manuel, Manuel,
Utopian Thought…, 168–9.
of Sforzinda the mediaeval radial diagrams of St. Augustine.98,99 The assumed,

official explanation is, however, the defensive need.
In Filarete’s plan, the city centre is occupied by a series of interconnected squares
dedicated to the palace, the cathedral and the market—the three powers that dominate
urban every day; the House of Vice and Virtue, placed in the centre, appears episodi-
cally. Filarete also describes other constructions—the bank, the mint, the public baths
and the podestà, the gardens (a quadrate layout depicting the image of the world),
the prison featuring themed punishments—as well as functional areas, such as the
residential area. The social segregation, a deliberate reinstatement of the Renais-
sance (and mediaeval) reality, is expressed through functional zoning, and motivated
by the good functioning of the city-organism.100,101 The utopian character of such
a layout derives from an individualist perspective of an idealized society, subse-
quently expressed in built form. That very built form not only supports the proposed
social-political structure (centralized power), and acts as a catalyst and contributes
to its functioning, but also ensure its illustration it in every aspect of its inner life.
This deliberate juxtaposition intended by Filarete, of the social and political ideal
(as a programme or ideology) and the architectural and the urban—will gradually
dilute over time. Yet, the proposed urban morphology (the central, radial pattern)
will endure, spawning numerous variations,102 and it will preserve within its built
form the initial encoding and its ordering as a layer of significance, ready to emerge
under auspicious conditions. The symmetry of ideology/ architecture (urbanism) will
be manifested again a few centuries later, resuming in part the already consolidated
formal language of the Renaissance.
98 De Civitate Dei contra paganos, Augustin de Hipona, sec. 5 d.Hr. (aprox. 427 d.Hr); The city
of God—governed by the spirit and love of God—is placed in antithesis with the City of Man, or
the Earthly City—governed by self-love, sin, pleasure and enchantment with one’s own power. The
earthly city is described as having a circular layout, divided by radially placed circulations and
circular belts, each defining a subdivision dedicated to a virtue and, respectively, to a vice.
99 See also Kostof, S., The City…; Manuel, Manuel, Utopian Thought…, 163.
100 To such extent that, as Manuel points out, in support of the utilitarian argument, Filarete proposes
the abolishing of the death penalty “as a waste of productive capacity”. Manuel, Manuel, Utopian
Thought…, 170.
101 Several centuries later, both of these characteristics (the centrality and the zoning) will be invoked
by modernism in the name of the efficiency of the city-organism and harbouring a similar segrega-
tion.
102 Kostof recalls some of the initiatives that took over the radial structure of Sforzinda (with diluted
or eliminated socio-political charge): the mining town with rectangular central layout, Freudenstadt,
Baden-Württemberg, Germany—1599 (the palace that would occupy the centre of the plan would no
longer be built); the city with hexagonal central layout, Grammichele, Sicilia, Italia—1693 (the only
power present in the centre of the plan is the church; radial streets delineate five individual neighbour-
hoods, and a segment dedicated to the prince). Other similar plans appear in the Italian space—Terra
del Sole, Province of Forlì-Cesena, (1564), a central-rectangular layout and an orthogonal street
grid; Avola—Sicily (1693)—hexagonal central layout and rectangular square; Palmanova, Udine,
(1593)—stellar layout and hexagonal central square; Sabbionetta, Mantua, (1554)—irregular stellar
layout, orthogonal grid; San Lorenzo Nuovo, Viterbo (1772), octagonal square and orthogonal grid.
When comparing Sforzinda’s schema with another one of Filarete’s projects,

Ospedale Maggiore, Milan—103 this time a materialized one, albeit with stylistic
alterations, a set of common features can be observed; the geometry, the symmetry
and the centrality all reiterate the Sforzinda experiment. Being one of Italy’s first built
structure of its kind (public hospital), the rigorous architectural formula was capable
of shaping the programme, by encoding in its built form mainly religious but also
social orderings, as suggested by the original plan proposed by Filarete.104 The initial
layout is quadrilateral, divided into three inner courtyards; the two large rectangular
courtyards, symmetrically located on the sides of the central court, are divided into
smaller yards by cross-intersected volumes; a narrower central courtyard contained
the Annunciation Church in its very geometric centre. The hierarchy is suggestive—-
man (represented by the cloister) and nature (gardens), equally divine creations, are
looked over by divinity (the church), a relationship suggested through both central
positioning and layout (cross-shaped volumes). The same hierarchy is replayed in the
ensemble’s elevation: the highest volume belonging to the church overlooks the other
spaces. The entire programme reiterates this hierarchy, and the afflicted individual
accesses the two manifestations of divinity—nature and the earthly sacred space—as
fundamental mediators of the divine healing. Filarete‘s two proposals (Ospedale and
Sforzinda) illustrate the juxtaposition of two different instances of the ideal, similar
in form (symmetry, geometry and centrality) and contrasting in their encodings: the
classical ‘pagan’ ideal and the Christian, divine ideal.
The de facto materialization of Sforzinda is limited. The compliance with the
designed schema implied its construction de novo and the identification of the ideal
very specific location (particular morphology of the terrain, the presence of multi-
ple essential features)—these constraining criteria greatly reducing the number of
regular and symmetrical citadels, perfectly emulating the model. The closest embod-
iments of the model are the well-known Palmanova, Italia105 —with a stellate-radial
layout—and its Dutch version, the Coevorden citadel (1597); irregularly shaped pro-
posals of this ‘ideal’ layout are abundant. The case of the treatise Des fortifications
et artifices by Frenchman Jaques Perret (1540–5 to 1610–9) appears as a hybrid,
positioning itself much like Filarete, at the border between the utopian treatises
describing the ideal city-organism and the military treatises on the ideally reinforced
city-citadel. Perret identifies three categories: the ideal city, religious edifices and pri-
vate buildings. For the first division, Perret explores a complex iconography of the
ideal city, represented through five regular-fortification ‘orders’, further illustrated
103 Described in Trattato di Architettura, 1461–64—the first architectural treatise written in Italian
(vulgar).
104 Filarete’s plan will not be observed à la lettre, thus losing the very particular divine ordering
expressed in built form: the initially oblong-rectangular plan of the central courtyard becomes
quadrate, and the nucleus, the Annunciation Church, mark of the epicentre and symmetry point for
the entire building, will not be built; in addition, the main building of the hospital undergoes a series
of stylistic adaptations of the facades, the construction details and its overall volume (its inner and
corner towers, distribution of its avant-corps, etc.).
105 Planned city, Palmanova was founded on October 7th, 1593, according to the plans of architect
Scamozzi.
through architectural layouts and perspectives, and grouped by dimensional criteria.

The general urban fabric of these ideal citadel-cities tends to be a uniform one, in
which a limited set of construction types is repeated and, for the larger layouts, recom-
bined. The utopian coordinate is featured in the last category discussed by the treatise,
dedicated to private-residential architecture; Perret introduces a typology of habita-
tion, “inspired by Protestant communal dwellings, where several owners lived in a
building served by a shared access”,106 also suggesting through this ideal, more effi-
cient scheme, a different social structuring. The particularity of the treatise consists in
a “mixture of types, of military and religious architecture, [which is] unprecedented
in the history of treatises on fortifications”.107 The religious connotation, the social
hierarchy reflected in the ordering of spaces, the ordering principle reiterated from
the macro- to the micro-scale, the symmetry, the regular geometry and the tendency
towards recombinations—are all characteristics shared with Alberti’s and Filarete’s
approaches. Bonaiuto Lorini (1540–1611),108 military engineer, maintains the radial
schema, the stellate layout (nine corners) and even the distribution and positioning of
the squares according to Filarete’s model, yet emphasizing the utilitarian/pragmatic
aspect of the fortification. By assuming the exact layout, although devoid of the
initially assumed social ordering, Lorini positions himself as an exponent of the pro-
cess of utopia’s permeation into reality. From Lorini, the trajectory of the ideal city
can be easily read: the utopian encoding, imprinted into a material expression, was
approaching the conclusion of its migration process towards the background, to the
detriment of pragmatic encoding or utilitas, which occupied a central position in the
discourse of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Although the principle of the representation of dominant power through the
urban structuring and the functional organization of the city persists, that ‘perfect’
synchronization between built form and social-political, the application (and appli-
cability) of the all-encompassing character of the layout (the infusion of the ideal
principle to the smallest aspect of the city) gradually dissolves. The subsequent
layouts apply the ordering principle in the same manner, “as if” designing a small
universe or city-organism, although they will almost always “ordinate” small com-
munities, with the exception of ‘systems’ designed and introduced by totalitarian
regimes. Although it appears as a materialization of the ideal city concept, parallel
106 “un type d’architecture collective inspirée des habitats communautaires protestants, faisant
cohabiter plusieurs propriétaires dans une même maison desservie par une entrée commune”,
d’Orgeix, Émilie, Docomomo International, Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, 2006, a review
of Jacques Perret’s treatise, Des fortifications et artifices. Architecture et perspective, Paris, 1601,
consultată pe http://architectura.cesr.univ-tours.fr/traite/Notice/ENSBA_LES1698.asp?param=en.
107 “Ce mélange des genres, architecture militaire et religieuse, est sans précédent dans l’histoire
des traités de fortifications”, Idem.

108 Lorini is involved as well, as military engineer in the service of the ‘Serenissima’ Republic
of Venice, in the building of Palmanova’s fortifications. To put forward his ideas he also turns
to the formula of the architecture treatise, with its already established military-utilitarian flavour-
ing: Delle fortificazioni, libri cinque, Venet, ia (1597) and Due pareri sulle fortificazioni di Udine
e Palma nel secolo XVI, printed by S. Beretta-Manin—G. L. Manin, Udine (1868). Doti, Ger-
ardo, LORINI, Buonaiuto, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani—Volume 66 (2007), http://www.
treccani.it/enciclopedia/buonaiuto-lorini_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/, accessed in July 2014.
to and contemporary with the architectural treatises and the construction of new
citadels, the utopias belonging to the ideal religious societies draw little interest
in their constructed forms—as plain objects and ensembles, largely self-sufficient,
characterized by simplicity and a basic ordination and hierarchy, although textually
invoking a lineage from, and their subordination to the ideal virtues (piety, temper-
ance, modesty, etc.). Their main argument is the resolute belief in the possibility of
creating real, perfect societies in the here and now, by strict compliance to the divine
rules. Theocratical communities emerge—such as the radical Hussites (the taborites,
Müntzer’s Anabaptists and their idea of a Christian Commonwealth, subsequently
recycled ad litteram by the Amana, Amish, Hutterite and Mennonite communities,
and indirectly by the Quakers and the Mormons).
The ‘Filarete layout’ develops in the direction of military architecture, one of its
later exponents being Francesco di Giorgio Martini,109 who, seeking to improve
the functional scheme and to solve “Sforzinda’s [supposed] design problems”,110
will contribute to the record of ideal cities. The utopian character is mediated again
through the interdependence between the built environment and society (man—c-
ity).111 Just like its predecessors, Martini resorts to the formula of the architectural
treatise, presenting numerous versions of the radial city.112 He also reiterates the Vit-
ruvian human body principle (a divine creation and therefore perfect) as standard for
the architectural proportion. In an overlapping of the interest in military architecture
and of the period’s search for a more hygienic urban fabric, Martini (re)imagines the
city-organism, based onto an anthropomorphic layout, aiming for a more ‘natural’
functioning as well as for efficiency, expressed through the use of perfect geometric
forms. Like his predecessors, Martini resumes and legitimates the existing social
structure and translates it into architectural form and urban fabric.113 The city and
its constituent elements—its buildings, its urban spaces, as well as its constituent
architectural elements—are utterly controlled, formally, structurally and relationally
dictated by the proportions of the human body.114 The idea of the city-organism
persists, even if it loses its religious connotation.
In general, the Renaissance architect succeeds in juxtaposing within the layout of
the ideal radial city—the go-to solution of the period—the (idealized) social, political
and religious beliefs, as well as the economic and military desideratum and the
109 Architect, theoretician and engineer, born in Siena, Italy (1439—1501). James Stevens Curl,
Giorgio di Martini, Francesco di, A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, 2000,
Encyclopedia.com, accessed July, 2014.
110 Kostof, Spiro, The City…, 189.
112 The treatise is “divided into sections on general principles, the essential features of a commodious
city constructed for a social animal, the ornaments of cities and fortresses, the temple to God,
the fortifications for dominion, and the technology necessary for construction”. Manuel, Manuel,
Utopian…, 175.
113 Di Giorgio proposes “four types of houses for the four lower orders of the city’s inhabitants,
peasants (villani), artisans (arte}ici), intellectuals (studenti), and merchants (mercanti), as well as
residences for the nobili”, Manuel, Manuel, Utopian Thought…, 169.
sanitary necessities. Although the utopian nature of these proposals is incontestable,

it leaves room for discussion. On the one hand, they are constructed by reference
to an idealized past, a lost golden era, and through the intention to recover the
principles (with or without copying its forms), as well as through a critical positioning
towards a present deemed inferior, due to its political instability, the internal and
external military vulnerability and the poor health of the ‘Gothic city’. At the same
time, the ideal Renaissance city does not offer an ultimate ideal ordering (like in
More’s work), but maintains almost unaltered the ‘official’ existing hierarchies and
social segregations. Moreover, for these Renaissance schemas segregation becomes
their very functional principle, guaranteeing the operation of the imagined universe
(Plato, Alberti, Castiglione, Filarete, Di Giorgio Martini, Lorini, Da Vinci, Serlio).
Ammannati (1511–92) and Giorgio Vasari the young (1562–1625) also explore
the ideal city, although their texts are limited to describing series of public and
private buildings models, through which the assembling of the ideal, the beautiful
and structured city,115 becomes possible; once more, the scheme falls short of a
critical social project. Similarly, Scamozzi designs the ideal city of Palma Cita
nova, materialized as Palmanova—116 reiterating the fortified stellate layout and
urban fabric’s orthogonal structure.
If there are many arguments in support of the utopian profile of the ideal cities,
the anti-utopian character of the ideal cities is represented by the presence of a legit-
imizing discourse. Da Vinci’s ideal city proposal (1487) is one of the most straight-
forward and illustrative examples of social segregation; this imagined reality put
forward by Da Vinci is the ad litteram enhanced materialization of the Renaissance
social hierarchy: by vertical arrangement of categories and by replacing the levelled
or same-dimensional centrality (found in Campanella’s, Filarete’s or Martini’s radial
horizontal layouts). For these previous layouts, the ‘earthly’ segregations expressed
in built form remain within the same dimension, hierarchized amongst themselves but
dominated and ‘watched over’ by the supreme principle (either God, morality, truth,
etc.); alone but not always, the central silhouette may rupture this one-dimensional
disposition. Da Vinci’s ideal city introduces a vertical three-levelled separation117 :
the first purely utilitarian lever (canals for hidden circulation and waste disposal), the
second dedicated to the common individual but mainly operating as a traffic network,
and finally the third, upper level, endowed with palaces and gardens is dedicated to
the noble class, which is thus “free to move about without being molested” by the
traffic and odours necessary to the city’s functioning.118 The higher level is depicted
as a universe of contemplation reserved for the chosen ones, suggesting a multilay-
ered segregation (physical, moral, intellectual, etc.). This segregated scheme reveals
115 Kruft,Hanno-Walter, History of Architectural Theory, 96.

116 Kruft,Hanno-Walter, History of Architectural Theory, 100.
117 Manuel, E. Frank and Manuel, Fritzie P. read Da Vinci’s scheme as a binary one (two-level city);
however when observing more closer the description and the plans of this ideal city, the tripartite
structure becomes more apparent, as the traffic network (both water and soil) additionally divides
the lower ‘hidden’ levels.
and critiques for the reader the flaws of the Renaissance reality, as perceived in the
period. The built form is yet again endowed with the role of expressing the symbolic
and the immaterial orderings. For the most part the urban morphology, and in sub-
sidiary the architectural expression, ‘become’ themselves social hierarchy as well as
a tool of segregation.
Renaissance theoreticians propose, like More, the binomial pairing of society-city,
imagined simultaneously as a tool and as an expression, subject to rigid function-
ing norms, emanating from a supreme ordering principle. Their heterotopic nature
derives however from the permeation phenomenon of the architects’ and commis-
sioners’ perspectives: the ideal city ceases to be a strictly imaginary one, dedicated
to contemplation, and becomes a possible, buildable and efficient city—a model.
This transition is mainly motivated by the new available technical possibilities and
the progress of science. If the imagined route of the ship that touched the shores of
More’s Utopia could now be pinpointed on a world map, then “the building of a New
Atlantis, a Christianopolis,119 a New Jerusalem, a City of the Sun was [thus] emi-
nently practicable”120 ; as Manuel notes, “if there were new lands and new inventions,
there could be new societies moulded by man’s [new] accumulated knowledge”.121
The social/religious/moral/… imagined ordering is expressed most clearly as imag-
ined constructed ordering which, once detailed and argued by means of the new
knowledge, presents itself as attainable. From here, there is only one step until the
idea of using the utopian layout as a blueprint for a real space. The architectural trea-
tise is shaped as an intermediary between the imagined and the real ordering, being
the preferred proliferation environment for ideal city variants, which often trace
over or reassemble their antecedent ones. If utopia would imagine and narrate the
ideal ordering, the treatise describes it in detail, calculates it and designs its layouts,
perspectives and sections, despite gradually forgetting its encoded prescriptions.
A particular aspect of the Renaissance utopia which warrants further exploration
is its revanchist character. It is sometimes attributed to it, but most often revoked,
even conditioning some projections’ their recognition as utopias. As Mannheim sug-
gests, the revanchist character lies at the foundation of the division between ideology
and utopia, the first assuming the integration within the dominant order of the epoch,
and thus showcasing a non-revolutionary attitude, and the second positioning itself
as a challenger of the official, in opposition, implying a break with the dominant
order. Thus, as a general assessment and at first glance, the ideal Renaissance city
119 Christianopolis (Reipublicae christianopolitanae descriptio) or Christian reformist utopia by
Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1654), published in 1619. Campanella and Bacon’s influence is
evident in this society’s hierarchical system of organization. Geographically, architecturally and
urbanistically, the descriptions also illustrate a well-known image: Capharsalama, a (triangular)
isolated island, accessible through the voyage of the ship (Phantasia) and the accident, the con-
ditioned access, the symmetrical and heavily fortified square city, zoned according to functional
hierarchies, standardization of urban space and its common use. If for Moore or Campanella the
city is a reflection of society but also a tool for its moral moulding, for Andreae the city contributes
to revelation and spiritual conversion of the individual.
may appear as anti-utopian. The argument for this approach is that although Renais-
sance’s ideal city may be critically positioned, in an apparent opposition towards its
contemporary present, by idealizing the past-as golden age, as well as by proposing
a solution, or the improvement and remoulding of society through a built form, it
preserves de facto the existing highly segregated societal structure of its own time.
This apparently, by not fundamentally challenging the exiting, does not introduce
the ‘trademark’ rift which signals the revanchist character. Therefore, according to
Mannheim’s delimitation, it cannot be considered utopia. By adopting this point of
view, many authors only begin their analysis of utopian thinking with the nineteenth
century. I argue that such an approach, especially in the case of the Renaissance
ideal cities, is in fact a simplified one since it evaluates the project outside of its
historical context and disconnected from the conditions that shape it. Taken out of
context, and thus excessively simplified, the project of the Renaissance ideal city
can appear as ideology. However, I argue that these projects of the ideal city can be
considered essentially utopian. As Raymond Ruyer notes, “the utopian thinkers of
the Renaissance continue to produce communist systems at the very moment when
the era of capitalism and free trade begins. They dream of a universal monarchy at the
very moment when nationhoods are asserted. They attach themselves to an ascetic
ideal when brilliant and luxurious cultures flourish (…)”122 or, in other words, they
position themselves in contradiction to their new, just crystallizing, contemporary
orderings and provide an alternative. Thus, viewed in context, the ideal Renaissance
city is definitely utopian as well as revanchist. If More’s utopia contested (in a dissim-
ulated manner) the dominant order of the time, the Renaissance’s ideal city supports,
justifies, praises and seeks to save its own, as it is already undergoing transformation
and dissolving. The ideal city becomes a legitimizing device for an existing order-
ing, illustrating it as a natural and even sine qua non ordering.123 The Renaissance
ideal city also corresponds to the virtual (imagined) city according to Augustin Ioan,
defined as the juxtaposition of the existing and the virtual project, in addition to
reality or as an alternative of the existing spatial urban ordering, yet suspended in a
project-stage.124 The active character is for Mannheim the essential mark of utopia:
the unachievable, inaccessible imagined projections cannot be considered utopian,
whereas those which become devices of direct alteration of reality, triggers for action
in their present, can indeed be considered utopias. Mannheim thus attaches (and con-
ditions) the utopian character to the revanchist, transgressive one. However, when
exploring this distinction, Mannheim does not define fixed categories but rather a
122 Ruyer, Raymond, L’utopie et les utopies, Paris, 1950, 159, apud., Arbore, Cetatea…, 66. Original
quote: “Les utopistes de la Renaissance continuent à fabriquer des systèmes communistes au moment
même où commence l’ère du capitalisme et de la libre entreprise. Ils rêvent d’une monarchie
universelle au moment où les nationalismes s’affirment. Ils s’attachent à un idéal ascétique alors
que florissent des cultures brillantes et luxueuses.”
124 Ioan, Augustin, Repede ochire asupra culturii urbane ideale [Quick overview of the ideal urban
culture], in Arhitectura care nu există. Imaginar, virtual, utopie, [The Architecture that does not
exist. Imaginary, virtual utopia] coord. Augustin Ioan, Paideia Publishing House, Spat, ii imaginate
Collection, Bucharest, 1999.
process: the projection is utopian as long as it retains its revanchist character, the
disruptive potential and the role of contender for the dominant order. A similar rea-
soning belongs to Kevin Hetherington, under the name of laboratory spaces, capable
of revolutionizing their contemporary existing orderings. For Mannheim, once the
utopian projection is materialized, its utopian character is automatically diluted. In
other words, once constructed, resolved as material expression, the ideal city (or any
other form of transgressive utopian projection) loses its utopian character, it becomes
something else—something which Foucault identifies as heterotopia. As the subse-
quent examples demonstrate, the built form plays a dual role in the becoming of
utopia: as an expression of alterity as well as a medium of normalization. Once built,
the alternate ordering becomes just another ordering (normality), which in its turn
can (and inevitably will) be challenged—thus generating new (utopian) projections.
2.3.1 The Baroque Utopia: Transition to the Functional City
The architectural treatises (of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) read and pro-
pose the circular-concentric layout as an ideal, but once materialized this ‘mecha-
nism’ reveals its utilitarian, economic, functional flow, etc., limitations—thus con-
firming the Foucaultian hypothesis: materialized utopia is inevitably incomplete or
imperfect, consistently falling short of completeness, and as such it can be designated
as heterotopia.
If the layout of Sforzinda proposed by Filarete finds its mirrored materializa-
tion in Scamozzi’s Palmanova (1593), in parallel to the technological advancement
the filiation between the utopian idea and the architectural-urban materialization
becomes increasingly more diffuse. The radial layout is fragmented, multiplied or
combined with the orthogonal grid, and the dominant ordering gradually becomes
subordinate to the military function The Renaissance utopian model—in both its
social ordering and its built form—is juxtaposed with the functional dimension; over
the radial-stellate layout, imagined as ideal, there subsequently are superimposed
the Renaissance model of fortification, followed by the Baroque one—gradually
dissolving the social-utopian encoding in favour of a focus on the utilitarian charac-
ter of form. The ideal becomes the inexpugnable city, and criticism, idealization or
eulogizing turn into prescription and norming. The ideal as aesthetic, cultural, reli-
gious or moral encoding is obscured and replaced by pure functionality. The layout,
the symmetry of the circulation network, the zoning and the central positioning of
administrative/power functions, originally motivated through religious, aesthetic or
representative arguments (the balance theory, the theory of the platonic numbers,
the centre theory, etc.) are re-filtered through the new scientific perspective; they are
not refashioned per se, but rather re-encrypted, argued and described by means of
the functional argument: the defence points’ accessibility, the multiplication of the
fortified enclosures, the protection of certain strategic facilities, the adaptation to
the new combat technologies, etc. However, the common point of the two perspec-
tives remains the control; both the ideal city and the fortification seek to achieve a
goal, either the ideal society or the inexpugnable fortification (power) through con-
trol, and the built form is almost automatically imagined as the optimal mediating
mechanism of this intention. The stellate formula is partially preserved as well as its
initial encoding, at least on a representational level. Sébastin Van Noy’s Philippeville
(Belgium, 1555),125 Alex von Löwen’s Hamina (or Fredrikshamn, Finland, 1723),126
or Vauban’s Neuf-Brisrach, (Alsace, France, 1698) are all variations of the radial-
orthogonal hybrid layout, adapted to the site where they are implanted, and mainly
bearing a military role focused on protection and control. The mutation phenomenon
of the radial-orthogonal Renaissance layout into military prescription advances and
the variants proliferate,127 as the social ordering intention—a key Renaissance argu-
ment—is inevitably diluted; however, when the layout is materialized for military
purpose, the inherited utopian encoding impregnates the material form, triggered or
diverted through practices.
One such layout, with an intentionally designed social ordering that has the poten-
tial to materialize in a profoundly negative manner, is the case of the fortified city
of Terezin (or Theresienstadt, the Czech Republic, eighteenth century).128 The
ensemble has three components: the fortified city with an octagonal stellate layout
and an interior orthogonal road grid, is located on the west bank of the Ohře river
(tributary of the Elbe); on the east bank, a second fortification, a smaller asymmetri-
cal stellate citadel, is axially connected to the city; the third component consists of
the tow fortification’s protective earthworks system, distributed along the connect-
ing axis. Through a dam system, the adjacent watercourse could be easily diverted
125 The city’s plan is an irregular pentagon, with a square central market, from which ten streets
radiate asymmetrically; two interrupted circular streets suggest the organization of the urban fabric
in two rings around the central market. Philippeville appears represented with two versions of forti-
fications (the first one, with polygonal bastions and enclosure wall and, respectively, with bastions,
wall, rampart and ravelins) both disassembled with the forced neutrality and the resulting demil-
itarization of Belgium (1831), in 1853–6, www.tourismephilippeville.be/patrimoine/presentation-
des-villages-de-lentite-de-philippeville, accessed in June 2014.
126 The city’s plan is an octagonal one with a central market, initially free, and later in the Baroque
period occupied by the City Hall building, from where eight streets extend perpendicularly on two
built rings; the plan receives, in the nineteenth century, three Vauban fortification rings (two curtain
walls with polygonal bastions, and one rampart).
127 Arras (1668–72), Besançon (1668–83), Blaye (1686–89) Cussac-Fort-Medoc (1690–1700), Bri-
ançon (1692–1700–1734); oras, ele nou create Longwy (1679), Mont-Dauphin (1692), Neuf-Brisach
(1698–1703); Saint-Martin-de-Re (1681–5), Villefranche-de-Conflent (1669)—all variations of the
well-known star planimetry, UNESCO-listed objectives in 2008, and only a few of the 330 fortified
citadels and cities made directly by Vauban; along with numerous other examples of the Vauban
model, we mention some of the Romanian space: Arad Fortress, Alba Iulia fortress, Timişoara
fortress, the second fortification of the Făgăraş Fortress.
128 The town-fort is built in1780–90 at the orders of Austrian Emperor Joseph II the second. Although
in late eighteenth-century Terezin was one of the most modern and well-equipped fortifications
in Europe, it will quickly lose its status (1882) due to the political context and the technologi-
cal advance. http://www.ghetto-theresienstadt.info/terezingeschichte.htm s, i http://www.pamatnik-
terezin.cz, accessed in June 2014.
for further defending the ensemble by flooding its immediate surroundings.129 The
rectangular-shaped central square of the fortified city concentrates the dominant
functions and power foci—the church and the military administration. Of the two,
the military function is preserved in time and constantly refashioned (surveillance
and protection, military training and military-political detention). During World War
I, it becomes a detention area for war prisoners. The layout of the fortification, in
itself the materialization of the control idea, as well as the functions it will subse-
quently fulfil, make the transition to its next repurposing a logical step. In 1941, after
a rigorous selection among other 20 proposed locations, Terezin officially becomes
a ghetto—“a collecting point and transit station for the extermination camps of the
East”.130 The pre-existing layout of the city already serves this purpose: the isolation
of the fortified complex within its territory, the successive enclosures, the thorough
control facilitated by the symmetry of the street network, the connection to the rail-
way network, the existing built facilities and the self-sufficiency typical for fortified
structures.131 From the 7500 individuals (soldiers and prisoners) accommodated in
the pre-war period, 59,497 are left by the end of 1942 (of an even larger number). The
layout of the ensemble allowed the autonomous and ‘hidden in plain sight’ operation
of the ghetto. The two main enclosures function as carceral and punitive, military,
administrative and economic spaces; the terrain within the median fortification, along
the axis linking the two fortifications, is exploited as agricultural resource. Along-
side these functions, readily moulded onto the control encoding, a new ordering is
introduced, paradoxical in nature. It is instituted in Terezin in July 1944, when the
German forces allow the Red Cross Organization to visit the ghetto—in order to
inspect the living conditions of the ‘refugees’. This new ordering is a performative
one, as confirmed by the preparations that take place in the ghetto: the massive depor-
tations to the extermination camps in order to ‘unburden’ the ‘camp’s density, and the
processes of ‘beautification’ (parks, terraces and the main promenade are created;
housing units are rehabilitated; new facilities are built, etc.). For the scheduled visit,
“everyday” cultural and social events are organized (football match, theatre plays, a
march, etc.) in order to illustrate normality. Parallel to this singular ‘event’-ordering,
temporarily introduced, another long-duration campaign is devised: Theresienstadt
is presented in the propaganda media as a “balneal/resort city”,132 intended for the
“safe retirement”133 of the elderly German Jews. Once the Red Cross visit is over,
the ‘actors’ are deported and the improvised scenography returned to its previous
ordering. This performative ordering, efficient albeit temporary, was possible by
129 http://www.ghetto-theresienstadt.info/terezingeschichte.htm si http://www.pamatnik-terezin.cz,

,
accessed in June 2014.
130 Idem.
131 Inside the main fortification, the 219 houses and 11 barracks were used strictly for the adminis-
tration and the housing of the stationed troops; alongside these, the buildings with other functions
were: warehouses, small workshops, shops, restaurants, a covered racetrack, a bakery and a army
brewery, as well as the garrison church, and underneath all these about 25 km of underground
passages.
132 http://www.ghetto-theresienstadt.info/terezinghetto.htm#kommission, accessed in June 2014.
133 Idem.
virtue of the pre-existing control encoding. Within the enclosure, any movement can
be monitored and regulated, the visitors’ route is guided (the smaller citadel used
as prison remains inaccessible during the visit) and the ‘accidentally’ encountered
scenes are directed. The layout’s control encoding sustains and fuels this negative
potential. The initial military function demonstrates the space’s potential to assume a
totalitarian order; the Nazi ordering enhances the control coordinates and transforms
the space into a panoptic one. By means of amplifying the Habsburg ensemble’s ini-
tial control ordering, Terezin becomes a dystopian version of the idealized ordering
inherited within its stellate layout. It is a materialized utopian space, which shapes
its community through its built form and functioning norms, in a distorted reflection
of the Renaissance ideal. This control encoding is shared by several architectural
programmes, as Foucault notes, with varying degrees of intensity, but almost always
illustrated through the presence of an enclosure—the clear delimitation between
the interior and the exterior, or between normality and the otherness which is thus
contained and normed.
The previous example preserves its connection with the Renaissance’s ideal
fortress (spatial hierarchy, formal ordering) and inevitably its control encoding.
Although the last Vauban fortifications still retained in their pragmatic military
demarche the faded reminiscences of the stellate schema, their design had gradu-
ally eliminated that intention of shaping an ideal society/community. The ideal is
downgraded to a pragmatic level, as it is translated into military efficiency. In other
words, the Vauban model perpetuates the built expression and the schema of the ideal
city, and transforms its social encoding into a social control encoding. The utopian
encoding remains embedded within the built form, and the subsequent orderings
consecutively occupying it (selected and introduced almost intuitively), may or may
not activate its heterotopic potential.
2.3.2 The Ideal City’s Expression in the Romanian Space
In the Romanian space, the radial ideal city model—with its circular, rectangular,
or other polygonal layout variants—manifests in its more formal, pragmatic aspect,
apparently lacking a social-utopian encoding. The ordering schema is assumed as
functional ideal or pragmatic prescription, and its potential as an intentional social
ordering tool is diluted. Nevertheless, the utopian intent appears to be attached to
the schema and the built form themselves, even if drawing from earlier sources (cen-
trality and the theory of the centre, axis mundi, the theory of the unique ordering
principle/power). Although the regular (radial, orthogonal, stellate) layout does have
a series of high-profile exponents in the Romanian space, I argue that three of their
precursory instances (all mainly defined by their fortified enclosure) can be consid-
ered as more interesting and less explored subjects. If the first can easily be identified
as an attribute of the religious function—the fortified church—the second one—the
peasant fortified fortress (church citadel)—manifests as a hybridization of the for-
mer, receiving within its enclosure additional functions and with them also a new
ordering principle. A brief excurse into the field of architectural history and history
of religions reveals this affiliation, as holy spaces are almost universally mirroring
their spiritual refuge function in a material form, serving a more pragmatic function.
An even more diluted variant of this layout is illustrated by the noble residences. For
this group, the schema is used by virtue of the pragmatic motif (protection). Given
the dilution of the externally conditioning factors, the reason for the perpetuation of
the layout remains a symbolic one, suggesting the representative significance held
by an already sedimented material expression.
Thus, the circular fortification invokes older sources, in a process similar to the
Renaissance’s inquest of Antiquity for its ordering principles (symmetry, platonic
numbers, perfect or transcendental geometric shapes, proportion theory), which are
then recycled and reapplied. The theory of circularity, of concentricity, or the theory of
the centre—134 explain the mythical sources of the formula; the intention commonly
associated with the form is the fashioning of an image—reflection of the universe.
As for the Romanian space, most of the fortified enclosures previous to the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries can be classified as circular, although they are almost
never perfectly regular—but circular, ellipsoidal, or combined with irregular polyg-
onal layouts. There are few exceptions, yet these too partially adapting the model
to the terrain’s morphology. When observing the schemas of the fortified churches,
the rural citadels and even the Saxon villages—outcome of the implantation of the
Saxon colonists—multiple ordering encodings emerge. The Saxon village, whose
identity is defined through its regular implantation, based on a unitary and compact
conception, a sort of “primordial plan imposed on nature”,135 is characterized by
isolationism and the need for protection. This typical colonist profile builds its oth-
erness through the relationship with its context, dominated by the Romanian village
type, as Fabini notes. This alterity is none other than the ordering intent characteris-
tic to the colonial space, and to the formulas by which it is appropriated. Thus, the
newcomer demarcates his new universe, and sets his coordinates—on the one hand,
nostalgically reproducing the known homeland (a safe space) and his old existence
and, on the other hand, displaying almost ostentatiously his colonist condition (and
the awareness of its dangers). The alterity is assumed, yet it is both unintentional
(its own lifestyle, techniques, built expression which are alien to the new territory)
and deliberate (conscious self-isolation as a safety measure). Thus understood as an
implanted organism, the Saxon fortified church and the fortified citadel136 appear
134 The latter in particular is discussed by Eliade in relation to the architecture and act of the
construction/building: “any new human settlement is, in a sense, a re-construction of the world. In
order to be durable, in order to be real, the new dwelling or the new city must be designed, supported
by the construction ritual, in the [very] Centre of the Universe. According to numerous traditions,
the creation of the world began in a centre and, for this reason, the construction of the city must also
take place in the circumference of a centre”, Eliade, Mircea, Tratat de istorie a religiilor, Mircea
Eliade, Humanitas, 2006, 342.
135 Blaga, L., Trilogia Culturii, Minerva Publishing House, Bucharest, 1985, 263, apud. Fabini, H.,
Universul…, 82.
136 The Saxon fortified citadel (or Cetatea bisericească/church fortress) is usually defined through
the presence of both a fortified church and a fortified enclosure, the latter serving the purpose
as two illustrations of the same ordering intent. These are featured as the focus points
of the settlements, “both in terms of layout and as a perspective point”.137 The for-
tified church thus occupied a dominant and central position in terms of both the
layout and the settlement’s profile. The fortification enclosure is ideally circular, but
most often it follows the terrain conformation and other particular limitations; the
conventional location of the wooden churches in the Romanian Transylvanian vil-
lage—in a higher setting, on adjoining hills—appears rarely in the case of the Saxon
villages and fortified churches.138 The same set of ordering principles shapes the
Saxon settlement, the fortified citadel and the church. This spatial fractal-like hierar-
chy, previously observed in Antiquity’s thinkers and Alberti,139 is evident in the case
of the rural citadel: inside the fortified enclosure, the ordering of the ascribed settle-
ment is replicated or mirrored at a smaller scale, each household occupying a specific
unit/scell, which becomes their dwelling during a siege. If observing the space of
the church, either part of a rural citadel or a ‘free-standing’ fortified church—the
same mirrored-ordering can be observed: firstly, there are the hierarchies typical for
Christian sacred spaces (the segregations based on gender, civil status, laic/sacred
character and those defined by the sacred ritual’s phases); a second layer of ordering
is given through the administrative-social hierarchies of the community (according
to wealth, prestige, title, function). This second layer manifests in a particular form in
the case of the Saxon churches, as an area designed for the community’s elite—two
sets of wooden stalls adjacent to the choir, with canopies and a rich and delicate orna-
mentation (carved, with inlays and polychrome painting), in a position of maximum
of shelter the villagers and some of their goods for a given period of time. The rural fortified
citadel (cetate ţărănească/rural citadel) is defined by its simple or complex enceinte, doubled by
an interior set of housing/storage rooms, at times lacking a centrally located fortified church. The
classification is additionally complicated by the third group—the refuge enceintes, or citadels with
more rudimentary fortifications and no church (Fabini, op. cit., 253). The distinction between the
first two is usually considered to be their location—within the fabric of the settlement, respectively,
outside or adjoining it; also, a commonly used means of distinction between the rural fortified
citadel and the refuge enceinte is their patronage, as the latter is financed, built and used by multiple
settlements. However, the rural fortified citadels (cetati taranesti) are not all of Saxon origin, some
belonging to the existing local Romanian communities.
137 Fabini identifies and exemplifies four typologies of spaces: (a) the village traversed by a main
street, at the end of which the church is positioned (Feldioara, Cisnădie), (b) the village traversed by
a main street in the centre of which there is a pocket-like space or square where the church is located
(S, ura Mare, S, ura Mică, Saschiz, Daia, Valchid, Băgaciu), c) the church located on the main street
(corner plot) where this is traversed by a secondary street (Axente Sever, Valea Viilor, Mos, na, S, aros,
pe Târnave, Seleus, , Codlea, also Vulcan), and its variant, d) the church located in the centre, in a
lenticular island delineated by two streets (Nocrich, Boian, Brădeni, Drăus, eni, Homorod, Stejăris, u);
Fabini, H., Universul…, 81…84.
138 Considering that 62% of the Saxon churches are located on flat land, 16% in an elevated location,
6% on a promontory alongside the built-up tissue of the village, and 16% on a slope. Data according
to the Fabini’s brief on Saxon churches in Transylvania. Fabini, Universul…, 84.
139 This ordering principle defined the perfect unity, a perfect balance between the constituent parts
or, in other words, the interrelation between the macro-layers (individuals, buildings, society, nature
and universe) and between the micro-layers, in a complete and harmonious synchronization of all
constituent parts along any direction considered.
proximity to the foci of the sacred ritual (the altar, the pulpit, the tabernacle). The
ordering principle simultaneously operates at the macro-scale of the settlement, at
the mezzo-scale of the enclosure and at the micro-scale or the interior of the church.
Beyond the utopian encoding which remains a diffuse one, present at most as
formal remnants, the rural citadel, a functionally ordered mechanism, fits into Fou-
cault’s definition of heterotopic spaces. The space is clearly delineated (visually,
physically and mentally): the function of the enclosure becomes active in a crisis
situation, yet it also projects the image of a safety guarantee (massive scale, severity,
isolation and inexpugnability), whose presence is part of the daily life of the com-
munity. The access is mediated and controlled; the enclosures “presuppose a system
of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable”.140 Their
double operation is dependent on the situation: when under siege—it becomes a cri-
sis space (cumulating multiple functions), during peaceful times—it is an everyday
space (used as storage); the sacred function, represented by the fortified church of
the citadel, is a constant, although particularly emphasized in times of crisis. It is the
context or the situation the one that also dictates the temporal rupture of this space:
the activation of the enclosure’s protection role is marked as a rupture in the everyday
temporal flow of the community (imagined either as linear or as cyclic); most often,
the built form documents the event(s): the destruction and degradation, the subse-
quent transformations (additional fortification of the vulnerable points)—illustrating
its social ordering and its evolution. The fortified citadel mirrors the settlement on
a smaller scale. As a colonial space (the Saxon settlement) its existence is deter-
mined in all of its aspects141 ; within the settlement’s fortified citadel its normings
and encodings are echoed and emphasized: Fabini describes the strict regulations
in case of siege,142 targeting the provision supply or the behaviour of both combat-
ants and non-combatants,143 and where disobedience was paradoxically punished by
incarceration in the same enclosure. Lastly, the colony as a spatial ordering reflects
the utopian intent, aimed at creating a perfect universe from the (tabula rasa) ground
up; even without a ‘doctrinal text’ and with an extremely diluted and hybridized form
of the ideal city schema, the fortified citadel can be considered the materialization
of utopian principles.
140 Foucault, Of Other…, op.cit., 21.

141 Foucault, Of Other,…, op.cit., 22.
142 Fabini likens these regulations to those which governed the fortified cities, such as Brasov, and
quotes one of these regulation acts, from 1491; thus the rules “had to be established and followed
in a strict manner, so that the power of the enemy is countered vigorously and courageously,
openheartedly and with hope, in the name of God, who is [himself] a durable fortress”, emphasis
added, Fabini, H., Universul…, 53.
143 The “defence spaces and walls must be guarded by strong, well-equipped men with good rifles
(…) all of the other guards in the watch must have ready a large axe”; the non-combatant population
is “forbidden to shout, cry, walk the streets consoling one another, all of them must remain at home,
praying to God and asking for His help. They must have ready water containers [,] in homes and
stables, as well as heat blankets in the case of fires”, Verteidigungsanstalten, 1491, apud. Fabini,
Universul…, 53. [The original German text appears here in a translation after Fabini’s Romanian
translation].
However, when considering the built form, an emphasizing of the utopian encod-
ing can be observed. The built form is the common denominator of both the com-
batant and the non-combatant condition of the fortified citadel, two aspects that are
not mutually exclusive, but rather they overlap. If the colonial filiation introduces
a strict norming and a utopian encoding, the survival imperative accentuates it: the
schema of the ideal city is gradually and organically imprinted in the fabric of the
fortified citadel, rather than by means of a pre-existing utopian intention, idealiz-
ing and all-encompassing, as is the case with the Renaissance utopian projections.
These local instances of fortified enclosures (rural fortress, the fortified citadel and
fortified church) can be considered as a primary, organically constituted variant of
the ideal city. This organic character should be understood in this case as a natural
and unmediated response to the immediate constraints of the context, when consid-
ered against the intellectual non-organic nature of Filarete‘s Sforzinda demarche;
if the rural citadel is mainly moulded by necessity, Filarete‘s project is fuelled by
the idealizing intention. The ordering that governs the rural citadel is none other
than the reflection of the one governing the settlement and the community, the ideal
functioning being equated to the community’s survival of the crisis and in a hostile
environment. The Saxon settlements are initially imported as a ‘subordinate order-
ing’ designed to contribute to the affirmation of an official dominant ordering (the
occupying Hungarian rule, which supports it through privileges); it later develops
into an autonomous body, in opposition to its ‘mecenas’. This suggests that the evolu-
tion of these interconnected ‘colonist enclaves’ were acting as organic ‘laboratories’
for new tentative and alternative orderings. Once settled, these albeit diverse com-
munities import their homeland-inherited ordering and adapt and juxtapose it with
the local dominant ordering, creating a hybrid-form which retains a strong German
profile; A contextual reading enforces the heterotopic nature of the Saxon enclave,
as it is defined by a constant intermediate position. On the one hand, the Saxons
are an officially recognized nation (via the 1437 Uniotrium nationum act, alongside
the Magyars and the Szeklers, and unlike the larger Romanian community); yet,
they remain subordinated and later (by 1848, when the power balance shifts) they
are denied their appeal for “autonomy and liberties […] by the Hungarian govern-
ment”.144 The socio-political and economical context, the practices and the event (the
colonial implantation) act as catalysts for the heterotopic profile. Set side by side,
Sforzinda reaffirms the societal structure of its time, its proposed ordering refash-
ioning an idealized and purified version of it. Imagined ab initio as such, Sforzinda
projects the ideal city model in an abstract time, subsequently turned template for the
Renaissance architects. Perfected through its social and built ordering, the schema’s
ideal functioning appears as a purpose in itself, in an indefinite cyclical reprise.
The ideal citadel is mediated by the conceptual projection, and only later mate-
rialized—as the case of Sforzinda, imperfectly and incompletely realized as Pal-
manova. The rural fortified citadel is generated by necessity, and thus it is first
144 Pavel,Teodor, (contributor, Babes-Bolyai University) Transylvanian Saxons, published online

for the Encyclopedia of 1848 Revolutions, https://www.ohio.edu/chastain/rz/transax.htm, accessed
June 2014.
and foremost ‘materialization’, in which the features of the ideal city can subse-
quently be identified or designed, suggesting a more organic process of conveying
inherited signifier/signify binomial pairings, which are sometimes read as a ‘com-
mon symbolic archetypal language’. Nevertheless, both formulas share the inten-
tion of control—through hierarchy and all-encompassing normative systems—ex-
pressed in a material form. The correspondence of these spatial orderings—centrality,
the interior/exterior separation and their delimitations, the legibility of hierarchies,
etc.—suggest the potential of a heterotopic reading; set side by side, the resemblance
to the panoptic system or the subsequent phalanstery mechanism is evident.
The model of the Renaissance ideal city will be imprinted in the fabric of the
fortified citadels starting with the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when the regular
layout replaces or alters the previous organic fortification layouts,145 where the terrain
allows it. Interventions are operated through demolition, adaptation, incorporation
or addition, emphasizing the symmetry and regularity of the layouts and gradually
paralleling the European trends. When not replaced, previous fortifications receive
additional enclosures. The layouts become regular, rectangular and symmetrical,
with equidistant, detached corner towers—characteristics dictated by the military
technique’s evolution. The symbolic, the representative and the pragmatic character
are merged.
Two representative examples of the regulated stellate layout citadels are the Ineu
Fortress (Arad, sixteenth to seventeenth centuries)—with a quadrilateral layout
and symmetrical circular corner towers—respectively, the pre-Baroque fortification
(fifteenth to sixteenth centuries) of the Oradea Citadel. The latter is designed fol-
lowing a heptagonal layout, with circular corners bastions and a perimeter defensive
moat—an Italian Renaissance-inspired formula, substituting the previous mediaeval
fortifications (an irregular oval enclosure wall, courtine, palisades and rampart).146
The fortification undergoes successive reconstructions, which mirror the evolution
of the ideal model, up to the stellate Vauban inspired layout (seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries), presently preserved to a great extent.147 The case of Oradea Citadel
illustrates the successive phases of the adaptation process to the epoch’s ideals, rever-
berations of the European utopian constructs or rather reverberations of their mate-
rialized instances. Although it is not an immediate, emulated materialization of a
utopian ordination (like the imagined Sforzinda and its real equivalent, Palmanova)
the citadel preserves the spatial encodings of the utopian model and thus allows a
heterotopic reading.
145 Anghel, Gheorghe, Cetăt, i medievale din Transilvania [Medieval Fortifications of Transylva-
nia], Meridiane, Bucharest, 1972 and Fabini, H., Universul cetăt, ilor biserices, ti din Transilvania,
MONUMENTA, Sibiu, 2009.
146 Rusu, A. A., Cetatea Oradea până în secolul al XVI-lea [The Oradea Citadel until the sixteenth
century], www.medievistica.ro, accessed in June 2014; Rusu also mentions the reorganization pro-
cess of the fortifications: “the rebuilding of the enclosures [13th century] was done considering the
episcopal cathedral as the central element”, which becomes the focal point.
147 The fortification is built between 1692 and 1695 according to the plans of Baron Ernst von Borgs-
dorf; the inner buildings belong to a subsequent phase, built between 1754–1755 and 1775–1777.
A related formula that resumes in a more condensed fashion and further distils
the stellate layout can be found in the corner-tower fortified manor ensembles. All of
the examples addressed here—the fortified church and citadel, the fortified manors,
as well as the fortified city, the more developed relative of the rural citadel) reveal
a common profile: the control, the structure’s functioning according to own “inter-
nal” orderings, the rigour of the ordering’s connection with the built expression, the
adaptability and the ability to alternate between functions, the centrality, the precise
interior/exterior delimitation yet without the complete cancellation of its permeabil-
ity, the mediation of its access, etc.—all attributes of a heterotopic makeup. Yet, each
of these is defined by the emphasizing of one specific attribute: focused on the com-
munity, the church and the fortified citadel assume the mirror role and the mediator
role with the outside world; the implanted colony is aware of its inevitable alter-
ity, accentuated in everyday life and overturned in crisis situations—a consciousness
which is expressed in a material form. Through the connotations of colonial space, the
formula best resembles the applied utopia, in its attempt to recreate a perfect universe
(or the idealized, known homeland). The fortified manor reiterates the outside-world-
mediation mechanism, but its alterity is assumed and deliberately displayed, mainly
expressed through the emphasizing of the built form’s representational character.
In the case of the urban fortifications as well, the mediation function is preserved,
although two instances can be further explored: the fortifications built around an
existing urban core, replacing or improving an earlier fortification, respectively, the
new fortifications designed together with their inner urban fabric scheme and unitary
in conception. In the case of the de novo settlement, the ordering intent also becomes
its cardinal ordering principle, allowing an easier reading even after successive trans-
formations. However, such cases are relatively rare,148 compared to the first more
common case, where the fortification strengthens an existing city and/or replaces a
technologically obsolete fortification. The latter is usually adapted to the pre-existing
conditions although it can also impose a new ordering, resulting in the restructuring
of the existing built fabric and partial or massive demolitions.
A subcategory worth exploring in more depth is the fortification adjacent to the
city,149 and to the city’s enceinte where the ordering intention minimally intervenes to
the already sedimented tissue. These adjacently attached citadels have a protection,
control and surveillance role. The insertion is deliberately isolated, with a single-
point connection to the city, and located in a dominant position. Later, when these
fortifications gradually lose their function due to the city’s development (through
urban growth or suburbanization, the relocation of dilution of the military function),
their formal expression (and even existence) is threatened; in a best case scenario,
some become recreational spaces, exploiting the vantage point and city panorama.
The earthworks and secondary elements (glacis, ravelins) of these fortifications are
the first to disappear, followed by the ‘opening up’ or interruption of the characteristic
stellate contour, invoking an improved accessibility—the first phase of the enceinte’s
dilution. The built fabric inside the enclosure is often maintained and reused, occa-
148 The citadels of Palmanova, Italy, Neuf-Brisach, France, or Terezín, Czech Republic.
149 A notorious example for this situation are the Arras and Besançon fortifications, France.
sionally losing annex buildings. This process reflects the importance of preserving
the initial layout. With the expansion of the city, the citadel’s isolation can be can-
celled, and it loses its enclave character and its alterity; the isolated buildings that
are preserved, for the most part protected as heritage, take on the role of the enclave
(become themselves isolated enclaves) preserving their alterity within their increas-
ingly contemporary built context, yet removed from their intended schema. Thus,
once the schema is diluted, the heterotopic character of the citadel diminishes as well
although the interior built fabric might be retained and repurposed. The interventions
that alter the initial ordering layout also affect the heterotopic potential. An optimal
re-functionalization should allow the reading of the initial schema; as the stellate
fortifications reveal, their utopian descent and the attached encoding is dependent
on preserving the original spatial and formal coherence. This process also illustrates
the relevance of the enclave character for the heterotopic spaces; I argue that the
enceinte, the delineation and the barrier are essential coordinates which not only
make up the heterotopic profile but also later contribute to the space’s heterotopic
functioning.
A Belgian example is the Fort Bourtange—a sixteenth century (1539) pentag-
onal bastion-fortress, designed by the engineer Adriaan Anthoniszoon. Its stellate
schema is introduced and applied in its strictly functional role (protection-military,
control); eventually, the ensemble loses this utilitarian function gradually followed
by its built form. Until the twentieth century, its outline is dissolved, part of its earth-
works and some of the interior buildings. Threatened by complete loss, the Belgian
citadel undergoes extensive reconstructions, which include the adjacent complex of
earthworks, ditches, glacis, etc. The conserved street layout helped determine pre-
cisely the position of the fortifications. Yet, via this intervention, it receives another
utopian encoding: it is rebuilt in its most developed (ideal) configuration. The histor-
ical fortification’s extensive reconstruction process (1970–2001) also aimed for its
complex functional reintegration, not only as a tourist attraction but also as a normal,
self-reliant town,150 and therefore introducing one of the most malleable function-
s—residential—conjointly yet subordinated to other touristic facilities (museum,
temporary accommodation, shops, spas).
Although the conservation theory generally deems reconstruction as unacceptable
and even condemns it, it is a method used fairly often. In most cases, as in the previous
Belgian case, the intervention is exclusively economically motivated (development
by increasing tourist attractiveness: longer stays, creation of new jobs, new income
sources, etc.); however, in many instances such an integral reconstruction is no longer
possible, hindered by the overlapping of built layers (the enceinte is disconnected
by constructions which in turn have accumulated significance for the community
and/or heritage value). The reconstruction of the original historical layout becomes
impossible—even if supported by the argument of conservation, based on the pre-
served original substance (authentic buildings, enclosures or earthworks) or crucial
for economic growth/survival. The preferred solution in such cases is the partial
reconstruction; however, from the previously advocated point of view, this can only
150 The official website of the citadel, www.bourtange.nl, accessed in June 2014.
be an insufficient manoeuvre, unless the reconstruction of the enceinte (or at least

its symbolic representation) is possible. In the absence of the enclosure, the initial
encoding remains unavailable and the heterotopic potential dormant—illustrating its
dependence on the built form.
The typologies discussed so far are more or less processed expressions of the
utopian ideal city; even if they lose the initial utopian prescriptions, they reiterate and
adapt its schema on a formal level. Utopia can be identified here in a secondary phase
or as a processed, ‘second-degree’ utopia, no longer just imagined and sought after,
but actually, something that can be built. The imagined becomes achievable in the
colonial space—endowed with both the attribute of the ideal, the terrestrial paradise
and the attribute of a tabula rasa par excellence. One of heterotopia’s examples quoted
by Foucault is the Jesuit colony; Manuel explores and describes the Jesuit experiment
in Paraguay, which although controversial at the time (eighteenth century), was to
be considered in the socialist literature of the following century as a good exam-
ple of community, or a successfully materialized utopia,151 despite the reality and
(probably because of) its profoundly panoptic nature.152 The examples approached
here inherit a series of common attributes, heterotopic in nature: the delimitation
and (when necessary) the isolation from the context, the mediation and control of
the access, the inner hierarchy and structure—simultaneously reflecting the ideal
and the known ‘outside’ ordering—the ability to operate as an isolated, autonomous
body, and according to an internal strict norming. The built form, or the material
expression of its inner ordering, therefore comprises the control intent, more or
less perceptible but always present. In general, this intent serves the good/efficient
functioning of its community (much like the utopian schemes), allowing however,
in its background, the existence of a negative and punitive potential. In order for
it to manifest an input is required, such as the re-functionalization (the example of
Terezin), and the negative/dystopian ordering attaches onto the existing segregated
and hierarchical spatial ordering; as these cases prove, the built form is usually readily
available, either suffering minimal to no alterations either sustaining a reinforcement
of its characteristics. The aforementioned categories reveal an interesting range of
both historical and contemporary repurposing interventions; fortified manorial resi-
151 Frank E. Manuel, Fritzie P., Utopian Thought in the Western World, Belknap Press; New edition
(September 15, 1982) 426–7.

152 On the one hand, the experiment can be considered a reprehensible exploitation example—as the
Paraguayan Indians were “living in bondage to Jesuit overlords who luxuriated at their expense and
filled the coffers of the order with the surplus from their labor” and on the other hand a praiseworthy
example of “abolishing barbarism and establishing a regime of law, order, communal living, and
happiness.” The reality, as captured in Bougainville’s travel accounts, and as mentioned by Foucault
(Of Other Spaces…), is nonetheless a very different one: “The Indians had been so tyrannized and
terrified by the Jesuit Fathers that for minor infractions of the rules adults allowed themselves to be
whipped like schoolboys. The hours of work and rest were so meticulously regulated by the clock
that their whole existence was rendered monotonous. They were so overwhelmed with tedium that
they died without regret, never having lived.” The Paraguayan Indians’ community was entirely
controlled in all aspects its life, under the ordering and the constant supervision of the Jesuits.
Manuel, Frank E., Manuel, Fritzie P., Utopian Thought in the Western World, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, New edition (September 15, 1982), 426–9.
dences and citadels tend to become detention spaces, prisons, asylums or hospices.153
Considering this Foucaultian record of functions, one can easily observe that their
“spaces-of-power” profile tends to be perpetuated; yet, the very capacity to alternate
between the positive and the negative encoding of the ordering is confirming its het-
erotopic character.154 Another relevant example is the well-known and controversial
Danish town of Fristaden Christiania (Freetown Christiania, Copenhagen), a recolo-
nized star-shaped fortress converted to autonomous anarchist commune, and finally
‘defused’ and turned into a heritage site and a tourist brand.
In the case of the ideal citadel, the control is implicit, exercised through functional
norming and through the built form, enforced onto the user community, invariably
by an ordering dominant entity (god, priest, elite, church, monarch, etc.) and with a
clear (and clearly stated) finality—either happiness, spiritual fulfilment, freedom or
efficiency, etc.—although indefinitely positioned in time. If the utopic ideal citadel
builds its discourse partly based on its real context and partly on idealized abstract
principles, the previously addressed examples are materialized formulas, and no
longer have the freedom to “look from the outside”, in an idealized and abstract
manner, compelled to adapt their initial ordering scheme to the reality in which they
are implanted. If utopia provides an architectural expression freely constructed from
word and schema, heterotopia, the former’s materialization, will operate automati-
153 Such a repurposing process was a common occurrence in the Romanian space during the com-
munist regime; the motivations are multiple: the large existing reserve of built stock, made readily
available through the process of nationalization and the dissolution of the big landowners class;
the ideologic connotations (taking from the rich/noble class and given to the people). However,
an indisputable motive is the utilitarian consideration: these former noble residences were almost
always secluded and enclosed in large green estates, and/or clearly delineated within their context.
This was the case for numerous such estates: in Alba: Thorotzkay-Rudnyánszky Manor (Colţeşti),
initially a rest house, then sanatorium for disabled children; Arad—Konopi Castle (Odvoş), Teleki
Castle (Căpâlnas, , Birchis, ), to this day a psychiatric hospital; Cernovici Castle (Macea) repurposed
as orphanage, visually impaired sanatory, and juvenile re-education centre; Bulci-Mocioni Castle
(Bata), neuropsychiatric hospital, then TB sanatorium; Bras, ov: Făgăraş Citadel, former prison;
Cluj: Corneni-Schilling Manor, former boardingschool, Banffy Castle (Răscruci), former special
needs boardingschool; the Gilău castle, boardingschool for disabled children, Gherla Citadel, prison
since the eighteenth century; in Hunedoara: Nopcsa Manor (Zam), psychiatric hospital; the Nălat,
castle (Nălat, ), asylum for mentally disabled children; Miercurea Ciuc: Miko Castle, exclusively
repurposed as military space: barracks, boys’ boardingschool, again barracks; Sibiu: Apafi Castle
(Dumbrăveni), former prison; in Timis, —Banloc Castle, former retirement home and orphanage;
Mures, : Teleki Castle (Glodeni), disabled people asylum, Teleki Castle (Gornes, ti), former orphan-
age; Brâncovenes, ti-Kendi-Kemeny Castle (Brâncovenes, ti), juvenile correctional facility, then dis-
abled children’s asylum, and currently repurposed as a neuropsychological recovery and rehabil-
itation centre; Banffy Castle (Gheja), psychiatric ward. These are some of the more prominent
examples from the Romanian space. Another utilitarian repurposing of these former residencies
was their reassignment as Agricultural Production Cooperatives (CAPs) centres; the motives were
similar: their location and size, their spatial structuring and their relative isolation by means of
enclosures and their large unbuilt adjacent estates.
154 The second principle of heterotopia proposed by Foucault: “a society can make a heterotopia
that exists, and has never ceased to exist, function in a very different way; for each heterotopia
has a precise and determined function within a society and the same heterotopia can […] have one
function or another.” Foucault, M., Of Other Spaces, in Dehaene M. and De Cauter L., Heterotopia
and the city…, 18.
cally with concrete elements—territory, materials, individuals/communities, negoti-

ating multiple hierarchies of power (compared to the unique hierarchy proposed by
utopia); paradoxically, the ‘crystallized’ heterotopia implies adaptation and becom-
ing, where the imagined utopia proposed the invariable and the eternal perpetuation.
If the line and the word can freely construct any kind of architectural expression or
space, and suggest malleability and adaptability, the written utopias remain fixed,
immobile, and unadaptable; Campanella’s solar city remains a model, a prescription
maybe, but always a reflection of its historical context. Yet, the concrete heterotopia,
conditioned by the built form in which it expresses itself, proves to be in time the
malleable one, allowing multiple uses and repurposings, interchangeable or overlap-
ping, with both positive or negative encodings. The heterotopic potential tends to be
preserved as long as the built form is preserved, as the latter encompasses the former;
even if the heterotopic potential disappears when the built form is diluted or loses
its integrity, it can also transition to a passive state (and thus preserved), when the
space is no longer practiced.
A textbook Romanian example that reiterates the ideal city layout, in its circular-
radial formula, is the Charlottenburg settlement (Timis, County). Established in
1771 by the governor of Timişoara, Count Karl Ignaz Clary Aldringen,155 the set-
tlement is a de novo or planned colonial space by excellence. The circular centre is
occupied by a square (in the initial plans occupied by a fountain and a tree plantation),
bordered by a circulation ring and encased in the third ring, divided in equal radial
plots. A symmetrical, cross-shaped network of four streets further divides the space.
The 1775 representation of the settlement still featured this proportional street grid,
although the layout undergoes changes (expansion, additional facilities). The initial
plot occupation and construction ratios156 are also symmetrical and ‘equalitarian’
in intent: the houses are arranged along the longitudinal axis of the plots, with the
short façade towards the square, forming an ‘opaque’, continuous or enclosure-like
built ring around it. In the 1784 representation, this formula is redrawn yet again: the
positioning of the volumes is altered (as they are adjoined to the plots’ side-limit),
although the overall plotting continues to be symmetrical and regular. Considering
the mixed structure of the colonist group,157 (visible however only ‘from the inside’)
the symmetry, the equal dimensioning of the plots and the equidistance of the built
volumes explain the intent behind this egalitarian organizational demarche: each
colonist, regardless of his provenance, has equal chances within the group. Although
initially imagined as a ‘closed off’, autonomous organism (the plots including a pro-
duction parcel), this enclave is not entirely self-sufficient—and the lands allowing
a large-scale production (vineyards and pastures) are located outside the village;
these are delimited and systematically ordered although adapted the terrain’s mor-
155 http://www.sarlota.de/index_e.htm, Accessed in June 2014.

156 The oldest identified representation: Franz Häscher: Plan von dem Dorff Scharlodenburg, 1775,
Map Collection—Königliche kameralische Mappierungs Direction—maps S1, No 102/1, consulted
on http://www.sarlota.de/index_e.htm, June 2014.
157 Typical for most colonist settlements, this group is also highly diverse: 67 colonists from the
eastern region of Trier, 12 from Lothringen, 10 from Baden-Württemberg, 8 from Hungary, 7 from
Rheinland and Rheinpfalz, 6 from Austria, 3 from Bavaria and other regions. Idem.
phology, and independently from the settlement’s circular layout. From a functional
point of view, all the essential facilities are appointed—the church, the parochial
house and the cemetery, the tavern, the butchery, the mill and granary—uniformly
represented (undifferentiated from the residential fabric) in the 1784 layout.158 This
formula, with its identical and equidistant units, remains, at least in its representa-
tion, perfectly radial, equal and ‘equalitarian’. Only in the 1821 layout,159 required
by corrections of productive plotting inconsistencies, the ensemble is more thor-
oughly represented, already showcasing alterations of the initial symmetrical form:
the plots are subdivided into two concentric rings—a smaller, inner one occupied by
the volumes in a radial distribution, and the outer one, assigned to small-scale produc-
tion and annexes. The settlement’s development—and departing from the original
schema—can be structured in two phases. An initial, almost uniform enlargement of
the circular contour, is plausible—a hypothesis supported by the presence of some
‘residual’ shorter plots, consistent of the initial contour. In a second phase, some
single plots expand radially, on various directions, creating the semi-asymmetrical
spike-shaped layout preserved to this day; another alteration can be identified as a
consequence of the expansion as a new typology of plot occupation emerges along
one of the main streets. The same layout presents an altered street grid which, by
losing its cross-shaped structure, distorts the circularity and symmetry of the initial
layout.160 In the 1821 layout, the central square receives four new buildings, and by
1876, a church is built in the square’s centre. While the ensemble’s layout is altered
in time, it retains a predominantly circular character. The initial plan and the ordering
intent are also largely preserved, despite the fact that the nineteenth century addition
of the church in its very centre hijacks the original meaning of the circular layout (the
equality suggested by the ‘empty’ centre). The deviations from the original schema
can be interpreted as phases of a process of significance accumulation: once the
community appropriates the place and adapts to it, the ‘ideal’ layout is transformed
according to everyday practices and necessities—redrawing the circulations to opti-
mize its flows, expanding or redrawing the plotting layout, densifying specific zones,
etc. The features of the original schema are largely preserved, thus maintaining its
legibility and its initial encoding.
The enclosure, in this case a planimetric two-dimensional delimitation and spatial
ordering rather than a solid, barrier-like structure, is present mainly in as a mental
158 Franz Häscher-Koller, engineer, author, Map of Charlottenburg, 1784, National Archives of
Hungary: Map Collection—Direction Königliche kameralische Mappierungs, Map S1, No. 102,
consulted on http://www.sarlota.de/index_e.htm, June 2014.
159 Kasmir Johann Haag (Johann Casimir Hague), Anton Fr. v. Baselli, engineer, author, Map of
Charlottenburg, 1821, National Archives of Hungary: Map Collection—Direction Königliche kam-

eralische Mappierungs, Harta S1, No. 102/3, consulted on http://www.sarlota.de/index_e.htm, June
2014.
160 Tangentially to the outline of the ensemble, a large-scale planted production terrain (the Şarlota
Forest) was initially designed, its road grid continuing the layout of the settlement—illustrating the
coherent and unitary intent of the colonial demarche; although this structuring is one of the first to
disappear, thus suggesting an alternative pattern of use than initially designed, the function of these
lands will be preserved.
delineation and less as a directly perceived object, and maps and aerial perspec-
tives illustrate this settlement’s concentricity better than an in situ examination. The
circularity of the layout focuses the entire community towards its self and its cen-
tre, automatically isolating it from the ‘exterior’, towards which it offers the rather
‘transparent’ railings of the parcels’ enclosures and a perimeter buffer space, a green-
agricultural yet unfurnished area. In this case, there is no enclosure per se, as a unitary,
commonly shared free-standing element (such as the churches or citadels’ fortifica-
tions)—rather the spatial ordering takes over this role. This is inevitably diluted
once the singular ordering intent (suggested by the layout) disappears and becomes
divided between the community’s individuals.
The mediation and the access control are more evident in the initial layout. With
four main access points and the two crosswise circulation arteries connecting in the
geometric centre of the settlement, all of the external flows are directly introduced in
the very centre of the square: the newcomer as well as the inhabitants is exposed to
the gaze of the community. The epicentre of the settlement is initially occupied by a
well, an essentially public and social feature and resting point by excellence (tem-
poral disruption), focusing and thus controlling the inward flow. Although the flow
is under the constant surveillance and control of the community, the space remains
apparently accessible; yet, the spatial-geometric unity of the built front which is
offered towards the square suggests isolation, and essentially expresses the relation-
ship us (community—interior) versus other/s (intruder—exterior). This relation is
characteristic of colonial structures. Thus, he who penetrates the settlement’s inner
ring is under surveillance, observed yet without being able to observe in his turn. The
viewpoint is now shifted, and the ‘intruder’ becomes other. The same surveillance
mechanism applies to the community itself: each member is under the supervision
of the others, at all times. This feature, borne in the very layout of the ensemble,
resembles a panoptic mechanism; although this self-regulating system is not a new
construct, but rather a common feature of many rural communities (strigarea peste
sat, ciufulirea161 , etc.), in this particular case it becomes its very material expression,
seamlessly integrated within its built form and structure.
In addition to the delimitation and the control mechanism, the built form and the
colonial character allow the discussion of another heterotopic principle: the capacity
to juxtapose in a single real space several other spaces. If considering the nature of
the colonial space, this capacity is intrinsically active. However, this characteristic
becomes even more clear once the ensemble is listed as heritage—in itself a new
ordering, with its own functioning and norming, juxtaposed and overlaid onto the
everyday ordering of the village. The relationship between interior and exterior is
redrawn, without erasing the existing ‘traditional’ one; the panoptic mechanism is
also reactivated, even if only temporarily. Although the access to the ‘tourist-intruder’
161 Strigarea peste sat, ad litteram translated as calling over the village, is a Romanian regional
traditional practice used as a ‘softer’ control mechanism: an individual is charged with ‘broad-
casting’—by means of calling/shouting specifically designed rhymes—the local events, news or
misdeeds of the community’s members. Much like the Charlottenburg’s built structure, this is also a
self-regulating mechanism which ensures that all the community’s members are aware of the actions
of their next-door neighbour, placing each one of them under the constant gaze of the community.
is legitimate, it continues to be mediated and controlled and subjected to the commu-

nity’s gaze. The alterity of the panoptic layout-mechanism, even if altered in time, is
emphasized by the presence of heritage ordering: the tourist, lured by the title of the
ensemble (the only circular village in Transylvania), enters the grounds having the
consciousness of its complete alterity—that of the village as well as his own, differ-
ent and dislocated from that way of life. If the heterotopic principle of the temporal
discontinuity is relatively diluted,162 it becomes reactivated through the introduction
of the protectionist ordering which, in the effort to preserve the built form and the
specific landscape, embarks on a journey to stop the transformation of the ensem-
ble. It attempts to stop the passage and the accumulation of time, sometimes even
revoking the original functioning and temporal rhythms.
The utopian encoding of the original project is barely masked; the ensemble sums
up the essential life functions of the colonial community in a self-sufficient and self-
regulating system. The unitary character and the symmetry create an overwhelming
equality among community’s members, equal amongst themselves and subordinated
only to the community—as the unoccupied centre would suggest. The heterotopic
character is demonstrated by the structure’s evolution, which reveals a drive to dis-
rupt the ‘imagined’ perfect equilibrium of the circular layout: the ‘opening’ of the
enclosure towards the adjacent watercourse, the distortion of the plotting, the den-
sification of the centre and its final occupation—the building of the church in the
now paradoxically asymmetrical centre. The materialization of the utopian projec-
tion proves to be imperfect, flawed. From all the heterotopic features identified so far,
the ‘utopian attribute’ appears to be the most conspicuous: the Charlottenburg village
can be read as an applied/materialized utopia (even without a programmatic text),
whose initial coordinates, imprinted in the perfectly symmetrical and equalitarian
layout, are gradually remodelled and adjusted to the reality in which it is implanted.
However, in the case of these examples (the citadel, the fortified church, the circu-
lar village, etc.) the utopian intent of moulding (its) society through the built object
is not programmatically assumed. The interdependence between built object and
utopian intent remains, however, imprinted in the material form. Thus, if a material-
ized utopian construct (with a normed, prescripted functioning and a particular built
form) can be identified as heterotopia, what are the circumstances and the status of
its reverberations, or the ‘second-degree’ utopias? The variants that succeeded the
initial materialization, which reiterate the model and inevitably dissolve or blur the
initial coordinates, most often retaining the formal at the expense of the functional-
formal binomial pairing—could they also be heterotopias? Can these secondary and
tertiary products, or derivatives of utopia, be in their turn heterotopias? Does the
162 The temporal dislocation could be supported by the obsolete character of these rural communities
in relation to the urban; however, it can be more easily observed in its colonial character: this enclave
assembles, along with its new emplacement, its very own time or temporal enclave, both implanted in
the colonized territory. The concept of colony itself allows the interpretation as a temporal fragment,
defined by discontinuity and disconnection from everyday life, from “home”. This feature can be
either accentuated by the passage of time (when the traditions and techniques brought by the first
generations are preserved) or diluted into disappearance. When retaining its colonial character, the
whole ensemble appears as a fragment of time, enhanced through heritage protection.
hybridization, the dilution of the functioning system (of the social, economic, reli-
gious prescriptions, etc.) and adaptation to local coordinates of their emplacements,
erase their potential heterotopic nature? Observing the first definition proposed by
Foucault, heterotopia appears as the real (albeit flawed) space completely ordered
through utopian prescription—in both its built form and internal functioning. Con-
sidering his series of heterotopic examples, it becomes obvious that the heterotopic
character depends mainly on the practice of that space, or, in other words, on its
internal functioning. Simultaneously—and paradoxically—it can easily be observed
that once the practice has disappeared, the heterotopic capacity of the space is not
entirely suppressed, but seems to transition into a passive state. I argue that the
material ‘part’ of a heterotopia, the built spaces turned residual by the practices’
obsolescence, continue to be partial heterotopias of sorts, or temporarily suspended
heterotopias. Certain arguments come in support of this interpretation. First of all, a
principle stated by Foucault, establishes that a heterotopia does not cease to exist—it
receives one function or another depending on the culture and the time in which it
manifests163 ; this suggests that a heterotopic space will continue to operate, regardless
of the function received, mainly by virtue of the built form, which plays a decisive
role in determining and perpetuating the heterotopic character. Subsequently, the
practice or the functioning of the heterotopic space, although defining for the hetero-
topic space, can vary depending on the social-cultural context, yet without affecting
the heterotopic character already sedimented in the material form. The material form
therefore harbours a heterotopic potential, which can be triggered through practice.
A second argument is precisely the utopia-heterotopia connection: if utopia almost
always proposes an interdependence between the built form and the internal func-
tioning (the ideal can be achieved through human-environment cooperation, and
utopias often imagine physical schemas, urban-architectural and/or natural, more or
less achievable), then heterotopia will automatically inherit this relationship, aiming
to achieve the ideal by starting with the built form. Moreover, precisely because of
the conditional relation between utopia (imagined) and heterotopia (real, material-
ized), the role of the built form is emphasized (to the detriment of the prescription),
and it inevitably becomes the main means of expression of the imagined ideal. In
conclusion, the built form can be considered as a defining attribute of heterotopia,
just as much as the practice(s).
The secondary and tertiary utopic derivatives should be understood as a result of
double processing: if the utopia—‘cardinal model’ generates through a process of
materialization a heterotopia—for the subsequent derivatives, the material hetero-
topia becomes a model, reiterated, reinterpreted and adapted. These processes are
carried out on a nonlinear temporal axis (see the historical recycling and recombina-
tion of models), and the ramifications and variations are generated by the different
paradigms in which the model (the original one: utopia, or the processed one: het-
erotopia) is interpreted and applied. The instances for which a materialized utopia
becomes the model also reiterate its utopian coordinates—as long as they reiterate
its material expression. Even without deliberately attempting to restore a utopian
163 Foucault, M., Of Other Spaces, in Dehaene M. and De Cauter L., Heterotopia and the city…, 18.
ideal, by resuming such a ‘second-degree’ material expression, a passive heterotopic

potential will also be inherited. Two Foucaultian arguments support this perspective,
the reshaping capacity of heterotopia and its resilience in all cultures throughout
the history of civilization. The reverberations of the heterotopia-model, insofar as
they resume the specific built expression, can therefore also be considered partial
heterotopias or passive heterotopias. Through the function-context relationship, the
paradigm in which they are (re)produced enables them to manifest and reactivate
their heterotopic potential stored in the material expression.
2.4 The Metamorphoses of the Ideal City. The Utopian

Project and the Transition to Modernity
The seventeenth century abounds in utopias that imagine balanced, enlightened and
perfectly ordered societies. As previously discussed, most utopian approaches up to
the seventeenth century imply a “collective commitment”,164 and design an orderly
and controlled public space through which they define themselves and on which they
depend.165 According to Kevin Hetherington, the process of constructing moder-
nity is, above all, the onset of a colossal, utopian and unachievable project of social
ordering.166 The author argues that modernity uses and “ often involves the idea of
utopia but not the creation of utopia in themselves”167 ; therefore of all utopian ini-
tiatives manifested in the beginning of modernity, only those that have “influenced
and shaped the spatializing processes within modernity”168 must be considered rel-
evant, Hetherington excluding from the start the ‘introverted’, small-scale tentative
demarches—in other words, the utopian experimental communities. Despite their
seemingly reduced impact on modernity and their “romantic” character, these com-
munities remain however valid proofs of the application of utopian ideals, sometimes
showcasing particular material and spatial expressions. Contrary to Hetherington’s
opinion, I argue that these experimental spaces, results of a utopian intent, are relevant
to the crystallization of modern space, influencing both the modern spatial perception
and its operation and modelling processes. Even if they are considered essentially
minor presences, they are instrumental to the ‘conservation’ or maintaining of the
utopian imagination.
164 Appelbaum, Robert, Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England, Cam-
bridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, in the review written by Williamson,
Arthur (California State University-Sacramento), Utopia and the Construction of Modernity, pub-
lished in H-Ideas, October, 2003, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=8304, accessed in
June 2014.
165 Idem.
166 Hetherington, K., The Badlands…, 55, apud. Bauman, Z., Modernity and Ambivalence, Polity
Press, 1991.
167 Hetherington, 56.
168 Hetherington, 56.
2.4 The Metamorphoses of the Ideal City. The Utopian Project … 49
The utopian project, seen in all its variants and manifestations, will acquire its
modern attribute because it acknowledges and gradually incorporates the rational sci-
entific discourse. Ordering becomes possible precisely through the scientific method.
The state-machine analogy positions the state as a ‘neutral’, ‘non-subjective’ media-
tor between the individual and the church; imagined as a legislating mechanism, the
state ensures an exhaustive and precise ordering of society. The utopian approaches
become activist in their demarche, and present new (self-) government formulas and
hierarchs, and imagine a radical social reform—if not universal, at least national.
These utopias are particularly concerned with the moral and political-social aspects,
and less with the material one, in the sense of an architectural and urban expression;
the built form seems to lose its ability to control, which is taken over by norm-
ing and supervision (G. Winstanley); the levellers, the diggers,169 the ranters, the
millennials, and then James Harrington with his commonwealth utopia, the ideal
Oceana (1656), all propose alternative hierarchical systems, in various combina-
tions of the social, moral and economic features. The architecture and the urban are
largely ignored and no longer the subject of detailed descriptions. By the end of
the seventeenth century, the religious encoding loses some of its importance. When
it is present, it is usually subordinated to the secular hierarchy and governed by
the spirit of reason.170 Yet, the religious encoding persists alongside the prominent
rational coding in the colonial space, in the process also agglutinating the specific
built expression. The traces of rational encoding are visible in the very orthogonal
structure of colonial cities, strongly influenced by the Renaissance model of the ideal
city.171 The new ideals overlap with the old, reiterating the formal principles. Thus,
here the principle of reason continues to be expressed in the constructed form, as
in the Renaissance model, by symmetry, geometry, centrality, rectilinear dominant
169 Diggers, or the “1650 communists” (Pepper, David, apud. Miles), demanded “communal own-
ership of land and goods, the abolition of money, free universal education, replacement of the legal
system and community service as punishment for less serious crimes”, Miles, Urban Utopias…,
35.
170 One such example is Vairasse’s (Denis Vairasse d’ Allais, 1630–1672) utopian novel Histoire des
Sevarambes which puts forward precisely this mix of official religion, alternative faith and reason;
“ The state religion was philosophical, founded on human reason, with revelation playing only a
minor role that wise Sevarambians knew was a political invention.” The proposed hierarchy was
composed of an invisible and somewhat distant god (“Since [this] invisible God could be perceived
only with the eyes of the mind, He was the object of formal adoration only once every seven years.”),
the Sun, as the main (and visible) focus of adoration and source of the predominantly agricultural
community’s welfare, and finally a maternal figure, surprisingly associated with the motherland.
Manuel…, 380.
171 The symmetrical and geometric model of the ideal Renaissance citadel permeates in the American
colonial and insular space, in cities such as Havana (Cuba), Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic),
the Fort in Port-Dauphin (Haiti), San Juan de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico) Lima, Trujillo de Perú
(depicted in a 1760 as a city with an orthogonal street network and a fortified circular enclosure
with 15 polygonal bastions, extremely similar to Perret’s representations in Des Fortifications et
artifices); then La Serena De Coquimbo (Chile), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Acapulco (Mexico);
besides the regular street network, another element shared with the ideal citadel model is the central
square, in a regular polygon shape, usually quadrilateral, bordered by the main institutions of the
official power (governor and administration, church, military power).
axes, and ‘equalitarian’ orthogonal structures. To a degree, the ‘known’ formal lan-
guage is recycled and reused, simply endowed with different meanings and ‘read’
differently.
However, the historical context’s evolution will lead to the separation of two
directions in utopian thinking. On the one hand, the progressive ideal is preserved;
yet, the period of instability that follows (the 30-year war, the anti-Ottoman war,
the British Civil War, the Franco-Spanish War, etc.) fuel a desire to return, project-
ing the ideal in a more innocent past and infusing it with a pastoral character. A
complete reversal occurs: if up to this point, the utopian ideal was the city, it now
rejected, condemned and criticized; overcrowding, increased density, the deepening
disparities between social classes as well as the urban-rural rift, all transform the
image of the seventeenth-century urbs into an anti-utopia. The ideal will be pursued
in the (re)connection with nature and in the processing of simple needs (countering
the effects of the increasingly unsanitary urban fabric), as well as in common own-
ership—a response to a divided and asymmetrical society. This ideal is necessarily
located in a re-appropriated rural where, mediated by strict norming, each individual
plays his determined role in the apparatus, contributing to his own and the commu-
nity’s happiness, which are inherently interdependent. This utopian model refashions
the Renaissance’s “egalitarian hierarchies”. Fuelled by the increasing urban pressure
and industrialization, the reversal of the ‘classic’ utopian ideal will undergo a rapid
escalation up to the nineteenth century. The blueprint alternatively locates at the top
of the hierarchy the state, the monarch, the governing councils, the divinity or its
mediating instance, an absolute ordering principle—truth, reason, etc. As Manuel
and Manuel note, an obsession for a fractal-like structuring persists,172 present in
most of the utopias so far. This will also be mirrored in the material form and fabric,
especially visible for ensembles.
In architecture, the two directions of utopian thinking coexist. The progressive
ideal of the city-machine or the production-mechanism persists, generating numer-
ous variants of technocracies with various built formulas. Its materializations reveal
hybridized features similar to those of the matured colonial space: the production
cum living mechanism with a fully normed functioning, the transition of the order-
ing power towards the secular (the state, the company, the administration, etc.), the
spirit of reason as the ordering principle, the self-sufficiency and enclave character;
the progressive ideal loses almost entirely the religious attribute. In opposition, the
anti-urban ideal imagines an agrarian community or one close to the natural envi-
ronment, but governed by the same principle of reason, with a massive dilution of
its mediation.
If the seventeenth century proposed the ideal citadel, the eighteenth century pre-
serves and emphasizes this tendency towards the rational, and assimilates both the
city-machine concept and the city-organism concept. The resulting alternative order-
172 Theordering principle is reiterated at any and every scale, in a pyramidal order: the head of the
family “governs” his family, maintaining the same power relations as the governor who governs his
community, the monarch who governs its society, the sun—the living world, and god—the entire
universe. Manuel, Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, Belknap Press; New edition,
September 15, 1982, 380–3.
ings which will define the epoch are predominantly expressed as project proposals
and are rarely materialized.
One such utopian perspective attempts to identify the ideal in an idealized past.
Considering his initial interest in, and endeavour to measure and catalogue monu-
ments, Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Piranesi (1620–1778) can be included
in the category of antiquarians.173 Their attention is focused on the ancient monu-
ment, and their chosen symbolic universal capital becomes Rome.174 Antiquity and
its still preserved structures are (yet again) invested with the dangerous attribute of
‘ideal’—via a process of agglutination of the aesthetic ideal and the social ideal, and
mediated through the lens of the past. The preferred medium of expression and the
‘vehicle’ that eventually became a characteristic of the period, is the engraving—also
used by Piranesi. In the first stage, the engraving will alter and adapt reality, reshap-
ing it after the ideal matrix in order to illustrate a glorious imagined past. Thus,
the engraving depicting the ancient monument is, despite the employed measure-
ments and surveys, quite detached from reality: “the edifices are truncated, taken
out of context”,175 differences are erased, some monuments receive additions and
are ‘rebuilt’ as fictional ideal instances, adapted or downright invented to fit into the
“abstract figurative grid”176 of the ideal. Thus, although it is presented as a document-
evidence—and thus an ‘objective’ and scientific—, the antiquarians’ engraving illus-
trates an imagined projection, an ideal deliberately constructed according to purely
aesthetic criteria—and one which will later manifest and flourish in the neoclassical
style. However, in the second phase of the process, the representations employed by
antiquarians gradually lose their imaginary-utopian character and subjectivity; the
engraving becomes more objective, as it tends towards scientific illustration. The rep-
resentation’s subjective nature will however be perpetuated until the late eighteenth
century and even in the nineteenth century.
As an established exponent of the period, Piranesi is situated somewhere between
these two attitudes, especially with two of his works, the vedute and the capricii. Le
antichità romane (1756) is focused on real objects: the ruined monuments of ancient
Rome. Nevertheless, the nature of the representation is deeply subjective, shaped by
imagination and infused with the author’s critical attitude. The perspective and the
objects are distorted and staged: through the unusual and non-traditional perspective
angles, the hyperbolic exaggeration of the objects’ dimensions and the miniatur-
ization of the human figures, and through the play between light and shadow—the
representation becomes dramatic, dominated by the aesthetic argument, deeply sub-
173 This highly diverse community of antiquarians brings together “scholars belonging to all nations
of Europe” and perhaps even more surprisingly, belonging to several classes, social ranks and schol-
arly fields. Among the main representatives, Choay names: Bernard de Montfaucon (1660–1741),
Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), Thomas Howard Lord of Arundel (1585–1646), scientists such
as Jacob Spon (1647–1685), Francesco Bianchini (1662–1729), an numerous artists, such as
Pietro Santi Bartoli (1635–1700) or architects—Julien David Le Roy (1724–1803), James Stu-
art (1713–1788), Nicholas Revett (1720–1804).
174 Choay, Alegoria…, 45.
176 Idem.
jective—driving any potential documentary role in the background. Compared with

other representations of the period, and even of the same subject, Piranesi‘s position
appears to be subjective and deliberately critical of the contemporary architecture.
Although the traditional concept behind illustrating ruins aimed to instil the feel-
ing of real into the viewer, and to replace the lived experience,177 the representa-
tion will inevitably remain subjective. This subjectivity is partially created by the
nostalgic-romantic nature of the documenting gaze reflected onto its subject and
the meanings attached to it; partially, this subjectivity is due to an excessive focus
on the built object, paradoxically omitting to represent even its context. Piranesi‘s
illustration of ruins employs the same mechanism of transposing the viewer and
substituting the visit, emphasizing, however, its pedagogical role; if the ancient mon-
ument was considered a manifestation of the sublime,178 its representation must
reflect it, and for this purpose Piranesi will use all the available elements of the
scenographic language, contesting en route the classical approach.179 Via this mise
en scene and mise en contexte of the ancient object—an alternative approach to the
classical veduta—Piranesi translates its sublime and its grandeur but above all its
value encoding and its national-inheritance encoding: “the visual, visceral impact
of the ruins, which move us precisely because they are signs of a closed histori-
cal cycle beyond our power to reclaim”,180 is first and foremost invoked with aim
of coagulating a preservationist and a national conscience181 ; yet, the pedagogical
and moralizing encodings are visible, announcing the passeist attitude of the clas-
sical revival, and forewarning about the ‘dangers’ of copying the ancient language
without the input of imagination. Piranesi’s Capricci illustrate precisely the nega-
tive potential of architecture and of extreme passeism.182 The phantasmagoric and
labyrinthic hybridizations of the ancient Roman ruin, these representations are for
Tafuri “the crisis of order, of form, of the classical concept of Stimmung, [which]
assumes ‘social’ connotations”.183 The classic dominant order is challenged and
replaced with a new complete ordering, which automatically entails a new society:
“the new existential condition of the human collectivity, liberated and condemned

178 More about the approach of the sublime in Piranesi‘s engraving in his artistic and historical
context in Ek, Fatma İpek, Şengel, Deniz, Piranesi Between Classical And Sublime, METU JFA
2007/1, (24:1), 17–34.
179 Kirk, Terry, The Architecture of Modern Italy: The Challenge of Tradition 1750–1900, vol. 1.,
Princeton Architectural Press, 2005, 48.

180 Kirk, The Architecture…, 49.
181 The Etruscan inheritance which Piranesi seeks to evoke, saves Roman culture when accused
of being a mere second-hand and unsuccessful copy of the ancient Greek ideal (the sublime par
excellence, because it processes at first hand the source of inspiration, nature). By illustrating the
Roman monument as a sublime object, Piranesi disrupts the contemporary official ordering, and
contributes to the creation and solidification of the quest for national identitary sources, or what
will later become the national heritage consciousness.
182 Invenzioni capric[ciosi] di carceri (1745), Piranesi.
183 Tafuri, Manfredo, Architecture and Utopia.Design and Capitalist Developement, trans. La Penta,
Barbara Luigia, MIT Press, 1976, 16–18.

at the same time by its own reason”.184 Liberation from classical norm is suggested
through a sense of an infinite, gigantic, disarticulated space without centre, ordering
axes and registers, and labyrinthine in nature—essentially cancelling and contradict-
ing everything that defines the classical space. These same coordinates also suggest
that the new ordering is also in crisis: the chaotic, entirely anthropized space, and the
restless and tense architecture, overwhelming through its infinitely reticulated repe-
tition, gigantic, suffocating and incomprehensible. Yet, the architecture of this new
ordering re-employs the ancient fragments. The message is clear: their indiscrimi-
nate veneration and exhaustive, unfiltered retrieval can only assemble an impossible
ordering.185 Piranesi‘s choice for a carceral space to express liberation from classi-
cal values and constraints is not accidental. Tafuri sees in this option the suggestion
of a future and inexorable condition of mankind—collective alienation. The same
alienation of the individual and the community that Piranesi attributes to reason, and
announces and illustrates in Carceri, will later re-emerge almost a century later, in the
context of the industrial space. The similarity between Piranesi‘s dark and labyrinthic
carceral space and the factories of the Industrialisation period is indisputable, both
suggesting the visceral interior of the city-machine, which had already started to
take shape. The carceral space illustrates the negative connotation and the oppres-
sive potential of the rational encoding, both proclaimed with urgency and violence;
if the old ordering is mostly suggested through its absence as a whole (essentially the
annulment of the classic Euclidean space) and through its presence only as derelict
fragments, remnants of the old monuments, the new ordering is announced by the
characteristic cues of spatial control and regulation.
The projection of the carceri’s architect is at the same time utopian—because it
expresses an ideal, the liberation from the old order and the establishment of a new
one—and dystopian—since the new order, although emanating from reason, is in
fact totalitarian, oppressive and persecutional. The Carceri series can be considered
an applied or utopia, even if it is sequential and fragmented, and even if it isn’t
materialized in the “classical” formula of the architectural project (built object, or
at least sketch, layout or model). This utopia’s entire process of embodiment—as
heterotopia—occurs (and remains) within the space of the drawn representation: the
utopian intention, its material execution, its flawed result and functioning—are all
depicted simultaneously in each engraving. Considering the intent and the encod-
ing of this representational medium, the engravings almost function as port-holes
opening upon a heterotopic space nearing the end of its transitioning from utopian
projection.
Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma (1762)—186 an alternative reading of the mon-
ument and the city comprised of monuments—initially appears as a celebration of
184 Tafuri, Architecture…, 18.

185 Sánchez, Jesús J. Perona, La utopía antigua de Piranesi, EDITUM, 1996, 92.
186 The title brings together 50 engravings (or 41 according to other scholars) and a bilingual text
(lat., It.) about the history of the area, or its urban evolution, analysed based on archaeological
findings. The area under consideration was originally outside the city walls; the present functions
were: military base, a series of altars and temples, graves; after the city expands, dwellings will be
built (urban villae), basilicas, baths, temples and theatres.
Roman culture and its material products, a demonstration of its viability and indepen-
dence in relation to the ancient Greek ideal, through which “Piranesi defends his own
national patrimony thus becoming an early champion of Italianità or Romanità, as
the patriotic sentiment in the arts will come to be called.”.187 However, the represen-
tation188 is utopian in essence: the pictured urban space is a figment of imagination,
an overly densified city, a puzzle assembled from public and private Roman mon-
uments, extinct, existing, imagined, reconstructed and augmented. Tafuri considers
Campo Marzio a “monstrous pullulation of symbols devoid of significance”,189 but
their very density suggests an over-signification, yet not of the object in itself but
of the whole. Each fragment is treated as an individual identity even if it is auto-
matically discharged of meaning through the agglomeration of monuments. Piranesi
uses the monument as a typology: the monuments-individual identities are reiter-
ated, reassembled and amalgamated, as to fill in the empty spaces of the real urban
fabric. Each completed or imagined monument that appears in Piranesi‘s layout is
assembled based on typologies and rational classical orderings and has real, iden-
tifiable antecedents. This “artifice” facilitates the creation of a collage of disparate,
‘dis-temporal’190 and reassembled fragments, which together make up the ideal city;
the construct is automatically superior to the original and to its parts, because it
cumulates multiple ‘idealized’ fragments—the real, the improved, and the virtual.
Even if the fabric is assembled according to classical ‘rational’ principles and from
structured and ordered fragments, the result is a suffocating, overcrowded, ambigu-
ous and chaotic. Piranesi‘s warning is yet again demonstrated: even if the rational
norm governs every fragment as well as the assembling principle, it does not transfer
to the ensemble. Paradoxically, the rational principle becomes a generator of chaos.
Piranesi uses the Campo Marzio compositional ‘mechanism’ to illustrate and to fore-
warn of the negative potential of reason—the same intention present in its sombre
subterranean counterpart, believably belonging the same built universe.
Although the same tactic employed for Carceri (representation of utopia’s entire
process of embodiment as heterotopia) can be identified in Campo Marzio, it foremost
appears as a uchronia.191 Campo combines three overlapping temporal instances:
187 Kirk, Terry, The Architecture…, 52.

188 From the entire collection of engravings, structured in an orderly chronology of the urban devel-
opment of the area, one—the Ichnographia, (Tavole V–X)—presents the simultaneous ensemble of
all these hypostases, or the ideal city—a kaleidoscopic juxtaposition, reconstructed from the ideal
instances of its constituting parts, the monuments at their apex, even if an imagined one.
189 Tafuri, 14.
190 The represented monuments belong to several temporal instances: from the first and second
centuries—a selection of the great and well-known public and private buildings—and from the
eighteenth century—the buildings “created” or rather reassembled by Piranesi in the context of his
own time.
191 The term uchronia is defined in short as alternative history; a uchronia proposes a speculative
projection or an alternate unfolding of a particular historical event—constructing from a hypoth-

esis an entire alternative universe that could have materialized under the fictitious conditions. In
the term’s orthography used here uchronia, differs from the one used in Romanian—ucronia—to
emphasize the difference of meaning, where (ro.) ucroníe—n.f. signifies a theory of cultural philos-
ophy according to which the events and facts of civilization in the history of mankind have occurred
a distinct plan represents the author’ contemporary present, the reassembled past
of the preserved monuments as well as an imagined idealized future. The chosen
representation, in the form of an urban layout, supports this projection, the edifying
intent and the yet unrealized virtual. According to Dixon, “chronological time was
manipulated in the illustrations of Il Campo Marzio in such a way that it succeeded
in creating a chasm between the past and the then present.”192 Whether interpreted as
overlapping or disjuncture, the uchronic character is present. The represented urban
fabric is an alternative present, a result of a different other historical course and a
cumulative evolution. The alternative universe described by Piranesi is a uchronia of
the monument par excellence; it is not only the optimal mediator of an alternative
history, but replaces the need for any other social-political-cultural description. For
Piranesi, the representation of an architectural and urban “what if?” is sufficient, as it
condenses and entails all of the other coordinates (the social, the political). Piranesi‘s
ideal city finds its absolute and exclusive materialization only as mediated by the
monument, or through what was already emerging as a patrimonial object.
If the purpose of this book is to demonstrate the heterotopic nature of heritage,
reassembling post factum the particularities of its functioning, Piranesi’s layout was
‘designing’ it ante-factum. The imagined city of Campo Marzio could easily be iden-
tified with the ideal city in a heritage viewpoint. The valuable heritage of the past is
miraculously recovered, in their most perfect form (the often unknown, yet highly
coveted integrity of the heritage object), jointly assembling a city of memory. Like
his antiquarian predecessors, Piranesi pieces together the real (the preserved monu-
ments, the common practice of their reconstruction) and the imagined—what appears
at first glance as impossible, becomes probable, even attainable, upon a closer, more
detailed inspection, by virtue of the realness of its constituting parts and composi-
tional rules. Undeterred by this utopian projection’s inherent impossibility, evident
and acknowledged even by the author himself, it remains plausible and potential. As
the evolution of the heritage perspective ramifies, a concept of an ideal city of mem-
ory also coagulates in parallel. Archaeology, conservation, restoration—thus appear
as tools in the achieving of this ideal. Piranesi‘s representation captures the ambiva-
lence of the attitude towards the inherited built object (an ambivalence that will
dilute alongside the sedimentation of the heritage consciousness): while the layouts
are based on a thorough research and technical architectural surveys—in the spirit
of the objective scientific method—Piranesi operates modifications, additions and
assemblages with ancient fragments, easily and without veneration, and deliberately
creating a ‘new reality’.
The safeguarding intent directed towards the contemporary city is equally utopian;
the intent behind the patrimonial ordering and its legislative framework functions
analogous to Piranesi‘s approach, even if the materialization of this ideal remains
as an inevitable but not foreseeable consequence of the continuous progress. The orthography of
the term has a similar composition to utopia (no place), where < Gk. ou-, “not” + Gk. chronos,
“time”.
192 Dixon, S. M., Illustrating Ancient Rome, or the Ichnographia as Uchronia and Other Time Warps
in Piranesi‘s Il Campo Marzio, în Envisioning the Past: Archaeology and the Image, ed. S. Smiles
and S. Moser, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, UK, 2008, 116.
unattainable. The contemporary heritage ideal—the conservation and restoration,

the reclaiming of lost built objects (with the somewhat tolerated anastylosys), and
the absolute restitution of the built heritage—is already deeply imprinted within
the contemporary city’s fabric, having permeated and shaped it. Read through this
heritage perspective, the contemporary city reveals itself as an applied or material-
ized utopia—a heterotopic organism—precisely because of the ideal’s unavoidable
imperfect and incomplete translation into reality.
Nevertheless, in the case of Piranesi‘s projection, the ideal has managed to tran-
scend its apparent impossibility to be materialized. A didactic approach has taken
Piranesi‘s utopian project even further: The Piranesi Variations ‘project’ exhibited
at the Venetian Biennale of Architecture—Common Ground 2012 addressed two
historical-analytical analyses alongside three projects attempting to transpose the
Italian author’s influence into contemporary architecture.193 Although the projects
propose engaging interpretations based on Piranesi‘s engravings, the two historical-
analytical approaches are of primary interest to this approach. The first is a three-
dimensional gilded representation or model of the engraving Campo Marzio, at its
original scale194 ; the second one extracts and analyses the individual objects, the
variations and the typologies processed by Piranesi.195 The first project succeeds in
translating into reality—even if a different form of application—Piranesi‘s utopian
projection. According to the Foucaultian argument, the translation of utopia into
reality is inevitably imperfect, as it implies a negotiation and a partial compromise
of the ideal. When considered as the material counterpart of an ideal layout, the
model appears as its imperfect interpretation, since most of the buildings’ eleva-
tions are largely unknown, unspecified in Piranesi’ layout. Yet, the student team’s
approach is similar to that of Piranesi‘s initial approach: both parts begin with a set of
known elements (the real, tangible, recordable yet incomplete vestiges and ancient
texts—in the case of Piranesi, respectively, the detailed Campo Marzio engravings,
yet ‘incomplete’ in terms of a technical project—in the case of the student team),
based on which they imagine and produce a new reality. The model proposes a dif-
ferent spatiality to Piranesi’s two-dimensional utopian projection: on the one hand,
it “domesticates” the projection, and it diminishes its fictional character through
its materialization and through its repositioning into the architectural paradigm: it
migrates from a fictional projection to an architectural layout. On the other hand, it
emphasizes its negative potential: the disregard for an urban programme and even
for basic functioning of the urban fabric (other than an overall geometric-aesthetic
consideration), the schizophrenic relations between objects and the hallucinating
density; all these negative coordinates become more prominent when expressed
in a three-dimensional medium. The ‘real’ materialization of Piranesi‘s projection
193 Three contemporary projects are presented—belonging to the Eisenman Architects design office
(the project of their own headquarters in New York), to the architecture critic Jeffrey Kipnis (from
Ohio State University) and to architect Pier Vittorio Aureli from the DOGMA design office.
194 The analysis and its resulting model were completed by second year M.arch 12 students, taught
by architect Peter Eisenman, at Yale University.

195 Project titled The Project of Campo Marzio, exhibited with the model.
remains impossible; the model is, however, one step closer to reality, and demon-
strates the functional potential of the heterotopic mechanism: the project juxtaposes
several incompatible spaces in a unique space. In a scenography whose components
are individual isolated signification foci, when juxtaposed they assemble a radically
different entity—other as signification and as signifier. Each constituting object is
reconstructed according to a rational ordering and a rational, scientific process, rem-
iniscent of the hypothetical archaeological reconstructions; yet, when juxtaposed
they dissipate and amalgamate into a single crisis space. Each built object featured
in Campo is singular and exceptional—and selected for that specific reason, but once
transferred into Piranesi’s layout, its individual alterity is erased into uniformity, an
other-object in a series of other-objects. Their accumulation—an a-temporal and
a-spatial ‘architectural reserve’—becomes alterity par excellence, and most of all
a heterotopia of a “time that accumulates indefinitely”.196 This heterotopic charac-
ter is visible in Piranesi‘s plan, and it becomes even more in its three-dimensional
material transposition: within the model, the accumulated time is an ancient past
(the inherited fragments), a potential future (the reconstructed fragments and urban
fabric) and the present of the author of the projection (the layout in itself), as well
as the contemporary present and an additional potential future; a new interpretation
of the model, a virtual reality model, reiterating or continuing the same demarche,
could add other temporal sequences and dimensions.
The Campo Marzio utopian projection possesses yet another heterotopic feature:
the reassembled space is a space of illusion designed to expose and criticize a Piranesi’
contemporary status quo. The dismantling and the reassembling processes operated
by Piranesi establish a conflictual relationship with the then-contemporary domi-
nant perception of the monument, but also with the present heritage and architectural
perception for which the three-dimensional model is more eloquent and familiar ‘dis-
course’. The role of this illusory mechanism, transferred to the three-dimensional
model, is (re)activated and demonstrated in the Biennale’s context: the visitors are
instantly drawn to the offered scenography, mistakenly assuming the gilded model as
a depiction of reality—Rome’s built fabric.197 This heterotopic mechanism is not new
to Piranesi‘s work. Willis identifies it in Carceri, where space also appears as a mech-
anism of illusion, in relation to reality: “Piranesi‘s fantasy exposes [through] truthful
fiction that all buildings are, at their hearts, tombs.”198 Through this representation,
Piranesi thus illustrates the potential of architecture to be strict materiality, empty
of symbolic encodings, and “nothing but endlessly executed material processes”, an
“architecture taken to its extreme, beyond the limits of proportionality”.199
196 Foucault, Of Other…, 20.

197 This confusion is observed even by the co-authors of the project. Talk-show: A Conversation
on the Piranesi Variations, 27 Februarie 2013, University of Michigan, Taubman College of Archi-
tecture and Urban Planning, Winter 2013 Events, http://vimeo.com/61530314, viewed in August
2014.
198 Willis, Daniel, Seven Strategies of Making Architecture, in The Emerald City and Other Essays
on the Architectural Imagination, Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, 230.

199 Willis, Daniel, Seven Strategies for Making Architecture, in The Emerald City and Other Essays
on the Architectural Imagination, Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, 230.

The materialized formula (the model) excludes, of course, a series of heterotopic

features associated with the practice of a ‘real’ space. However, the three-dimensional
model illustrates more clearly the potential functioning of such a construct, in the
hypothesis of its translation into built reality. Generally speaking, the exercise high-
lights the adaptations and hybridizations that an imagined utopian schema (an ideal
Rome, in Campo’s case) inevitably undergoes as it is transposed into built reality,
and which enhance and add to it heterotopic character.
2.5 The Perspective of Boullée and Ledoux: Sublime V.

Pragmatic
If Piranesi‘s approach is more akin to a creative artistic composition and an exhaus-

tive repertoire of disparate elements rather than to an architectural project, Étienne-
Louis Boullée (1728–99) and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806)200 provide a
different embodiment for the eighteenth-century utopian projection, this time as an
actual architecture project, conceived as such even if eventually not materialized.
Boullée‘s declared objective is beauty (or the sublime) translated as fantastic, and
expressed as prefect architectural form: although the source invoked is nature, reiter-
ating Antiquity’s model and his predecessors’ approach, its rational processed form is
its abstraction—the perfect geometric shape. Although a prolific practicing architect,
Boullée’s career remains defined by “producing unbuildable theoretical projects”.201
Beyond the encoding of this architecture, its utopian nature also derives from a con-
tradictory aspect—its assumed unbuildable character, undeniable at the time of its
creation: these are “idealized compositions in immaterial space, lacking any anal-
ogous relationship to processes of construction”.202 The imagined architecture is
intentional, as in the case of Piranesi, yet even more pronounced, since Boullée uses
a familiar, albeit hybridized,203 language as a conveying medium: the architectural
project. Boullée‘s imagined architectures have a strong conceptual foundation—the
search for the sublime—and “differ greatly from his early [and built] architectural
projects, and depend upon the inflation of simple geometrical shapes”.204 Accord-
200 The two architects are generally presented together, see Kaufmannn, Emil (Three Revolution-
ary Architects, Boullée, Ledoux and Laqueu, 1952), Lemagny, Jean-Claude (Visionary architects:
Boullée, Ledoux, Lequeu, 1968), Rosenblum, Robert (Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century
Art, 1970) and Moffet, Marian and Fazio, Michael (A world History of Architecture, 2003).
201 Willis, Daniel, The contradictions Underlying the Profession of Architecture, in The Emerald
City and Other Essays on the Architectural Imagination, Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, 179.
202 Willis, Daniel, The contradictions Underlying the Profession of Architecture, in The Emerald
City and Other Essays on the Architectural Imagination, Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, 179.
203 As with Piranesi‘s Carceri, Boullée‘s projects use as method a “hyperbolization” of the form
and of the architectural element; both Boullée and Piranesi alter the object’s scale with the purpose
of eliciting a sensorial perception (the viewer’s sensation) and to convey the sublime.
204 Braham, Allan, The Architecture of the Enlightenment, University of California Press, 1989,
116.
2.5 The Perspective of Boullée and Ledoux: Sublime V. Pragmatic 59
ing to Willis, these projections are reductionist, in the sense that they “dismiss the
realities of building without replacing them with other realities”,205 and they “lack
a critical dimension relevant to [the] present cultural situation”.206 The lack of a
programme/solution and of a critical approach would disqualify it of as much as
the title of utopian projection (as opposed to the ideal Renaissance citadel and its
blueprint for reality role, where the social prescription is filtered into built form).
Boullée‘s projection appears to be purely formal, lacking social encoding and even
impregnated by megalomania.207 This reading is, however, unjust and decontextu-
alized. Together with Ledoux and his other contemporaries, Boullée falls into the
category of “revolutionary architects” who set on to define and achieve the ideals
of their time, through unprecedented architectural schemes, which would serve the
common good of society.208 The proposed projects209 are defined by a clean geome-
try, simplicity and monumentality, a formal and dimensional antagonism,210 coupled
with a total rejection of the past—zeroing in on the baroque style and its final version,
the rococo. The expression of Boullée‘s architecture is surprisingly modern, at least
from a formal standpoint (its volumetrics and compositions), if not even theoretically
or functionally. The perfect forms—monumental spheres, prisms and pyramids—of
his architecture are the result of purely rational processing and of an essentializa-
tion of nature. It cannot and must not be copied nor replicated, but rather analysed
and interpreted, and then translated into built form, with the absolute purpose of
expressing the sublime. If the built object succeeds to capture the sublime, it is no
longer necessary for it to represent reality.211 Like Piranesi, Boullée deliberately
and knowingly illustrates a non-reality, or a potential, alternative reality—or a more
decontextualized uchronia. If for Piranesi the chosen graphic representation has a
strong critical substrate—the alternative ordering is constructed for deliberately and
critically framing and showcasing reality—for Boullée the graphic representation
becomes itself the alternative reality (or alternative ordering), precisely because its
materialization is imagined as impossible and because of its format (the architectural
project). The unfeasibility of Boullée’s architectures can also be interpreted as faith in
technological advance, making his projection a utopia of the future. The dimensional
scale preferred by Boullée has earned him the attribute of megalomania. However,
Vogd proposes a reading of this dimensional hyperbolization from a different per-
205 Willis, Seven Strategies for Making Architecture in The Emerald…, 230.
206 Willis, Seven Strategies for Making Architecture in The Emerald…, 230.
207 Willis, Seven…, 230
208 Kaufmannn, Emil, Three Revolutionary Architects, Boullée, Ledoux and Laqueu, the American
philosophical Society, 1952, 435.

209 See Palais d’ Assemblée Nationale, Chapelle des Morts, Tour tronconique, Cénotaphes avec
leur enceinte, Cirque, le projet (pour Place de L’Étoile), Cénotaphe entouré d’une colonnade, Arc
Triomphal avec inscription, Le Cénotaphe de Newton, Grand monument funéraire, Porte de Ville
avec des canons, Porte de Ville avec quatre tours—imagined, more profoundly utopian projects,
and their more realistic counterparts, Salle d’Opera a l’Emplacement du Carousel, and Bibliotheque
publique (sur le Terrain des Capucines), Palais de justice.
210 Kaufmann, Three Revolutionary…, 466.
211 Jensen, Joel Kaj, Architecture and Authenticity: Constructing the Ontological, 112.
spective, more sensitive to the coordinates of the historical context: if the employed
pure geometry formal repertoire is merely a recycling of the Paladian concepts, and
if this architecture was meant to mirror the orderly structure of the universe, why
wouldn’t these also translate in the dimensions of the architecture? Vogd proposes
this hypothesis of the double analogy, and explains it through an overwhelming
despair in the face of the universe’s scale and the coldness and in the face of Antiq-
uity’s monumentality and increasingly distancing.212 If the model—the universe,
time and space—causes the feeling of alienation, anxiety and “threatens to crush and
annihilate” the individuals,213 its translation into a built object will also reflect it.
Boullée deliberately seeks to illustrate the sublime of the universe in his architec-
ture, yet it also embeds within its form—deliberately or not—the anguish towards
the vastness of the void. This is expressed mainly in the forms’ dimensions and their
perfection but, according to Vogd, also by the “attributes of power and a defensive
augmentation” with which the imagined objects are endowed: the opaque fortifi-
cation walls, the reinforced and inaccessible gates of the city, the unapproachable
and hermetic buildings (Palais de Justice, Palais Municipal, Necropolis-monument
funéraire, Cénotaphe entouré d‘une colonnade, Bibliothèque avec Atlantes, etc.).
On the other hand, another argument is discussed by Jensen: authentic architecture
can simply exist in a state of virtuality, lacking its physical dimension and unfold-
ing only in a conceptual realm—214 as is Boullée’s case. The unbuildable nature of
Boullée‘s imagined projects is irrelevant, as architecture is no longer constrained
to produce built objects but, in a purely romantic approach, it must itself become
materialized sublime and rouse the sense of contemplation. The language of the
essential geometric forms employed by Boullée, although atypical and consequently
rejected215 in the artistic and architectural context (in favour of Baroque and Neo-
classicism), was already known and in use; thus, Boullée‘s proposals can be read
as reassembling process, issuing an other ordering from a known language. The
pure geometric form itself, reduced to its essence, is devoid of meaning, yet through
recombination as ensemble, through the play between shade and shadows,216 the
proposed architectural object becomes expressive, in a state of tension; moreover,
212 Vogd, Adolf Max, Donnell, Radka, Bendiner, Kenneth, Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and
Etienne-Louis Boullée‘s Drafts of 1784, in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
43/1 March, 1984, 60–64, 62, accessed in August 2014.
213 Vogd, Donnell, Bendiner, Orwell’s…, 62.
214 Jensen, Joel Kaj, Architecture and Authenticity: Constructing the Ontological, 110.
215 Boullée‘s utopian projection and its architectural expression (with a striking modernist character),
although generally not appreciated by the general public, are well received in the field, among
aspiring architects of the time as well as among numerous students of the Academy, for whom
Boullée will later become a mentor and a source of inspiration. For a detailed list and the architect’s
influence see Kaufmannn, Three revolutionary…
216 “According to Boullée, the art of combining the masses effectively is the most important in
architecture. All effect is to be derived from the whole, but not from its details. The masses should
be grand, and full of movement”; this movement is introduced into the object through the device
of ‘shade and shadows’—or the “disposing [of] the masses so that their contrasting forms produce
attractive lighting effects.”—Kaufmann speculating Boullée himself as the creator of the device.
Kaufmann, Three revolutionary…, 472.
the architecture resulting from the recombination of these pure volumes, is meant
to be read and to ‘speak’ to the viewer, to become the signified—in opposition to
the architecture as simple ornamental-object, or a decorated volume, as Boullée sees
the fatigued Baroque. This perspective takes the form and name of “architecture
parlante”—an architecture that endows the built object with the capacity to ‘freely’
express its role in the ensemble and the function it hosts, simply through its built
forms. On the one hand, this architecture anticipates modernity, with large opaque
surfaces and its aversion towards ornament; on the other hand, it also anticipates
postmodernism, which will rediscover and reedit its principles.
Dominated by the overwhelming formal expression, the social encoding of Boul-
lée’s architecture is almost invisible, although not entirely absent. Although the built
form is endowed with the power and the role of shaping society, acting as a mediator
of the sublime, it remains, like in Piranesi‘s case, in a stage of representation, as a
series of snapshots illustrating fragments of the imagined alternative ordering. The
universal, all-encompassing character of the projection also disappears. Although
heterotopic features can be identified, an overall heterotopic character remains as in
a state of potentiality. Until a materialization of Boullée‘s architecture,217 his utopian
projections are representations of an other architecture—both formally and con-
ceptually. The all-encompassing, well-defined functional programme or the strict,
hierarchical and normative social ordering that were featured in projects such as
Sforzinda and other the ideal cities directly germinated from utopias are increas-
ingly rare, and the built form gradually assumes this role, as it becomes evident in
Ledoux‘s architecture.
Only Ledoux will resolve to “probe the validity of the newly-discovered prin-
ciples”, with, but also beyond, the imagined architectural expression, as he will
re-infuse architecture with the utopian goal “to serve the humanitarian ideals of
the revolutionary era”.218 Ledoux‘s architectural production is varied, covering the
exemplar Baroque, the academic classicism and the neoclassicism as well as the new
purist-geometric trend. Compared to Boullée’s projections—closer to the fanciful
caprici, where the representation ‘snapshots’ in a subjective aesthetical instantané
the object-materialization of the sublime—Ledoux‘s approach is more pragmatic
one. He presents an architectural project in the true sense of the word, with all of its
characteristic representations, the spatial delimitations and the disposition of func-
tions in accordance with the functional flows; the object is designed, and not just a
mere panorama image of an imagined object. The perspective angles used by Ledoux
are more lucid, more documentary in their intention, compared to Piranesi‘s impetu-
ous and febrile representations, but also compared to Boullée‘s detached, sterile or
even picturesque ones. Kaufman identifies some of the new revolutionary spatial
orderings that Ledoux employs, where architectural objects appear as “aggregates of
interpenetrating masses; or as crossings of volume and mass; or as piles of stepped off
217 The conceptual foundation and the formal language employed by Boullée are often associated
with the totalitarian architecture of the twentieth century, with projects proposed by architects such
as Speer.
218 Kaufmann, Three revolutionary…, 473.
units (motif of contrasted sizes); or as assemblages of incongruous elements (motif

of contrasted shapes)”,219 the last two also featuring in Boullée’s works. Ledoux
is also a representative of the ‘architecture parlante’. Due to the solid connection
between architecture design and imagined projection (fractured in Boullée‘s case),
the layout, and not just the volumes, becomes an output for the ‘architecture par-
lante’. Ledoux alternates between the two approaches. For example, in the (unbuilt)
project for Aix Prisons (1785–7) the general volume and the facades are those that
suggest the inaccessibility, the isolation and the carceral (through massiveness, the
small-scale fenestration, the massive corner towers, the enclosure’s opaqueness, etc.)
whereas in Maison de plaisirs/Oikema (1780) the layout is the only one evoking its
function, while the volume remains silent.
The project establishing Ledoux‘s utopian reputation is the well-known Arc-et-
Senans, for which Ledoux designs two proposals. The first version, less known and
unbuilt, has a perfectly symmetrical and uniform quadrilateral layout, with “all the
houses coherently arranged around a square court, with bordering alleys forming
an outer square”220 and porticos connecting the volumes. These are surrounded by
agricultural plots or gardens designed to supplement the employees’ incomes, and
the entire complex is enclosed within an enceinte. The context of the project’s cre-
ation,221 allowed Ledoux an absolute freedom of design and the opportunity to over-
look practical considerations—obvious in the rigid, axial and symmetrical geometry
of the layout. The initial ordering proposed by Ledoux (with productive function
occupying the centre, the minimization of the sacred function through the marginal
exile of the chapel and its atypical expression) contradicts the existing dominant
ordering (supported by/supporting the project’s patron)—automatically leading to
the project’s rejection. Ledoux himself appreciates the layout as far too utilitarian,
favouring the production function at the expense of the symbolic encoding and the
artistic expression.
The second version of project—with a circular-radial layout—approved and par-
tially built will be acknowledged as the architect’s best known project. Ledoux imag-
ines an entire city (Chaux) built around the salt works, and though only partially
completed in the nineteenth century, will become “the first major achievement of
industrial architecture”.222 The main access is mediated by a portico volume, flanked
by a set of colossal columns. The passageway is a textbook example of the princi-
219 Kaufmann, 488.

220 Kaufmann provides a detailed description of the functional disposition of the schema: “The
forefront contains the gateway, flanked by the apartments of the director and the employees; the left
corner pavilion houses the circular chapel with the altar in its center, that to the right, the bakery. The
wings and the pavilion of the lateral fronts include the homes of the workers. The rooms destined for
the fabrication are located in the rear. The center of the court is marked by a fountain.” Kaufmann,
Three revolutionary…, 510.
221 At the moment of its design, the initial project, and perhaps even the second project, can be
considered a purely theoretical proposal: the construction site will be selected only after the project
had been elaborated.
222 The complex consisted of Ledoux‘s ideal city (Chaux/ Royal Saltworks of Arc-et-Senans), The
salt mine itself (Salins-les-Bains) and the whole connection system between them (21 km)—a
“double water evacuation channel composed of wooden cylinders and protected from place to place
ples of architecture parlante,223 simulating in stone the irregular surface of a grotto,

or the salt mine’s entrance.224 The same building accommodates the guard post, a
prison, and a forge. The centre of the layout is occupied by the mine manager’s
building, flanked on its sides by the main production buildings (drying kilns, heating
rooms, Sales des Bosses and salt storehouses)225 ; the following circular perimeter is
occupied by production buildings (carpenters, mine-workers, coopers), administra-
tive buildings, religious buildings (the chapel, the parish house) and other essential
institutions (the courthouse, the hospital, the market and the public baths); the town
hall is axially located, mirroring the main entrance. According to the initial intent
of the project, the city would later expand concentrically, perpetuating the central
layout. Ledoux‘s project is only partially carried out, but even in this incomplete
formula, the ordering intent embedded in its built form, its normed functioning, its
delimitation, and its enclave character remain visible.
Ledoux‘s project is “guided by a clear formal idea”, yet “contrary to other Utopian
cities, Chaux [is] conceived for an actual site”,226 imagined ab initio with the intent
of its materialization, and more than a simple theoretical-critical exercise; its well-
defined and detailed functional/utilitarian programme, coupled with its insertion in
the site and context also support this argument. According to the site’s UNESCO
description, “this functional urbanism plan has evolved from a philosophical, politi-
cal and social concept that announced some of the ideal cities of the 20th century”227 ;
however, viewed from the historical perspective of the ideal cities, Chaux reiterates
and recycles part of their characteristics. The same formal expression is employed for
a similar set of functional and symbolic prerequisites, despite the distance of more
by control tower’s”; UNESCO, From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bains to the Royal Saltworks
of Arc-et-Senans, the Production of Open-pan Salt, Advisory Body Evaluation, 1982–2009, http://
whc.unesco.org/archive/advisory_body_evaluation/203bis.pdf, August 2014.
223 Another architecture parlante example in the complex’s architecture is featured on the main
facade of the entrance building: a series of carved, wall-mounted urns seem to pour out “the precious
fluid that evokes the salt mine, the source of the city’s wealth”; other examples are: the Coopers’
building—Atelier des cercles—“a simple cube, the four fronts of which are formed by gigantic
concentric circles inscribed in square (frames)”, a “a fantasy pattern representative of its function”;
the church, which reiterates the Greek cross in its layout; the chapel-like cemetery building, with
its spherical central hall—a geometry associated by Boullée as well with the void evoke by eternity
and death or the infinite nature of the universe; the Atelier des bûcherons, gardes de la forêt, a
pyramidal volume made of overlapping logs; then Maison des directeurs de la Loue, where the
water course passes through the cylindrical pipe-like upper segment of the building; Kaufmann,
Three revolutionary…, 514, 516–7, 524, 527, 535.
224 Kaufmann notes that the passageway successfully combines three non-homogeneous elements:
“the classical features, the pseudo-natural romantic finish, and the new cubism”. Kaufmann, Three
revolutionary…, 514.
225 The text which accompanies and explains the drawings, and which places the Stock exchange in
the centre of the layout, is created after the designing of the Chaux project (displacing the initial
central positioning of the production function).
226 Kaufmann, 512.
227 UNESCO, From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bains to the Royal Saltworks of Arc-et-Senans,
the Production of Open-pan Salt, Advisory Body Evaluation, 1982–2009, 230, http://whc.unesco.
org/archive/advisory_body_evaluation/203bis.pdf, August 2014.
than a century between Chaux, Sforzinda, Campanella’s and even Da Vinci’s ideal
radial city. I argue that Ledoux‘s unfinished ideal city, with its central salt works,
is also emerging from a fundamentally utopian construct, where the built form and
its ordering become a shaping device or mechanism through which a community
(and potentially the entire society) is to be moulded into a better one. The saltworks’
utopian filiation is often disputed and even (officially) dismissed, and it is labelled
as “one of the rare examples of the futuristic search for a functional, ideal but not
Utopian, urban model”,228 or simply “visionary architecture”,229 despite somewhat
contradictory acknowledging its inherited encoding (“Its semicircle is a permanent
appeal to mankind to continue and complete the unfinished task of building the Ideal
City”).230 Ledoux directly addresses in the ensemble’s project multiple issues of his
contemporary society—habitation and workspace hygiene, the welfare of the work-
ing class and even the happiness of individuals,231 anticipating the industrial company
towns232 of the nineteenth century. Alterations to traditional ordering are visible in
the layout and the architectural language but also in the structuring and selection of
functions. Although the radial layout (inherently) retains the idea of social hierarchy,
Ledoux attempts to re-code it. The previous radial schemas are generally defined
as segregated and hierarchical in nature—due to the centre-periphery relationship
and the automatic decrease in intensity which is subsequently supported through
the architectural expression, volume distribution and road network. In his ideal city
project, Ledoux attempts to interpret the radial pattern in a rational and egalitarian
manner—where circularity is employed as the equal distancing from a centre. This
non-hierarchical encoding is consequently consolidated in the architecture of the
ensemble. This deliberate re-encoding and re-ordering of the radial schema demon-
strates one of its heterotopic features: the resilience, or the ability to function in a
very different manner in different spatial and temporal contexts. The architectural
language is deliberately uniform, in order to erase the social stratification tradition-
ally attached to a hierarchized schema. The egalitarian intent endows it with a utopian
character. In Ledoux’s solution, the ‘classical’ architectural expression traditionally
attributed to official public functions, becomes the expression of the entire ensemble
(including civil, non-representative buildings), and the initiative’s social intent is not
dissimulated. However, the utopian intent is best illustrated in terms of the func-
tions proposed. Either new or reinterpreted-traditional, Ledoux‘s ideal city proposes
several such functions meant to shape the new individual and the new society: “the
228 UNESCO, From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bains…, 233.

229 Idem., 234.
230 Idem.
231 Kaufmann, 510.
232 These planned almost self-sufficient enclaves, designed and built by companies, proliferate in
the nineteenth century; although the residential fabric and the buildings designated for services
and leisure are sometimes vaster than the production facilities they serve, they are in fact their
annexes; the ideal functioning is in “close circuit”, entirely structuring the life of the company’s
employees—most times including the religious and moral aspect. This formula is entirely imagined
and sketched in Ledoux‘s proposal, although preceding its more modern full-fledged industrial
variants, the company towns.
Panarétéon [Temple of Virtue] dedicated to the new ethics; and the Pacifère [a Court
not for judgment and punishment, but for mediation] representing the [appropria-
tion and exercise of] new rights”,233 both cubic and just “as simple as the law for
which [they] stand”234 ; in the spirit of the architecture parlante Ledoux correlates the
latter’s simple, monumental and clear-cut volume as a “symbol of justice”.235 The
new functions and their expressive buildings reveal the utopian intent: The Maison
d’union, a guild house representing “the ideal of comradeship”,236 followed by the
Maison d’education—another paradoxical hybrid as Kaufmann observes (the con-
tradicting “concept of the Church and the Public Baths!” merged into one building),
and Maison de Plaisirs/Oikema or the Temple of Immorality—a bold educational
and architectural experiment, where “youth, in its innate goodness, will be revolted
by the ugliness of vice [in Atelier de corruption], and turn to the path of virtue”, the
latter also represented as a temple.237 There are also Le Tènement-Maison de cam-
pagne and La Cénobie, both models of common dwelling, the latter being the closest
to the autonomous formula of the phalanstery. The layout, the architecture and the
new functions reflect almost ad litteram the new ideals: the centre is no longer occu-
pied by the religious power, a monarch or a symbolic universal power (science/truth,
morality, beauty, etc.) but by the representative of the production system and the
production unit itself. Through its physical location, the production function also
announces its position in the new society (and as later illustrated by the nineteenth-
century industrialization) and affirms itself as its guarantor. The once quintessential
symbolic power, centrally located and emanating its influence towards the periphery,
is now more subtly infused, multiplied and diffused—just as the functions repre-
senting morality, education, or science are equally distributed in built fabric of the
ideal city. Although Ledoux’s narrative dismisses hierarchization and segregation in
favour of equalitarianism, his ideal structuring too easily reveals its hidden exclusions
and prescribed power relations; these are paradoxically materialized as heterotopian
cellules, like the Hospice: located “[a]t a great distance from the city, in a stretch of
woods […], [i]t would shelter the worthy traveller, and contribute to the improvement
of mankind by separating the sheep from the goats. Not every one would be allowed
to continue on his journey; whoever aroused suspicion would be put on trial and, if
found guilty, be condemned to forced labour”.238
All of this is imagined by Ledoux in addition to, and projected as a future devel-
opment of the salt works, while simultaneously serving as an exercise to define a new
non-traditional architectural expression. Only the very nucleus of this ideal city (the
Royal Saltworks) will be built and only partially; however, even truncated it man-
ages to evoke the imagined functioning of its ideal society. All the other secondary
proposed objects—for housing and facilities—that would have comprised the fabric
233 Kaufmann, 519.

234 Idem.
235 Kaufmannn, 519.
236 Kaufmannn, 521.
237 Kaufmannn, 522.
238 Kaufmannn, 521.
of the ideal city, remain tentative, imagined projections, albeit revealing of Ledoux‘s
confidence in the architect’s and the built object’s capacity to shape society. Espe-
cially in the case of the public buildings, but not exclusively, the architect imagines
a certain functioning, a scenario that is sometimes just as surprising, paradoxical
and contrasting with the social context of the time, as the new repertoire of forms
is contrasting to its architectural context of an exhausted Baroque and a flourishing
Romanticism.
Ledoux‘s ideal city, with its industrial profile, is one of the first ensembles of its
kind and among the first model-factories that will become the defining image for
the nineteenth century. A number of other architects—Jean-Jacques Lequeu, Jean-
Nicolas-Louis Durand, Louis-Ambroise Dubut—propagate the modern ideas illus-
trated in utopian projections, albeit in more or less hallucinating or subdued variants.
The attractiveness of the functionalism and utilitarianism of Ledoux’s and Boul-
lée’s schemas exceeds that of the proposed formal repertoire, which will continue
to germinate until late nineteenth century and early twentieth century—as Ledoux‘s
geometrics, volumetrics and sober facades become increasingly more recognizable
in architecture of the 1910s, 20s and 30s. The alterity of these projections will gradu-
ally metamorphose and eventually permeate into the official ordering, while leaving
behind the unfinished and imperfect ‘testing sites’ such as The Royal Saltworks of
Arc-et-Senans.
Ledoux’s project forwards a supplementary reading in a heterotopian key. The
two connected and juxtaposed nuclei—the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bains and
the Royal Saltworks of Arc-et-Senans (the latter, Ledoux’s project)—are excep-
tional, spatio-temporally bound instances of a common production practice (salt
exploitation). Their listing as a world heritage site239 simultaneously acknowledges
the ‘laboratory’ character and the otherness of Ledoux’s Royal Saltworks (OUV cri-
teria 1 and 2) as well as the ‘repository’ nature of the Great Saltworks—illustrating
the entire “chronological timeframe during which the extraction of salt continued in
Salins, certainly from the Middle Ages, and probably from prehistoric times, through
to the 20th century [as well as its] Spa activity [which] has extended its use until
nowadays.” (crit. 4).240 This description suggests the heterochronic nature of the site,
a space where time has accumulated almost indefinitely—241 and in the process also
acquiring its very own materialized utopia.
239 Date of inscription: 1982, extended in 2009.

240 UNESCO, World Heritage List, From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bains to the Royal
Saltworks of Arc-et-Senans, the Production of Open-pan Salt, http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/203/,
accessed August 2014.
241 Foucault, M., Of other spaces (1967), (translated by Lieven De Cauter and Michiel Dehaene), in
eds. Dehaene, Michiel and De Cauter, Lieven, Heterotopia and the city: public space in a postcivil
society, Routledge, 20.
2.5.1 Utopia as a Social Experiment
The utopian projection of the nineteenth century will be marked by social experi-
mentation. The utopian text is closely connected to the actual utopian projection. It
does not imagine an impossible and removed ideal universe, but becomes a projec-
tion of “a practical transformation of society—a plan no longer self-contained but
applicable to the world in which the writer lived”.242 This world was perceived as
being in a state of crisis, synonymous with the individual’s identity crisis in relation
to society.243 The direct objective of this century’s utopian projection is the discovery
“of human nature’s essence and the construction of new social structures from the
solid pieces of human reason, reality, instincts, desires, necessities, and its capabil-
ities”.244 Utopia becomes achievable through the transformation of the present. In
this process, some of the utopian projections lose the idealized and exemplary aura
of the past that becomes “a mere prologue and the present a spiritual and moral, even
a physical, burden that at times was well-nigh unendurable”.245 This progressive
orientation will find its opponent in the culturalist and passéist model represented by
John Ruskin, William Morris and later Ebenezer Howard. The construction of the
past was something to be done with immediate urgency for the moral, intellectual,
social and economic healing of society. At the same time, there are three alterna-
tive, progressive projections that manifest—Henri Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and
Robert Owen’s. The functioning of the absolute systems they propose is paradoxical.
On the one hand, they are imagined as test spaces “grow within the body of the old
system, but independent of it, and they expected to be granted tolerance because
no present government would be threatened by them.”246 On the other hand, the
implementation, in the form of the social experiment, was not the final objective but
a demonstration of the alternative ordering’s validity that, once proven, would be
willingly adopted as the official ordering. These three utopian social experiments
belong to the category of the progressive model and are well-researched topics of
urban studies. The social criticism that sets their proposals in motion seeks for alter-
natives both to the moral and to the built context. These progressive models of the
pre-urban stage outline principles which will remain coveted targets up until the
twentieth and even the twenty-first centuries (e.g. hygienization and the opening of
the urban space, which is to become greener and filled with more air and light, as
well as the demarcation and consistency of the built environment through functional
zoning).
242 Miles,
Urban Utopias..., 37.
243 Manuel, 581.
244 Manuel, 587.
245 Manuel, 581.
246 Manuel, 587.
2.5.2 Utopian Projections After Fourier: The Phalanstery
François Marie Charles Fourier (1772–1837) observed the problematic operation of

his time’s social context and also identified its causes: the fierce and ruthless com-
petition between individuals, the wasting of resources, especially of the workforce,
the perpetuation and the deepening of bad living conditions for the lower classes, as
well as the general crisis situation resulting from the clash between the traditional
and the new orderings. Fourier places himself in opposition to the rational method,
whose principles are considered to be the supreme source of the individual’s cor-
ruption, setting the norms for “how people should be, what they should do, and the
feelings they should have”.247 The result of human nature’s repression could only
be negative. The Fourierist alternative seeks to understand and accept human nature,
along with its flaws, as well as to make happiness available to it through an ideal and
harmonious (built!) environment of functioning: the phalanstery. The individual’s
proper functioning and happiness and even the economic efficiency of the system
are equated. The ordering principle is passion—work becomes pleasant as soon as
it is no longer motivated by pure necessity and when it is in coherence with the
individual’s nature, which does not deviate in this case, because it is not restricted
and forcibly subjected to the patterns of normality. Fourier maintains as well as
redefines the right to property and to the reward system—as the material possession
remains somewhat minimized compared to the possession of freedom to exercise
one’s passions. Hence, human nature is opposed to civilization which, according to
Fourier, is imposed upon the individual through various mechanisms of control and
punishment.
While the social hierarchies of the previous utopian projections were structured
according to the principle of similarity and unity, Fourier’s ordering and the func-
tioning of his hierarchies depended on plurality, complexity, contrast and variety,
diversity being its actual driving engine. Paradoxically, Fourier proposes as an alter-
native to the existing system a similar one, even more strictly regulated. The principle
proposed here, the free unfolding of his passions sets the individual free and “enrich-
es” him or her, so that even the disparities created by the unequal financial reward of
the Fourierist phalanstery become unimportant. As a source of happiness, richness
is—according to Fourier—equivalent to the freedom of expression of individual pas-
sion, while in his contemporary, corrupted “civilized world”, all individuals, nobles
and workers alike, are poor because they do not have the possibility to satisfy these
essential passions.
The final objective of Fourier’s alternative ordering is universal harmony, but also
“the creation of a new social being”,248 possible only within a perfectly controlled
and efficient society. The individual’s freedom is the result of interpersonal associa-
tion and cooperation, of the combination of economic efficiency and the fulfilment
of passions. The pragmatic aspect of the structure proposed by Fourier is directed
at replacing the industrial system, whose deficiencies are severely criticized, with
247 Manuel, 651.

248 Manuel, 660.
a “more efficient form of agricultural production”,249 an industrial-manufacturing

hybrid.
The phalanstery, derived from the word la phalange,250 represents the material-
ization and the actual structure of Fourier’s utopian projection that he will explain
and detail in almost all of his publications. From the very beginning, the phalanstery
is imagined as a set of prescriptions, as a model and as a real-scale experiment
intended to demonstrate the universal applicability of the alternative ordering. The
utopian intention is obvious: the world is imagined as a federation of ‘phalange
nations’, united under the same capital.251 Françoise Choay analyses Fourier’s pro-
jection from the perspective of the urban project, the phalanstery as an ideal city, as
it displaces the traditional concept of the city.252 According to Fourier, the city in its
traditional sense, or the civilized city, is structured according to “a monotonous and
imperfect order, as on a chessboard”,253 best illustrated by the form of new cities. The
spatial structure of the phalanstery, designed to facilitate community interrelations,
condenses the functions of the city so that the Fourierist cell acts as a replacement
of the ‘traditional city’.
The formula is clearly described and defined, extremely detailed, ranging from
its territorial positioning (topography and neighbours) to the ordering, dimensions
and quality of the constructions, and their prescribed use. The ordering principle
(passion and attraction) is also applied at the level of the object—expressed through
architectural elements: the volumes are united through protected galleries (ventilated
and heated according to season), and the spaces of common use (les séristères)
are abundant. Where there is no natural barrier, the building is surrounded by an
enclosure (palisades) in order to protect the community from the outside. In order
to serve the strict social ordering and the combination of typologies proposed by
Fourier, both arbitrariness and monotony have to be avoided in the distribution of
the built objects—faults exemplified by Fourier through his rival’s, Owen’s New
Harmony project. In connection therewith, Fourier also extensively criticizes square
ground plans that “cause disorder in interrelations”.254 For its optimum operation,
the phalanstery should ideally be built from scratch. Its buildings are distributed
symmetrically, according to perpendicular ordering axes. The entire architectural
ensemble is surrounded by an enclosure—on the representation of Le Nouveau
Ordre Industriel, with a double water ditch of irregular shape. The centre of the
249 Miles, Urban Utopias..., 41.

250 Fouries introduces a neologism, by combining ‘le monastère’ (the monastery) and ‘la pha-
lange’. Victor Considerant, Exposition abrégée du système phalanstérien, de Fourier, Paris, Librairie
sociétaire, 2ème éd., 1845, 24, apud. Pierre Mercklé, mars 2006, Le Phalanstère, in Le Site de
l’Association d’etudes fourieristes et des Cahiers Charles Fourier, http://www.charlesfourier.fr/
spip.php?article328#nh2, accessed August 2014.
251 Morris, James M., Kross, Andreea L., The A to Z of Utopianism, no. 36, The Scarecrow Press
Inc., Plymouth, Great Britain, 2009, 108.

252 Choay, L’Urbanisme..., 19.
253 Fourier, Charles, Ciotes Ouvrieres. Des Modifications a introduire dans l’architecture des villes,
1848, 18, gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliotheque Nationale de France, accessed August 2014.

254 Fourier, Le Nouveau monde..., 145.
architectural ensemble is occupied by a square (place de parade) along with a planted

“court of honour”. Both the housing units and the rural ones (bâtiments ruraux) are
on quadrilateral premises, with planted and covered patios at their centre. The build-
ing units should have at least three levels and double tracts, in order to encourage
interrelating. The common areas (les séristères) serve the same objective as meeting
halls further separated into rooms, compartmentalized so as to serve any variation
of individual groupings. The internal ordering of the built objects is determined by
functional zoning, hygienist principles (lighting, noise), the relationships between
the human categories designated by Fourier, and finally the relationship with the out-
side (the caravanserai and the zones designated for relating to outsiders). There are
representative functions concentrated in the centre (the church, the stock exchange,
the areopagus, the opera, the tower of order, the carillon, the telegraph and the postal
pigeons),255 but the sacred is located marginally. Paradoxically, the traditional social
hierarchies are maintained, reiterating the spatial delimitations for the accommoda-
tion of the wealthy classes. The equality of the inhabitants is not generated by the
artificial levelling of incomes, but rather in the form of interpersonal relations.
In respect of the actual construction of his phalansteries, Fourier establishes mate-
rials and architectural expressions of the modest kind. However, conceiving them as
evolutionary, he also prescribes their future reconstruction as “very sumptuous, since
we know from experience that, in the state based on associations (l’état sociétaire),
luxury in architecture as well as in all other matters is the seed of attraction and
consequently a road to enrichment”.256 The detailing of Fourier’s descriptions is
overwhelming. Invoking Newton’s law of universal gravitation, Fourier develops
the mechanism of the perfect community and its architectural formula, a fractal-like
globally multipliable structure, controlled and regulated to the smallest detail of their
functioning and construction.
The heterotopic character of Fourier’s formula is even more prominent, as the
mechanism is deliberately imagined as a model. The urgency (and abnegation) with
which Fourier transmits his message stem from his attempt to set in motion the pro-
cess of realization of his phalanstery and the new order as the next development
stage. The ordering he proposes, although in many respects alternative to the exist-
ing, is essentially defined by its strict standardization. The phalanstery is a condensed
version of the universe, a micro-world—or a critical and idealized reflection of the
actual. The spatial structuring of the phalanstery also shows heterotopic character-
istics: the isolation of the enclave, nevertheless accessible here to curious eyes, in
return for a fee and in the hope of ‘conversion’. The newcomer enters this alterna-
tive space gradually and is placed in an intermediary space of moral quarantine—a
process equivalent to an access ritual. As Mercklé observes, “the phalanstery must

be transparent, impermeable”.257 Yet, even this lack of permeability is a temporary

one, since the quarantined visitor is also a potential proselyte and taxpayer.
Fourier’s phalanstery did not remain at the stage of an imagined utopian projection
and had many realizations, one of them also in Romania (Scăieni, 1835–1836). Other
examples have appeared in France and Russia, as well as in the United States of Amer-
ica, with a mystical-sectarian tinge, between 1820 and 1865.258 In France, there was
the Condé-sur-Vesgre phalanstery to southwest to Paris (1832/3–36), based on the
initiative of Alexandre François Baudet-Dulary259 and of Fourier’s disciples. Other
Fourierist projects built on French initiatives were carried out in Brasil (1841–45)
and in Algeria (1846), both of which failed.260
The Cîteaux phalanstery (1841–46) was founded by Scotsman Arthur Young, on
the territory of a former monastery. The failure of this experiment is paradoxical,
since, of all the initiated Fourierist projects, the existing functional ordering of the
monastic type, on which the phalanstery was superimposed, shared similar functional
and spatial features, such as self-sufficiency, isolation and production flows.
This correspondence between the two types of spaces reveals the ambivalent char-
acter of the phalanstery as well as its negative potential. Although the individual’s
happiness is identified in the freedom of the expression of his passions, the pha-
lanstery turns into a control mechanism due to its panoptic spirit and to its material
and architectural expression. In the case of both models, the individual is constantly
supervised by his own community in a system that is, according to Fourier, posi-
tive and generates unity for the community. Paradoxically, the ordering proposed by
Fourier proves to work in the same manner as the ordering that the author attempts
to replace—that of the ‘civilized world’. According to Fourierism, the individual
(with his passions) is born good (as a result of divine creation), but is perverted by
the punitive and prohibitive regulation of the civilized world. Placing at his disposal
a scientifically determined and thus optimal structure, along with the freedom to
exercise his natural passions, the phalanstery may only lead to the fulfilment of the
individual. Nevertheless, the phalanstery experiments seem to fail precisely due to
this freedom.
257 Mercklé, Pierre, mars 2006, Le Phalanstère, in Le Site de l’Association d’etudes fourieristes et des
Cahiers Charles Fourier, http://www.charlesfourier.fr/spip.php?article328#nh2, accessed August

2014.
258 Morris, Kross, The A to Z of Utopianism, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., Plymouth, Marea Britanie,
2009, 108-9.
259 Desmars, Bernard , Être fouriériste en province. Nicolas Lemoyne, propagandiste du Phalanstère,
Cahiers Charles Fourier, 7/1996, http://www.charlesfourier.fr/spip.php?article 28, accessed August

2014. See also Guarneri, Carl, J., The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-century
America, Cornell University Press, 1994, 23.
260 Guarneri, Carl, J., The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-century America, Cornell
University Press, 1994, 23.

2.5.3 The Industrial Ordering and the Company Town
Following these experiments, the model of the production association continues

its development: between the communist and socialist communities (Owen’s and
Cabet’s model), the Fourierist and the anarchist communities, the religious ones
make their reappearance (the Shakers in 1776, Ephrata—1735, Mormons—1830,
Oneida—1848, Amana 1855, etc.), other secular ones (Owen’s New Harmony
1825–27, the Brook Farm turned Fourierist, 1841, Cabet’s Icaria 1848, the numerous
American phalansteries) and finally the paternalistic structured capitalist commu-
nities. Fourier’s phalanstery stands as the company town’s model: the humanitarian
principle is adjusted to the capitalist formula and becomes paternalistic control.
These company towns are private initiatives: the company owner finances the con-
struction of production areas, housing and facilities (church, public areas, schools,
etc.) and assumes responsibility and surveillance of the employees’ welfare. The
model is extensively applied during the nineteenth century: the mining garden-city
of Le Creusot, owned by Schneider company (1836, France); the town of Mar-
quette of Scrive Frères et Danset company (1846, France, arch. C. Tierce)261 ; the
industrial town attached to the textile factory of Saltaire, owned by the industrial-
ist Titus Salt (1853, Yorkshire, Great Britain); the housing complex (cum facilities
and services) of Mulhouse created by Dollfus-Mieg & Co. (1852, Alsace, France,
arch. Emile Muller); the industrial town of Guebwiller owned by Filatures et Tis-
sages Bourcart et Fils. (1854, Alsace, France); the model town of Crespi, owned by
Crespi textile mill (1869, Lombardy, Italy, arch. Ernesto Pirovano); the model indus-
trial town of Noisiel-sur-Marne owned by Menier company (1870–1900, Paris,
France, arch. Jules Saulnier);262 the town of Bournville,263 owned by Cadbury
company, (1879, Great Britain, architect George H. Gadd), displayed as a “fac-
261 Garner, John, Noisiel-sur-Marne and the Ville Industrielle in France in The Company Town.
Architecture and Society in the Early Industrial Age, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992, 43–73,
47–8.
262 The compound is gradually created and, besides residences (fully equipped), schools are built
as well (providing free education for the employees’ children), a free-access library, restaurants,
cafeterias, various shops, a savings bank and a clinic (free medical assistance for the employees’
families). More details by Garner, J., Noisiel-sur-Marne and the Ville Industrielle in France in The
Company Town. Architecture and Society in the Early Industrial Age, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1992, 43–73.
263 The Cadbury brothers design the ensemble with the declared intention of raising the life standard
in the industrial environment; the town is newly built and it assembles around the industrial area
and its production annexes not only the residential area—with affordable yet high-quality duplex-
es—but other communitarian facilities. The imagined scenario is laxer than its predecessors, as
these residential units and the family units they accommodate, are conceived as autonomous, as
opposed to the communal living formula of Godin’s familistère. The ensemble complies with the
then new hygienist principles of lighting, ventilation and the density; the social facilities promote
education (community centre, school) and sports (playgrounds, football, cricket, swimming pools,
etc.)—suggesting a similar normed and controlled functioning typical of the ideal city model, yet in
a more diffuse form. Trahair, R.C.S., Utopias and Utopians: An Historical Dictionary, Greenwood
Publishing Group, 1999, 45–6.
tory within a garden”,264 influencing and promoting the same principles that would
later become the social hygienist garden-city movement. Cité-Suchard owned by
Suchard Company (1886–1908, Neuchâtel, Switzerland, arch. William Mayor and
Eugène Colomb), the model settlement of Port Sunlight owned by Lever company
(1887, Cheshire, Great Britain), the town of New Earswick, owned by Rowntree
company (1902, Great Britain, arch. Raymond Unwin),265 showcase variants of the
same model. Adams identifies several other European initiatives: Agneta Park com-
plex, near Delft, owned by Nederlandsche Gist & Spiritusfabriek company (1884,
Holland), the garden-city of Gustavsburg (now included in Mainz) owned by MAN
company (Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg), the model town of Ludwigshafen
owned by Badische Anilin-und Soda Fabrik company (Bavaria, Germany) and the
famous example of the Krupp Colonies owned by the Krupp company, (near Essen,
Germany)—266 reflecting the widespread dissemination of the model.
One such example, which remains a proposal, is the Plan for a Model Town
(1849)267 issued by James Silk Buckingham. The schema is familiar: central, sym-
metrical, with a quadrilateral layout and radial and perimetric streets. This layout
is to reflect a social ideal ordering, based on both moral principles, and functional-
utilitarian ones, such as accessibility and hygiene (through its perfectly linear street-
gird, the town is not only ventilated, as it is thus connected to the adjoined ‘rural
area’, but also more rapidly serviced). The layout is hierarchized and segregated —at-
tribute introduced through functional zoning: the central area is reserved for housing
and offices, and the outer perimeter for light industry and manufacturing (relatively
low noise pollutants); the functions deemed more ‘aggressive’ are displaces to the
periphery (chemical industries, factories, forges and slaughterhouses), together with
other space-consuming functions such as the cemetery, public gardens and agricul-
tural lands. The public functions (public baths, museum, university, etc.) are located
in individual isolated ensembles and distributed within the layout, surrounded by
green areas. Another hierarchizing mechanism is revealed by the housing formula,
where the social classes are spatially illustrated through their distancing from the cen-
tre. In a hygienist spirit, the residential function is always doubled by green areas,
commercial areas and interconnected by porticoes. Social hierarchies are innately
expressed in the architecture of the ideal town: each perimeter has a distinct stylistic
‘theming’.268 The very centre, designed in a composite style, harbours the public
institutions essential for the town’s operation. The repetition of the same hierar-
264 “Bournville factory in a garden”, the company motto assumed at the founding the Bournville
complex, https://www.cadbury.co.uk/the-story, accessed in August 2014.
265 Raymond Unwin will also take part in the designing of the new town of Letchworth (1904,
Letchworth Garden-City, Hertfordshire, Great Britain), based on Ebenezer Howard’s utopian plans.
266 Adams, Thomas, Early Urban Planning, vol. 9, Taylor and Francis, 2004, 271.
267 Buckingham, James Silk, Chapter VI: Plan for the Model Town, as Represented in The Accom-
panying Engraving, and Supplementary Sheet, in National Evils and Practical Remedies: With
a Plan for a Model Town, Cambridge Library Collection—British and Irish History, Cambridge
University Press, 2011, 183–196*.
268 From the periphery towards the centre each ‘ring’ or perimeter is homogenously designed in a
specific style: the so-called Gothic order deemed as ‘barbaric’ or vulgar at the time is reserved for the
chy on a functional, a social and an aesthetic level, is reminding of the fractal-like

ordering previous ideal city schemas. This deliberate hierarchization, just like in the
Renaissance model, is visible through the occupation of the layout’s geometrical
centre by the ordering power or principle, in this case technology—represented by
an octagonal tower serving as the electric lighting source for the entire town. The
proposal conjures the ‘scientific’ argument: the demographics and its structuring,
hygiene and accessibility—but the layout’s reiteration remains a deeply segregation-
ist one. The architecture (triumphal arches, the successive enclosures, the stylistic
theming, etc.) communicates and enforces a spatial cum social hierarchization and
segregation, expressing a meagrely dissimulated intention of control; the underly-
ing ideal is the production’s efficiency, to which all other aspects of everyday life
are subordinated. The spatial ordering and the ordering of the built fabric become,
just like in the Renaissance model, a tool designed for the shaping of the individual
and society. Unlike other similar models contemporary to Buckingham’s, his Model
Town presupposes an ‘inert’ society that, once distributed within the schema, works
as a closed circuit, ad infinitum, much like an industrial inanimate mechanism. The
care for the individual’s happiness and fulfilment meticulously detailed in Fourier’s
schema, seem to be missing here. For Buckingham, the strict norming aims for an effi-
cient production, translating into societal ordering and dependant on a strict spatial
and social hierarchization, ousting the interest in individual’s and even the group’s
happiness. However, I argue that this subjective, ‘soft’ vector is simply downgraded,
subordinated to the utilitarian coordinates: a hygienic medium, an orderly society
furnished with the more than the basic essential facilities will automatically produce
a happy fulfilled individual, in an ideal mutually beneficial relationship.
Essentially, Buckingham’s layout supports and reaffirms the existing official
ordering (just as Sforzinda did). Although the schema is presented as an improved
alternative, it does not criticize nor does it require a radical break with the existing. In
its more condensed and orderly depiction of the existing social ordering, the formula
actually expresses one of the heterotopian principles: the imagined town reveals itself
as “a space of illusion that exposes all real space, all the emplacements in the interior
of which human life is enclosed and partitioned, as even more illusory”.269 Although
motivated by a seemingly positive intention (an ideal functioning of society), the
very essentialization as a simplified idealized schema and its proposed refashioning
as a detailed built mechanism reveal its negative potential.
Another notable example, positioned between the company town and the pha-
lanstery, is Jean-Baptiste André Godin’s (1817–1888) familistère270 of Guise
(France)—a cooperative association created in 1856 and, unlike other such exper-
iments, surviving until 1968, when it becomes a classic capitalist company. The
outermost perimeter, followed by the classical Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and finally the Composite
orders.
269 Foucault, M., Of Other…, 21.
270 The newly coined term is formed based on Fourier’s term of “phalanstery“ and it is recorded in
1860 in Jean-Baptiste André Godin’s letters to his son. Panni, Frédéric, Jean-Baptiste André Godin,
Dictionnaire biographique du fouriérisme, published in February 2014, http://www.charlesfourier.
fr/spip.php?article1287, accessed in August 2014.
collective ensemble is intended to be an addition to the already existing factory,

aiming to provide better housing and facilities for the company employees. Godin’s
familistère successfully combines the principles of the Fourierist phalanstery and
sets the model the company town. The project assumed by Godin is a small-scale271
experimental one, emerging from the direct experience in production, from a solid
career as an industrialist and from the previous failure of another more exotic Fouri-
erist project.272 As Panni observes, Godin diligently and tenaciously undertakes the
multiple roles required by the project (its architect, engineer and urban planner)
and, “for 30 years he creatively organizes the specific social material orderings [of
the Social Palace]—the architectural, the domestic and the economic one”.273 The
ensemble—encompassing three large collective housing units (1865, the last one in
1879)—is meant for accommodating 1300–1500 company workers and employees.
The familistère abandons the Fourierist selection which conditioned the access (the
Fourierist passional classifications). As its predecessors, the proposed layout reprises
the principle of self-sufficiency and the comprehensive structuring. The project is a
success; the ensemble develops and gradually receives additional facilities,274 target-
ing the improvement of life standard with a special focus on education (free, mixed
and mandatory) and on hygiene. Turned into a multifunctional device, the familistère
works autonomously and unitary, and answers the individual’s needs in every respect
and thus retaining him on the premises of the ensemble. The numerous functions and
activities provided give the company’s employees a superior life standard compared
to the then-contemporary proletarian one. Despite replacing the typical and coveted
industrial housing standard (isolated house) with collective housing, the familistère’s
layout complements through the multiple facilities. Despite the panoptic nature of
the layout and the schema, significantly emphasized in the case of the familistère
compared to its Fourierist model, the community functions within the prescribed
parameters even after Godin’s death.275 The success of the formula can be attributed
271 Godin reiterates a Fourierist principle in the development of his familistère—the construction
and the operation of an initial ‘trial’ phalanstery-unit before implementing a full-scale phalanstery.
272 The experiment of La Reunion phalanstery, in Dallas, Texas, USA, initiated in 1885 by Victor
Considerant, one of Fourier’s disciples.

273 Panni, Frédéric, Jean-Baptiste André Godin, original quote: “L’industriel n’est pas seulement le
promoteur du Familistère, il s’en fait l’urbaniste, l’ingénieur et l’architecte. Il conçoit l’organisation

générale du « Palais social » et pendant trente ans, il met au point avec inventivité ses dispositions
matérielles particulières, architecturales, domestiques, économiques et sociales.” In Dictionnaire
biographique du fouriérisme, published in February 2014, http://www.charlesfourier.fr/spip.php?
article1287 accessed in August 2014.
274 The new facilities are aimed at improving the quality of life of the company’s employee as well
as retaining him and his income within the ensemble; the mix of facilities (a pharmacy, a nursery, a
preschool, a school, a library, a theatre, a laundry and a swimming pool—the latter positioned right
between the production and the housing areas, thus anticipating the modern hygienist functional
zoning) forms an arrangement which is not only hygienist, in the sense of ensuring an improved
working and habitational medium, but also educational, promoting a so-called hygiene of the mind
through physical activity, education and culture.
275 Initially, the schema has a classical paternalist basis, and the ensemble’s association had Godin
as its main decisional factor and shareholder; however, his declared intention and project is to
to its intended flexibility: it is designed to evolve into a self-governing structure, as the

decisional power gradually passes to the ‘comités de gestion domestique et sociale’;
its power relations are ‘softer’—the individual is not simply coerced into complying,
he is encouraged, recompensed and gradually convinced to adopt and respect the
regulations; beyond the architectural aspect, the ordering and the new community
is created by means of doctrinal texts (Godin’s conferences) and practices aimed at
developing the sense of community.276
In its attempt to partially apply the Fourierist model, the familistère may be con-
sidered a reification and a materialization of a utopian projection and, therefore, het-
erotopian. Whereas Fourier’s schema was universal in its intent, Godin’s experiment
remains exactly that, a small-scale and condensed laboratory displaying the hallmark
of pragmatism. The initial theoretical model is critically processed and adjusted to
the actual needs of industrial production and the community, even if Godin will aspire
for the recognition of its experiment as a phalanstery. Some of Fourier’s theoretical
and more idealistic principles (le travail attrayant, les groupes et séries du système
passionnel) are completely erased in Godin’s formula; this imperfect of flawed mate-
rialization of the ideal is deliberate, assumed by Godin in the light of the previous
experiments and his own personal convictions.277 However, the familistère of Guise
is the most successful in achieving an alternative ordering, among all of the other ini-
tiatives of the time. The hygienist theories, effectively implemented by Godin from
the project’s inception, succeed to make their way into the official ordering only
towards the end of the nineteenth century and effectively become a standard only
by the middle of the twentieth century. This laboratory of modernity, an essentially
heterotopian body of utopian descent, has fulfilled its purpose.
The self-sufficiency of the ensemble, its assumed role as an improved reflec-
tion of the dominant, ‘outside society’, its alternative functioning according to own
rhythms and flows, the sometimes contradictory juxtaposition of certain functions,
unattempted at the time, the isolation and the conditional access—are all charac-
teristics of a heterotopic nature. The ensemble’s listing as a heritage monument278
retraces and enhances its inherited heterotopian profile.
No other similar attempt will match Godin’s familistère. Nevertheless, when
observing the lists, hierarchies, hierarchic combinations and the almost obsessive-
transfer the property rights and the responsibility to the employee association, thus granting them a
self-governing power—essentially illustrating a dynamic variant of the paternalistic model. More in
Panni, Frédéric, Jean-Baptiste André Godin, Dictionnaire biographique du fouriérisme, published
in February 2014, http://www.charlesfourier.fr/spip.php?article1287 accessed in August 2014.
276 “le développement durable d’une communauté solidaire”, Panni, Frédéric, Jean-Baptiste André
Godin…,
277 Godin attributes the failure of other phalansteries to the unwillingness to work of the Fourierist
enthusiasts. Panni, Frédéric, Jean-Baptiste André Godin…,

278 The ensemble is partially classified in 1991, under the name of Cité ouvrière dite Familistère
Godin, Picardie/Aisne/Guise/France, address: rue André-Godin (rue Sadi-Carnot, allée des

Peupliers), author: Calland Victor (architect), the second half of the nineteenth-century, ref-
erence code: IA02000890, https://inventaire.hautsdefrance.fr/dossier/ancienne-cite-ouvriere-dite-
familistere-godin/4da6d304-5831-42fa-908f-9661b81b486a, accessed in July 2014.
compulsive calculations dominating and supporting Fourier’s theory, and when con-
sidering its materialized version, the familistère—a set of urban and functional princi-
ples can be identified: the hygienics of housing and work areas—proper illumination,
ventilation and protective green areas, the decongestion of housing and of the living
space, functional zoning according to logic flows (as those of production spaces),
the accessible circulation grid, etc. All these principles emanate from a prevalent
critical stance towards the increasingly industrialized city. They are championed,
in the formula of the standardized ‘replicable’ model layout and with quite similar
physiognomies, by Owen, Considérant, Cabet, Proudhon, Richardson, Godin, Verne
and Wells, who approach it in more or less detailed proposals. Other two progres-
sive utopian projections worth mentioning belong to Edward Bellamy (1850–1898),
Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888) and to William Dean Howells (1837–1920)
A Traveler from Altruria (1892–3), the latter a ‘mirrored’ reply to Bellamy’s utopia.
If Looking Backward doesn’t offer a replicable model in the sense the previous
utopian projections do, and is rather reminiscent of More’s Utopia, it does advance
a descriptive ideal which will engender consistent answers in both of the oppos-
ing ‘factions’ the culturalist one and the progressive one. Bellamy defines the ideal
or “Perfection [,] as the negative of present reality, the reverse of what he saw in
the lonely crowd of Boston in the 1880s”279 ; this inverted reflection takes the form
of a quintessentially urban society, “a subtly scaled meritocracy, in a setting that
combines American competitiveness with a welfare society of relative equality in
goods and services”280 ; reprising a known theme, the ideal is read as efficiency, a
“rational efficiency and lack of waste”281 in Bellamy’s case and efficiency through
mechanization—the leitmotif of the progressive approach. Moving onward, How-
ells’ projection282 is located in an intermediate, paradoxical position, between the
progressive and the culturalist models. The mechanism employed is a familiar, sim-
ilar to the one used by More, Campanella, Filarete and others: the “island” motif,
or the different distant world, whose existence (and particular ordering) unfolds in
parallel to reality. Howell’s isolated Altruria is “a suburban, even a rural utopia”,283
constructed through an absolute, ‘correct application’ of the epoch’s ideals (democ-
racy, equality, commonwealth, etc.)—thus providing a positive ‘what if’ reflection of
the nineteenth-century American society. The utopic projection combines a hybrid
socialist and meritocratic discourse and a selective, paradoxical passeism, with a
rather subdued rational overlay.284 The discrepancy aspect of this projection, consid-

280 Manuel, Manuel, 763.
281 Manuel, Manuel, 764.
282 William Dean Howells, A Traveler from Altruria.
283 Clayes, G., Sargent, L., T., The Utopia Reader…, 301.
284 “the sweet sense of neighborhood, of brotherhood, which blessed the golden age of the first
Christian republic is ours again. Every year the people of each Region meet one another on Evolution
day, in the Regionic capital; once in four years, they all visit the national capital. There is no danger
of the decay of patriotism among us; our country is our mother.”; on science: “we had completed
the round of your [the outsiders] inventions and discoveries […]; and we have since disused most
of them as idle and unfit. But we profit, now and then, by the advances you make in science, for we
ered in the epoch’s context, is precisely the superimposition of the rural ideal with
the technological ideal (the machine-city), which are ‘miraculously’ coexistent.285
Furthermore, the attitude towards the ‘old’ present in Altruria is distinctive: corrupt,
malignant and a source of human suffering, the old cities are almost entirely dis-
mantled, erased from the surface of the earth286 ; some isolated fragments of the ‘old
order’ are partially preserved to act as an example and a warning.287 Lacking a more
concrete schema of model, both of these utopian texts will simply become part of a
diffuse theoretical foundation as semi-veiled utopian descriptions and will find their
materialization only by proxy.
A considerable part of the ideal orderings emerging during this epoch turn to
technology as the solution to contemporary issues, an approach defined by Choay as
the progressive model, given its optimistic future-oriented thinking and its ingrained
concept of progress.288 The self-definitions of these projections reveal their utopian
profile: the proposed ‘world’ or community are no longer detached or abstract “the-
oretical” ideals or intangible Edens; they become attainable projects, with ample
descriptions and exact accounts of the essential steps for the materialization of the
proposed alternative; they are advanced as projections of a future that must be built,
as in Godin’s case. The ideal community can be rationally and scientifically built,
just as its imperfections can be mediated and eventually neutralized. The individual
and the society can be reinvented by combining the technological progress (func-
tional systematization and structuring of the built form) with the new moral, social
and economic principles (which would also be suggested and instituted through the
architectural expression). The utopian connotation is gradually diluted: what was
once imagined as an accessible albeit distant future is now replaced by an achiev-
able, objectified goal. Simultaneously to this evolution, the utopian configuration
acquires a negative reading and is accused of being a mere refuge, a non-engaging,
indifferent and purely contemplative attitude towards a reality that calls for action.
Among the classic utopian philosophers, Robert Owen’s (1771–1858) approach
has the lightest utopian encoding and is the most pragmatic one—similar to Godin’s
in both practice and spirit. His interest in the individual and society and his belief
that the environment is the main influence of the human character motivate the New
are passionately devoted to the study of the natural laws, open or occult, under which all men have
their being.” Howells, W.D., A Traveler from Altruria, 301–311, in eds. Clayes, G., Sargent, L., T.,
The Utopia Reader…, New York University Press, 1999, 305–306.
285 “but machinery works so much more thoroughly and beautifully, that we have in great measure
retained it. Only, the machines that were once the workman’s enemies and masters are now their
friends and servants; and if any man chooses to work alone with his own hands, the state will buy
what he makes at the same price that it sells the wares made collectively. This secures every right
of individuality”. Howells, W.D., A Traveler…, 306.
286 Howells, W.D., A Traveler from Altruria, 301–311, in eds. Clayes, G., Sargent, L., T., The Utopia
Reader…, New York University Press, 1999, 303.

287 “A part of one of the less malarial of the old cities, however, is maintained by the commonwealth
in the form of its prosperity, and is studied by antiquarians for the instruction, and by moralists for
the admonition it affords.” Howells, W.D., A Traveler…,303.
288 Choay, L’Urbanisme…, 16.
Lanark experiment (Lanarkshire, Scotland, 1800)—later referred to by Owen him-

self as “the most important experiment for the happiness of the human race that had
yet been instituted at any time in any part of the world”.289 Its reception in the epoch
is similarly characterized, as Davidson observes: “New Lanark illuminated the dark-
ness of the Industrial Revolution—as the very antithesis of ‘dark Satanic mills’”.290
He improves the technical, hygienic, moral and economic conditions of the “work-
ing community already in existence”291 of New Lanark (since 1785). Initially, Owen
uses the existing built fabric as a laboratory for testing his theories; in addition to the
updated and extended production spaces and the already existing housing, he designs
and builds new specialized units—such as the utopian titled Institution for the For-
mation of Character (1815–6) and the School for children (reiterating the structuring
of the familistère’s school). A humanitarian idealism replaces the religious or moral
encoding. Similarly to Godin’s success, in 25 years, Owen’s alternative ordering
becomes a model industrial community, acknowledged worldwide, with a system
quite similar to Fourier’s project in two main aspects: the strictly controlled hierar-
chy and the system’s capacity to “process” the individual and to concurrently render
it productive and happy. However, for Owen, the human character is a formable
entity and not a locked, divinely defined cipher—a relationship that is more radi-
cally expressed in the proposed built formula, which inevitably becomes a tool for
shaping the individual. As Davidson and Arnold observe, Owen’s view of society is
“relatively mechanistic”—as “a machine which could be altered and adjusted. Thus
did ‘social engineering’ become an especially purposeful activity and a systematic
way of creating Owen’s ‘New Moral World’”,292 as well as his ideal new rational
individual.
After his experience with New Lanark, Owen designs his “first full-fledged utopian
plan”,293 in the Report to the Committee for the Relief of the Manufacturing Poor
(1817); a response to a context of crisis, the ideal community imagined is self-
sufficient—autonomous—and is located in non-corrupt territories—isolated. Its par-
ticipants are to be the unadaptables of his then-contemporary society: the “victims
of technological advances and prey to vice and misery”294 ; the unemployed would
thus be rehabilitated and reintegrated into society. The urban solution proposed for
this community of “unity and mutual co-operation”295 is an industrial-agricultural
289 Claeys,Gregory, ed., Selected Works of Robert Owen, London, 1993, vol. 4, p. 112., apud.
Davidson, Lorna and Arnold, Jim, The Great Experiment: New Lanark from Robert Owen to World
Heritage Site, in Williams, Chris and Thompson, Noel, eds., University of Wales Press, Cardiff,
2011, 55–70, 56.
290 Davidson, Lorna and Arnold, Jim, The Great Experiment: New Lanark from…, 56.
291 Manuel, 679.
292 Davidson, Lorna and Arnold, Jim, The Great Experiment: New Lanark from Robert Owen to
World Heritage Site, in Williams, Chris and Thompson, Noel, eds., University of Wales Press,
Cardiff, 2011, 55–70, 64.
293 Manuel, 679.
294 Idem.
295 Owen, R., Appendix 1, Report to the Committee of the Association for the Relief of the Manufac-
turing and Labouring Poor, referred to the Committee of the House of Commons on the Poor Laws,
settlement for 1200 individuals, with a quadrilateral layout and an orthogonal street
network. The social housing and the other facilities are arranged along the perimeter.
The corners of the square layout are unoccupied, and the uniform architecture is
interrupted in the central points of the sides by massive buildings, either representa-
tive or of public use. The exterior of this layout is surrounded by a green belt. A third
perimeter, enclosed within a protective green area, holds the pollutant production
spaces. Just as Fourier did, Owen imagines a progressive development and expan-
sion of this model layout, and its integration into a wider national, if not universal,
network of similar nuclei. With the same Fourierist resolve, he is convinced that,
once demonstrated, the efficiency of his proposal will assure the general embracing
of the schema.296
This utopian projection is the basis for a series of community experiments—settle-
ments of unity and cooperation—created by Owen or under his aegis. The community
of Orbiston (Scotland, 1825–8), an Owenite experiment without his direct involve-
ment, applies almost identically the proposed layout, the functional organization and
the operation principles.297 In 1825, the New Harmony experiment (Indiana, USA)
starts with an already present Rappite community298 ; the organization of this colony,
applying Owen’s model described in Report… is done by the architect Stedman
Whitwell. The layout of the New Harmony settlement has many similarities with
the panopticon,299 as Miles also notices,300 especially due to the central positioning
of the authority/monitoring instances. Bentham publishes his Panopticon model in
1787–1791, preceding Owen’s initiatives and, maybe not entirely paradoxically, he
becomes a shareholder and supporter of the New Lanark project (initiated in 1800).301
Despite its different, non-detentional function, the New Lanark experiment proves
most clearly and efficiently the panoptic principles: the functioning regulations, aim-
ing at abolishing poverty and improving the employees’ conditions, are implemented
through a very strict and hierarchized surveillance system (connecting the individ-
ual’s workstation directly to Owen’s office, with a minimum of intermediaries) and
March, 1817, 138–141, in The Life of Robert Owen, Vol. 1, ed. Wilson, 1858, original copy from
Harvard University, scanned: 8 March 2008, via Google Books, http://books.google.com/books?
id=pLQWAAAAYAAJ, accessed in August 2014.
296 Owen, R., Report to the Committee…
297 Donnachie, Ian, Orbiston: The First British Owenite Community 1825–28, Spaces of Utopia:
An Electronic Journal, 2/2006, <http://ler.letras.up.pt> ISSN 1646–4729, accessed in August 2014.

298 Father Johann Georg Rapp (1757–1847), an American religious leader of German origin, founds
the Rappite sect (Harmonists) and, based on the same community cooperation principle, they set up
the Equality Community in Harmony, Pennsylvania (1805), and Harmonie, South Indiana (1814),
later acquired by Owen (in 1825). http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/491531/George-
Rapp, accessed in August 2014.
299 The Panopticon, a circular prison model project, is created by Jeremy Bentham as a proposal
in the social reform project of the eighteenth century; deriving from it is panopticism, defined as
a theory of prison management and surveillance, and an essential characteristic of the nineteenth-
century detention system. Foucault examines and popularizes the term in his history of the prison,
Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison (1975).
300 Miles, M., Urban Utopias…, 49.
301 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/436254/Robert-Owen, accessed in August 2014.
through a punitive system (a ‘three offences’ expelling rule). The schema employs
a punitive system despite condemning its generalized use by the ‘outside’ dominant
ordering. In Godin’s schema, the built layout displays a self-management and a self-
monitoring system, more so than the accompanying narrative. The community itself
is the main ordering organism, monitored and monitoring at the same time, and the
paternalist intent ends with the creation of the ideal environment, as demonstrated by
Godin’s transfer of the familistère in its community’s responsibility. Owen’s layout
reflects an acute paternalism, although more temperate in terms of its discourse. The
Owenite formula is essentially panoptic through its layout and intention, maintaining
the division between the authority figures and the ‘system-processed’ subordinate
community. The surveillance conditions the strict order and guarantees the success
of the formula—namely the moral recovery of the ‘victims’ of industrialization, but
also the investor’s economic profit; paradoxically enough, and even in a theoretical
universalization of the Owenite model, this investor remains in an undefined and non-
localized exterior, leniently monitoring the system’s functioning. The panopticism
of the Owenite ‘machine’ is deliberate, the very condition of its operation. Compar-
atively, the schema of the familistère formula is almost coincidentally panoptic.
Especially due to their experimental space constitution, all of these models and
laboratories for new social orderings,302 communicate their projections via particular
typologies of the built form which share common features with a particular, albeit
not new, typology: the monastic space. The main shared coordinate of these pro-
jections is their isolation and their separation from the existing dominant ordering.
The connection to the ‘outside’ is however not entirely severed. Then, similar to the
monastic space, their operation depends on their relative autonomy and material self-
sufficiency; their internal hierarchy and strictly determined flows—best reflected in
the built form. Their isolation is counterbalanced by a partial and rigorously con-
trolled permeability303 ; and finally, the paradoxical juxtaposition of equality and
hierarchy among its members. Linked with the latter, and especially via the net-
work of power relations, the schema—either monastic or utopian—is revealed as a
space of illusion further reflecting the exterior’s condition. In terms of the built form
and its organization, the following aspects are indisputable: the physical isolation
(morphology of the selected site, the external enceintes and the enclave-like layout
of the ensembles, the controlled access), the rigorous interior ordering (regulated,
grid-like disposition of volumes, symmetry, axiality, etc.), the functional zoning and
the multifunctionality of the ensembles. These coordinates—among others, such as
the dystopian potential—support the reading of these spaces as heterotopias.
302 Laboratories of the new social orderings, laboratories of modernity—or laboratories for testing
alternatives to a dominant ordering—all define a concept coined by Kevin Hetherington in The
Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (1997, republished Taylor & Francis,
Nov 1).
303 Almost all devise a “quarantine” space, meant for the curious potential recruit or for those
who take a scientific interest in studying the utopian mechanism—also potential proselytes and
‘disseminators’. Such spaces are present in Fourier’s and Owen’s formulas, and it is in fact a
variation of the monasteries’ separate visitor areas.
Pastoralism—the aesthetic idealization of the campestral—and the re-evaluation

of the rural and the natural (and implicitly of the past and its materializations), the
refocusing on the individual, alienated and ‘homogenized’ through industrialization,
combined with the acknowledgement of the rift produced by industrialization—all
lead to the crystallization of the culturalist model. This position, although preceding
and coexisting with the industrialization processes, is acutely intensified by the crisis
of massive industrialization, consequently becoming a model. Examining the pro-
gressive development of the heritage consciousness, one can easily observe that the
culturalist model is but a consequence of a continuous red thread. Choay nominates
William Morris (1834–1896) and John Ruskin (1819–1900) as the main repre-
sentatives of the culturalist perspective, even though the latter does not ‘produce’ a
utopian text akin to More’s formula or to that of his contemporary, Morris.
Considered a socialist utopian, Morris depicts in his News from Nowhere (Or an
Epoch of Rest) (1891) an ideal utopian society (Nowhere) of the twenty-first century,
in the same topos of London yet radically different than his then-contemporary
Victorian version. He employs the now-familiar trope of the traveller discovering
the perfect society; however, in this case, the distancing between the existing and
the ideal is no longer expressed in terms of space (the remote island motif), but in
terms of time: William Guest, the main character, is miraculously projected in time,
two centuries ahead, to witness and describe in detail the ideal social ordering, in
the hope of its materialization.304 The temporal displacement is used as a device
through which utopia becomes accessible, although at first glance it might be read
as a purely fictitious projection. Due to the reader’s familiarity with the location,
the utopian ideal becomes all the more believable and achievable—simply a matter
of time and determination. The alternative ordering reiterates recognizable themes,
as it defines itself through a “common ownership and democratic control of the
means of production, [and] this utopia lacks money, classes, governmental structures,
congestion, poverty, crime, and industrial pollution.”.305 Although idealizing the
mediaeval society—in terms of organization, production (including the architectural
production), interrelations and especially in terms of spirituality—Morris’ utopia
does not exclude technology. The projection is marked by nostalgia, as it is clearly
reflected in the image of the ideal production (mediaeval-manufacture), motivated by
the pleasure of creating an object not out of necessity. The quantity ideal characteristic
of the progressive model is replaced by a quality ideal; this principle reflects Morris’
beliefs, which will later become the foundation of the Arts and Crafts movement.
The imagined ideal Middle Age—seen as an era of stability, of spiritual freedom,
of an organic connection between environment and individual—also reflects onto
the built form. The organicity lost by the industrialized city can only be recovered
through the restoration of a ‘mediaeval’ ordering; the proposed ‘solution’ is partly
based on Saint-Simonianism—and the motto each according to his capacity—and
partly on Fourierism—from which it assumes the pursuing one’s individual fulfilment
304 Morris, News From Nowhere, or An Epoch of Rest, Being some chapters from a Utopian Romance,
new edition, Longmans, Green and Co., Fifth Ave. New York, London, Bombay, 1901, 278.
305 Segal,
H.P., Utopias…, 59.
and happiness. Similar to his predecessors Morris’ identifies work, albeit in the form
of craft, as the sole medium through which the individual may obtain happiness.
The architectural ideal is defined through various coordinates: the (modern prin-
ciple of) correspondence of the function to the architectural expression, the style
and decoration unity, the manufactured character, hierarchization through architec-
tural expression (simplicity for everyday buildings, sumptuousness for representative
ones), etc. Morris expands his projection even further and describes the architecture
of the ideal city of the future: a mixture of a flamboyant European Gothic style,
Saracen and Byzantine architecture. The ideal—be it built-architectural, social, or
moral—is depicted in News… by constant relation and comparing to its Victorian
opposite. The inherited fragments of the ‘imagined-obsolete’ Victorian ordering are
either preserved as relics, mementos of the past, either tolerated due to their occa-
sional positive characteristics. Moreover, the preserved architecture is either pre-
industrial mediaeval (in cities such as Oxford, seen as closer to Morris’ ideal), either
transformed industrial buildings, re-functionalized and unburdened of their polluting
technology. According to Mannheim theory, this utopian projection has an interme-
diate character, positioned between the absolute and the relative utopia. The News
from Nowhere’s ideal has a double potential to be achieved. Morris starts of by
describing the essential phases and the bloody schism from the existing dominant
ordering, possible only by means of a revolution; afterwards, since the coordinates of
the ideal—the mediaeval ordering—are already known, it must simply be recovered,
rediscovered and not invented anew. On the other hand, the sheer dimension and the
prerequisites of Morris’ imagined projection cause it to “stubbornly resist realiza-
tion”.306 However, the temporal distancing, the chosen topos and the detailed cata-
loguing of the necessary steps for achieving this alternative ordering counterweigh its
deep-rooted impossibility of its fulfilment. Neither similar to More’s island of King
Utopus, nor to Buckingham’s grid-like town network, this universal-scaled utopian
projection essentially lies within the individual’s power—if given enough time and
determination. Another characteristic of Morris’ utopia is the double encoding: the
imagined universe is simultaneously a projection in the future and a projection in
the past—simultaneously utopia and uchronia. This double encoding conveys and
essentially demonstrates Morris’ credo: the recovery of the past’ formulas (material,
social, relational, etc.) is not only possible but acutely necessary, as the only means
to materialize the ideal society.
If for the progressive model, the built object is a ‘fabricable’ and replicable
machine/tool, serving the purpose of processing or shaping the individual, exte-
rior to and independently of it, and essentially conveying (re)formative intention
of an ordering power (the company, the industrialist or Fourier’s philosopher)—its
society-shaping function is also perpetuated by the culturalist model. Nevertheless, in
Morris’ projection, the built object additionally becomes an expression of the individ-
ual’s identity, a means of conveying his creative instinct and mediating his happiness
and fulfilment.307 By attributing the built object to the community/individual, Morris

307 Manuel, 770.
mutates the classical utopian schema and its power interrelations. The architecture
is created by and for the community,308 and since it is created through a “communal
effort, it has the potential to unify art and society”.309 The aesthetics of the built object
and natural context binomial pairing plays a central part in this culturalist schema;
the individual is forged through aesthetics, and as Manuel observes, similarly to and
with the same intensity as the in Renaissance model.
The organic character of the mediaeval built fabric is idealized by both Morris
and Ruskin. Even though Morris does not propose nor ‘design’ an ideal city per se, a
typology or a fixed algorithm in his News from Nowhere, the entire text is an appeal
to revive the obsolete mediaeval order—even if idealized and distorted, yet always
in opposition to the dysfunctional Victorian order of his time.
2.5.4 The Ruskinian Utopia: Art and Moral
Ruskin is not typically mentioned as a representative of the utopian thinking, com-

monly associated with architecture, restoration and conservation theory. A critic of
his contemporary Victorian era, Ruskin debates the same key themes attached to the
industrialization process. Although he does not put forward a preservation theory in
itself, Ruskin has a strong impact on the field, initiating the “anti-restoration” move-
ment. In the epoch’s interpretation, restoration was equalled to a deeply subjective
reconstruction, a ‘recovery’ of an ideal state, even though imaginary, of the historic
object. One of the typical practices attached to this approach was the removal of
so-called parasite attachments, in order to achieve stylistic uniformity and an ideal
‘completed’ state, according to the nineteenth-century esthetical standards. This type
of restoration is in fact—and according to Ruskin—a destruction of the historical
authenticity, hidden behind the coveted completion of the built object’ so-called
real potential. Linked to the authenticity coordinate, the transmission the object in
time has, in Ruskin’s opinion a documentary value and, above all and paying tribute
to his paradigm—an aesthetic value. The temporal coordinate, the aesthetic value
(beauty), authenticity and the spiritual encoding (creation of God) become equiva-
lent and interdependent. For Ruskin, the object’s quality of being “weathered through
time”—310 essentially a degradation of the original material substance—contributes
to its authenticity and beauty, and signals its appurtenance to the past. Therefore,
preserving the object’s authenticity is imperative, since it represents “a symbolic
system: a closed, dynamic field of meaning in which any part signifies the whole,
and the character of the work expresses the character of the producer.”311 In other
308 Choay, Françoise. L’urbanisme, utopies et réalités. Une anthologie. Paris, Editions du Seuil,
1965, 24.
309 Coleman, 78.
310 Jokilehto, Jukka, A History of Architectural Conservation, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2002, 175.
311 Duncan, Ian, Reactionary Desire: Roskin and the Work of Fiction, in Ruskin and Modernism,
Giovanni Cianci, Peter Nicholls, 67–81, Palgrave, 2001, 72.

words, the creator (and Ruskin most likely envisioned the mediaeval craftsman)
organically inscribed within his creation his own identity, moulded by a genius loci
and a genius temporis—reflections of the context’s coordinates (political, economic,
moral, societal, etc.).312
Similar to other utopian projections, Ruskin’s utopian vision is based on a criticism
of his then-contemporary society’s status quo. However, his utopian projection does
not take the formula of a classic utopian text—it rather permeates all of his works.
In Unto This Last (1860), Ruskin directly addresses social issues or the corruption
of the industrial capitalism, offering as solution the formula of the social assistential
state, yet partially preserving the existing ordering of the epoch, the non-equalitarian
and non-democratic Victorian social stratification. Paradoxically, the ideal alterna-
tive ordering envisioned by Ruskin is strongly romanticized and mediaeval-organic
in character even if the process of its materialization is designed as normed and
highly regulated, even disciplinary. Only “under Government [’s] discipline”313 the
moulding of the individual even his happiness is to be achieved, by catering to his
basic necessities and through his useful integration in society. Ruskin’s proposed
ordering falls along the same lines as the utopian thinking of his epoch; textually, he
positions himself in opposition to the dominant official ordering, then at its highpoint
as Cockram notes, not only in terms of his political economy principles, but also in
terms of the generally accepted values.314 Ruskin includes “a biblical metaphor of
communal welfare into the philosophy of laissez-faire individualism, with startling
results. He seriously questioned the nineteenth-century liberal interpretation of eco-
nomics by substituting a human ethics for a monetary goal”.315 What Ruskin is thus
trying to recover is “the symbiotic relationship between work, culture and capital-
ism”,316 through “a form of post capitalist organicity, which rejected both profit and
interest”317 ; consequently, he resorts to the organic formula of an (idealized) past,
aiming to initiate a moral revival. Ruskin’s initial starting point is art and architecture.
While identifying in the Gothic style “the embodiment and expression of a system
of values, based on Christianity, but with significance for the whole of mankind”,
broadly symbolizing “cooperation and humanity”,318 Ruskin equals art to morals.
And a society without morals—as the industrial one inherently is—is automatically
unable to produce art, condemned to an ineluctable moral degradation. According
to Ruskin, the recovery of the art production system of the Middle Ages is—more
than the recovery of the aesthetic paradigm—the solution to the industrial society’s
moral crisis. With Unto This Last, Ruskin ceases to seeking human salvation through
art and suggests an “alternative set of values, derived from Christian principles, but
312 Duncan,I., Reactionary…, 72.

313 Ruskin,Unto…, 15.
314 Cockram, C., Gill, Ruskin and Social Reform. Ethics and Economics in the Victorian Age,
I.B.Tauris& Co. Ltd., London, 2007, 41.

315 Cockram, Ruskin and..., 41.
316 Cockram, Ruskin and…, 31.
devoid of evangelical hypocrisy, which were to be the salvation of a sick capitalist

society.”319 Although deemed a “unworkable economic utopia” when published,320
Unto This Last becomes the blueprint for the economic operation of the Ruskinian
utopia.
The second critical publication is the monthly series Fors Clavigera (1871–84),
continuing on the same general direction. Directly dedicated to the working class, it
reinforces the same critical perspective against the amoral industrialized society and
its flaws (alienation of the individual, poverty, pollution, etc.); all of these issues pre-
dominantly related to industrialization acquire in Ruskin’s narrative a strong moral
encoding. The series depicts in a more concentrated manner Ruskin’s beliefs focus-
ing on morality, nature, work and production, but most especially art, adding to
the more pragmatic aspect of the Ruskinian utopic schema. The materialization
of his utopian perspective will be The Guild of St. George (1871–1878)—“small
community which, in return for spiritually rewarding labour, would enjoy fixed
rents and good working conditions”321 ; just like the previous materialized utopias
and experimental utopian communities, Ruskin’s Guild was also envisioned as an
‘model’ that, once applied and displayed, would demonstrate its efficiency and be
adopted on a national level. In the proposed layout, the museum appears as the focal
point—a model structure that would be indefinitely replicated in order to assem-
ble a national network, entirely accountable to the Guild. The project’s intention
is to democratize art—a clear utopian animus that would later materialize as the
state governed museum network. For Ruskin, art remains the fundamental device
for moulding the ideal society. The Guild will secure various locations in Great
Britain: Totley (Sheffield), Cloughton Moor (North Yorkshire), Barmouth (Whales),
Bewdley (Worcestershire)—the latter upgraded to contemporary standards and still
operational today, Mickley (Derby),322 and finally the American experiment—the
Ruskin Commonwealth Association—in Dickson County, Tennessee. Nevertheless,
apart from the above-mentioned exception, the Ruskinian model-communities fail.
Despite the fact that Ruskin does not design an actual physical model or layout—an
ideal unit or structure, ensemble or city—his utopian projection eventually perme-
ates into and imprints onto reality; it remains relevant especially for its precision and
finesse in analysing his then-contemporary society and its mechanisms. For each
issue of his contemporary ordering, Ruskin meticulously details its counterpart in
the idealized ordering of the past: the architectural uniformity and monotony of the
industrial urban fabric is set against the diversity of the mediaeval one; the symme-
try and sterile regularity are set against the organic, the asymmetry and (yet again)
diversity; the monotonous and ‘godless’ mass production is set against the individu-
alized, authentic and ‘inspired by god’ craftsmanship—or the anonymous against the
319 Cockram, 39.

320 Cockram, 66.
321 Cockram, 79.
322 Ruskin, J., The Guild Of St. George, The Master’s Report, (1879), 20, in The Works of John
Ruskin, publishers Cook, E.T., and Wedderburn, Alexander, London, George Allen, 156, Charing
Cross Road, New York: Longmans, Green, And Co., 1907.
identitary. Even though the principles championed by Ruskin are met with resistance
when published, they finally be acknowledged, and his model for an ideal alternative
ordering will gradually permeate the official ordering—just like one of Hethering-
ton’s veritable ‘laboratories of modernity’. Some of the principles formulated by
Ruskin reverberate in the fields of ecology, sustainability and landscaping. His ideas
on architecture and cooperation will influence the crystallization of the culturalist
urban principles, and his aesthetic and social ideas will fuel the development of the
Arts&Crafts movement. The principle of art as a moulding device and the univer-
salization of the access to art irrespective of social status—two central themes in
Ruskin’s work—are yet again current, even if operating in a different context. Art’s
accessibility by means of the virtual, with an overwhelming coverage and speed,
could fulfil the Ruskinian desideratum, yet it seems to remain stuck on a rather
superficial aesthetic level.
Another experiment worth exploring here belongs to Robert Pemberton
(1788–1879)—The Happy Colony (1854), in New Zealand. Its proposed ordering
reveals its lineage with the previous models (Owen, Bacon, Ruskin), as its desidera-
tum: to universalize education, now assuming the role of the main moulding principle.
The classic utopia’s characteristics are present as well—as the project’s materializa-
tion is possible only in the “new world”, a promise (is)land, “untainted by the moth-
erland’s infamous systems”.323 Pemberton’s layout is essentially a familial ordering,
and the proposed colony—an educational communitarian system, comprising nine
towns (of ten thousand inhabitants each) and one capital. Pemberton avoids provid-
ing any details related to the operation of the economic policy. In terms of the built
form, the layout is a familiar circular-radial one:
The first circle, and area of fifty acres, contains the four Colleges, with Conservatories,
Workshops, Swimming Baths and Riding Schools adjoining. Also the Educational Circles,
such as the Terrestrial and Celestial Maps, laid down on the ground, the Groves embodying
History, and the Muses, and Mythology, the Botanic and Horticultural Gardens, and the
Geometrical forms & and the Miniature farm in the centre. The second circle contains the
Manufactories, and Public workshops. All the ground enclosed by the houses are orchards.
The Arboretum and Horticultural gardens occupy the fourth circle. The outer circle is the
Park, three miles in circumference. The public buildings are coloured in [crimson], the
churches in dark red, and the Dwelling houses in grey.324
The schema anticipates Ebenezer Howard’s garden-city, but overlaps a more dis-
tant ideal—the Eden archetype—rediscovered and recognized in the virgin New
Zealand space. Though unburdened with a religious encoding, Pemberton’s project
is imagined as a rigorously, orderly and normed new beginning of mankind, and its
utopian rebirth ‘intention’ is universal, as J. Rockey notices. The built object medi-
323 Rockey, John, An Australian Utopist, in The New Zeeland Journal of History, vol. 15, no. 2,
October 1981, 157–178, 171.
324 Pemberton, Robert, Model town for the happy colony, to be established in New Zealand by the
workmen of Great Britain, projected by Robert Pemberton, FRSL. Robert Wm Armstrong, Archt.
London, Day & Son, Lithographers to the Queen, [1854], http://mp.natlib.govt.nz/detail/?id=23520,
accessed in August 2014.
ates the relationship with the natural element, but it is mostly out of focus—giving
priority to an urban and a functional ordering.
In Choay’s opinion, the two models—the progressive and the culturalist one—-
compile the incipient phase of urban planning or pre-urbanism, as they are issued by
“generalists” or non-specialists (artists, historians, economists or politicians),325 and
address the city’s essential issues. When observing their approach of the built object
and fabric, the first utopian projections (the ideal cities) can also be included in this
category; even if issued by trained architects, these projections are in fact the prod-
uct of Homines universales—universal or polymath individuals (self-appointed in
Ruskin’s case), and they reflect a “global vision of society”.326 The utopian imagina-
tion gradually becomes subordinated to the architectural projection; in other words,
the architectural and the urban creation acquire the utopian projection as their ‘work-
ing tool’. In order to imagine the object or the ordering, the architect employs the
utopian projection—scripting and designing an ideal functioning—and he himself
becomes its main agent. The architect is assigned the task of imagining and creat-
ing the physical environment, and through it, implicitly, the task of moulding the
user-individual and the ideal society. The built object and the urban ordering become
the main focal points. Expressed as an architectural project, the utopian projection
automatically becomes more plausible, not just feasible, but having inscribed in
itself the very intention of its materialization. This change of perspective implies,
besides the refocusing on the object, also a reorientation of its intention: if the tradi-
tional utopia proposes the ideal alternative ordering whose hierarchy and functioning
are expressed in built form, the modern utopian projection proposes the ideal built
form capable of enforcing/moulding an alternative improved ordering. The tradi-
tional utopia reveals the shortcomings and the flaws of its historical context—in a
more or less critical or veiled manner—and confronts them with an imagined ideal:
a promised world of spiritual, and moral (More) fulfilment of the individual and the
community, an ideal fortress reiterating celestial or scientific principles (Campanella,
Filarete, Alberti)—whose schemas and layouts permeate into reality, engendering
particular built formulas. The modern projection proposes ab initio the built for-
mula (real or feasible) which is capable of revolutionizing the existing dominant
ordering through its proposed alternative one, convincing by power of example. As
Choay notes, the utopian character gradually diminishes, or as the modern utopian
projection will prove, rather shifts into the background.
The main modern utopian projections correspond to the inflection moments
of architectural history and pre-eminently of urban-planning history. The modern
utopian projections substantially express a criticism mainly directed towards the
existing built fabric of the city and its functioning. Choay identifies and reviews the
main representatives: Tony Garnier (1869–1948)—with his progressive model, Cité
Industrielle, based on the principle of functional zoning, the diffusion of the built
fabric and hygienism; Georges Benoit-Lévy (1880–1970), the promoter of a French
garden-city overlaying the industrial town. An exponent of the same progressive
325 Choay, 30.

326 Choay, 30.
model, Walter Gropius (1883–1969) targets the synthesis of art and production,
based on standardization/typification and prefabrication (a favourite theme for the
attempts to imagine the future, as a result of the new materials and techniques,
especially reinforced concrete). The ideal envisions an improved future world, yet
without the blueprints delivered by the traditional utopias; when such blueprints are
sketched, they take the form of the general, smaller scale typology—such as the verti-
cally developed shared housing unit—a cell part of a larger organism. The uniformity
combated by the culturalist model is here envisioned as salutary, ideal mostly from
an economic point of view, but also from an aesthetic, a technological and even a
social one.
In the opposing culturalist model ‘camp’, Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928)
(jointly with The Garden City Association 1899, later 1909, The Garden Cities and
Town Planning Association) is the main representative and promoter of the garden-
city. The culturalist model also recruits Camillo Sitte (1843–1903)—a promoter of
the garden-city and of the intrinsic value of minor architecture (the dominant compo-
nent of the built fabric)—and Raymond Unwin (1863–1940). The main theme, the
garden-city is defined through several coordinates: the focus on community, the self-
sufficiency, the improved health/hygiene—via an engagement with the issues of over-
crowding, population redistribution and decentralization—and the functional zoning
leitmotif. The garden-city is defined as a complex and autonomous cell; its schema,
as proposed by Howard in To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), and
based on elective property,327 imagines the disintegration of the nineteenth-century
hierarchized and segregated metropolis, through a process of decentralization and
of colonization of the rural.328 The towns are replaced by urban centres, each with its
own green belt (parks and agricultural areas); the industry is relocated to the periph-
ery, yet in the proximity of and connected to the workforce; the centre’s nucleus is
assigned to services and housing. The imbalance between the urban (overpopulated
and congested) and the rural (massively depopulated due to industrialization), or
between the urban and the peri-urban (dormitory-suburbs, one of the first solutions
to the industrial workforce migration), is thus corrected through the establishment
of a network of urban centres, theoretically “equalitarian”, non-hierarchical and not
inter-subordinated, multifunctional, specialized although self-sufficient. The road
network includes major traffic arteries, both under and above ground. The principle
327 The economic schema imagined by Howard implied that the town’s construction and the acqui-
sition of the land would be resolved through a charity obtained low capital. Once the community is
built, the town would be governed by a managing board/trust committee, equally comprised of the
initial investors and the community’s representatives (all pursuing the community’s welfare); the
governing organism would centralize the collected rents in a social fund intended exclusively for the
town’s necessities—thus eliminating the state as an administrative entity, and gradually becoming
the common property of all the community members.
328 These two major principles, decentralization and the reorganization of the rural, aimed at reduc-
ing urban pressure, are solutions that circulate long before the crystallization of Howard’s con-
cept—making an appearance in Buckingham’s utopian projection on the ideal town model (1849),
in Alfred Marshall’s (1884), plan for the decentralization and re-orienting of the pressure towards
dedicate industrial settlements (variants of the company town), or in Edward Bellamy’s utopian
projection, Looking Backward (1888).
is hybridized: a return to nature, albeit maintaining the benefits of progress—“low

rents, fresh air, bright homes and gardens, freedom, and cooperation”, but also “[…]
higher wages, social opportunity, and access to capital […]”.329 This would be “a
golden opportunity for the reconstruction of the entire fabric of […] civilization”—330
a statement revealing clear utopian undertones.
The layout of the urban centre is yet again a circular-radial one, its perfect sym-
metry employed to graphically and spatially express the equality between the com-
munity’s members; the residential blocks are equidistant and equal in size, imagined
as self-sufficient smaller scale versions of the urban centre. Howard reiterates one
the favourite motifs of the traditional utopia—the pyramidal or fractal-like corre-
spondence between the parts. Yet again echoing its predecessors, Howard places at
the very centre of his urban centre the cardinal motif of the garden-city—the natural
element—immediately followed by its governing powers, or the representative pub-
lic functions, located on its perimeter (the city hall, opera, theatre, library, museum,
hospital, etc.).
Upon a more detailed examination of Howard’s proposal, the equalitarian inten-
tion dissipates: the deviation and the abnormal are not solutioned, but expelled outside
the urban, in the interstitial space. The alcoholics, the orphans, the blind, the mad,
the epileptics, the convalescent, even the dead are rounded up and isolated outside
the everyday urban functioning. This reduced visibility is also graphically expressed:
while Howard’s layout clearly outlines and details the position, structure and rela-
tions of the urban functions, the technical services and the overall urban structure,
the spaces designed for ‘the deviant’ are represented only as text, generally and
ambiguously assigned to the peripheral green areas; this lack of accuracy is not a
mark of disinterest nor of negligence, but rather of a deliberate intention to hide
and dissimulate the ‘abnormal’. This artifice of representation reveals the schema’s
hybrid nature: on the one hand, it expresses its idealized vision—the perfect city and
its perfectly normal society; on the other hand, the factual presence of the deviant
cannot be left entirely unaddressed, although it is minimized and excluded—sug-
gesting its gradual dissolution in the imagined ideal future. The geometrism and
the regularity of the proposed formula are tributary to the critical attitude towards
the contemporary city—where the ordering, the symmetry, the strict divisioning and
the clarity of spatial relations counter the chaotic, the alienating and the unsanitary
industrial built fabric; however, this appeal to an almost classicizing formal purity
reveals the conception’s idealism and, in the end, its utopian encoding. The formal
purity of the layout is a projection onto the individual and onto society: the process
of re-humanizing and reassembling of morals requires a return to the essential (natu-
ral)—a recovery of true values and its ‘true’ language—and not as a regression; this
is also suggested by the presence of the technological progress as a main vector of
329 Clavel, Pierre, Ebenezer Howard and Patrik Geddes: Two Approaches to City Developement,
in From Garden City to Green City, The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard, Parsons, Kermit C. and
Schuyler, David, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 2002, 38–57, 42.
330 Clavel, Pierre, Ebenezer Howard and Patrik Geddes:…, 42.
the schema. The initial architectural expression imagined by Howard—illustrating a

hierarchized mix of different architectural styles and epochs—supports this reading.
The main materializations of Howard’s model will be more or less accurate ren-
derings. Letchworth (1903), designed by Unwin and Parker, is the first experimen-
t—listing many differences in the model to practice translation.331 Still on British
soil, Howard’s blueprints inspire other interbellum experiments: the Welwyn Gar-
den City (1920) and Wythenshawe (1920) as well as a set of garden-suburbs.
Starting with the first British experimental attempt, Howard’s influence is gradually
assimilated in the official ordering, initially as smaller scale suburbs and garden-
neighbourhoods, and later as new garden-cities. In the wider European space, the
model is scarcely applied until the 1920s, when a construction upsurge occurs. In
France, the model is imported and promoted by Georges Benoît-Lévy (with the
publication La cité-jardin, 1904). The model of the garden-city is hybridized with
the company town and the principles of modernist urban planning (drawing from
the progressive model).332 The model will also be transplanted outside the European
space,333 in Brasil or Japan; in the U.S.A. the model is adopted as altered, smaller
scale garden-neighbourhoods/blocks, but is shortly engulfed in the sprawling sub-
urban fabric—a process easily explained through the extensive available space. In
331 “Differences in methods of raising capital, administration, ownership of the sites and public
services, land tenure, the size of the estate, the proportion reserved for agriculture, restrictions on
growth, layout, and the system of distribution”, but also the architectural expression (very diverse,
from Neo-Gothic to Arts and Crafts and modernism); as Hardy notes, the “fundamental principles”
of Howard’s theory are replaced by a “mixture of pragmatism and an ideological preference for a
more commercial approach than Howard originally envisaged”. Hardy, Dennis, From Garden Cities
to New Towns, Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004, 55.
332 This hybrid class of attempts includes many new towns: in France—Cité des Foyers-Pantin
(1910–12), Epinay “Blumenthal” (1912–14–27), Champigny-sur-Marne (1931–3), Reims (Trois

Fontaines, Chemin Vert 1923, Maison-Blanche), Suresnes (1921–1939), Bruno (Bruno Ancienne,
1904 and Bruno Nouvelle, 1920), Stains (1921–27), Drancy (Drancy-1, 1920, Drancy-La Muette,
1933, a modernist garden-city with large-scale collective buildings, subsequently turned dystopian
as it is transformed into a concentration camp during World War II) Pré Saint-Gervais (1928–34–52),
Promper, Margodillot, Lens, Anzin, Clochette, etc.; in Belgium: Winterslag (a set of three garden-
cities, 1913–48), Anderlecht, Cheratte, Klein Rusland in Selzaete (Flanders, 1921–23), the cubist
La Cité Moderne-Berchem Saine Agathe and Kappeleveld (both near Brussels, 1922–25 and
1922–26, respectively), Logis-Floréal at Watermael-Boitsfort, the largest Belgian interwar garden-
city (1921–30); other Belgian attempts see Lambrichs, Anne, Les Cites-Jardins en Belgique [Lam-
brichs, Anne. (2018). Les Cites-Jardins en Belgique. Ciudades: Revista del Instituto Universitario
de Urbanistica de la Universidad de Valladolid, ISSN 1133-6579, No. 6, 2000–2001, pp. 57–74.
6. https://doi.org/10.24197/ciudades.06.2000.57-74]. In Germany: Hellerau (1909–1913), Römer-
stadt (1928); in Italy (Milanino, 1909, Aniene, 1920); but also in Russia, Spain, Holland and
Austria. [See Selvafolta, Ornella, Temi e luoghi della citta-giardino in Italia nei primi decenni del
Novecento, in Ciudades—Revista del Instituto Universitario de Urbanística de la Universidad de
Valladolid, 75–97, no. 6/2000–2001, coord. Roger-Henri Guerrand, María A. Castrillo Romón].
333 In Brazil, the garden-city model is adopted predominantly in the form of the garden-
neighbourhoods: Jardim América de São Paulo (1913)—a dormitory-town where the Howardian
principles are considerably diluted: Chacara Assunção Jaillie, Porto Alegre (1937); [Cé Sulzbach,
Ana Rosa, and Regal, Paulo Horn, La cité-jardin au Brésil, in Les Cahiers de l’IAU IdF, n° 165/April,
2013, 14.].
Australia, Howard’s model makes a rather late entrance and it will overlap the
already established grid-layout as seen in the cases of the Haberfield (Sidney) and
the Garden City (Melbourne) garden-districts, and the cities of Perth and Canberra
(1911, whose urban planning directly invokes Howard’s model). Canberra’s poly-
centric plan, with the centrally positioned artificial lake and the radially distributed
circulations, appears as an undistorted version of the original blueprint, and is delib-
erately adopted by the Australian government for its “symbolic formal language
[capable] to express the ideal of nation”.334
2.5.5 The Culturalist Model in a Heterotopian Interpretation
In many European cases, the garden-city model is combined with the company town
paternalist model. The hybridization of the model also implies a dilution of the social
programme; many of these new ‘urban centres’ are simple plotting ensembles of
private or collective housing, spaciously distributed in large green areas but lacking
basic community facilities and often too remote from any urban nuclei—overall
more similar to dormitory-districts; other such new ‘urban centres’ are designed in the
image of the garden-city but with the essential makeup of the company town: arranged
according to Howard’s principles, but under the fully paternalist management of a
company, without any community involvement. The two World Wars create a fertile
medium for the dissemination and the adoption of the Howardian model, which
will be expressed in two separate and intense construction phases; aside from this
pragmatic orientation (motivated by necessity), the historical flow of events had
also emphasized the utopian character of the entire (re)constructive demarche: the
newly built cities or the reconstructed segments of the existing, are charged with a
strong identity signification, and they deliberately express the hope of rebirth—in
the aftermath of destruction, the possibility to reinvent the individual and the society
becomes palpable.
The universal nature of the vision and the revanchist intent of replacing the exist-
ing dominant order (the envisaged network of garden-cities and its cooperative asso-
ciations system) signals the utopian character. However, this utopian projection is
ab initio designed with the ingrained intention of its materialization. Howard’s pro-
posal is no longer that imaginative exercise traditionally understood as utopia, a
tool of social critique or a veiled eulogy—it is constructed as a blueprint, a model
explicitly planned for its implementation. Both the author and the organization cre-
ated around the garden-city, channel their entire efforts towards materializing the
idea: the construction of the first garden-city is envisaged as an absolute demon-
stration of the new ordering’s efficiency, which undoubtedly convinces its public;
the entire demarche is reminiscent of both the Fourierist and the Owenite models.
334 Originalquote: […] le gouvernement australien a choisi délibérément le langage formel sym-
bolique de ce plan pour exprimer «l’idéal de nation» .” Devereux, Mike, Les cités-jardins, un idéal
à poursuivre, in Les Cahiers de l’IAU IdF, n° 165/April, 2013, 10–13, 12.
The imagined space (the garden-city schema) and the built one (Letchworth, and
the other international examples) stand out in their historical context through their
alterity: in the case project proposal, both the spatial and the social orderings rad-
ically different from what epoch’s common practice; in the case of the material-
ized versions, they are automatically other in relation to their physical and social
background, as well as in relation to their idealized model or blueprint. Illustrating
once more Foucault’s theory, in the materialization process of a utopian projection,
the imagined ordering (perfectly operational in theory) suffers a mutation and its
subsequent materialized ordering proves to be not necessarily non-functional but
rather dysfunctional, distorted or simply altered; even when the projection is trans-
lated into reality as accurately as possible, the potential of its hijacking remains.
The dystopian potential of the garden-city of Drancy will be revealed via a recod-
ing of its essential characteristics: its self-sufficient character, its relative isolation
within its context and its efficient arrangement of the built fabric; these will allow
its transformation into a concentration camp during World War II. Its materialized
ideal coordinates easily reveal their negative potential when the everyday practice
is interrupted and replaced; the ideal city all too easily becomes a ghetto. Other
garden-cities are gradually incorporated into the sprawling fabric of the larger urban
nuclei, becoming residential districts although sometimes managing to maintain their
particular character; others become isolated enclaves, dormitory-towns, too remote
to be incorporated and lacking the diverse urban profile to function as autonomous
urban organisms. The initial utopian intent is encoded within the layout of the built
form (as both quantitative features—area, dimension and distance, positioning and
as qualitative features—flow, functional relations, zoning, etc.); thus, even when the
ensembles acquires a new function a new set of practices, the utopian encoding
continues to affect its operation. This capacity enacts Foucault’s second heterotopia
principle—the ability of that particular space to function in very different ways,
assuming various and even contradictory functions/roles. However, this ability of
materialized utopias is demonstrated beyond the particular, extreme situations, such
as Drancy: most of the garden-cities, although designed to provide a better living
standard for the underprivileged classes, become luxury residential districts (some
immediately after their construction)—financially prohibitive for their very public
which had justified their creation. As a conclusion, the operation of such an enclave
can be defined and redefined according to the context; the heterotopian character
can be read even in a more subtle examination: although the architectural function
(mostly habitation) is not radically modified, the functioning of these enclaves can
vary according to extremely different coordinates.
The first garden-city materializations perform as veritable experimental labora-
tories (Hetherington) for what was going to be the new ordering. Even though both
Howard’s layout and the first garden-city inspired by it (Letchworth) have prede-
cessors (Port Sunlight, Bournville), supporters and an ever-increasing acceptance,
the model’s significant alterity within its context illustrate it as a deviation space;
following its materialization, it functions as a space for the unusual and exceptional,
preferred by radicals, eccentrics and reformers,335 and not in the service of its initially
targeted public.
In connection to the functioning of the garden-city, the third heterotopian charac-
teristic can be explored: the ability to juxtapose in a single real space, multiple other
spaces, paradoxical, contradictory and even incompatible. Apart from the meanings
imprinted ab initio, the assuming of various and successive functions endows a space
with new layers of significance, juxtaposed and competing. It is the assumed role
and the declared intention of the heritage status to introduce a new all-encompassing
ordering, able to contain and reorganize these layers of significance—no matter how
overlapped, mutually exclusive, adverse or contradictory they are. Under this her-
itage ordering, each layer is acknowledged its own historic and documentary value,
irrespective of its positive or negative connotation and of its interrelations with the
other layers of significance. The competitive relations automatically become juxta-
positional. Yet, even in the absence of the heritage protection, materialized utopias
tend to juxtapose, through their very encodings, multiple layers of significance. In his
essay, Foucault illustrates this heterotopian principle through the garden space. The
symbol of the garden of Eden/sacred space is represented in Howard’s model (the
‘return to nature’) as well as supported by the common property principle (mirroring
the equality of individuals in front of God), even if the proposed utopian schema is
not governed by a religious principle. ‘Nature’ is the “source of all health, all wealth,
all knowledge”,336 and “the symbol of God’s love and care for man”.337 The graphic
layout chosen by Howard, concentric and symmetrical, reiterates the already familiar
formula of ‘perfection’ and even the representation of the divine, as it is superim-
posed onto the traditional symbolism of the garden ‘as a smaller scale reflection of
the universe’—interpretation also discussed by Foucault. The self-sufficiency of the
garden-city and its efficient and ideal functioning restates in modern terms the same
motif of the all-giving, abundant Eden, akin to the traditional interpretation of the
garden: “garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the
world”.338 In his proposed layout, Howard equips, designs the flows and assigns the
functions of an amplified version of the traditional garden.
The fourth principle of the Foucaultian heterotopian space is the ability to func-
tion independently, detached from the everyday timeframe and according to its own
temporal rhythms. The garden-city envisaged by Howard, in its final and com-
plete version (the universal network or garden-cities), essentially proposed the abso-
lute replacement of the existing temporal ordering. However, in the context of the
schema’s dissemination and of its first experimental materializations, the garden-city
functions as a temporal enclave, detached from and opposed to the arrhythmic nature
of the industrial(ized) town. The garden-city proposes a refuge-temporality, the coun-
terpart of the chaotic ever-passing urban temporality. This other time is, just like the
335 Miles,Urban Utopias, 65.

336 Howard, Ebenezer, Garden cities of to-morrow, (being the second edition of “To-morrow: a
peaceful path to real reform”), published by S. Sonnenschein & co., ltd., London, 1902, 18.
337 Howard, Garden cities…, 17–18.
338 Foucault, M., Of Other…, 20.
imagined city, a hybrid between a rural and an urban temporality—each of them

interpreted according to the characteristics of their corresponding space. Therefore,
the garden-city assumes the positive aspect of the urban timeframe—the temporal
compression delivered by the accelerated movement (the mechanized transport)—as
well as the coveted temporal coordinates of an idealized rural: the reconsidering
of the work/relaxation sequences and the efficiency of their succession, the tempo-
ral dilation, etc. Howard’s proposed ordering does not aim to correct the existing
industrial ordering, but to replace it entirely; similarly, its temporality requires an
absolute break with the existing, dominant temporality and, eventually, its replace-
ment altogether. This feature is characteristic of almost all utopian projections. The
temporality of the garden-city is thus defined, in direct relation to its “external” con-
text; however, the “internal” temporality of the new organism, as compared to itself,
is a circular one: the balanced and regulated functioning implies the repeating of the
same sequences ad nauseam, in an infinite perpetuation; while the expansion of the
garden-city network still retains a sense of progression, of temporal crescendo, its
ideal, completed state is utterly defined by this circular ‘frozen’ temporality (other-
wise common to almost all utopian projections). The exclusion of the unpredictable
and of variation (envisaged as ideal and a prerequisite of the utopian control objec-
tive) becomes invariably a negative feature, expressed as monotony, once the first
garden-cities are materialized.
Considering the two instances of the temporal-enclave heterotopia identified by
Foucault,339 the garden-city appears yet again as a hybrid: it is a cyclical temporality,
albeit a non-cumulative one. This feature is also supported by the leisure (retreat)
character which is initially attributed to the garden-city schema (and its main ‘selling-
point’). The constructed garden-cities which maintain their initial character, also
maintain an enclave character, appearing as rifts in their contemporary timeframes,
and whose temporal sequences are continuously repeated. Although at first glance,
the garden-city could be assigned to the first category of cumulative heterochronia,
Howard’s polycentric layout solves the equivoque: the temporal sequences of the
garden-city can be cumulative only up to the completion of the individual city’s
structure, subsequently the ‘excess’ is relocated on the outside, where it generates a
new garden-city, until the network reaches a universal coverage. Foucault’s example
of heterochronia is the holiday village, a construct which shares with the garden-
city two aspects: the retreat role (attached to the temporal break, and the slice of
time)—a time which is other– and its exceptional, ideal character reflected onto the
space, which is itself other.
Foucault’s fifth principle underlines the enclave nature of the heterotopian space:
the access control system, translated as isolation and clear delineation of the space
(material coordinates) and the conditional admittance (both material and practice
related coordinates). Howard’s garden-city is imagined as an alternative for the work-
ing classes which abandon the rural area in search of better living conditions and
339 Foucault differentiates between the heterotopias of an “indefinitely accumulating time” and
the heterotopias “that are linked, on the contrary, to time in its most futile, most transitory, most
precarious aspect”, or the heterotopias of a festive mode; Foucault, Of Other…, 20.
subsequently crowd the cities; consequently, Howard sets the social class access cri-
teria—which essentially have a philanthropic and idealistic motive. The first model
town created, Letchworth, is a compromise of Howard’s initial schema and, even if
it retains the access control mechanism, it is gradually transformed and ultimately
attracts a quite different public (reformers, eccentrics, radicals). Despite the numerous
and diverse materializations of this ideal city, the access control system will evolve
along a similar direction as Letchworth. This is mainly due to the context’s transfor-
mation: the increasing urban densification and the overall space crisis, and especially
the scarcity of green areas, which eventually become a luxury item, together with the
ideal ‘isolated house with a garden’; these coordinates fuel a complete reversal of
the initial significance and intention. All of the materializations of the initial model
are re-encoded, acquiring a different significance. The increased desirability of these
garden-cities and garden-neighbourhoods is automatically translated into financial
value, which will in its turn translate as an additional access criterion. This evolution
also involves supplementary hybridizations, which emphasize the isolation and the
space’s alterity; among them, a descendant of Howard’s schema worth mentioning
is the gated community: these are garden-neighbourhoods or residential ensembles
whose alterity and enclave nature is enhanced through control, surveillance and a
clear physical demarcation between the inside and the outside (secured precincts).
Even though these gated communities commonly employ the garden-city coordi-
nates—the spatial arrangement, sun orientation and illumination, distribution and
sizing of green areas, the self-sufficiency of the ensemble, etc.—it can be explained
through an overlapping of the utopian projection and the contemporary ideal; these
coordinates have impregnated the dominant ordering, even if the initial encoding of
the schema appears to be distorted or even cancelled.
The sixth heterotopian principle—explained in its turn through a contextual rela-
tion—is defined between two extremes: the space’s capacity to create an “illusion
that exposes all real space, all the emplacements in the interior of which human life is
enclosed and partitioned, as even more illusory”,340 and the space’s capacity to func-
tion as a compensating device. The garden-city is positioned somewhere between
the two extremes, sharing both their characteristics. Both Howard’s layout and its
first materialized instances assume the function of a ‘revelatory’ construct: as labora-
tory spaces, they showcase an improved other ordering, contrasting to the dominant
ordering and revealing its flaws. Yet, assembled according to utopian coordinates,
both the blueprints and their materialized versions can only be illusory—illusions
of perfect systems for a perfect society. The first garden-city is created as example,
intended to reveal the truth; on a small scale, the imagined ideal ordering is applied.
Even the subsequent fragmentary versions, only partially employing the original
schema, rely on this mechanism: they are showcased as enclaves of alterity—an
alterity which is contextually constructed, as all the ‘positive characteristics’ that the
real is lacking—and thus exposing it as unfitting and flawed; the illusory real is thus
confronted with the materialized ideal. Based on this contextual relationship, the

garden-city (much like its predecessors) can be considered a space of compensation,

providing the missing elements of the existing ordering.
And finally, the metaphor of the ship as a ‘fragment of space’, the last defini-
tion of heterotopia suggested by Foucault, can be identified in Howard’s layout. The
garden-city is that well-defined, orderly and normed, and most of all self-sufficient
fragment of space—a small-scale world in itself; the garden-city network envis-
aged by Howard in replacement of the evolution he was then witnessing, supports
Foucault’s ‘maritime’ metaphor: the independent and self-sufficient units, with their
green belts, are equidistantly dispersed, ‘floating’ in the territory, interconnected
amongst themselves yet autonomous. The concept of ideal city itself, regardless of
its many instances, fulfils this heterotopian coordinate, as “the greatest instrument
of economic development […], but also the greatest reserve of imagination.”341
Apparently in opposition to the garden-city and the culturalist model is, according
to Choay, the progressive model. However, this opposition is debatable: according to
Howard’s schema, the garden-city is located between the organic and the mechanical,
between a qualitative approach and quantitative one, and between a participatory
structure and a non-participative one—without overlapping any of the preceding pre-
urban models—neither Morris’ culturalist, purist and passeist (medievalist) model,
nor the progressive one, celebrating industrialization and technological progress. This
permeation is a two-way process: despite the dominant culturalist characteristics,
Howard’s model also retains progressive features, just like some of the representatives
of the progressive model inherit and integrate a series of ‘themes’ central to the
culturalist model.
2.5.6 Progressive Model as an Official Ordering. Plan Voisin

and Plan Obus
According to Choay, Le Corbusier’s (1887–1965) utopian projection coagulates

around the same issues approached by his predecessors and contemporaries (green
spaces, hygiene and circulation, functional typification and economic and temporal
efficiency of architecture/urban planning, zoning, the issue of urban centres, hous-
ing, etc.), but he distinguishes himself through the absolute, integral nature of his
intent, as well as through his attitude towards technological progress. The suggested
urban ordering—new, radical and Cartesian—is meant to create a new social order-
ing. Again, a familiar subtle differentiation can be observed: the built fabric as a
contributor to the new ordering, versus the built fabric as the main ‘engendering
device’ of the new ordering, generating alterity albeit not entirely on its own. The
ideal is the recognizable, enlightenment-inherited rational one, as Jencks outlines: “a
rectilinear geometry is not only functional, for speed, and beautiful, because clear,

but the basis of the best culture as well”342 ; Le Corbusier clearly favours “the clas-
sical equilibrium of rectangles and pure volumes”,343 identifying a ‘natural’ source
for this formal language. As Le Corbusier himself proclaims, “precision and order
are essential”344 for the new modern spirit.
These characteristics could just as well describe the Renaissance utopian pro-
jection. And just as the previous utopian projections, the imagined alternative to
the existing ordering must be absolute: the old town had fulfilled its duty, and has
become a simple residue and an obstacle in the way of progress. The new ordering
‘demands’ a separation from this ‘expired present’. Yet, this rift must be necessarily
total, absolute: “good planning was indeed efficacious in creating social harmony,
but only if it embodied a genuine rationality and justice in the structure of soci-
ety”345 ; as Fishman observes, the “radical reconstruction of the cities would solve
not only the urban crisis of their time, but the social crisis as well”,346 but only via
a total upheaval—urban, political and economic, implying both the built form and a
prescriptive functioning. Only thus can the newly built ordering deliver a new social
ordering and implicitly a new individual.
The theme of the built form as a social molding tool is revived. Although Fishman
argues that Le Corbusier’s ideal town was never designed as a blueprint, a model
to be transplanted ad litteram into reality, the very format used, the architectural
project and its language of expression seem to suggest the opposite; at its very least,
it intends to utterly minimize the inherent flaws occurring in the translation from the
‘illustrated’-but not model ideal (the project) into reality. Le Corbusier envisions the
ideal town where social harmony (the individual’s happiness and the urban mecha-
nism’s functioning) is mediated by the built form. The large-scale urban version—the
plan for “Ville contemporaine” (1920), “Ville Radieuse” (presented in 1924, pub-
lished in 1933), even if unaccomplished, inspire the materialized Chandigarh project
(1947), and the less known “Mundaneum” (1929, named Centre of Centres or The
World City).347 The fact that the Mundaneum project was tentatively translated into
342 Jencks, Charles, Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture, Allen Lane Penguin Books
Ltd., London, 1975, 66.
343 Jencks, C., Le Corbusier and the Tragic…, 70.
344 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, trans. F. Etchells, London, 1929, 7, apud. Jencks, Le
Corbusier…, 70.
345 Fishman, Robert, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd
Wright, and Le Corbusier, MIT Press, Jan 1, 1982, 5.

346 Fishman, R., Urban Utopias.., 4–5.
347 This unrealized project is created in cooperation with Paul Otelet. The purpose “of the Munda-
neum is to expose and make known by literature, objects and words: How Men, from their humble
origins, have elevated themselves to the splendour of their Geniuses, their Heroes and their Saints;
How the World was discovered and, its Foreces being brought under control, was almost entirely
settles; How the Cities Nations ans Civilizations grew up…”. [Mundaneum Project, 1929,] It has a
symmetrical, hierarchical orthogonal layout, which culminates in a pyramidal building sheltering
a universal and “infinite” museum (Musee a croissance illimite/Museum of Unlimited Growth): “a
spiral in plan and stepped pyramid in section, which would show the various stages of civilization
in continuous development”; “the world library and university are (located) on either side of the
axis, while the stadium is the terminal point of another (axis).” Based on this layout and its variant,
the realm of reality, also suggests that the ideal cities of Le Corbusier ware not just
theoretical exercises, as Fishman suggests. These three main projects (Ville Con-
temporaine, Ville Radieuse, Mundaneum) form an ‘essential core’, a base that can
be identified in many of the architect’s projects, even if reinterpreted, augmented or
adapted.
This projection can also be read in its object-scale concentrated version: the
housing machine, implemented during the post-war period in “Unitée d’habitation
Marseille-Michelet” (Marseille, 1947–52), essentially a module and an experimen-
tal fragment of a ville radieuse. Observed closely, the Unitée is inspired by the
‘ship’ metaphor both functionally and stylistically—a ‘floating city’ or sorts. The
proposed structure of the ideal city Ville Contemporaine is dominated by zoning
(housing, work, circulations, etc.) and it is strongly hierarchized: the centre of the
layout, assigned to a technocratic elite, is marked by the vertical architecture of
glass skyscrapers and a single traffic juncture (a train station, an airport and the
intersection of all main circulations); the industry and the culture are subcentrally
located, on either of the nucleus’ sides. The residential areas are hierarchized, mir-
roring the social classes and their subcategories. The surrounding subservient area
remains unbuilt and green, similar to Howard’s protective green belt, albeit with a
different purpose: it acts as a spatial reserve for future extensions of the urban fabric.
The traffic is also hierarchized, both functionally and physically: it is distributed
on different levels, under and above ground, according to a hierarchy of moving
speeds—and essentially reminiscent of Da Vinci’s projection. The ideal positioning
of this ensemble is the already typical flat, open and smooth terrain—enabling its
subsequent and ‘guaranteed’ expansion as well as the maximization of its geometric
and axial character.
From the standpoint of the proposed ordering and its intention, La Ville Radieuse’s
schema is reminiscent of Giorgio Martini’s layouts for the ideal city-organism, with
the “business center as the head, housing and institutes as the spine, factories, ware-
houses and heavy industry as the belly.”348 However, Le Corbusier’s utopian projec-
tion rises from a complete trust in the efficiency of technological progress; the social
reform is possible by reshaping the receptacle, the built environment, by means of the
new available technologies. The machine is the synonym of technological progress, it
symbolizes logical order, economy and efficiency—then expressed in a pure geom-
etry and spatial structuring, essential to a flawless functioning. This ideal of the
machine becomes the “lens” through which everything is explored: the individual,
house and its objects, the city, the territory, etc.
While Howard projected his garden-city in a future, albeit accessible and fea-
sible, in regard to the ‘old’ city (now turned inefficient) and its relating to the
present, he remained somewhat silent. Once the efficiency of the new model would
be demonstrated, the garden-city network would gradually cover the entire territory.
The existing industrialized urban nuclei—the ‘sources of social, physical, and eco-
Corbusier designs two versions of the infinite museum, in Japan and India, respectively. Jencks, Le
Corbusier…, 115.
348 Jencks, Le Corbusier…, 123.
nomic evil’ and the very background on which the alternative is assembled—would
simply be abandoned, while the garden-city grid would be developed outside, around
and detached from them. Howard focuses his attention on the rural, an uncorrupted
space which allows the development of his ideal city network, while the existing
inferior urban fabric ‘silently’ dissipates in the background; the non-concurential
and unproblematic relationship implied, the undetailed solution or the ‘silent exit’ of
the then dominant ordering reveal Howard’s faith in his schema as well as its utopian
encoding. For Le Corbusier, the imagined ordering requires a total break from the
present,349 to such an extent that the new town and the new architecture must have
no history and no context,350 and must be a pure product of the architect’ imagina-
tion, who thus becomes an “absolute sovereign who could ‘organize the world on
his drawing board’”.351 Unlike Howard, Le Corbusier does not search for an ideal
tabula rasa outside the existing city, but envisions within it—in its very place. The
break from the past (and his then present) is a guarantee of a “moral health”,352 and
the abandoning of “old tools”353 is also imperious. The inherited built fabric (and
Le Corbusier implies Paris) is grotesque and terrifying in its chaotic diversity354 and
dissonance—over-densified, polluted, non-human or rather no longer human.355 One
can easily find the same antithesis: the order, higher good versus the dreadful chaos.
However, Le Corbusier’s operates upon the entire language: the traditional ‘organic’
is replaced by its modern version, an organic where the human natural impulse is a
Cartesian one, and its expression is the rectilinear trajectory, the axis and the angle,
the pure geometry, the order and the hierarchy. The existing ordering is overturned:
the ‘organic’ historical town is the artificial one, and the modern Cartesian town is
the essentially ‘organic’ one, since it is assembled according to human needs and
dimensions.
Two of the non-materialized projects—Plan Voisin (1925) and Plan Obus
(1930–40)—assembled on the same progressive principles, illustrate two different
modes of relating to the existing or historic built fabric. Plan Voisin reiterates the
349 “a new architecture, applying the new building techniques and the new vision of space”, Choay,
L’Urbanisme…, 233. [original quote: “une architecture nouvelle, mettant en oeuvre les novelles
techniques de construction et la nouvelle vision de l’espace”].
350 “The contemporary city had no history”. Fishman, 205.
351 Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and
Le Corbusier, MIT Press, 1982, 205.

352 Jencks, Charles, Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture, Allen Lane Penguin Books
Ltd., London, 1975, 65.

353 Idem.
354 Even though the architect accuses the disorder of the existing town, emerging from an ‘unre-
strained’ formal variation, on a different occasion he accuses the same inherited town of formal
uniformity and banality, which are then linked to a lack of technical knowledge and technical pos-
sibility; the suggested panacea for both situations, regardless of their indictment, is the new modern
architecture. More in Jencks and Choay, op.cit.
355 Le Corbusier does not entirely repudiate the ‘old’; an admirer of what Jancks identifies as the
Parthenon spirit—Le Corbusier has seen in the Parthenon a “machine which had been perfected
through evolution and a symbol of the tragic human condition”, he sees the platonian concepts and
proportions, and principles—all of which he will recycle in his work.
Ville contemporaine layout: Paris’ absolute epicentre is to be levelled and, in the

place of the unsanitary, hallucinatory and grotesque density, Le Corbusier locates his
business centre, with its circulation node and its functional zoning, encased in large
green areas. However, the past is not completely erased but carefully filtered: the
diverse hyper-central historic fabric is preserved as fragments, isolated units adrift
between high-rise towers and lush parks. With an indulgent and indifferent gesture
and with a lucid (and thus more atrocious) subjectivity, the omnipotent architect
grants clemency to certain relics: a “charming Gothic church nestling among its belt
of trees: either the Fourteenth-Century St. Martin (abbey) or the Fifteenth-Century
St. Merry”,356 interchangeable and uniformed. The historical monument is down-
graded to the status of a decorative object, with its aesthetic impact increased by the
pure surfaces and the greenery screens. The old built fabric present in the periphery
of the modern centre—“the quarters of Paris that remain encrusted in their secular
mould”—357 is simply a space reserve, temporarily tolerated for the subsequent and
inevitable expansion of the city.
However, Plan Obus provides a different perspective, despite the common con-
ceptual basis—the initial Ville Contemporaine. Under the impact of the aerial image
of Algiers, harmoniously spread onto a diverse and exotic landscape, a first prin-
ciple of the Corbusian ideal city is dethroned: the planarity and uniformity of the
construction site. A second principle follows closely—the Cartesian axial character,
with its rectilinear axis and angles, is replaced by the curved, more organic line; the
most utopian element of the entire plan is a connecting structure between the French
colonial area (the ‘white district’) to the old centre (the historical Casbah), through
a “great winding coastal viaduct that would provide the structural framework for
worker housing”.358 The Muslim urban fabric seduces Le Corbusier: the previous
condemnation of hyper-density in its European version is forgotten, as the architect
praises its Oriental version, the local identity and its particular and efficient urban
morphology. In the architect’s projection, the fate of the Parisian Marais is not shared
by the Algerian Casbah, even though both have a somewhat similar organic evolu-
tion. Through its exoticism, the old Algerian quarter gains in the eyes of the architect
the status of a “heritage worthy to be known”359 : The casbah is spared as built fabric,
preserved and protected “as a relic in the midst of the modern city”,360 following to
somewhat more lenient selection process, although just as subjective and destructive
as the Parisian one. Only in this manner, “emptied of 60% of its accumulated struc-
356 Le Corbusier, Plan Voisin, Paris, France, 1925, [“Ici, tout a coup, on est devant une charmante
eglise gothique, bercee par les feuillages; c’est St-Martin ou St-Merry du XIXme ou du XVme
siècle.”], in Le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret. Oeuvre complete 1910–1929, publiee par W. Boesiger
et O. Stonorov, Introduction et textes par Le Corbusier, Les Editions D’Architecture, Artemis, 1974,
vol. 1. (1910–1929), 114.
357 Idem.
358 Lamprakos, Michele, Le Corbusier and Algiers. The Plan Obus as Colonial Urbanism, in Forms
of Dominance, on The Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise, Ethnoscapes Series,
183–210, AlSayyad, Nezar, Avebury, 1992, 194.
359 Lamprakos, Le Corbusier and Algiers…, 195.
360 Idem.
tures, [the Casbah] it becomes a prodigious historic document”.361 Lamprakos sees

in Le Corbusier’s intention only a “preservation syndrome” through which the colo-
nial authority imposes its own western value grid over the indigenous one, selecting
the subjective fragments (as seen from the ‘outside’) to be preserved from the wider
heritage of the colonized. Even though Le Corbusier designs the proposal according
to an invoked principle of organicity, it remains on a superficial formal level—362
the new ordering essentially preserving and enhancing the colonial segregation. The
architect’s ‘organic’ concept is however transformed, acquiring a more traditional
understanding—that which is grown naturally and “slowly over time through the
interventions of many individuals and groups”.363 Paradoxically, Le Corbusier will
try to introduce this rediscovered principle of organicity through that familiar ‘total-
itarian’ formula: the large-scale urban plan, entirely under the control of the sole
author and omnipotent architect, excluding the collective participation, the slower,
more gradual development as well as the flexibility and the perpetual process of adap-
tation typical for organic developments. Despite invoking the indigenous model, the
layout is in fact a projection distorted through a European lens; the open space, the
ventilation and illumination principles, the green areas, each with distinct temporal
mapping and preset (regulated) functions—in short, the hygienist principle is the one
essentially governing the new ordering, disposing of the religious, social, political
and symbolic aspects of the traditional existing ordering—which is not enriched and
developed but annulled. As Lamprakos observes, the project is essentially Le Cor-
busier’s “[attempt] to impose an alien vision on the city that would legitimize the
political and economic dominance of the mother country”.364
These (unrealized) utopian projections assemble versions of the ideal city, tracing
back to an initial model layout (Ville contemporaine); however, both are imagined
interventions in very specific contexts and end up formulating somewhat different
proposals concerning the historic built fabric: its almost complete elimination (Paris),
respectively, its more sensible enhancement (Algiers). If the utopian projection
becomes a heterotopia through its materialization, according to Foucault’s definition
and this text’s hypothesis, in both situations (Plan Voisin and Plan Obus) it infuses
in its turn the coordinates of the historic fabric. Seen either as an isolated object (the
fragments conserved in Plan Voisin), or as homogenous fabric (the Casbah in Plan
Obus), the historic built fabric is regarded and manoeuvred as a heterotopian enclave,
that other space, in opposition to the what was to be the new modern context, but also
in opposition to its former self, preceding the intervention. Plan Voisin’s isolated
historic objects become ornamental relics; their documentary, historic, spiritual and
even the economic value fade against the aesthetic value, in a modernist sense, in
addition to and in contrast to the purity of the new architecture. The historic object
is endowed with simplified role of an accessory to the modern architecture. In this
projection, the (safeguarded) historic object undergoes a hybridization: the original
361 Le Corbusier, 1932, apud. Lamparkos, 196.

362 Lamparkos, 196.
363 Idem.
364 Lamparkos, 202.
meaning remains embedded in its physical body, which remains unaltered, yet a
new layer of meaning is superimposed, diverting its meaning and overall altering its
‘reading’. An applied Plan Voisin would start as an enclave of alterity in the context
of the overall Parisian fabric yet, within this ever-expanding modernist enclave, the
fragments of the old eliminated ordering would become in their turn similar enclaves
of otherness, contrasting, contradicting and resisting the dominant ordering govern-
ing their context. In the case of Plan Obus, the existing ordering would be replaced
with the modernist one, and the historic Casbah would be reduced, delineated but
preserved. By means of its transformation into an enclave of alterity, it would
maintain its material identity and integrity and partially its traditional functioning.
Although both projections acknowledge the documentary value of the historic
fabric, a ‘basic’ aesthetic value, the imagined solution is the same: the enclavisation
of the past within the new ordering. If the built fabric has an initial accessory role,
as decorative ‘historic relic’, in the Plan Voisin, in Plan Obus it also acquires the
role of ‘witness of the past’, and even the role argument and source for the new
architecture—somewhat reminiscent of previous utopian projections and their way
of relating to the inherited past.365 If in Plan Voisin the historic object is safeguarded
almost out of capricious inclination, in Plan Obus it becomes a landmark, a reference
point. In the Corbusian projection, just like in the previous utopian projections, the
proposed alternate ordering is imagined and designed to become official ordering,
or norm. The force ratio is altered: the historic fabric/object, a dominant ordering
in the space and time frame (Paris/Algiers), becomes a (fragment of) tolerated
ordering. The alterity assigned to the historic object/fabric replaces, or even entails,
the alterity introduced by a heritage status—a status (and an ordering) that mostly
remains outside the utopian vision, not taken into account. Paradoxically, in both
projections, the architect himself constructs the alterity of the heritage object—even
if in a destructive manner, fragmenting the fabric and isolating the objects. Even if
both projects remain unbuilt, Plan Obus influences for the future development of
Algiers, and the Casbah gradually becomes that very enclave, isolated but preserved
within the fabric of the modern city, just as the architect had envisioned.
The progressive modernist utopian projection translates permanently from a sub-
ordinate position to the official ordering through the CIAM (1933) congress and
subsequently through its doctrinarian text, the Athens Charter (1941). The model
space (urban and architectural) championed by Le Corbusier will be propagated
and will eventually engender numerous versions, albeit developed along two main
directions: either by applying the new principles onto the existing built fabric of the
city, either by applying them as a formula for creating new cities, and in the process
reducing the pressure on the historic centres.
365 The negative moralizing value attributed to the conserved fragments of the past in the utopian
altrurian society imagined by William Dean Howells, in his A Traveler from Altruria (1892–3).
2.5.7 The Hybridization of the Progressive Model: The

Usonian Model and the Futurist Model
The same progressive model governs Frank Loyd Wright’s (1867–1959) utopian
projection. Yet again, the proposed solution is a model ordering; the ideal
Broadacre City (1932–59), is based on the common post-war issues: increasing
the efficiency of urban centres—through traffic management, functional typifica-
tion, housing improvement, etc.—and the hygienic ‘updating’ of the urban envi-
ronment—through increasing green areas, resolving hyper-densification, etc.; along
with the other dominant theme, the promise of technological progress, these are all
adjusted to the coordinates of the American territory, unaffected by war destructions.
Wright’s utopian projection is a solution to these issues by reinventing the city and
implanting it into a tabula rasa territory—spatially and temporally remote—and
not through abandonment or decongestion of the existing urban nuclei (similar to
Howard’s approach). The ‘traditional’ city concept is replaced by a ‘network’ con-
cept; the ideal city is broken out, dispersed according to a uniform and uncluttered
Cartesian pattern. This decentralization becomes possible given the technological
progress—and the subsequent time-space compression; a second factor would be
the geomorphological nature of the American territory (at least the one considered
by Wright), which would allow an almost unlimited spatial extension—and implic-
itly a democratically and equally distributed private property. The connection of both
architecture and urbanism to the ‘natural’ element remains a cardinal principle of
the vision. Yet, Wright’s network is above all a hierarchized traffic network, with its
interstitial spaces uniformly equipped. The grid is furnished according to principles
of functional zoning, providing a uniform distribution of equipment (leisure/sports,
culture, production, etc.): for any given residential area, the entire range of equipment
is available within a fixed radius, easily accessible by car.
The clear difference between urban and rural is blurred, and a ‘culturalist’ view
surfaces: the rural is idealized, and nature is seen as the only means to self-sufficiency
and individual happiness. The built formula is customized for the ‘new’ demo-
cratic society whose basic cell is family; the individual is multi-specialized (farmer,
mechanic and intellectual), and the difference between leisure and work fades due
to technological progress: the hard, unpleasant industrial work (not agricultural) is
machine-exclusive, executed in factories uniformly distributed within the territory.
Yet, Wright’s society is positively individualistic: although the network is the shared
starting point for all, and each individual assembles his own living/production unit
according to his own means and desires—however, this expression of individuality
still has a regulating mechanism (the architect); education is seen as the redeeming
solution of mankind and therefore universal; however, higher education is reserved
for a small minority—the intellectual elite. The schema appears as democratic and
egalitarian, but is essentially a neoliberal-capitalist hybrid.
Architecturally wise, the mechanicist perspective dominates; the residential units
are classified according to the number of cars (a house for one, two, three cars)
and to the unit’s production capacity. This hybrid ideal equalitarian-capitalist soci-
ety, strongly stratified and hierarchized, is not new, as demonstrated by previous

utopian projections—Plato, Alberti, Filarete, Di Giorgio Martini, Da Vinci and Ser-
lio, Fourier, Buckingham and Owen, or Le Corbusier; equally familiar is Wright’s
paternalist perspective, similar in its intention and approach to Owen’s and Le Cor-
busier’s, although Wright introduces a new ordering role. In Wright’s projection,
the state’s governing role is minimal and isolated (local administration with limited
responsibilities), while the forefront position is occupied by the omnipotent architect,
as a mediator and sole creator of the perfect society, with full responsibilities and
exercising absolute control over the ideal city. The schema is presented as demo-
cratic, equalitarian, free and individualistic—as the orthogonal “equalitarian’ grid
suggests; however, this ordering is segregated, controlled and surveyed by an abso-
lute disciplinary authority (the architect). Wright’s projection is extremely detailed:
the residential units (single and multifamily housing) are presented in full architec-
tural layouts, supplied with landscaping, urban planning and spatial planning pro-
posals; most major functions (school, gas-stations, commercial centre, community
centre, high-rise administrative buildings, etc.) are similarly detailed in architectural
solutions, as well as the infrastructure (highway typologies according to traffic types,
passageways).
At first glance, this utopian projection seems to elude the possibility of an inter-
pretation in heterotopic coordinates. However, Broadacre city reiterates in both its
intention and structure, orderings similar to Howard’s garden-city or Le Corbusier’s
ideal city; interpreted as a utopian projection, a materialized Broadacre City sums up
a range of heterotopian coordinates. First, the principle of juxtaposing incompatibili-
ties or contradictions can be found even in the—paradoxical—functioning algorithm
of the envisioned society366 ; “his ideal decentralized “city without walls” would rec-
oncile the organic social order and the industrial-mechanicist order, man and nature,
distinct individuality and communitarian spirit.367 The built form assumes these roles
cumulatively, as fabric, and individually, as separate units; firstly, the dwelling is the
absolute expression of individual identity, yet it simultaneously finds itself under the
absolute control of the ordering power, defined within specific sets of coordinates
(architectural, aesthetic, economic, urban, etc.). Secondly, the built fabric or rather
the traffic and equipment network, is portrayed as the highly controlled guarantor of
stability, yet its imagined formula—the grid—suggests the presence of an individual
freedom space. This becomes more visible when compared to Howard’s schema:
the successive concentric bands with predefined functions and without unregulated
interstitial zones reveal a highly controlled space, whereas Wright’s grid alternates
366 […] creative individuality [the ideal of the Usonian society] must have its roots in a stable
community whose values the citizen shares and protects. […] Yet, these [value bearing] institutions
can have no ultimate power over the citizen. […] everyone must be free to pursue his own conception
of what is right, regardless of the consequences for the stability of society. The individual is thus
dependent on a stable community, yet his freedom to question and to negate is always a potential
threat to the society which nurtured him.” Fishman, Robert, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century:
Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier, MIT Press, 1982, 157.
Wright, and Le Corbusier, MIT Press, 1982, 157–8.

between ‘occupied/empty’, regulated/non-regulated: while the grid and the facilities

make up a fixed, uniform, regulated and equalitarian network, the functioning of its
interstitial spaces depends on individual (quasi-) free choice.368 This ideal society
with its paradoxically operating mechanism is based upon Wright’s absolute trust in
the built form’s shaping ability, by then a deeply rooted conviction, as this tentative
exploration of utopian thinking proves.
Another heterotopic coordinate is linked with the project’s traffic network, the
sine qua non condition of Wright’s ordering and the very expression of technolog-
ical advance. The temporality of this layout is closely connected to infrastructure.
The infrastructure is imagined as constantly expanding, while the interstitial spaces
are occupied and used; even if the ‘enceinte’ or outline is diluted, the network itself
becomes the quantifying reference (through its ‘cells’) for the city’s development.
The imagined functioning is hybrid, positioned between the two temporal hetero-
topian instances—of an indefinitely accumulating time and of a transitory time. If
the boundless expansion is analogous to an indefinite temporal (and spatial) accu-
mulation, the uniform and universal nature of the grid suggests continual movement,
the transitory and the fugitive temporality—as the essential unit or cell of the layout
can be positioned anywhere and everywhere.
One of the essential principles of the Broadacre City is the abolition of the spatial
delimitation or the ‘enceinte’, associated with the traditional town and the invoked
source of its hyper-densification. Wright also applies this principle for the individual
unit: the separation between the built and the landscape is diluted, in favour of a
natural integration. Linked to this coordinate, the layout seems to elude one of the
heterotopian principles—the enclave character and functioning. The destitution of
the ‘classical’ delimitation and the imagined uniform expansion, erase the enclave
potential of the schema. Yet, the counterargument is offered by the same utopian
projection: even if the ideal city is not imagined as an autonomous enclave, its com-
ponents are—the grid-defined cells are isolated, self-sufficient units, “[…] designed
to protect the family from the outside world and ultimately from itself”.369 If for
the theoretical model the readability of this heterotopian coordinate ends here, the
materialized instances, albeit partially, reveal more distinctly the enclave function-
ing of the ideal ‘unit’. Like most of its utopian predecessors, Broadacre City will
not transition into reality. However, its coordinates will permeate into the American
urban realities of the twentieth century, in the form of two massive suburbaniza-
tion phases (interwar and post-war), and the spectacular development of the traffic
mega-infrastructure—the ‘raison d’être’ of the American lifestyle of the following
decades, and one step closer to the decentralization ideal.370 These materializations
368 The plotting is regulated (4,000 m2 /household) but multiple plots can be cumulated, depending
on individual capacities; the occupation of the plot is completely controlled by the architect, but it
must reflect the individual’s needs and capacities.
Wright, and Le Corbusier, MIT Press, 1982, 158.

370 For a detailed exploration of the phenomenon and one of its case studies—Los Angeles—see
Fishman, Robert, Bourgeois Utopias. The Rise and Fall of Suburbia, Basic Books Inc., New York,
1987.
are not surprisingly, faulty translation of the ideal. In his Broadacre City, Wright
did not pursue a uniform, monofunctional suburbanization, but rather a decentraliza-
tion and a ‘relaxation’ of the traditional town’s density, maintaining the animation
characteristic of cities371 —basically a reiteration of the city as technoburb.372
Wright’s ideal layout finds its materialization in two equally dystopian variants:
the ‘traditional’ suburbanization, monofunctional, isolated and sprawled around an
urban centre and car-dependent—which Fishman identifies as an already obsolete
formula.373 The second one, the technoburb or technocity, is a diffuse city or a
metropolitan area without a sole, defined centre, a polynucleic entity. Just like in
Wright’s ideal grid, the centre becomes individually defined, through the daily indi-
vidual/family trajectories, with the house-enclave as the unique central point of ref-
erence. The known formula of the public space no longer exists: the individual
and parallel motorized routes exclude traditional interaction; the public space is re-
imagined—374 in the condensed, isolated and controlled mall.
Broadacre City recycles the network structure of Howard’s garden-cities and its
gradual sprawling in the territory, rather than the concentric layout. Howard’s ‘com-
mon’, inclusive and self-sufficient garden-city enclave becomes in Wright’s projec-
tion customizable, individual self-sufficient enclave. These two utopian projections,
along with Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine, establish—via the argument of indi-
viduality—not only the coordinates of a morally good and efficient functioning of
the society but also of the individual’s happiness. Among these, Broadacre City
appears as the most equalitarian and liberal formula, even though employing the
(same) principle of the absolute control. In Wright’s suggested ordering, projected
in a remote, yet certain future, the past is never taken into account: the traditional
city vanishes almost organically due to its inefficiency, leaving behind that ideal void
un-anthropized space, propitious to the implantation of the Usonian ideal city.
On a similar ‘progressive’ lineage as Le Corbusier and Wright, the Futurist
movement takes even further the fascination for and belief in science and tech-
nological progress. Antonio Sant’Elia (1888–1916) envisions an ideal city of the
future—Città Nuova (1913–14), and readdresses the common themes: the increased
efficiency of the machine-city, the focus on the coordinates of technological innova-
tion (traffic, communication, production, especially electricity—the motive power
371 Fishman, Robert, Bourgeois Utopias. The Rise and Fall of Suburbia, Basic Books Inc., New
York, 1987, 188.

372 The term is assigned by Fishman to a particular kind of suburbanization: one that does not retain a
monofunctionality and a subordination relationship in relation to an urban centre—a suburbanization

that is in itself a multifunctional built fabric of an other city, with multiple business and commerce
centres, dominated by the residential (in the idealized form of single-family units) and dependent
on infrastructure. The formula is quite on par with today’s metropolitan development and the urban
regions.
373 Fishman, R., Bourgeois…, 205. See also Fishman Robert. Metropolis unbound: the new city of
the twentieth century. 43–55, in: Flux, 1/1990, doi: https://doi.org/10.3406/flux.1990.1172, https://
www.persee.fr/doc/flux_1154-2721_1990_num_6_1_1172, 44–45.
374 Fishman outlines H.G. Wells’ utopian work—“The Probable Diffusion of Great Cities”, pub-
lished in 1900, projection of a city in the future of 2000; Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias..., passim.
of the modern city). His new city has overwhelming dimensions, it is massive and
monumental, with oversized towers and skyscrapers, designed in an unornamented
industrial-functionalist architectural language—a celebration of the new techniques
and materials. The traffic schema is a familiar one: the complex network spreads its
arteries both above and underground. More than Broadacre City or Ville Contempo-
raine/Ville Radieuse, Cità Nuova is a city of speed, an entity created for and in the
image of the machine. Moreover, in an authentic Futurist spirit and vexed by his then-
contemporary eclectic context, Sant’Elia argues not only for a break with the past,
but for its violent destruction along with tradition—encompassing the entire formal
repertoire, the ‘classic’ techniques and even materials.375 Sant’Elia declares this as
an essential phase for the ‘ratification’ of the new architecture. All that is inherited
from the ‘old city’ is obsolete and corrupt, and must be destroyed. However, mir-
roring Piranesi, Sant’Elia’s utopian projection remains a relatively condensed one,
lacking a social programme, the detailed ‘functioning algorithm’ or the prescription
scenario which governs other utopian visions; his utopian projection amounts to a
set of drawings—fragmentary images—and to the descriptions of the Manifesto of
Futurist Architecture (1914). Despite this, the architectural object is envisaged as the
source and the main agent of social change, the man-made machine through which
the new individual can be created.
2.5.8 The Interwar Period: The Architecture Project

as a Social and National Shaping Device
This principle of social shaping through the architecture project also marks the inter-
war period, creating similar algorithms expressed in the form of new cities or ample
urban projects, within different, even contradictory ideologies. “In the Soviet Union,
in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, and in democratic America the importance of
planned cities grew and strengthened”,376 combining the previous and the contem-
porary utopian projections and their models: the garden-city, the industrial company
town, the emerging machine-town. Kargon and Molella provide an analysis of this
process on German territory. The main invoked reason for decentralization is the
necessity to repopulate rural areas and it is assumed as a nationalistic, “internal
[re]colonization” programme or “repatriation”,377 —with the “anti-urban and anti-
technology”378 solution, idealizing the rural, suggested by Richard Walter Darré; his
idealized rural becomes a synonym of identitary character and national identity (an
archaic romanticized nordic identity). Although a direct consequence of the agri-
375 More on the futurist perspective on heritage as decandent, in the movement’s doctrinary text
from 1909, by F. T. Marinetti’s [Futurist Manifesto].
376 Kargon, Robert, H., Molella, Arthur, P., Invented Edens. Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century,
MIT PressCambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 2008, 28.

377 Kargon, Molella, Invented Edens, 40.
cultural crisis (1932), the discourse supporting this programme will assume a moral
aspect: it invokes a recovery of authentic values, a necessary moral re-education,
or the society’s spiritual salvation from the corrupt and corrupting city; as Kargon
and Molella point out, in the end and “in practice, the decentralization programme
became a tool of social control and forced migration of undesirables. Focused on
minority groups and workers, the policy would eventually have deadly implications
in the Holocaust”.379 Gottfried Feder imagines a different variant, albeit echoing
older ideals380 but essentially progressive: a “program of invented cities that aimed
to reconcile urban/technological and rural/agrarian values”,381 Both solutions are
combined in the project for a new industrial town (attached to the industrial state
corporation Reichswerke Hermann Göring)—Salzgitter (1937); the project’s guid-
ing principle of the, imagined by the official architect of the German national socialist
party—Herbert Rimpl, was “to preserve a sense of the rural and natural within the
heavily industrialized landscape”.382 The proposed layout of the new city is an “or-
ganic metaphor drawn from the heart of Nazi ideology”,383 but also a juxtaposition
of existing principles and already crystallized concepts, such as the machine-city and
the organism-city. The layout is symmetrical, Cartesian and highly hierarchized; it
applies the hygienist principles of orientation, lighting, ventilation, the separation of
functions and traffic arteries, the relative isolation of the heavy industry, the buffer
green belts and interstitial green areas, etc. The residential areas (single and multi-
family housing) are grouped in cell-units (“a subsystem of small communities”),384
or subordinate/satellite each serviced by a centre with public facilities and adminis-
tration; they are interconnected through a network of secondary traffic arteries. The
hierarchic and symbolic structure of the layout is evocative of the utopian schema:
the ‘heart’ of the city is “a sport and health complex”,385 and the ‘head’, the con-
ventionally elected ‘place of power’ or of the governing principle, is occupied by
the administrative centre. As Kargon and Molella note, Rimpl employs different
architectural languages as a means of hierarchization and segregation—especially in
terms of functions (massive neoclassic style, for official administrative buildings, the
more modern international style for industrial buildings and the German traditional
style for residential buildings). Rimpl’s project is built, even if it will not be finalized;

380 The “iron and rye” ideal, represented as a combination of industry and agriculture “Germany’s
official development policy dating from Bismarck’s Sammlungspolitik (politics of “pulling togeth-
er”)”, Kargon, Molella, Invented Edens, 40.
383 “Salzgitter was to function as—and be—an organism at one with nature, a Nazi garden-city.”
Kargon, Molella, Invented Edens…, 43.

384 Kagon, Molella, Invented Edens, 45.
385 This focus on sport and health through sport is not new, and is common for the epoch; the source
invoked in the case of Saltzgitter and in the Natzi ideology is debatable—as part of the hygienist
movement or perhaps going back to the idealized Antiquity and the greek model. Quote from Kagon,
Molella, Invented Edens…, 44.
the city is operational and develops until the end and even after World War II (during
which it adds a series of camps and ghettos destined to increase the workforce).
A similar example belongs to the Volkswagen Company: its industrial colony
“Stadt des KdF-Wagens”, or Wolfsburg (1938). It is a company town par excellence,
with a self-sufficient functioning centred on automotive production (and temporarily
weapon manufacturing). The town is built according to architect Peter Koller’s plans,
employing modernist principles, functional zoning and hygienist ordering—strict
separation of production area from the town itself, concentration of maximum den-
sity in the central area, the structuring of the layout on a dominant central axis
equipped with public interest facilities (commerce, administration, cultural centre,
etc.), the positioning of the housing units (single/multifamily) within generous green
areas, etc. The main axis—almost as a triumphal pathway—connects the massive
production unit and the adjacent Wolfsburg castle with the town. Between 1939 and
1942, more housing is created,386 gradually diverting the initial profile (the garden-
city) towards a garden-suburbia; in the same interval, the city acquires a negative
encoding, through its equipping with barracks and work camps. Visually, the axis
crossing the ensemble joins its central square with the old castle of Wolfsburg, but
the connection is not an aesthetic one, but a purely functional one—as the ‘umbilical
cord’ between production and the city; paradoxically, this connection is juxtaposed
with the ‘old’ one (between city and castle) showcasing the flexibility of power rela-
tions even in their materialized forms, as well as reminding to the then everyday
user the new governing principle. The project will not be entirely completed and
its development is resumed only after 1945. In the 1950s–60s, with the company’s
support and under housing crisis’ pressure and the increasing workforce influx, the
residential and facilities’ area is completed with a set of international projects (Aalto,
Scharoun); a second similar phase unfolds between 1996 and 2003.387 The town’s
development gradually cancels the initial zoning (production/housing) and alters
the initial layout: the creation of additional tangent or isolated points of interest
contradicts and dissolves the straightforwardness of the dominant central axis; the
functional schema is diversified; the city even receives a new point of access, etc.;
however, its identity, marked by its initial industrial functional profile and its enclave
character, is maintained. Observing the town’s urban evolution,388 Koller’s initial
layout—with the residential area connected to the industrial nucleus—remains not
386 http://issuu.com/instituteforsustainableurbanism/docs/wob_4_-_online_version, Carlow pub-
lishing house, Vanessa Miriam, WOB 4.0., Thinking the Un-thought, Szenarien fur die Autostadt,
ISU—Institute for Sustainable Urbanism, Wolksburg und Seine Planungen, Bauen auf der grunen
wiese, 10.
387 The initiative of the Volkswagen Company results in several internationally acclaimed projects:
Autostadt Wolfsburg, Henn Architekten (1996–2000), Seat-Pavilion, Alfredo Arribas (2001)

Phaeno Science Centre, Zaha Hadid Architects (2006), Autostadt Roof and Service Pavilion, Graft
Architects (2013).
388 The evolution stages and the main projects involved in Schneider, Nicole, Wolfsburg. Eine
Stadt verandert ihr Gesicht: Von der industriallen Wohnstadt zum Dienstleistungs und Freizeitzen-
trum/Wolfsburg. A City changes its appearance: From industrial colony to service and leisure cen-
ter, Stadt Wolfsburg publishing house, Kramer, Werner, Guthardt, Wolfgang, Siegfried, Klaus-Jorg,
2001, http://www.wolfsburg-staedtebau.de/stadtwob_1.pdf, accessed in August 2014.
only legible but also dominant, despite the multiple interferences such as expansion
and densification of the built fabric or the newly introduced functional mix.
The German overlapping of the garden-city model, the technological model and
the re-colonization of the Heimat theme, are mirrored in the Italian space, in the form
of slightly different utopian projections and their materialized heterotopic coun-
terparts. Burdett analyses the new Italian Fascist town as an “effectively enacted
utopia”—389 a climax of an absolute control over the society exercised under the
regime; his endeavour identifies these materialized utopias as heterotopic spaces.
The coordinates are familiar: the cult of the nation and its rebirth, the myth of the
“golden” past and its potential recovery (dissolving in the process the individual
into the collective)—all of which are meant to be expressed in the built object. Italy
is recreated via a new genesis, and the ‘virgin’ territory is reclaimed and recolo-
nized, for a new nation created by and under the careful watch of Mussolini. The
new towns are colonies presented as materialized Edens, but are in fact extremely
regulated and controlled mechanisms—as Burdett outlines, strikingly similar to the
prison and garrison space. Littoria, Sabaudia, Pontinia, Aprilia, Pomezia, Mussolini,
Carbonia, Fertilia, Guidonia, Arsia are some of the new towns, designed in the early
1920s, and built between ‘32 and ‘39 and immediately ‘colonized’; they display the
self-designated expression of Fascism390 (or the authoritarian regime)—Cartesian,
rationalist, defined by “geometry, purity and clarity”.391 The planimetrics simulta-
neously recall a ‘traditional’ typology (the central square), and the symbolic schema
of the centralized political ordering (high towers, oversized administrative build-
ings grouped around the square, dominating a monofunctional-residential ‘periph-
ery’, with restricted height regime and a serial nature). The absolute control is also
evoked through the central or grid-like layout, symmetrical and essentially panoptic.
The strictly ordered layouts of these towns recall a familiar local model—the Cam-
panella’s solar town and Sforzinda—both Renaissance utopian projects. The ‘use’
of history is rampant: “[t]he palingenetic, ultra-nationalist world view of Italian Fas-
cism encouraged the veneration of the greatness of the Roman empire”,392 leading
to a “sacralisation of the nation”393 and the selective reconstruction of history, its
encodings and its inherited markers; as Burdett observes,394 the process entails a
389 Burdett, Charles, Journeys to the other spaces of Fascist Italy, Modern Italy, 5:1, 7–23, 2000,
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13532940050003014, 8.
390 “The new towns were supposed to be the architectural manifestation of the Fascist state in stylistic
questions as well as regarding the image of society, which they were to represent, for they were
a prestige object of national and international importance”, Spiegel, Daniela, The Relics of the
Fascist Regime on Italuan Buildings, or Who is afraid of the Fascio Littorio, 61–66 in Edinburgh
Architecture Research Journal—EAR, no. 29, 2004, 63.
391 Nuti, Lucia, La Città Nuova nella cultura urbanistica e architettonica del fascismo, METODO,
N. 17/2001, in Architettura—Urbanistica: Carbonia, “città di fondazione”, http://www.globnet.it/

carbonia/cittadifondazione.htm, accessed in August 2014.
392 Burdett, Charles, Journeys to the other spaces of Fascist Italy, Modern Italy, 5:1, 7–23, 2000,
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13532940050003014, 9.
393 Burdett, C., Journeys to the other spaces…, 9.
394 Burdett addresses these ‘internal colonies’ along with other “segregated institutions or hetero-
topias [which] served an indispensable role in subjecting the individual to the control of the state”
“fusion of the world as lived and the world as imagined”.395 Yet the neoclassical
architectural expression usually preferred and employed by totalitarian regimes is
replaced in the Italian case with a mix of neoclassical and modernism, elected to the
status of official architecture.396
In the Italian space, in parallel with the new fascist ordering turned official, the
model of the progressive urbanism infuses an alternative movement; based on the
model space, in the image of the ‘radiant’ city, a hybrid crystallizes: the ‘corpo-
ratist’ zoned town, well anchored in the regional network. Kargon and Molella bring
forward two interesting examples, both suspended in a project phase. The first, the
modernization of the city of Pavia (the BBPR group),397 is based on functional
zoning, hygienism and access to green areas, and especially on technology as a
dominant feature (circulation, communication, constructions, industry, etc.); in the
spirit of Plan Voisin, the old urban fabric is “razed and rebuilt for reasons of aes-
thetics [!] and hygiene”.398 The second quoted example is Piano Regolatore della
Valle d’Aosta (1937) designed by the Olivetti Company; here, “[t]he central concept
of the Plan was regionalism. The conception of the region was historical, cultural,
and industrial, not administrative”399 ; the rationalist driven proposal combines the
CIAM principles, the company town model and the regional-network model (theme
employed by Howard, Mumford and others). While the two projects remain no more
than proposals, Adriano Olivetti continues to campaign in favour of the formula,
gradually reducing its scale, until finally materialized in the refitting of the city of
Ivrea and of his own factory—the only completed project. The rehabilitation of the
Olivetti factory introduces modernist-hygienist architectural and organizational prin-
ciples, and dons the paternalist social coordinate of the company town: two residential
colonies, Borgo Olivetti and Castellamonte, cafeteria, nursery, high school, summer
camps for the employees’ children and sport facilities—intended exclusively for the
factory employees—public facilities (transport systems). Starting with these projects
and by the end of World War II, Adriano Olivetti will gradually define his utopian
perspective of the cooperative community, detailed in his L’ordine politico delle
and as “vehicles for the expression of articles of faith, places of ritualistic or sacred importance,
where grand narratives of the past, present and future could be experienced.”. Burdett identifies
these “sites of commemoration, the prison and the internal colony” as heterotopian spaces, which
illustrate all of Foucault’s principles of the heterotopia. Burdett, C., Journeys to the other spaces…,
9.
395 Burdett, C., idem.
396 This identitary construct is however a mere appendage in the larger apparatus assembled through
the Fascist endeavour: fascism is “a civic religion” comprised of “a set of beliefs, myths and liturgical
practices which could make appeals to the whole of the Italian people”. “At the core of the Fascist
religious system lay the cult of the nation, understood as a sacred community awoken from centuries
of decadence […]”. Burdett, Charles, Journeys to the other spaces of Fascist Italy, Modern Italy,
5:1, 7–23, 2000, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13532940050003014, 9.
397 Together with the BBPR group members—Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Gian Luigi Banfi, Ludovico
Belgiojoso, and Enrico Peressutti, engineer Gaetano Ciocca also takes part. More in Kargon and
Molella, Invented Edens…, 91–95.
Comunità dello Stato secondo le leggi dello spirito (1946). The basic unit, or the
model space is organic and self-sufficient—“comunità concreta”; it represents the
optimal combination of the material (technology, the benefits of industry) and the
spiritual (moral ideals illustrated in the human scale, the connection with nature,
the individual freedom, etc.). Just like his German predecessor, Olivetti’s utopian
projection envisaged substituting the urban/rural divide with their hybrid, an organic
“industrial decentralization”,400 or, in other words, an all-encompassing restructur-
ing the Italian territory as a “federation of 400–500 autonomous communities”,401
hierarchized and specialized. This economic, political and administrative reorgani-
zation would also engender a “transformation of all human relations”, (re-)creating
the individual but most importantly, the community. The passeist undertone comes
through: the unity, the connection between individuals and the community’s connec-
tion with the territory need not be reinvented, just revived and reinterpreted. This
type of social interconnection (illustrated as ‘community’) that this utopian projec-
tion intends to revive is nothing else but the one “dominating Europe, before the
rise of Fascism and Nazism”.402 The new individual was to be integrated and shaped
through the new ordering, in itself extended from a town and community level to
that of urban planning, regional planning and eventually to national planning. As
the previous examples prove, the paternalist ordering can easily become panoptic,
totalitarian, despite its positive intention. In Olivetti’s approach, the ideal unity and
harmony of this reticular organism can only be provided through an “oversight by
a single authority that could coordinate its complex activities”403 ; in order to avoid
the perils of centralized control, he divides “authority among co-equal bodies, each a
sub-organism in its own right”.404 Everything is framed within a “moral and ethical
system rooted in Christian belief”.405 Even if resting on the strong pragmatic foun-
dation arising from his personal experience, Olivetti’s utopian projection is never
fully materialized, although partially translated into reality in the general layout of
the city of Ivrea and of the Canavese region, with Gruppo Tecnico Coordinamento
Urbanistico del Canavese, 1955; his projection will eventually permeate the official
ordering, through programmes such as the Istituto per il Rinnovamento Urbano e
Rurale, or I-RUR, (1954).

402 Idem., 104.
403 Idem., 105.
404 “Power was vested in three entities: a president elected under universal suffrage, a vice-president
elected only by workers and trade unionists, and a cultural representative elected by ‘men of com-
petence’”, Kargon, Molella, 105.
405 Idem.
2.5.9 The Total Institution and the Dystopian

Metamorphosis. The Fascist Utopia and the Labour
Camp as a Heterotopian Space
Mixing and recycling these models, (the culturalist and the modernist-progressive
one), the newly built towns, beginning with the interwar period on German and Italian
territory (but not exclusively), are primarily encoded as attempts to recolonize and
reclaiming the homeland. However, the materialization of this ideal is mediated by a
tertiary factor, external and unacknowledged. The new machine-towns of totalitarian
regimes are imagined as exact and efficient production mechanisms encased within
the political dispositif, and as idealized fragments of the new emerging ordering; yet
their creation and especially their operation depend on the existence of forced labour
camps.
The camp, either designed for work or extermination, along with the military
or the detention camp comprise a spatial typology directly addressed by Foucault,
as heterotopian spaces—due to their strict order, self-sufficiency and isolation from
the outside, as well as their functioning according to own internal over-regulated
rhythms. The all-encompassing control exercised within these spaces and in their
internal ordering (both physical and non-physical) mirrors the Foucaultian defini-
tion of “total institutions”, as well as the previous parallel interpretation offered by
Goffman406 ; “the latter lists the concentration camps in one of his five typologies, as
“total institutions organized to protect the community against what are thought to be
intentional dangers to it; here the welfare of the persons thus sequestered is not the
immediate issue”.407 Wachsman’s camp/town analogy408 understood through Goff-
man’s total institution concept, focuses on the factory space, on the highly efficient
machine-town as a production device—and mirroring the modern understanding of
the ideal town. Besides its most prominent punitive role, the camp is understood
and implicitly used as an ideal production space—with minimized consumption,
maximized production and the workforce always at the disposal of its controllers.
Once crystallized, the standard formula has a rectangular and simple layout, with
well-defined and hierarchized zones—a functional ordering inspired by the factory’s
typical production flows, intended to facilitate productivity but most of all the control
and the constant (panoptic) surveillance of the prisoners. These ‘production’ spaces,
406 Social establishments—institutions in the everyday sense of that term—are buildings or plants
in which activity of a particular kind regularly goes on…. Each captures something of the time and
interest of its members and provides something of a world for them. […] Their encompassing or
total character is symbolized by the barrier to social intercourse with the outside that is often built
right into the physical plant: locked doors, high walls, barbed wire, cliffs and water, open terrain”,
Goffman, Erving, The Characteristics of Total Institutions, initially published in Symposium on
Preventive and Social Psychiatry, 15–17 April 1957, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research,
Washington D.C.
407 Idem.
408 Wachsmann, Nikolaus, The dynamics of destruction. The development of the concentration
camps, 1933–1945, 17–44 in Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany. The New Histories., eds.
Caplan, Jane, and Wachsmann, Nikolaus, Routledge, 2010.
in conjunction with the Nazi monuments (the Reich’s architectural monuments),

form a veritable system, “each [space] making the other one possible”.409 If the work
camp of World War II, particularly the German one, is quite easily read as deliberate
spaces of alterity, its other positioning within the everyday fabric of the city presents
a more interesting and complex version. In the historical context of the time—under
the influence of the Zeitgeist—410 utopia is automatically endowed with a particular
architectural expression—illustrating the application of the “Nazi utopia of realis-
able perfection”.411 As Sargisson notes “the matrix of Self/Other”, or their “relation
informs many other social and political relations”,412 and can be used, much like
Foucault does, to explain processes and practices and implicitly the configuration of
the built space; however, this dichotomic relationship is fluid, contextual and capable
to coexist in multiple instances. In this sense, the Natzi ideal of the self and the camp
illustrate two coexisting non-exclusive and quite different self/other relations: the
undesirables as other versus the German ideal as self—in Sargisson’s reading; how-
ever, the German ideal is can also be identified as the exceptional other, in relation to
its then-contemporary context—and completely shifting and contradicting the previ-
ous relation. In short, Self can equal Other and elude the oppositional relation. This
equation also suggests a further ‘splintering’ of relations: the (mouldable) ‘self’ is
suspended in an intermediate position, between the ideal self and the past self. Here
the utopian projection and its materializations come into play, as a catalyst. The
state as totalitarian institution is the one defining and constructing the representation
of the ideal self through its two main means of operation, the built object and the
urban project; these are employed as shaping devices of the ideal self and the ideal
community/nation.
One such all-encompassing demarche, envisaged to serve the Nazi ideology
is the urban refitting of Berlin—or its reconstruction as the new capital of the
Reich, Welthauptstadt Germany, officially Gesamtbauplan für die Reichshaupt-
stadt (1937). This project is preceded, as Speer notes, by the idea of planning and
constructing a new city, the “German Washington”,413 or an ideal planned city. The
design specifications received by Speer included the creation of a triumphant boule-
vard (a Berliner Champs-Élysées) and the positioning of several ‘monuments’ or key-
buildings that would dominate the ensemble (Volkshalle/Ruhmeshalle—a congress
hall giant dome and the terminus of the axis, a triumphal arch). The project involved
the “razing [of] the heart of the city”.414 The final version of the project consisted of
409 Sudjic, Deyan, The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful—and Their Architects—Shape
the World, Penguin, 2006, fn., via Google Books, accessed in August 2014.
410 Gonen, Jay Y., The Roots of Nazi Psychology: Hitler’s Utopian Barbarism, University Press of
Kentucky, 2000, 3.
411 Sargisson, Lucy, Green Utopias of Self and Other, în The Philosophy of Utopia, Barbara Goodwin
publishing house, Routledge, 2012, 141.

412 Sargisson, Lucy, Green Utopias of Self and Other, 141.
413 Speer, A., Inside the Third Reich. Memoirs by Albert Speer, translated from the German by
Richard and Clara Winston, introduction by Eugene Davidson, New York, Macmillan Company,
1970, 76.
414 Speer, 77.
two intersecting major axes, framed by buildings with mixed functions—resuming

the modernist tiered schema (central concentration of towers, progressively lower
height towards the periphery). The development of the metropolis would supplement
“five [traffic] rings and seventeen radial thoroughfares”,415 all oversized, as well as
underground passageways for fast traffic between the centre and periphery; Speer’s
schema reiterates the already familiar theme of traffic hierarchization. Onto this
urban restructuring, the project would graft a massive Olympic stadium, a new uni-
versity district, a new ‘medical’ district and an entire area servicing the new museum
ensemble of Berlin: the “museum’s district” or the “museum’s island” on the river
Spree. The main axis would connect two new terminus points, two monumental train
stations; along the axis, the major public functions are distributed (Triumphant Arch,
ministry buildings, Volkshalle, etc.). Again for a functional diversification, the axis
is envisaged as “a continuous sales display of German goods which would exert a
special attraction upon foreigners”.416 The whole project is intended to showcase and
celebrate the power that had created it—417 to overwhelm and amaze through “the
[spectacle of the] urban scene and thus the power of the Reich.”418 In Speer’s descrip-
tion several heterotopian coordinates become apparent: the materialized project was
to be the representation of a victorious Reich, consequence but also agent of this
new identity—a materialized and miniaturized version of the victorious Reich (sta-
tus enforced through its capital status); it was to be a compensatory space,419 and a
temporal enclave—suspended in perpetual flourishing. The enormous urban ensem-
ble is indeed overwhelming but austere, just as the dominant official architecture.
The neoclassical language—a Doric-style interpretation—invokes the “noble orig-
in”, reassembled from an imaginary Greek Antiquity, colonized by the Doric tribes
of German descent.420 The project of the new capital, only partially constructed,
was meant to impress and overpower the individual, to ingrain the official narra-
tive and, at the same time, to serve as the background for the climax of the Reich’s
power. Moreover, in one of the Fuhrer’s national programmes, the new Berlin would
have provided the model for the upgrading of the German city, to be followed by
Muremberg, Lintz, Munchen and Hamburg.
415 Speer, 78.

416 Speer, 134.
417 Sudjic, Deyan, The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful—and Their Architects—Shape
the World, Penguin, 2006, fn., via googlebook.com, accessed in August 2014.
418 Speer, 135.
419 The compensation would be in both size and ‘content’, “The station plaza, thirty-three hundred
feet long and a thousand feet wide, was to be lined with captured weapons, after the fashion of
the Avenue of Rams which leads from Karnak to Luxor.”; a “combination of an armory and [a]
veterans’ memorial […]” would receive as its first exhibit “the dining car in which the surrender
of Germany had been signed in 1918 and the surrender of France in 1940 was to be brought here”;
“a crypt was planned for the tombs of celebrated German field marshals of the past, present, and
future”. Speer, 134–6.
420 Speer, 97.
Just like Welthauptstadt Germany, initiated and not entirely completed, is the
Prora project (1936–39, arch. Clemens Klotz): a seaside balneal-town421 on Rügen
Island, part of the national organization “Kraft durch Freude” (KdF/‘Strength through
Joy’) and part of a set of five similar but never completed resorts.422 Although a new
town, Prora continues the pre-existing, nineteenth-century functional profile of the
area; extending in the north of the nineteenth-century spa/resort city of Binz, the
modernist ensemble juxtaposes the new instance of (mass) leisure.
If the new Berlin would primarily be the ‘head’ of the Reich-body, the nucleus
of the dominant power—as suggested by the disposition, the scale and the accumu-
lation of administrative and representative institutions—Prora would be the ‘body’
and ‘for the body’ of the Reich, illustrating a social narrative. According to the ini-
tial project, the ensemble stretches along approximately 5 km of coastline and was
intended to accommodate 20,000 tourists; it is designed as a self-sufficient enclave:
“[…] a festival square, event halls and had additional plans for restaurants, cine-
mas and sporting venues”,423 and a quay. The already familiar mechanism is used:
the Prora resort is imagined as the built expression of the ideal ordering and simul-
taneously its mediator, by directly shaping the ideal individual of Nazi ordering
and propaganda. The project is endowed with a double mark of modernism.424 On
the one hand, it is infused with the modernist principles—hygienist and functional-
ist—which are here enrolled in the service of and as an extension to the ‘superior
race’ myth. Beyond its immediate utilitarian encoding (health/leisure as the means
to an efficient worker/soldier), this idealization of physical prowess and the ‘cult of
the body’ also has other secondary encodings, such as its deliberate association with
421 Beltran and Roca include the German Prora resort-town in the category of “New holiday towns
[NHT]”, that “were born in the early twentieth century when holiday leave became a legal right
for the working class, building the environment of a modern way of life based on leisure time, a
healthy life based on sun and beach, far away from the city, the pollution, and work routine.” The
envisaged diverse functional profile—a permanent resort-town and not just a seasonal resort—-
suggests the self-sufficiency argument. For the Spanish counterpart of Prora see Beltran, Lidia;
Roca Cladera, José Nicasio. New holiday towns as Non-places: the case of Marina d’Or. A: Con-
ference of the International Forum on Urbanism. “6th Conference of the International Forum on
Urbanism (IFoU): TOURBANISM, Barcelona, 25–27 gener”. Barcelona: IFoU, 2012, p. 1–10.;
also Carcelén González, Ricardo. La ordenación del reposo en la España del régimen franquista: las
ciudades sindicales y la cualificación para el descanso. A: Seminario Internacional de Investigación
en Urbanismo. “VIII Seminario Internacional de Investigación en Urbanismo, Barcelona-Balneário
Camboriú, Junio 2016”. Barcelona: DUOT, 2016.
422 Official page of Prora resort, http://www.proradok.de, accessed in February 2014.
423 Grein, Adam W. (major), The Third Reich’s Macroeconomic Policies: Enablers Of Genocide,
thesis presented to the Faculty of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Master of
Military Art and Science, published by Pickle Partners Publishing, 2014, (accessed via googlebooks.
com) 36.
424 The “[…] strictly functional band city plans of Le Corbusier for Algiers (1931) and Ernst
May for Magnitogorsk (1929)”. Dorries, Cornelia, Prora oder: Die Unschuldsvermutung in
der Architektur, 29. Juni 2015, In Architektur+Raum, Ausbau, Deutsches Architektenblatt,
https://dabonline.de/2015/06/29/prora-oder-die-unschuldsvermutung-in-der-architektur-binz-
ferienanlage-insel-massentourismus-nationalsozialismus-ddr-ruegen-koloss-kraft-durch-freude-
sowjetunion-kommunismus-wohnen-appartments-geschic/, accessed September 2018.
the Greek model. On the other hand, the favoured architectural expression, the aus-
tere neoclassical style, is replaced by an equally austere, yet balanced modernism,
with ocean liner style features.425 The layout is symmetrical, with a dominating cen-
tral accent; the square is bordered by the oversized festivity hall, from which two
‘wings’—the main accommodation units—extend along the beach; this barrier-like
volume is rhythmically fragmented by perpendicular volumes, extending towards the
coastline. The two main accommodation wings offering the coveted sea view for all
the rooms, while the perpendicular volumes—massive, serial blocks—are entirely
dedicated to common facilities and vertical circulations.426 Their rhythmic pattern,
austerity and repetitiveness highlight the colossal dimensions of the ensemble, and
enhance the military, almost detention-like character of the ensemble. It is envisaged
to function as a restricted, self-sufficient universe,427 servicing the 20,000 tourists
according to fixed ten/fourteen-day sojourns. By imposing its absolute control even
on this ‘private’ social function—leisure—the Reich would make it available for
the entire population in a ‘democratic’, equalitarian manner. However, Prora will
never actually carry out its intended function. The utopian intent resurfaces: just
as the previous formulas, the dominant ordering disposes of certain freedoms of
the individual/community, in the name of a greater good (truth, freedom, efficiency,
happiness, fulfilment or morality), employs a tactic—control, surveillance, norming,
internal ordering—and constructs a built mechanism, almost inevitably heterotopian.
The Prora ensemble’s organization and built formula, its imagined functioning and
the creative intent behind it assign it to the category of heterotopic spaces. The resort-
town is simultaneously a heterotopia of illusion: device and witness of the new ideal
ordering; it is a heterotopia of the transitory time: the extra-ordinary interval or the
temporary interruption of the every day—a free albeit a highly normed time, given
its fixed intervals—an other time and an other space par excellence; it is simultane-
ously a heterotopia of crisis and one of deviation, since the individual’s crisis (poor
health, fatigue, disability) is, in the eyes of the dominant ordering, considered to
be deviant, to a certain extent. These two ‘modes of operation’ are acquired along
with the beginning of the war, and alternatively maintained during the succession of
functions it receives: a re-education camp for police officers and military radio oper-
ators (‘39–‘45), a refugee shelter (‘43–‘45), a military hospital (‘44), and finally a
labour camp for war prisoners (after ‘45)—in a complete reversal of the initial order-
ing (leisure/detention), and thus juxtaposing radically different functions within the
same space. During these phases, the complex is partially demolished and enters a
425 “At the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris, Klotz’s design receives the Grand Prix—for the first archi-
tectural manifestation of modern mass tourism.” Dorries, Cornelia, Prora oder: Die Unschuldsver-
mutung in der Architektur…, f.n.
426 The “communal houses” house restaurants, dining rooms and leisure facilities. Dorries, Cornelia,
Prora oder: Die Unschuldsvermutung in der Architektur…, f.n.

427 The ensemble was automatically multifunctional: the buildings of administration compound,
the accommodation units for tourists and employees, squares and parks, festivity rooms, pools,
restaurants, coffee houses and theatres, cinemas, sports fields and garages.
prolonged degradation process. The complex receives additional hybridisations in

the ‘90s, it is fragmentarily sold to various investors, as well as listed as heritage.428
The more recent development of the ensemble has fuelled its conflictual encod-
ings. On the one hand, there is the leisure encoding: this encourages the redevelop-
ment of the site (its reconstruction, rehabilitation and re-functionalization). On the
other hand, both the ethics and the morals of the entire demarche are questioned.
The first approach is supported by a utilitarian argument, the exploitation of and the
access to a natural resource, an appealing stretch of the Baltic seashore; the existing
mega-structure is ‘read’ more pragmatically (even if not entirely neutral, due to the
ever-present real-estate speculations), as simply “steel and concrete”, too costly to
demolish and as an existing robustly built ‘facility’ ready to serve its new purpose.
Even in this approach, the architectural ‘colossus’ is not perceived as entirely ‘inno-
cent’, miraculously emptied of its negative encoding. As Dorries notes, the Nazi
legacy is perceived by investors as an overshadowing presence, inhibiting its coveted
re-inscription in the leisure/real-estate market, and hence conveniently minimized
or erased in the promotional flyers. However, I argue that the heritage status—also
contested—has endowed the space with a paradoxical, heterotopian encoding: its
value and symbolic encodings are acknowledged without a perilous ‘monumentifi-
cation’ or glorification; the still meagre presence of the necessary heritage narration
(the museum and the information point) serve as devices that attempt to neutralize
the negative charge of the space, by placing it in an intermediate, more objective
position. On the other hand, its reinvesting with meaning and its re-entry in everyday
life are questioned as unethical, as a dismissive (or even positive encoding) of its
dark history—and thus some have supported its demolition or its progressive natural
degradation.429 From this perspective, the ensemble retains in its architecture and
urban schema the initial encoding and negative associations; the signification encod-
ing is acknowledged through the heritage status and, as a consequence, its heritage
listing is also questioned. I argue that exactly through this heritage status the other-
ness430 of the ensemble (or its endemic heterotopic nature, as a materialized utopia)
can be—and to a certain extent it already is—stabilized, ‘encased’ in an additional
delineation, which allows the coexistence of all layers of meaning, regardless of their
valences. As van der Hoorn notes, while “rehabilitations are not always solutions that
pacify feelings and attitudes towards controversial eyesores […]”, and can remain
themselves controversial, they also essentially “consist of new material forms, in a
428 Since then it houses “a hostel, alternative cultural initiatives, small galleries and a café [that]
have settled in the reasonably usable tracts over the years, the provisionally secured property has
become neglected and rapidly decaying.” More recently several luxury hotels and other smaller
scale accommodation are gradually recoding the ensemble. Dorries, Cornelia, Prora oder: Die
Unschuldsvermutung in der Architektur…, f.n.
429 Dorries, Cornelia, Prora oder: Die Unschuldsvermutung in der Architektur…, f.n.
430 The Prora resort has been discussed as a heterotopic space by Matthew Philpotts in The Ruins of
Dictatorship: Prora and Other Spaces, Central Europe Journal, Volume 12, 2014—Issue 1: ‘Remem-
bering Dictatorship’, 47–61, https://doi.org/10.1179/1479096314z.00000000022.
new sociocultural context, with new purposes—and that apparent continuity with
former eyesores is often illusory”.431
Just like in the previous utopian projections, the built form becomes an ‘instru-
ment’—for controlling and for engendering the new society—simultaneously rep-
resenting and enacting the ideal order. There used ‘mechanics’ are already famil-
iar—symmetry, Cartesian layout, centrality, spatial and functional hierarchy—all
suggestive of the controlling, serial and the panoptic nature of the ensemble. The
preferred architectural expression of totalitarian orders generally gravitate towards
a rigid neoclassicism with modernist, and in some cases regionalist influences (sim-
ilar for Fascist Italy, the Third Reich, the Stalinist Soviet Union, communist China,
Peronist Argentina and communist Romania); totalitarian powers look for valida-
tion through a visual encoding—a transfer of an undeniable significance burden—a
selective analogy of already established values and their often distorted adoption.
The conservative message behind the recovery of the past (the classical architec-
tural language) is thus processed through oversizing, a common mechanics for most
totalitarian paradigms. Oversizing is intended to express power and dominance, ven-
eration and perhaps reverence, but also the promised progress—the new ordering is
simultaneously the recovery of the ideal past and of its values, the moulding and the
control of the ideal present, but also its projection into the future. The new ordering
is thus presented as authentic, better, stronger and more heroic, yet an infinitesimal
fragment of a hypertrophied future.
Foucault considers that architecture in itself can be neither liberating, nor repres-
sive, and that the built form cannot resolve social issues—a task which falls upon
usage policies, norming and practices of the space, the only vector able to produce
a social impact. Paradoxically, the previous overview of utopian projections (either
materialized or not), confirms and simultaneously contradicts this argument. The
contradiction is based upon the very aggregation of the architectural projection: the
architectural/urban project—and especially the utopian one—starts precisely with
the premise, or rather the conviction and belief in its capacity to resolve the given
social issues of its historic context. Coleman interprets the architectural imagination
(in general) as an implicitly utopian practice, and exactly this utopian encoding—an
integral part of any architectural project—grants its undeniable social dimension.
The utopian architectural projection illustrates most clearly the paradox of Fou-
cault’s reading. It is systematically and deliberately oriented towards identifying and
solving social issues, and its resulting ‘proposal’ is first and foremost a built layout
and secondly a textual, functioning scenario; the built from itself is a materialized
usage-scenario, enforcing the ideal ordering. The ideal city and the citta-del-sole, the
familistère and the phalanstery, the garden-city, the living-machine and the radiant
city—or the models—as well as the radial fortified town, the company town, the
new towns—materializations of the models—are born from the need to correct an
existing allegedly defective social ordering. These models revive hierarchies, lim-
its and segregations and safeguard the individual/society—by means of the built
431 Hoorn,
Mélanie van der, Indispensable Eyesores: An Anthropology of Undesired Buildings,
Berghahn Series: vol. 10, Berghahn Books, 2009, 172.
form. However, these very same utopian examples confirm Foucault’s statement:
when materialized, they remain impotent, unable to resolve those social issues. The
use-strategies of these models and their variants are successive, alternating between
opposites, liberating or repressive. The same model can read as negative, totalitar-
ian and dystopian, but also in the author’s initial encoding, generally positive, and
directed towards achieving a positive ideal. The heterotopian spaces, resulting from
the materialization of utopian models, bear the same double encoding.
A Romanian example is the Parliament Palace project, the former Casa Repub-
licii or Casa Poporului [People’s House], “born of totalitarian ideology”;432 Doina
Petrescu notes the ambivalence gained by this symbol during a few decades. Part of
the project’ original encoding and the most visible is the “the desire for immortal-
ity, the obsession to preserve forever the memory of his name [Ceausescu’s]”,433 a
component of more complex concept—“myth of the Ceausescu-epoch as ‘the golden
age’, the summit of history, etc.”434 A similar festive but more neutral encoding is
identified by Tulbure.435 According to Tulbure, the building “represented a ‘writing
of a page of communist history’, ‘a deeper link with history’, ‘providing evidence
of the glorious era’, ‘proof of the peaceful work of a free nation, owner of its des-
tiny, constructor of socialism and communism’”—436 suggesting a predominantly
commemorative, less engaged functioning. A second encoding, and the first ‘freely’
acquired, is a negative one—as a representation of a “a violation of reason by a
totalising hubris of an ideology, a violation of the city by a strategic implantation, a
violation done to architecture itself by disregard for its rules”.437 This encoding is
further enhanced: the building itself (part of a new Civic Centre), as the systemati-
zation of the capital, are at the time motivated by the earthquake of 1977, and are
the cause of extensive demolitions (450 ha). This intervention is not new,438 but it
432 Petrescu, Doina, The People’s House, or the “voluptuous violence” of an architectural paradox,
in Architecture and Revolution: Contemporary Perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe, Leach,
Neil, Routledge, Taylor & Francis E-Library, 2004, 188–195, 189.
433 Petrescu, Doina, The People’s House…, 191.
434 Petrescu, The People’s House…, 195.
435 “the huge building of Casa Republicii did not have an explicit and pragmatic aim, the inten-
tion—as it emerges from the printed media—being rather to celebrate the glorious times of social-
ism, the golden era of Ceausescu and Ceausescu himself.” Tulbure, Irina, From Casa Scânteii to Casa
Poporului and Back Architecture as Icon of a Totalitarian Regime, 79–89, in Studies in History and
Theory of Architecture-Studii de Istoria si Teoria Arhitecturii (sITA), vol. 1/2013: Printed in Red.
Architectural Writings during Communism, ISSN (print): 2344-6544 | ISSN (online): 2457-1687 |
ISSN-L: 2344-6544, 86.
436 Tulbure, Irina, From Casa Scânteii to Casa Poporului and Back…, 86.
437 Petrescu, 190.
438 “Ceausescu was inspired (and advised?) in choosing it by a series of projects that envisaged the
same area: the construction of the Patriarchal Cathedral in the interwar period and the potential
construction of a new University Center in Bucharest, stipulated in a draft version of the mid-
sixties systematization plan for Bucharest. But the source of inspiration can also be easily found
in the projects of the Fifties for Bucharest (also draft sketches) that imagined the systematization
of Dâmbovita and the creation of a great landscape of skyscrapers accommodating cultural and
educational facilities.” Tulbure, Irina, From Casa Scânteii to Casa Poporului and Back…, 87–88.
will be completed under the communist regime. In the antithetical relation noted by
Petrescu, the imagined “wonder” reveals its true “monstrous” face—through its read-
ing by the one to whom it was intended/designated for and whose name it bears (‘the
people’) and “to which it would never be accessible”.439 Surprisingly, as Petrescu
notes, the building receives yet a new encoding, via the general public itself (the
intended recipient of the project); this post factum encoding, if not exactly posi-
tive, is at least favourable, despite the controversial and residual symbolic imprint.
The temporal distancing contributes to the process of significance sedimentation;
in the case of the People’s House, the three codifications coexist, in different yet
simultaneous instances: as a dual historical witness—the image of a positive ideal,
but also of an oppressive and totalitarian cult of power. In its third instance, the
construction appears as a representative of the democratic state/the current politi-
cal ordering—and essentially illustrating Foucault’s statement: single repository for
opposing orderings, the totalitarian oppressive regime and the democratic ordering,
cladding them both in the same architectural ‘garment’. This reinvestment with a
positive signification is additionally demonstrated by re-evaluation of its heritage
value, in a similar manner to the socialist industrial built heritage; the ‘totalitarian’
built inheritance (buildings as well as monuments, the favourite target of negative
re-encodings and destruction) gradually gains visibility, and it is included in vari-
ous protection categories (heritage of the twentieth century), and eventually receives
its own dedicated division (Socialist Realist). Beyond pragmatic economic motiva-
tion, similar to the Prora case, the ambivalence of the significance attached to the
object imposes the preservation of these memory places, despite issues connected to
their management, re-functionalization and valorisation of this heritage. On totalitar-
ian architecture and its relationship with power in Augustin Ioan (for the Romanian
space), Igor Golomshtok (for the Italian, German and Russian space),440 Boris Groys
(Stalinism),441 among others.442
Within totalitarian orderings, the utopia seen as a myth or as ideology is increas-
ingly further from its initial definition. Segal sees in the construct’ evolution a meta-
morphosis and a degradation, but not a disappearance nor a death of utopia—as
Choay does. Segal’s argument and marker is the public perception displayed in the
exhibition “Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World”, pre-
sented in Bibliothèque Nationale de France and later in the New York Public Library
439 At least under the regime. Petrescu, 190.

440 Golomshtok, Igor, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the
People’s Republic of China, transl. Robert Chandler, New York, NY: Icon Editions, 1990,
441 Groys, Boris, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond,
transl. Charles Rougle, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

442 And others—Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991, Peter Smith
Pub Inc., 2001; Sudjic, The Edifice Complex: The Architecture of Power, Penguin Books, 2011
[2005].
(2000–1), whose quadripartite structure443 culminates with the dystopian turn of

utopia in the twentieth century.
2.5.10 Ecologist Utopia and Consumerist Utopia
Its function to “identify, mark and formulate the insoluble or indefinable societal
issues”,444 or in other words the criticism of the existing and the imagining of the
ideal, makes the utopian projection as the starting point of any political commitment,
as Choay remarks. Even Choay, although associating “the end of the 20th century and
the disappearance of utopia”—including the textual version, the technotopian ones of
the 1950s–1970s—identifies a re-ordering in the utopian structure. The three coordi-
nates of ‘traditional’ utopia or the “structural terms of More’s paradigm” as named by
Choay—the criticized social context, the model space and the model society—are no
longer on ‘equal terms; beginning with the 19th, this three partite unit is gradually
disintegrating—a process simulating that disappearance of utopia. I argue that its
three components are simply shifting from foreground and background position. In
Choay’s opinion, the classic utopia permanently disappears in the twentieth century,
replaced by an anti-utopia, and she names the “non-plan” proposed by Price, Barker,
Banham and Hall in 1969 (the foundation of the contemporary participative archi-
tecture) and the “Instant-city” experiment of the Arhigram group; Choay considered
the latter the anti-utopia par excellence, because it lacks the binomial pairing of exist-
ing (criticized) space and ideal (compensating) space but also the anthropogenetical
encoding of the model spatial organization. Nevertheless, other alternatives develop
simultaneously, such as Soleri’s proposal for an ecological reconceptualization of
architecture and urban planning—arcology (approx. 1963–70). His eco-urban exper-
iment has two materializations, Arcosanti and Cosanti, in Arizona, USA—utopian
embodiments which are perhaps even more comparable with the self-sufficient reli-
gious colonies or the kibbutz communities, albeit replacing the religious encoding
with the ecologist principle. Soleri’s version is ecological, localized and contex-
tual, opposing globalization; the goal is to ‘replicate’ a structure ‘in the image’ and
structure of nature, capable of harbouring “the relations and interactions that liv-
ing organisms have with respect to each other and their natural environment”.445
Arcosanti is proposed as an ideal city, an integrated, ecological, sustainable, com-
443 “Sources: Ancient, Biblical, and Medieval Traditions”; “OtherWorlds: Utopian Imagination from
More to the Enlightenment”; “Utopia in History: From the Revolutionary Age Through the Nine-
teenth Century”; and “Dreams and Nightmares: Utopias and Dystopias in the Twentieth Centu-
ry”, Segal, H., P., Utopias, A Brief History from Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities, Wiley-
Blackwell, John Wiley & Sons, 2012, 242.
444 Choay, F., Pentru o antropologie a spatiului, Biblioteca Urbanismul (Serie nouă), ed. Registrul
,
Urbanis, tilor din România, transl. Kovacs, K., Bucures, ti, 2011 (2006), 227.
445 Lopez, Oscar, Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti: The City in the Image of Man, 03 Sept 2011, ArchDaily
accessed on 12 August 2014, http://www.archdaily.com/?p=159763/ https://www.archdaily.com/

159763/paolo-soleris-arcosanti-the-city-in-the-image-of-man/. ISSN 0719-8884.
pact and efficient alternative to the suburban sprawl—with “its inherently wasteful
consumption of resources and tendency to isolate people from each other and the
community”.446 As illustrated in Soleri’s architectural project and drawings, the pro-
posed built form consists of self-sufficient habitation mega-structures, developed
both above and underground, with a high residential density and a minimum envi-
ronmental impact (in terms of resource consumption per occupied surface). As Lopez
argues, the principles of arcology can be identified in the predecessor of Arcosanti, F.
L. Wright’s Broadacre City; however, the latter offers a more controlled and ruralized
version of the sprawl, where the meagre density and the car dependency create a hal-
lucinating energy consumption, and not the long-term sustainability sought by Soleri.
Soleri’s ideal town is imagined as a reformation of the habitation and the consumption
concepts, an “implosion” or a condensation of the city—dimension wise (as “inten-
tional community or eco village”)447 but also consumption wise (frugality).448 The
built proposal is an expression and an application of the new principles that enable the
creation of a new individual and a new society—the same mechanism employed by
previous utopian projections. The built formula of Arcosanti represents the experi-
mental laboratory or the ‘model that should demonstrate and convince’, and it applies
its elected principles for a positive undertaking (ecology, minimizing the negative
impact on the environment and on the individual/community, equality and reduction
of disparities, economic efficiency, etc.); however, it assembles a contradictory built
formula. Even though imagined as organic, arcology’s embodiment is controlled and
hierarchized; even though it proposes a functional mix and the condensation of urban
functions, the ensemble is rigid, suggesting simply another variant of the modernist
ordering and its functional zoning. As Miles observes, “successive dwellers might
add detail but only within the confines of the original dream they are required to
manufacture.”449 Even though it implements a number of ecological principles and
technologies (solar heating, greenhouse effect, solar panels, natural ventilation, etc.),
the ensemble is made of cast and prefabricated concrete; even though it aims to min-
imize the environmental impact, the ensemble is massive, a multifunctional variant
of the ‘dwelling machine’ assembled from non-ecological components. Although
proposing solutions to urbanization and hyper-urbanization issues—overpopulation,
pollution, resource exhaustion, living standard degradation—the arcology material-
izes, just like the previous utopian projections did, a strongly individualized archi-
tectural expression (emerging from a one-way projection), rigid, implanted in the
ideal tabula rasa terrain, similar to the familiar modernist ideal. The relation with the
existing city or with any built fabric of the past is neglected. Arcology’s ideal town
is almost self-generated, enclave turned self-sufficient, implanted in a unoccupied
territory. Yet, arcology’s architectural expression is exceedingly singular, suggesting
446 Lopez, idem.

447 Miles, M., Urban utopias…, 186.
448 Miles, M., Urban…, 186.
449 Idem.
a futurist postmodern hybrid; the layouts of the suggested versions450 are generally
central, even concentric, geometrical and symmetrical, with serial uniform modular
structures.
Another case, often quoted, is Disney’s schema for Walt Disney World—the
project of an ideal model town for a society of the future. The initial projection
“is born from the technological optimism of the 1920s and 1930s”,451 proposing a
futurist and equalitarian technopolis blended with the model of the garden-city and
the company town. The theming phenomenon, as well as the generalized and insin-
uating diffusion of the entertainment/consumption function, recognizable today in
urban planning, architectural design and even culture, find their predecessor in this
experimental oversized project drafted in 1966 by Disney—EPCOT (Experimental
Prototype Community Of Tomorrow) and in its subsequent evolution. EPCOT, just
like the previous progressive models, combines rational planning and technological
progress, placing them in the service of the utopian dream to “shape human behaviour
and forms of social organization”,452 into improved versions of them. Again, the built
form, infused and supported by technology, becomes the favourite tool for creating
the new individual. Kargon and Molella analyse in detail the evolution of this utopian
projection—from the foundation of the first large-scale structure for “leisure shop-
ping”,453 to the unbuilt project for Disney’s city of the future, and to the paradoxical
re-embodiment of the project in the 1990s, as the new town of Celebration, Florida.
EPCOT (and the entire ensemble)454 emerges from a utopian projection, focused on
creating, materializing the model space. For Disney, the city of the future in its ideal
expression is a “planned, controlled community,455 a showcase for American indus-
try and research”.456 The built formula of the experimental community combines
familiar aspects of the garden-city, of the radiant city and the company town, as well
as Wright’s ‘autopia’ (albeit transferred into the underground); familiar themes can
be identified: the circular-radial layout, the green belt, the density gradient (maxi-
mum in the centre and decreasing towards the periphery), the expulsion of industry
450 Based on the arcology principles, Soleri imagines a series of “ideal towns” (model typologies
for communities with different population) and drafts various versions: Hexahedron Arcology,
Babel Canyon, Arcvillage Arcology, Arcube Arcology, Stonebow Arcology, 3D Jersey Arcology
(1969), Two Suns arcology (1975), APSEDRA (or Nudging Space arcology, 2003), Lean Linear
City (2005).
452 Idem.
453 The first theme park, Disneyland Park, in Anaheim, California (1955), is rapidly extending and,
as Kargon and Molella point out, it starts to raise the typical issues of a traditional city (transport
and traffic, urban arrangement, etc.). Kargon, Molella, Invented Edens…, 132.
454 According to the original master plan, the ensemble extends on 111.37 km2 , and it includes a
theme park, an airport, a visitor complex, an industrial park—all of which connected by a specialized
traffic system, distributed on multiple levels; in the very centre of this ensemble the experimental
community of EPCOT is positioned.
455 The absolute control of the schema goes beyond the urban planning and the architectural design:
Disney’s formula did not envisaged housing property titles for the EPCOT residents. Mannheim,
Steve, Walt Disney and the Quest for Community, Ashgate publishing Ltd., 2002, 156.
outside the ‘city’, the ordering according to major traffic axes and functional zon-
ing, the implantation into an ideal tabula rasa territory, and optimal infra-territorial
connection (interstate arteries), the penchant for expressing the technologist iden-
tity in architecture and, paradoxically, the aversion towards vehicles (yet not against
traffic, connectivity and transport speed). Compared to the previous radial layout of
other utopian projections, EPCOT’s internal circulations connecting the peripheral
residential area to the centre, are not further connected to the layout’s outer ring,
remaining ‘cul-de-sac’ streets within the radial neighbourhoods. This characteristic
cancels the periphery-exterior connection and constrains the all traffic to transit the
centre—essentially reinforcing the panoptic and enclave-like nature of the schema.
If the whole layout is based on the use of already existing technologies (albeit over-
sized and extended), the centre of the layout, occupied by commerce, services and
offices, receives the main, iconic futurist detail: it is covered by a giant transparent
dome used for providing climate control; another futurist theme, deriving from the
specialized differentiation of traffic (Le Corbusier, Da Vinci) is their vertical dis-
tribution, above and underground, on several levels. The major east-west axis joins
the city with the exterior, with the theme park and with the industrial area, the latter
also designed on a circular-radial layout. Theming, previously used by the company
in amusement-parks, is also transferred to the commercial areas of EPCOT, where
the architecture of street-fronts mimics the South-European historical fabric. The
EPCOT project remains however in an urban planning conceptual phase, without
the detailing of its architectural objects. However, the company will recycle in the
1990s the original concept of the EPCOT, the living experimental community, and
co-modify the values promoted by it—“private initiative, know-how, up-to-dateness,
and small-town values”, under a modernized form: “community, environmental sen-
sitivity, social and ethnic diversity”.457 Celebration (Florida, 1994–6) assumes (and
sells) the image of the autonomous company town promoted by EPCOT, but over-
turns its initial utopian projection: from the technopolis of the future envisaged by
Disney, it becomes a retro-polis—assembled from historicist postmodern architec-
ture (recruiting names such as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Philip Johnson,
Cesar Pelli, Michael Graves, Charles Moore) and the principles of the New Urban-
ism (focused on the community, “higher density […], a disdain for the automobile
and a preference for the pedestrian, a positive attitude towards public transit, public
open spaces, mixed land usage, and easy access”, etc.).458 Theming propagates, and
the favourite architectural expression oscillates exclusively between historicist styles
(revival colonial, classic, French provincial, Mediterranean, Victorian), an attempt
tributary to new urbanism’s aim for sense of place. The technological character is
displaced not only into the background, but entirely backstage, invisible and masked
under a conservative-traditionalist image. All of New Urbanism’s positive principles
used in the town’s layout seem to be hijacked precisely by its exaggerated scenogra-
phy, the lack of authenticity ultimately dominating the entire ensemble. Mannheim
457 Kargon, Molella, Invented Edens…, 134–5.

458 Idem., 136.
S. and Rybczynski459 consider that Celebration retains little if nothing from the ini-
tial EPCOT concept, even though it continues claiming it as its origin. Kargon and
Molella see Celebration as just an updated version of the EPCOT,460 since it main-
tains its two original coordinates—technology, even if concealed, and the focus on
community and on traditional values461 ; moreover, the two consider that Celebration
recycles the very formula which defined the original EPCOT: drawing out “from
within each of us our images and stereotypes, and use clever techniques to make
them ‘real’”,462 thus building a city from “memories of a simulated [and idealized]
past”463 that has never existed.
The utopian projections, with their ordering principles and their formal reper-
toire (model spaces), propagate their influence over time and gradually penetrate the
dominant ordering. The two spaces attached to Disney’s projection, the imagined
one—EPCOT, and the materialized one—Celebration, reflect this very ‘becoming’:
while the first rethinks and condenses the projections of the past for better worlds,
reusing their improved layouts, the latter reflects an additional filtering in its mate-
riality. The model space of Celebration (considering it is displayed and sold as a
model for a better life) retains no resemblances to Disney’s layout, nor to the previ-
ous ones, precisely due to its intention to escape any comparisons to theme parks;
the aspect that it does retain is the ordering principle, or the idealizing intention,
displayed in the projected image itself: the town, essentially a bedroom-suburb with
an added set of functional facilities appears, no doubt, as a highly organized scenog-
raphy where the ideal is so clearly pursued and expressed, so that it migrates toward
the artificial. The deliberate and controlled character of the “ideal features” give
away the “recipe”. Thus, the overly planned non-grid character of the street network
(simulating the organicity of sinuous roads) reveals its artificiality through unifor-
mity and through the contrasting relationship of the ensemble with the outside: a
rigid separation defined by the diagonal trajectory of the highway and by the rect-
angular delineation of the ensemble, a differentiation reprised in the neighbouring
fabric, compact areas of serial suburbs, and the poorer trailer-parks. The relation
with its exterior, together with the theming, emphasize the intention of self-isolation
and exclusion/exclusivity, underlining the border beyond which the ideal city lies,
the border between us (community) and them (non-community). From the initial
functional mix, increasingly diluted as Celebration is expanding, up to the architec-
tural expression and the arrangement of the public space—all aim to illustrate an
authentic imagined ideal, the organic and the familiar. Combined, all these features
are meant to support the title of town and to separate it from the classic, serial and
459 Mannheim, S., Walt Disney and the Quest for Community…, respective Rybczynski, Witold,
Tomorrowland, The New Yorker, July 22, 1996, 36, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/07/

22/tomorrowland, accessed in September 2013.
460 Kargon, Molella, Invented Edens…, 144.
461 According to the two authors “Celebration was built on a shrewd ‘technonostalgia’ that combines
a yearning for a mythical ‘way it used to be’ with a profound admiration for technical progress.”
Kargon, Molella, Invented Edens…, 145.
463 Idem.
uniform American suburb—yet becoming in the process a hybrid that Knox names
Vulgaria.464 It simulates place, organicity and community, but maintains the aseptic,
regulated and serial image of classic suburbanization, and hypocritically diverts the
ideal into consumerism. Yet, in the heterogeneous conceptual mixture of Celebra-
tion, Vulgaria’s presence is increasingly palpable, as the initial fabric is expanded,
and as the entire city assumes the image of yet another themed gated community.
Beyond this contamination, Knox observes a more serious mutation phenomenon.
The New Urbanism itself is transmuted “from a critical and oppositional force into
an instrument of the prevailing order”, siding with the real-estate developer, and
non-discriminatory lends its name to any prefabricated master plan—“privatized
dioramas and picturesque enclaves of, well, sprawl”.465
In the case of the Celebration project, with the intent to create organic and cus-
tomized places (New Urbanism’s favourite theme), the ‘identitary characteristics’ are
democratically or, in other words, uniformly distributed for all the residential areas
of the ensemble: the park, the monument, the details of the public space design, the
architectural expression, etc., are all unitarily imagined and equally distributed. The
idealizing intention, with a strong nostalgic tone, is most obvious in the centre of
the ensemble where each institution (bank, post office, city hall) displays the “ideal
expression” of the function they represent—resuming a specific process of themati-
zation used in entertainment, resulting in a familiar and stereotype image-construct.
The populist-consumerist scenography, as well as the historical quote, are also part
of the postmodern repertoire, Celebration proving exactly this overlapping of influ-
ences: postmodernism found its ideal outlet into the theme of the new town, proving
that entertainment’s influence had already operated on both culture and architecture.
More cynically, Knox points out that nostalgia sells, although not even the pack-
aging has to be authentic anymore, but a mere disproportionate yet familiar interpre-
tation. Knox remarks the perverting of the symbol attached to the architectural object:
the oversizing announces to the viewer the owner’s social supremacy, the prosperity
replaces the cosmopolitism and urbanism, and ostentation and simulacrum replace
style and good taste.466 The phenomenon is no longer localized, illustrated in rela-
tively small and experimental ensembles such as Celebration, but, after only a decade,
it has become generalized. The American taste for such a manipulated nostalgia not
464 The term is coined by Paul Knox. Vulgaria represents the “the emblematic cultural landscapes of
contemporary American suburbia. They are landscapes of bigness and spectacle, characterized by
packaged developments, simulated settings, and conspicuous consumption, and they have natural-
ized an ideology of competitive consumption, moral minimalism, and disengagement from notions
of social justice and civil society”—essentially “a conservative utopia of sequestered settings that
are provided by the packaged, themed, and fortified subdivisions of private master-planned devel-
opments. […]” and “a landscape rich in the symbolic languages of exclusion and entitlement”,
“a landscape of casual vulgarity, dominated by a presumed reciprocity between size and social
supremacy”, where “affluence is confused with cosmopolitanism and urbanity”. Knox, Paul, Vul-
garia: The Re-Enchantment of Suburbia, 33–46, in Opolis, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2005, http://escholarship.
org/uc/item/5392f4vq, accessed in February 2013, 1, 42.
465 Knox, Paul, Vulgaria: The Re-Enchantment of Suburbia, 33–46, in Opolis, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2005,
42, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5392f4vq, accessed in February 2013.

466 Knox, Vulgaria…, 42.
only persists, but it even acquires an official acknowledgement; and in order to vali-
date and to affirm it, what could be more efficient than the association with a resonant
name: in 2011, the Congress of the United States declares Andrea Palladio the father
of the American architecture. Even though the intention is positive and mainly aims
to mediate the visibility of historical architecture—such as the national Capitol, the
various other states’ Capitols, the White House, cultural institutions, etc.—it con-
firms and consolidates at the same time (even if not deliberately) the neo-classicist
theming and the suburban hijacking of the symbolism.
The process of theming infiltrates in the dominant practice, operating diffusely
but still as a tool for shaping of the ideal city/environment and individual. As Kargon
and Molella point out, “stage-set cities increasingly replace real ones as desirable
tourist destinations”, in the same way as “all aspects of culture […] tend to veer
toward entertainment and are measured by its standards. Architecture becomes an
‘attraction’; museums are increasingly organized around ‘blockbuster’ shows”.467
The two authors identify this system also in the structuring of cities, in a similar
manner as in the case of Celebration: it represents the simplest version of entertain-
ment and the practical necessity’s association—“a fantasy to live in”, artificial and
easy to control.468
2.6 Refocusing the Utopian Projection
Although theming has been considered as a phenomenon typical for the American
territory, the European space makes no exception, nor does its built heritage. The her-
itage object and the historical centres are its preferred victims, as they are processed
by a version of thematization, and as part of an extensive project of commodifica-
tion of culture. The place is marketed as experience: the iconic authentic object, the
authentic traditional activity attached to the place (to the area, region, country—gen-
eralized to meet the demand and affix the consumption). The process of gentrification
is immediately attached to it. The abstractization and the destitution of traditional
activities are employed for the creation of an ideal, total experience. The experiencing
of culture is usually associated with the formula of an embellished historical envi-
ronment, punctually displaying specifically selected traditional functions (those that
are considered to be attractive, economically efficient, or easily manipulated); these
are intermeshed in a network of familiar, “global” activities, the large supermarket
or company chains. As Zukin remarks, the “disappearance [and corruption] of old
sources of regional and local identity impoverishes others, leading to a new pursuit
of authenticity and individualization”.469 The creation of places becomes a process
of market creation, as these spaces—newly created or old and rediscovered—offer

469 Zukin, Sharon, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World, University of California
Press, 1991, 214, via Google Books, accessed in October 2014.

the experience of the ideal city and the ideal community; while the idea of authentic
substitutes the notion of ideal, these spaces exercise an overwhelming attraction on
the individual in search of authenticity and identity. Both the utopian model space
and the utopian projection itself, as we have become familiar to them, are no longer
among the preoccupations at the end of the twentieth century and the twenty-first
century, and one of the main contributing factors is precisely the sedimentation of
the identity consumption as a (favourite) activity; this itself can be considered as
connected with and a repercussion of the dilution of individuals’ identity. By now,
utopia is no longer the non-place, the impossible or the imaginary island. Although
hybridized, utopia continues to be projected as attainable; it simply loses (due to
its ‘failures’ and its acquired negative connotations) its name and its boldness—to
imagine total, universal and complex orderings, and to design the ultimate media-
tor, the built form able to offer to the individual/(universal)community the access
to absolute concepts, such as happiness, freedom or equality. The negative reaction
towards utopia’s laboratory spaces has subdued their enthusiasm and has (gradually)
shortened their perspective; but in this increasingly ‘narrowing’ field of sight lies the
historical built heritage, revealing the possibility to shape the ideal space in the very
present and from these readily available fragments. The descendants of the classic
utopian drive learn (and must learn) the lesson of the ideal communities: the small
scale and the flexibility in relation to the existing context. The historic object and
fabric—also including the inherited laboratory spaces and their hybridized, reinter-
preted or fragmentary versions—allow the assemblage of a new utopia, not yet fully
disclosed: the heritage utopia. By recovering its own images and by safeguarding
them in a heterogeneous collage,470 thus assembled from restored and reinstalled
fragments, the heritage utopia redefines itself in the present. The heritage utopia
projects itself in the past—building its identity from its own past identities, mul-
tiple and fragmentary—and simultaneously projects itself in the future—where its
image no longer appears as different from the classic utopia: a remote island of a
time that no longer unfolds—the impossible undertaking assumed as such by con-
servation and restoration; the island of an ‘equalitarian hierarchy’—with its multiple
cultural identities, its very diverse and different sources and generators, and where the
selected and listed objects are all equal, since they harbour the memory and identity
of mankind itself; it is a place of the freedom and of an individual and communitarian
fulfilment—a freedom emerging from the safeguarding and the acknowledging all
identities and their value grids expressed into built form.
470 Rowe suggests the conceptualization of the city as a collage of utopias, heterogeneous and
miniature, precisely in order to avoid the installation of a totalitarian vision over it. More in Rowe,
C., Koetter, F., Collage City, (1978).
2.7 Utopia and Heterotopia. Heterotopia as an Applied Utopia … 131
2.7 Utopia and Heterotopia. Heterotopia as an Applied

Utopia. Heritage as Alterity
These utopian projections of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries appear as possi-

ble schemas because the model space coordinate is placed in the very forefront of
their preoccupations. As Choay outlines, the nineteenth and then the twentieth cen-
tury convey a hypertrophy of, or the focus on a single coordinate, the model space,
to the detriment of the other coordinates of the traditional utopian triptych. There-
fore, a superior individual and society depend on the architect’s (or planner’s) active
involvement and on the ‘very corporeal model’ issued by him. The ideal—in all of
its variable nuances (individual happiness, efficient functioning/production, prosper-
ity, equality, freedom, etc.)—is inevitably mediated by the order; it can be reached
through the total control of the physical environment (and inherently through the built
form) and through the control of its functioning (the written norming which controls
the practicing of the space). If the transferring of the ideal into reality is impossible,
since it would imply the colossal total reformation/replacement of reality, the small-
scale or fragmentary application of the model (i.e. garden-city, phalanstery), as an
example and demonstration, is the ‘next best’ version, where the small-scale allows
a better control of the space, of the functioning and of the model community—essen-
tially increasing the chances of success. Nevertheless, although imagined as perfectly
ordered and controlled, the materialized model space immediately reveals the very
impossibility of its total control. In spite of its evolutionary trajectory, which demon-
strates that the model (if not its principles) is in fact fallible, corruptible or at least
divertible, the ideal (and in part its principles) transgresses into the real. Either imag-
ined as actual, buildable models, either as fictitious models, the utopian projections
construct the model space and the model society starting from an existing ‘inven-
tory’ of concepts and forms (seen with a critical, an apologetic, an eulogistic eye,
etc.), and from the inevitable position of its own present. The principles mediated
by utopian projections—such as the hygienist, aesthetic, compositional, functional,
formal, etc.—penetrate the ‘everyday’ architecture practices, exceeding this initial
model. Thus, the initial model almost always remains an isolated enclave space, an
experimental space and a testing site for the newly proposed ordering, arrested in an
incapable other, when compared to the initial utopian projection that generated it;
similarly, it is suspended in a deliberate and assumed other, when compared to its the
real context, as a witness of an attempt to change it (a coup d’état of sorts). As demon-
strated by the previous, inevitably incomplete, exploration of utopian projections, the
initial model spaces (such as Sforzinda, the Familistère of Guise, New Lanark, Letch-
worth Garden City, etc.) can be considered the most fertile heterotopian spaces. These
spaces retain in the most condensed form the utopian encodings and they represent,
at the moment of their creation,471 the most authentic and palpable version of the
471 Although the utopian projections retain the potential of their rediscovery, reinterpretation and
reformulation, they are strongly anchored in their own present; in other words, even if the ideal
engendering the utopian projection appears to be the same (ecologic ideal of sustainability, of
freedom and social equality, of an efficient production, of technological progress, etc.) for different
utopian projection. The subsequent versions, resulting from the model’s dissemina-
tion, introduce adaptations or reinterpretations that partially and gradually dilute the
initial utopian encoding. The phenomenon observed by Choay—the focusing onto
the model space, characteristic for the last two centuries—can be interpreted as a
consequence of the experiencing of the utopian project’s evolution: the model space
or its built form is perceived as the optimal medium for receiving and perpetuating in
time the other utopian coordinates—the critique of reality and the ideal, along with
its ‘recipe’. Even if this focusing is predominantly expressed during the last two
centuries, previous utopian projections such as those of Alberti, Filarete, Giorgio
Martini or Da Vinci already intuited (and used) this ability of the built form. The
applied utopias and their still preserved model spaces allow—as far as the utopian
coordinates are successfully encoded—a reversed reconstruction of the utopian pro-
jection, even in the absence of its prescriptive ‘text’ or its tools (lost along with the
dissolution of the cultural paradigm): both the source of the utopian projection, the
criticized society, and its ideal, the model society, can be decoded and read from its
built form.
The subsequent dissemination of the model and its applied principles generate
spaces that inherit, albeit partially, the encoding of the model and consequently, also
heterotopian coordinates. Therefore, such spaces, not entirely materialized utopias,
but mere reflections of the model, have a heterotopian character whose intensity and
visibility are variable, making them potential heterotopian spaces, and more difficult
to identify. The heterotopian character of these spaces can be either enhanced or
diminished (as explored elsewhere)472 especially through the practices they shelter
and acquire.
Thus, the utopian projection endows the built form with the ability to express the
criticized society through metaphors or languages of oppositions. While the every-
day built object can and often expresses a critical attitude towards its context (and
through its creation, it actively contributed to its transformation), the critique is often
diluted and requires specialized decoding. In the case of utopia, the imagined and
built object has an antinomical abstract construction: the built form will express in an
essentialized and augmented manner the very opposite of the critiqued coordinates.
The strict ordering and the hierarchized zoning of the radiant city reflect the epoch’s
negative perception of the disorganized and heterogeneous historic centres, in the
same manner as Giorgio Martini’s living organism ideal city reflects the syncopal
nature defining of urban fabric of his time. Broadacre city (Wright), Cité Industrielle
(Garnier), Ville Radieuse (Le Corbusier) or Garden City (Howard) used such a mech-
anism, defining and constructing their identity as the absolute opposite of the old city
(even if often in absentia)—while the characteristics of the criticized society (and
projections in different epochs, their interpretation and the proposed solutions (including the built
form/model space) contain and illustrate present or the context of that particular projection.
472 Spânu, Smaranda, Practices of the Built Heritage as Other Space: Conservation and Destruction
of the Wooden Churches of Transylvania, Session 9b: Space, Place and Heritage, la Space
and Place 4th Global Conference, Oxford, Great Britain, 2013, http://www.inter-disciplinary.
net/critical-issues/ethos/space-and-place/project-archives/conference-programme-abstracts-and-
papers/session-9b-space-place-and-heritage/, accessed in September 2014.
promptly replaced) were expressed through the exacerbation and the hyperbolization
of their opposites. By comparison, William Morris’ utopian projection (News From
Nowhere) focuses on two of the three coordinates of traditional utopia: the criticized
society (the result of an aggressive and degrading industrialization process) and the
model society, partly a new ordering and partly a recovery of the pre-industrial value
grid; the third coordinate, the model space is transferred in the background and is
constructed as a heterogeneous mix of the old and the new. His criticized society pro-
vides the built context, inherited and subsequently purified of the absolute industrial
evil, a witness (re)converted to the new ordering;473 around built remnants devoid of
function, Morris’ model society rebuilds the city, with its identitary markings, in a
composite historicist style.
Even though, in general, the utopian projections propose different model spaces,
with diverse architectural expressions, their common feature is order—present from
the very first Cartesian ideal cities schemas, and until the modern movement for
the recuperation of the city, openly focused on “restor[ing] order”.474 The imagined
ordering is defined first of all through its relation with reality—the dominant order-
ing—towards which it offers itself as alternative; the utopian projection however
does not imagine itself as an alternative, but as normality and dominant ordering,
seeking to replace reality. This external positioning, outside the official ordering,
can be considered a double catalyser: on the one hand, it fuels the vision’s total
character, and on the other hand it fuels the preoccupation for the physical model
space—and justifying from a different perspective Choay’s argument (the modern
utopia’s obsession for creating model spaces); the imagined and non-materialized
alternative of the existent thus seeks to express itself through what could affirm in
a more visible and irrefutable manner its existence—the built form. Nevertheless,
from the ‘excluded’ position—as subordinate or unofficial—the utopian projection
reintroduces, despite its positive intention (and perhaps through its naivety), delib-
erately or accidentally, other exclusion mechanisms similar to those of the dominant
ordering. This way, it reveals that “utopia for some may be [at the same time] dystopia
for others”.475 This negative potential of materialized utopia has been the focus of
research, due to its paradoxical nature, at the expense of the positive encoding, and
has eventually led to utopia’s ‘disgracing’—as a mechanism of self-knowledge and
evolution. The utopian projection presupposes a process of contraction, a reductio
to an absolute that contradicts materialization itself (an impossibility suggested by
the etymology of the word itself, ou-topos or non-place); nevertheless, utopia is
materialized and, once the imagined model space becomes a built object, its neg-
ative encoding is also transferred from the virtual to the existent. If, as Bingaman
affirms, utopia presupposes an “[absolute] ideal [absolute] that does not exist, [and]
473 Morrisimagines a new London that fragmentarily retains traces of industrialization in the form
of reconverted factories, with “furnaces without smoke”, isolated in a new built fabric.
474 Bingaman, Amy, Sanders, Lise, and Zorach, Rebecca, Embodied Utopia. Introduction in Embod-
ied Utopias. Gender, social change, and the modern metropolis, 1–12, Amy Bingaman publishing
house, Lise Sanders and Rebecca Zorach, Routledge, London, 2002, 6–7.
475 Bingaman, Sandres, Zorach, Embodied…, 10.
indeed cannot exist except in the imagination”,476 then its materialization will not
automatically equal the materialization of the ideal, and the positive potential will
inevitably also dissipate in favour of the negative one. Thus, the model space imag-
ined as a positive ideal of freedom engenders a built object of oppression and control,
the ideal of equality and democracy (with its extensive circulation network model)
generates a space of isolation and hierarchy, and so forth. Yet, even if dystopia would
thus be inseparable from utopia, remaining the indissoluble negative accessory of
its transformation, utopia’s positive potential cannot be completely suppressed. It is
a “revealing and revolutionary”477 encoding, accountable for a social, moral, cul-
tural and scientific change and transfiguration. The materialized model spaces are,
despite their paradoxical functioning (and even because of it), experimental spaces
or, according to Hetherington, laboratories of alternative social orderings. Beyond
the initial laboratory space instance, the built model (architectural or urban) pene-
trates and is disseminated into the every day, through the architectural practice. Even
though the initial experimental space fails and, in many cases is revoked, it is also
‘dismantled’, and its components are refashioned and propagated, thus entering the
structure of the official ordering. The process is most accurately demonstrated by
the example of the phalanstery and the garden-city: initially, they contest the official
ordering (the accepted norm), and propose its alternative. The materialized form is
inevitably adjusted to reality’s conditionings, once it crosses from virtual into reality,
and, as it is reprised, the model enters the dominant ordering. Another example is the
‘modernist utopia’, with its radiant city; its process of permeation into reality is more
than a tempered influencing of the dominant ordering, it is its entire replacement.
This shift from dominated to dominant generates in its turn a contestatary reaction:
subsequent projections for an alternative ordering.
Even though utopias are considered impossible fictions, detached from reality, and
the applied utopias are deemed as failed experiments, their purpose seems neverthe-
less to have been reached, even if only in part: they successfully contest the official
ordering, radically and efficiently or in a more softer manner, and they manage to
create, even if for a short interval, a rift.
Nevertheless, as Amale Andraos points out, in architecture utopia is associated
with “a body of very real images, events and consequences that are continuously
operating on our architectural and urban imaginations […]”478 —identifying pre-
cisely the diffusion and dissemination into normality/reality of the principles (or their
fragments) expressed by utopias through the built object. Focusing on the modernist-
progressive utopian perspective, Andraos identifies these images as visionary urban-
ism, or processed fragments capable to become tools, “agents of change that operate
differently from […] utopia”,479 but have the ability to operate efficiently, for the

478 Andraos, Amale, Visionary Urbanism and its Agency, 20–31, in zawia#01:Utopia, Decem-
ber 2013, published online: http://archinect.com/features/article/95130918/screen-print-10-zawia-

s-utopia, accessed in February 2014.
479 Andraos, Visionary…, fn.
purpose of progress and onto the built environment. Andraos imagines a rehabilita-
tion of visionary urbanism, and through it, a rehabilitation of the utopian projection,
and especially of the progressive, oriented towards the future utopia; even though
she explores the process in the Arab space, Andraos’ warning on the urgency of
reviving the visionary can be extended to the European space as well. Thus, only
by recuperating and “enlisting the power of images and the imagination, a progres-
sive redefinition of democratic civil society will engage Visionary Urbanism as a
tool to reject the boundaries of the accepted possible while passionately project-
ing the still impossible”.480 Andraos justifies this rehabilitation of an instance of
the utopian projection by demystifying its five myths: the causal relation between
built form and social ordering; the disconnection of visionary urbanism (progressive
utopian projection) from reality; the impotence of projected non-materialized utopia;
the opposition between formal and informal; and the superiority of the unplanned
(the organic) over the planned (deliberately created). The intention of reviving this
tool—Andraos’ visionary urbanism and as I argue also the utopian projection—ex-
tends also to the materialized utopia and particularly to those materialized and failed
utopian projects; Andraos suggests their reconsideration through the integrating lens
of accumulated experience.
The relationship between the built form and the social ordering is indeed—as
Andraos notes and as concluded from the herein explored utopias—a connection
intensely exploited by the utopian projection, and it inevitably involves multiple fac-
tors (cultural, economic, political, etc.). Thus, the relationship stops being a reduc-
tive, ‘cause and effect’ one, thus explaining the different evolutions of implementing
“similar formal and typological strategies” (the modernist model of the tower in a
park or the model of the radiant city, of the hierarchized three-levelled street net-
work/3d street, etc.).481 In the case of utopia’s detachment from reality, “the image of
a disconnected idealism”, imposed by a unique conscience (the demiurge architect),
Andraos point towards the context of these projections (Plan Voisin, Broadacre City),
and warns about the minimization of their pragmatic anchoring into reality (standards
of social and economic operation). The unrealized utopia’s incapacity to act as a tool
of change, blocked in the form of the architectural or graphic representation finds its
counterargument in its visual impact; the condensed two- or three-dimensional rep-
resentation is capable of conveying the essential and to engender new projections,
even without a built model space. The (apparent) opposition between the formal
and the informal is counter-argued in Andraos’ exploration of the urban evolution of
Teheran; here, by means of social, political and economic factors, the interlacing of a
planned ordering and an organic informal ordering becomes possible—as the formal
and the informal coexist. Supporting this approach, an additional interpretation, in
terms of space practicing, can be considered. The spatial formal/informal binomial
pairing corresponds to the binomial pairing official practice (dominant) and unofficial
practice (subordinate); the latter is able to not only occupy the formal space, more or
less temporary, but it can also shape it. The informal practice and its informal spaces
480 Andraos, Vizionary…, fn.

(even when lacking legibility) colonize, challenge and reinterpret the space of the
official ordering, in spite of its strict norming. The materialized utopias, considered
in relation to the official ordering of their context, represent exactly such informal
spaces, as exemplified by the Fourierist phalanstery advocating the individual’s total
freedom (as compared to the epoch’s norm) or the less known feminist utopias.482
The last myth attached to visionary urbanism is the superiority of the unplanned
over the planned, imagined as “the best, the freer, the more authentic and bottom-
up”483 ; nevertheless, the unplanned or informal city ultimately displays an actual
well-defined, albeit soft infrastructure and even if lacking a narrative and legibility.
All of the positive readings of organicity do not justify the “unregulated development,
able to deploy itself in the form of endless sprawl and cheap building, maximizing
profit at the expense of social or environmental concerns”.484 This lack of planning
is at its best a short- (and very short-) term planning, shaped by the economic profit
imperative, and paradoxically positioned in the opposition of the unitary single-agent
urban vision—more sustainable in the long term; the planned approach becomes the
alternative—a dominated, alternative and critical discourse. As Andraos notes, “the
‘unplanned’ itself becomes a model, [and] it is exported, multiplied and turned into its
ultimate inversion, gated communities”—485 ultimately demonstrating the cyclicity
of the ideal normalization process.
The materialized model spaces allow through their very materiality what is denied
to the utopian text and projection: their ‘becoming’ in time through practice, accu-
mulating, juxtaposing and alternating layers of meaning. Paradoxically, the built
object—defined through its immobility and durability—is therefore endowed with
the capacity of becoming, evolving and transforming in time. Moreover, in this
‘utopia/materialized utopia’ binomial pairing, the existence of the latter depends on
this very becoming. Practices alone make possible the heterotopic functioning.
2.7.1 Materialized Utopias: Heterotopian Spaces
As seen so far, materialized utopias are veritable heterotopic spaces. The subsequent
penetration of their principles into normality (through the everyday architectural
practice) engenders spaces that inherit, even if fragmentary, the heterotopian coordi-
nates. Their heterotopian character thus varies in intensity, making their identification
more difficult. The heterotopian character can be potentiated or diminished: firstly
482 Mostly written utopias—Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge
Piercy—but also materialized, Llano del Rio, Alice Constance Austin, California, 1916—based on
the principle of liberating women from domestic oppression, by means of cooperative housekeeping,
and a predecessor of the garden-city. Greed, Cara H., Women and Planning: Creating Gendered
Realities, Routledge, 2003, 98.
485 Idem.
by means of the practices they acquire, and secondly, by means of the context in
which the space is ‘read’ and practiced.
Considering the act of ‘practicing the space’ from De Certeau’s point of view, the
place becomes space through the very act of practice. Just as the individual crosses a
space—predefined between certain coordinates (possibilities and interdictions)—and
he moulds it through practice, by selecting among its possible coordinates (updat-
ing, removing or reversing certain possibilities and interdictions), as De Certeau
explains,486 in the same way the heterotopian spaces are manipulated and shaped,
and define their identity through their acquired practices. Thus, a practice or another
conveys a functioning of a heterotopian space—seen as a materialized utopia—in
a completely different way than the one initially assigned. Through practice, a real
(material) space acquires the ability to accumulate multiple “emplacements that are
in themselves incompatible”487 ; similarly it can acquire the ability to function as a
temporal enclave or to function in its own temporal cycle or frame, detached from
traditional time, as a heterochronia, as defined by Foucault. The heterotopic space
is thus generated through practice, and it claims (and generates in turn) specific
practices—as suggested by Foucault’s fifth principle discussing the opening-closing
system of heterotopic spaces, and the ritual-practices that control the heterotopic
space’s access.
Observing the relationship between utopia and materialized utopia (heterotopia),
the practice occupies a similar indispensable position. Utopia, as the previous exam-
ples demonstrate, inevitably and mandatorily crystallizes within the official ordering
(in a ‘pocket-like space’) in a position from which it challenges the state of fact and
projects its alternative. This ‘tolerated’ position shapes its contrasting and paradox-
ical character—and its very alterity. If, as Certeau suggests,
“A society is thus composed of certain foregrounded practices organizing its
normative institutions [dominant ordering], and of innumerable other practices that
remain ‘minor’ [dominated, secondary ordering/ordering], always there but not orga-
nizing discourses and preserving the beginnings or remains of different (institutional,
scientific) hypotheses for that society or for others.”488 then the utopian projection is
a part of this category of secondary practices, located outside the “the reach of panop-
tic power”,489 yet within its structure. Therefore, as a consequence of the dominant
ordering’s affirmation, “a ‘polytheism’ of scattered practices survives, dominated
but not erased by the triumphal success of one of their number”.490 The utopian
projection, imagining an alternative ordering, starts as impalpable practice, immate-
rial, lacking legibility—always amidst numerous other secondary projections and in
486 Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life, transl. Rendall, Steven, University of Cali-
fornia Press, LTD., London, Great Britain, 1984, 98.
487 Foucault, M., Of Other Spaces, apud. Dehaene, M., De Cauter, L., Heterotopia and the City,

488 Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life, transl. Rendall, Steven, University of Cali-
fornia Press, LTD., London, Great Britain, 1984, 48.

489 Certeau, Michel de, Practices of Space, 122–145, in Blonsky I., Marshall, On Signs, Johns
Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, USA, 1985, 128.

490 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 48.
a competitive relation with the official ordering. Even when the utopian projection
succeeds to transgress into reality, as a materialized utopia, and becomes a practiced
space, it does so yet again by means of minor, secondary practices—seen as such
in relation to the dominant ordering. However, once materialized and practiced, the
utopian projection becomes official ordering for its own delineated spatial enclave
and, consequently, is able to engender new (‘second degree’) secondary practices;
these in turn reveal its oppressive character and undermine its dominant ordering.
This evolution can be observed in the Fourierist phalanstery, in Godin’s familistère
or in the Sant-Simonist utopian projection. From this materialized ‘real’ position, the
utopian projection-‘secondary practice’ acquires legibility; and perhaps in this very
manner, by demonstrating its ordering and controlling potential through its laboratory
spaces, it exercises its seduction as a potential “organizing principle of a technology
of power”,491 and thus becomes (or imbues) the dominant ordering. When the sec-
ondary practice crosses over into the foreground, in an official ordering position, its
contestatary role dissipates and it is replaced by a version of the challenged mecha-
nism itself. As De Certeau observes and deduces from Foucault’s argumentation,492
this foreground repositioning represents the assuming of the institutionalized and the
dominant position, and it is in turn and inevitably “slowly colonized by still silent
[lacking discourse] procedures”.493 The cycle is resumed: the dominant ordering is
once more challenged by and through minor practices, potential alternative orderings.
The ‘aggregation’ of the material form can be thus considered as a means of nor-
malization: the secondary practice becomes comparable to the ‘image and likeness’
of the dominant practice precisely through the creation of its own material form. The
latter’s capacity to provide legibility is intuitive, has been previously discussed and
need no further argumentation. This is the case of temporary architecture: almost
always the prerogative of secondary practices and minor, unofficial discourses, it
is a way to express their identity; on the existing city background, these temporary
objects make visible secondary discourses and practices, regardless of their nature;
these contest and propose alternatives to the dominant ordering, and are present for
a determinate period of time, either consensual or imposed. The built object of these
secondary discourses/practices challenge the official ordering from within; tolerated,
the object’s contestatary role endows it with a compensatory space, comparable to
the mechanism of the mediaeval carnival celebration, where the temporary inver-
sion of normality serves as its reinforcing. When prohibited and eventually silenced,
its presence acquires a contestatary role, exposing the official ordering’s repressive
mechanisms.
The materialized utopia thus appears as a tolerated discourse plus practice within
the structure of the official ordering; however, it assembles its built expression as
a space of contestation, proposing revanchist alternatives, attacking and undermin-
491 Idem.
492 Certeau’s analysis is based on some of Foucault’s works, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la
Prison (1975), Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (1966), and partially
on Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1964).
493 Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life, 49.
ing the official ordering. Even before defining the concept and the principles of
heterotopia, Foucault sets this first coordinate: the heterotopic spaces are noth-
ing but “effectively realized utopias”,494 where utopia’s imaginary and immate-
rial become heterotopia’s material—the built object and the physical location. The
philosopher defines these other spaces through an ultimate, complete and deliberate
alterity—utopia—different from everything that is real and representing everything
that reality is not—its compensatory variant and its critique. Observing and ampli-
fying this alterity coordinate, heterotopia takes shape: other than and different from
utopia—precisely through its materiality—yet inheriting from utopia’s alterity in
relation to its real context, where it manifests and operates. The material form—ar-
chitectural object or ensemble—thus assembled from a utopian projection, assumes,
as previously demonstrated, the “the curious property of being in relation with all the
other sites, but in such a way as to suspend, neutralize, or invert the set of relations
designated, mirrored, or reflected by them”495 ; in other words, the applied utopia
puts into practice, between its physical enclosures, a structure reflecting the real,
criticized society, reiterating its relations and spaces in a critically altered form.
2.7.2 Materialized Utopia and the Alterity of Heritage
Some attempts to recover the significance and positive potential of utopia emerge as
early as the beginning of the twentieth century. One of these attempts belongs to the
philosopher Ernst Bloch—in his Geist der Utopie (The Spirit of Utopia, 1918) and
then in the three-volume Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope, 1938–1947).
Bloch combines a non-Orthodox Marxism, an anthropocentric perspective, the trust
in Bildungsbürgertum and the faith in the reforming role of culture, delivered in
a Messianic language, with Christian mysticist sources. The philosopher links the
notion of ‘hope’ to the concept of ‘utopia’ and identifies as concrete utopias as those
“[…] relative historical gains, revolutionary transformations and formations, […]
stepping stones and indications of what the human individual and the world could
become”—496 not far from Hetherington’s more concrete and targeted reading of
his laboratory spaces, as materialized or applied utopias where alternative radical
and revolutionary orderings are projected, constructed and tested. For Bloch, art and
literature (with their concrete result) carry humanity’s utopian capacity; their function
is precisely that of “impelling human beings to move forward in the direction of
Utopia”497 ; by fulfilling this role, art and literature are the main
494 Foucault, M., Of Other Spaces, apud. Dehaene, M., De Cauter, L., Heterotopia and the City,
495 Foucault, 17.
496 Zipes, Jack, Introduction: Toward a Realization of Anticipatory Illumination, in Bloch, Ernst,
The Utopian Functon of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, 4th edition, 1996, transl. Jack Zipes
and Frank Mecklenburg, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1988, p. XXVI.
497 Zipes, J., Toward a Realisation…, p. XXX.
“[…] means through which human beings form themselves, conceive their ques-
tions about themselves and portray the possibility of attaining their objectives. Day-
dreams by themselves remain unproductive. They can only provide the impetus to
move out of oneself, to come into oneself, if they are shaped into images that deny ide-
ology’s hold over humankind. In this regard, all art and literature that have anything
to say to humankind are utopian.”498
The product of literature and art—where architecture too claims a partial position,
via its tripartite structure (venustas, utilitas and firmitas)—concentrates the individ-
ual’s ambitions and hopes, expressed as “wish-images and wish-landscapes [that]
are formations conceived by artists to measure the distance we have yet to go to
achieve happiness”.499 Materialized and re-materialized in subsequent epochs and
in different embodiments, constantly recycled, these wish-images “leave indelible
marks in our consciousness and in cultural artefacts: they are the traces of utopia that
[together] constitute a cultural heritage”.500 Thus, both art and literature presume a
utopian projection, infusing an “aesthetic significance of happiness [found] at a dis-
tance, concentrated into a frame”501 ; in a similar manner the architecture project also
employs a utopian projection, exceeding however through its intention and through
the potential of its materiality that particular frame: it not only depicts, but it also
assumes and contribute, or builds utopia. If the art object and the literary text “de-
scribe”, redefine and perpetuate wish-images, the architecture project proposes their
very materialization. In this respect, the product of art and the utopian architecture
project are similar, more or less symbolically encoded reflections of wish-images,
whereas the architecture object strongly anchored into reality (through its utilitas
and firmitas), is inevitably an incomplete materialization of the individual’s ideal,
ambitions and wishes.
In Bloch’s interpretation, the (significant) artwork contains not only ambitions of
the artist, essentialized and concentrated, but also a surplus (Uberschuss), exceed-
ing the individual’s subjective ambitions and continuing to provide significance to
the work, beyond its own timeframe. This surplus is however partly an encoding of
its own timeframe (the critical dimension) and partly the “objectification of shared
human values and possibilities that provide us with hope that we can realize what we
sense we are missing in life”.502 Even though through its materiality and concrete-
ness, the architectural object assumes an active role, providing a palpable version of
the wish-image (instead of simply depicting it), precisely because of these it seems
to lose that encoding of shared values, initially perceived as a simple encoding of its
own timeframe and even as a subjective demarche. This impression is most clearly
exemplified through the comparison of the contemporary architectural object with the
historical one, listed as heritage, acknowledged as valuable and absolute possessor
498 Idem., p. XXXI.

499 Idem., p. XXXVIII.
500 Idem.
501 Bloch, Ernst, Prinzip Hoffhung, în Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977,
980–981, apud. Zipes, J., Toward a Realisation…, p. XXXVIII.

502 Zipes,
J., Toward a Realisation…, p. XXXV.
of human values: the contemporary object is predominantly read as an expression of

its own time (and technologies) and of individual creation, whereas the historical one
is perceived as a ‘valuable inheritance of significations’ illustrating universal human
values, epochs, achievements, etc. This problem is the very challenge confronted by
the recipients of the ‘young heritage’—the ‘newly’ acknowledged heritage of the
twentieth century—whose surplus is reduced to the encoding of its own time, and
the universal value encoding is in numerous cases still perceived as non-existent (as
the case of the industrial heritage) or minimal (modernist architecture). However,
the heritage status is the very tool for the legitimation of this surplus. The heritage
status confirms and affirms the presence of the surplus. One of its instruments is the
universal heritage list (UNESCO WHL) that aims to acknowledge in their multiple
(exceptional) instances those very shared human values, introducing however a hier-
archy, a criteria-grid through which the object’s surplus is quantified (expression,
integrity, unitary character, uniqueness, etc., of manifestation).
The utopian architecture object or the materialized utopia, more than the architec-
ture object, assumes not only an active role in materializing the wish-image, but also
assumes the solutioning and the attainment of the absolute ideal. The imagined ideal
cities constituted according to utopian projections—the phalanstery, the garden-city,
the ideal fortress—are assembled as absolute and final models, model orderings
whose application is and must be universal, at least in their authors’ perspective. The
difference between the art object and the materialized utopian architecture project
lies in each one’s attached intentionality. Even though both are finite through their
own materiality, the art object reveals the image of the possible utopia, whereas the
built object aims for its very achievement. As demonstrated in the previous analysis,
through materialization utopia will become other in relation to its context, as well
as in relation to itself. Observing Bloch’s argument, one can observe the difference
between the art object’s materiality and that of the utopian architectural object: the
first is more faithful to the utopian projection (as its very image), whereas the latter is
inevitably other, an altered version of utopia (and thus heterotopic), through the mere
intention of its becoming. Yet, both remain fragments, instances of Utopia, depict-
ing multiple and various interpretations of the same absolute principles—beauty,
freedom, truth, happiness, etc. As Zipes notes, for Bloch, the identification and inter-
pretation of these fragments—products of art and literature—lead to illumination
(anticipatory illumination or Vor-Schein) or what he calls in his mystical language
the absolute revelation, the secret or the absolute truth that he reads as Heimat.503
The term implies an emotional attachment to the place of origin, source of iden-
tity, but also the nostalgia of its regaining—the equivalent of regaining one’s roots
and one’s self. Bloch identifies this process as a reconstruction and a rediscovery
of one’s self (both individual and common) through the fragmentary forms of the
human cultural creation; safeguarded as heritage, it has the ability to reconstruct and
reveal our own identity. Heritage’s capacity to construct and define identity (be it
503 Zipesnotes that Bloch deliberately uses this term, aware of the nationalist-socialist connota-
tion especially for the German territory. The philosopher thus demonstrates the potent mobilizing
capacity of hope, ideal and of utopia (even if turned negative through their hijacking).
individual, communitarian or societal) needs no further justification; and the built

object’s palindrome role in this process proves its very capacity to assume different
interpretations and meanings—by virtue of the surplus, or its contained universal
values. Thus, the heritage demarche can be interpreted as an unavoidably utopian
project of (re-)assembling human identity, operating through the accumulation and
(equalitarian) interpretation all the relevant fragments—the ones that harbour that
surplus of meaning. Just like the translation of the ideal into the real, or the utopian
architectural projection’s into reality, automatically grants alterity to the materialized
object—and leads to the constitution and operation of the space as heterotopian—in
the same way, the concrete application of the theoretical heritage demarche involves
a similar transformation. The everyday object is acknowledged as a carrier of uni-
versal human values and becomes other through this status—in relation to itself and
to its context. The heritage status affirms its alterity. The purpose of the heritage
demarche—the reconstruction and the safeguarding of human identity—proves to
be equally utopian, due to the indefinite accumulation of its ‘material’—as demon-
strated by the recognition of newer heritage and the constant reconsideration of
the assessment criteria. This reassessment has already engendered the progressive
enlargement of the interest areas of heritage and the addition of new categories, and
has on occasion imposed the reconsideration of the ‘already filtered material’. An
additional utopian feature emerges from the very materiality of its objects, involving
the actual conservation of their inevitably degradable physical shape. If the heritage
demarche is thus considered as a utopian projection, a translation from the imagined
(the ideal) into the real (materialized ideal) will reveal the already familiar hetero-
topian mutation.
The concept of cultural heritage is imagined—just like its quintessential concrete
symbol space the museum—as a mirror of human identity, both constructs engaged
in the service of safeguarding and accumulating the cultural products of human cre-
ation. This very role assumed—that of a most faithful and precise reflection of the
essence of humanity—as seen through the Foucaultian perspective, announces the
heterotopian character of the heritage demarche, as the mirror is the ultimate or
‘model’ utopian/heterotopian medium.504 Both constructs evolve together: from a
simple recipient role towards a more active and involved attitude; from the content-
ment of its own subjectivity (the antiquaries’ collection, the antiquity as the unique
expression of heritage values, the more modern Eurocentric heritage approach, etc.)
towards the endeavour for attaining an objective perspective (the inclusion and recog-
nition of the plurality505 of identitary expressions—as epochs, ethnicities, groups,
etc., and as forms of manifestation—immaterial and material, from artefact to land-
scape, etc.).
504 Foucault,M., Of Other Spaces, 17.

505 When discussing the evolution of utopia, Goodwin considers that the argument of plurality is
introduced via postmodernity and inevitably has devastating consequences—as the pathological
pluralism that “reduces the critical capacity of utopia and jeopardizes its transformative power”.
Goodwin, Barbara, The Philosophy of Utopia, Goodwin, Barbara, ed., Routledge, Great Britain,
2001, 3.
It is worth mentioning the evolution of the two denominations of the her-

itage/museum binomial pairing: patrimonialization,506 also discussed elsewhere,507
and the negative version attached to it, museification. The source of the second
denomination is the built object itself—the main recipient of heritage and the his-
torical expression of the patrimonial intention, undeniably positive. By means of its
materiality and especially its operation, the museum reveals the deficiency of the
translation into reality of the patrimonial ideal (the project of reassembling human
identity through accumulating and interpreting the fragments that preserve that sig-
nification surplus)—thus providing the core of the pejorative denomination. The
museum itself is the result of an attempt to materialize the utopian projection. The
museum accumulates the cultural artefacts in the same manner in which cultural
heritage accumulates the instances of human identity deemed valuable. The internal
functioning and the physical delimitation of the museum—its enclosure, its con-
trolled access, spatial ordering, flows and times—find their match in the listing
and protection norms, in the categories and classes introduced by the patrimonial
demarche. The heritage object (artefact and built object) is handled similarly in
both situations, listed, categorized, protected, interpreted and showcased; thus, it
becomes other in relation to its itself—given its original purpose is at least altered if
not completely discontinued and replaced—and other in relation to its context. This
contextual contrasting character is usually more or less perceptible in the case of the
heritage built object and its proximate built fabric, whereas in the case of the artefact
the contrast is enhanced by the usually neutral nature of the museum environment.
The immediate ideal, the red thread common to both instances is conservation or the
attempt to arrest the passing of time and its physical consequences; however, heritage
is not the utopia of the static time: its projection is deliberately oriented towards a
future whose evolution and transformations are thoroughly acknowledged.
Thus, if considering the concept of cultural heritage as a utopian projection, its
materializations carry a heterotopian functioning (and ‘being’). Focusing the anal-
ysis on the built heritage object, it can be confirmed that the introduction of the
heritage status causes the designated spaces to function as heterotopias. The built
object’s accumulated significations are simultaneously acknowledged, through the
recognition of its value, but at the same time contradicted, through the interdiction or
506 Heritage-isation or heritageification comes from the French term patrimonialisation and defines
the “process by which elements of culture and nature become invested, at a certain point in the history
of societies, with a quality of heritage worth safeguarding, presented for the benefit of present gen-
erations and transmitted to future generations”, and expressed through the granting of the heritage
status. Ahmed Skounti, ‘De la patrimonialisation. Comment et quand les choses deviennent-elles
des patrimoines?’, Hesperis-Tamuda Journal Vol. XLV, 2010, 19, apud. Spânu, Smaranda, Practices
of the built heritage as other space: conservation of the architecturally-homogenous rural settlements
of Transylvania, in Acta Technica Napocensis: Civil Engineering & Architecture, Vol. 56, No. 3,
2013.
507 Spânu, Smaranda, Practices of the built heritage as other space: conservation of the
architecturally-homogenous rural settlements of Transylvania, in Acta Technica Napocensis: Civil

Engineering & Architecture Vol. 56, No. 3 (2013), Journal homepage: http://constructii.utcluj.ro/
ActaCivilEng, Special Issue: Interferences in architecture and urban planning. Architectural teach-
ing and research. QUESTIONS 2013.
restriction of its specific everyday practices. The model-objects or applied utopias

previously analysed (the ideal fortress of Sforzinda, the phalanstery, the familistère)
represent exceptional cases: for these spaces, the introduction of the heritage status
acts as a renewal of their heterotopian character, acknowledging their uniqueness and
their experimental, laboratory space role that have created, tested and influenced new
social ordering. These miniature models carry that surplus, and are able to mediate
the anticipatory illumination conjured by Bloch, because they concentrate instances
of a human ideal in very subjective formulas, well anchored into their own timeframe.
These heterotopic spaces from different epochs represent, just like Foucault’s mirror,
the self-constructed image of society at a certain moment in time; the built object
reveals (one of) society’s ideal self, as well as the real self in two instances: (a) that
of the criticized self and therefore meant to be changed—an identity which needs
to be sought in the reversed image of the ideal; and (b) that of the hybrid self, the
reconstructed one, on the other side of the mirror—the new real self transformed by
its ‘passage through the laboratory space’, now other in relation to its initial criticized
self, and other in relation to the ideal self. The importance of rehabilitating utopia’s
role (its transformative capacity) in the contemporary context appears now more
clearly. Without the utopian projection and without its materialization attempts, the
very heritage demarche—the reconstruction of humanity’s identity—is refused the
fragment carrying that signification surplus; by denying ourselves utopia, we deny
ourselves that very coveted recuperation of home, of our own identity.
Thus, the heritage perspective assumes an even more complex and difficult role:
from the unstable, continuously changing, position of a hybrid (and aware) self,
it undertakes the process of recovering all of the identitary images and instances
produced.
In the current context, utopia has begun to regain its central creative and critical
position, even if only partially and moderately, becoming yet again a useful tool in
exploring the present. As Andraos argues, it is necessary to revive utopia—especially
the progressive, visionary one—as a vector in surpassing the contemporary archi-
tectural and urban condition (densification, sprawl, lack of sustainability, etc.). Nev-
ertheless, even as its advocate, Andraos prefers to identify it by a different name
(visionary urbanism), thus revealing the still unsure position of utopia and eluding
(and failing to assume) the complete restitution of its status.
The identification of a utopian perspective within the heritage demarche, briefly
explored and argued here, is however one of the main arguments of the heritage-
heterotopia relation. This utopian lineage explains the paradoxical interrelations
within the heritage construct as well as its contextual relations, and announce its
heterotopian character.
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Chapter 3
The Heterotopic Character
and the Function
Abstract One of heterotopia’s main interpretation directions in the examined spe-

cific literature points towards the function of the object—term understood as the
binomial pairing of architectural programme and the associated characteristic prac-
tices. This direction is first justified through the very structure of the referenced Fou-
cauldian text (Of Other Spaces) which offers one such architectural programme as
exemplification of each heterotopic principle, be it the binomial pairing of object plus
practices (cemetery) or space plus practices (the festival, the colony); each of these
palpable examples or programmes addressed in the philosophers text are read within
their context (historic, social, political, geographic, etc.) appearing as mechanisms
created by and for its functioning and necessities. This chapter explores this direction
following the six-principle structure described by Foucault and their more prominent
function-focused interpretations (Dehaene, De Cauter, Cenzatti, Petterson, etc.). The
main profiles defined by Foucault—the crisis space, the space of compensation, of
illusion, etc.—as well as the ‘secondary’ interpretations—defining it as tertiary space,
intermediate space, public–private hybrid or space of mediation—are discussed from
the perspective of the functions of the space, the architectural programme, but also
in their redefined instances as heritage spaces. The generalization of the heterotopic
character for an entire functional category (or architectural programme) can lead
to an excessive abstraction and equivocal interpretation, hiding the individuality of
the single object and finally downgrading the concept. At a quick glance, several
common heterotopic traits can be identified for each functional category (such as
cemeteries, prisons); despite these, upon covering the various approaches found in
the specialized literature, it has been observed that the structure of the physical space
and the functional structure can indeed possess a heterotopic potential, more or less
intense or manifest, but not necessarily an all-encompassing heterotopic character. As
shown in the previous chapter, focused on utopias, the consideration of any embodi-
ment and evolution of these utopias as a heterotopic space would reflect a superficial
approach of the concept, as well as a devaluation of the complexity of its significa-
tions. A favourable valorization of the concept would be, as considered throughout
this research, the pursuing of the heterotopic characteristics not only within the func-
tional categories (where they manifest and can be observed as physical traits) but also
as practices and as contextual relations—both spatial and temporal. As this research
argues, the category can retain, and usually does, this heterotopic predisposition,

152 3 The Heterotopic Character and the Function
or heterotopic potential, that can become “active” on an ‘object to object basis’,

through the manifestation of specific practices and through its particular relationing
to its spatial and temporal context. Thereby, this chapter argues that the interpretation
of the heterotopic space must rely on both an analysis of functionality/architectural
programme (the material) and an analysis of the practices that have generated it (his-
torical practices) and that inhabit it (present practices) as well as an analysis of its
internal and contextual relations.
Keywords Heterotopic spaces · Function of heterotopia · Enclave spaces ·

Heritage narratives · Materialized heterotopia
The essay “Of Other Spaces” clearly enumerates the criteria according to which the
heterotopic character of a space and its material manifestations can be identified.
Each principle defines a type of heterotopias, explained through a concrete example:
the school dormitory, the barracks (heterotopia of crisis), the asylum, the hos-
pital, the jail (heterotopias of deviation), the cemetery (a multilayered heterotopia,
reflecting the multiple significations a heterotopic space may accumulate within dif-
ferent contexts), the theatre, the stage, the movie theatre, the garden (the capacity
to juxtapose into one real space several spaces which are incompatible between
them), the museum, the library (the ‘slice of time’—heterotopia separated from
the traditional time; heterotopias of the indefinite accumulation of time), the festival,
the exhibition, the holiday village (heterotopias of the transitory time), again, the
barracks and jail, but also the Muslim hamam, the sauna—spaces of purifica-
tion—and the hotel (all heterotopic spaces due to the presence of mechanism which
controls the access and conditions the physical entry—physical inclusion/symbolic
exclusion), the colony, the brothel (heterotopias of compensation and/or hetero-
topias of illusion). These spaces are explored from a historical perspective (or from
that of the archaeology of knowledge): their evolution is observed in time and in dif-
ferent contexts—through this ‘technique’ the philosopher focusing the attention on
the importance of their contextual reading. Thus, the aim of the Foucaultian examples
is not necessarily to exhaustively define the specific architectural functions or pro-
grammes which may function as heterotopias; through the diversity of the examples
and the employed historical perspective, the essay outlines the ‘interior functioning
system’ of heterotopias and emphasizes their relation with their context; I argue that
between those coordinates, their otherness or their heterotopic character comes into
shape.
Nevertheless, starting from those very clearly stated principles and their concrete
examples, the theory has gradually become more rigid. In general, the approaches
exclusively target a specific function (i.e. cemeteries, jails, asylums), minimizing
or even entirely omitting to address the context. Even though the structure of the
analysed physical space may have certain heterotopic features or coordinates, these
bear the heterotopic potential in themselves as a potential that may or may not man-
ifest itself, conferring only under certain conditions the heterotopic character and
functioning to that space. To consider these features which store a heterotopic poten-
3 The Heterotopic Character and the Function 153
tial as a given, common profile for the entire functional category ultimately serves
only as a reduction of the concept: the entire apparatus of temporal historic and
contextual relations is entirely eliminated. This ‘functional category’ generalization
produces an abstract and isolated, even depersonalized consideration of the analysed
object. A similar generalization could also be introduced in the analysis of the utopi-
as—extending uniformly and without discrimination, the heterotopic character from
the very first materialization of the utopia to all its subsequent variants and varia-
tions. Although these reiterate the coordinates (especially built coordinates) of their
model spaces, also inheriting in the process their heterotopic coordinates, they do
not automatically and universally become heterotopic spaces. I argue that they truly
become heterotopias only when specific practices and relations (attached in a certain
moment/time interval and always in relation with a certain context) are able to acti-
vate the inherited coordinates. Symmetrically, if Bentham’s Panopticon is considered
a heterotopic structure and the functional scheme of the jails resumes its principles
and coordinates, the extension of the heterotopia title to the entire functional category
would only simplify and dilute the potential of Foucault’s concept.
The approaches vary, dominantly gravitating towards a function analysis of the
built object (previously mentioned) and expressed in a material form, without the
articulation with the variable coordinate of the context. Nevertheless, one analysis
direction preserves the rigid functional classification, yet it incorporates it into a
twofold analysis, of the individual object and of its context: the analysis targets a
specific case, a space whose heterotopic profile is deduced not necessarily from
the functional generalization, but rather from the functioning peculiarities and the
relations of that space with its context. I argue that this second approach is closer to the
Foucaultian concept, as it discusses the set of particular relations in which the object
is inscribed and through which it is defined, as opposed to the first approach, which
simply observes the form, flows, circulations, functional organization of spaces, etc.
I believe that an opportune interpretation of the ‘heterotopic space’ concept must lay
at the intersection of these two approaches; both functions and practices that occupy
and generate it are interdependent, reflexive but also connected to and depending
on the context. The heterotopic character may thus be identified as the result of
multiple interrelations, “rather than through sharing common or essential elements
or features”.1
In this chapter, some of these approaches will be explored, especially those focused
on the field of architecture but also some tangent to other fields (sociology, anthro-
pology, urbanism), which enrich the understanding of the heterotopic character and
built space and object. On the basis of this analysis, the heritage perspective will also
be explored, in order to identify the heterotopic features of the built heritage object.
1 Peter Johnson, Heterotopian Studies, Interpretations of Heterotopia, essay published online http://
www.heterotopiastudies.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/3.1-Interpretations-pdf.pdf, accessed
February 2013, 3.
3.1 Instances of the Heterotopic Space in the Urban Space.

Dehaene and De Cauter, Boyer and Cenzatti
In the field of urban planning, the concept of heterotopia has served to identify,
analyse and explain particular coagulation patterns/instances of urban fabric, as well
as use and functioning patterns/instances. M. Dehaene and L. De Cauter are the main
exponents of this interpretation approach. They propose an analysis of the urban and
the architectural space through the lenses of a phenomenon characteristic to the
last decades of the twentieth century: the partial disintegration of public space and
its recrystallization as new hybridized or alternative forms—contrasting, antithetic
or enclave-like spaces. Their approach focuses on one of the main contemporary
processes of the city transformation, namely the redefinition of the public/private
limit, with the entire set of fluctuating relations between the two. They essentially
argue that where this limit appears more difficult to identify, where the delimitation
public/private is more diffuse and ambiguous, where the public character assumes
the functioning of the private one and vice versa or where the two overlap and
hybridize—there the heterotopic space can be identified.
Observing the correspondence of the Foucaultian principles with the characteris-
tics of the new hybridized forms of the urban space, Dehaene and De Cauter argue
for the redefining of relations and of limits of the public/private dichotomy by way
of the French philosopher’s heterotopia concept. The two propose a series of theo-
retical contexts for the reading of the urban heterotopic space, or binomial relations
through which the concept of heterotopic space can be more accurately defined: a.
the ordinary/common (or the everyday, in reference to Lefebvre and Certeau) versus
the extraordinary, b. oikos versus agora (or the public space/the city versus the private
space), c. space versus non-space, where the heterotopic spaces are seen as spaces of
the localization (or place—landmark) and sources of normality (even if indirectly)
in a network of flows (space of flows); and finally d. the heterotopic space under-
stood as the opposite and the solution to the camp-like orderings (military, refugee,
poor neighbourhoods), where the public/private separation and even the society can
become suspended.
Dehaene and De Cauter focus on a single heterotopic principle from the fou-
caultian schema: the access control mechanism; in their opinion, this very principle
determines the quality of heterotopic space. The two authors explore the urban space
for those hybrids created thorugh an overlapping of the public and of the private;
in order to be considered heterotopic these spaces are compulsorily “collective and
shared”.2 Considering it an oversimplification of the concept, Dehaene and De Cauter
contest one of the most popular interpretations of the heterotopia—as the excluded,
the marginal or eccentrically positioned, the interstitial, or the space contesting the
official order. Still, they too call to attention the generalization tendency attached
to the concept, or the penchant for identifying heterotopias in any manifestation of
alterity. Nevertheless, the two note the pervasive proliferation of heterotopic spaces
2 Heterotopia
and the city: public space in a postcivil society, Introduction, ed. Michiel Dehaene
and Lieven De Cauter, 2008, Routledge, 6.
3.1 Instances of the Heterotopic Space in the Urban Space … 155
in the contemporary city along, their strong presence and the interest they focus in
contemporary society; this multiplication of the public/private hybrids suggests a
crystallization of a new way to imagine, assemble and use the urban space.
M. Dehaene and L. De Cauter read heterotopia in the urban studies field not so
much an intervention tool but rather as a tool of analysis, of mapping the new spaces
generated by the city evolution.3 Their collective work—Heterotopia and the city:
public space in a postcivil society resumes Foucault’s ‘technique’, by addressing a
set of examples/case studies in order to illustrate as well as consolidate the definition
of heterotopia and to identify its ‘working’ potential. However, the majority of these
case studies focus their analysis on a single heterotopic coordinate.
Christine Boyer analyses the concept of heterotopia in the field of architecture
and criticizes the architects’ recurring “obsession with the object itself”,4 even if it
is traditionally their trade’s object and purpose. Boyer considers that the architects
[…] sought to reduce heterotopian space to any autonomous fragment set in opposition to
the compositional totalization of the city. They thought that fragmentation alone could offset
the terrifying power of architectural dreams to make all cities rational and beautiful. The
network of relationships surrounding the visible and the articulable, the variety of subject
positions, the indivisible intertwining of space and ideas, and all the necessary confusions
of utopic, dystopic and heterotopian spaces, fell outside what most architects heard or saw.5
Boyer identifies one architectural approach of the 70s as the closest to the complex-
ity of the heterotopic concept as alternative ordering—the utopic project-scenario
Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture of the architects Koolhaas and
Zenghelis represents “a gigantic strip of «metropolitan desirability»”6 traversing the
heart of London, an area protected by its walls from the rest of the city. The project
is reminiscent of Piranesi’s Campo Marzio, with the same strong utopian aura. The
empty space defined by the two parallel walls is “divided into 11 autonomous squares
and filled with the flotsam and jetsam of collective monuments […]”,7 reminiscent
of the rigorousness of ideal citadels. As an architectural element, the wall is abso-
lute symbol of segregation, and it is employed in the project as a quintessential
mechanism of exclusion, palpably and radically marking the difference between two
instances of the same city: that of the “preservationists and [that of the] modernists,
between the ideal and the real”.8 The proposed scenario is in fact a critique of the
processes which at the time defined the urban evolution of the British capital, but
also a critique of the general tendency in the architecture of the period. The ‘city
in the city’ is not (and it should not be) an idealized utopic product, but it must be
3 Heterotopia and the city: public space in a postcivil society, Introduction, ed. Michiel Dehaene
and Lieven De Cauter, 2008, Routledge, 9.
4 M. Christine Boyer, The many mirrors of Foucault and their architectural reflections, Heterotopia
and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, Michiel Dehaene, Lieven De Cauter, Routledge,
2008, 53–73, 57.
5 M. Christine Boyer, The many mirrors…, 64.
6 M. Christine Boyer, The many mirrors…, 66.
7 Idem.
8 Idem.
‘understood’ in its true form, of negative utopia. The project criticizes the Corbusian
urban planning, the mega structures and the residential complexes, the emphasized
tension between the old fabric of the city and the modern intervention, the relation-
ship of the user-inhabitant with the design process—all by employing the techniques
of hyperbolization and contradiction. Boyer sees Koolhaas and Zenghelis’ scenario
as heterotopic exactly because of those mechanisms of contestation, challenging and
reversal of what, at that moment, functioned as the dominant ordering, or the urban
and architectural reality of London. The built fabric and the its relationships are,
in the proposed scenario, distopic manifestations that represent an alternative, very
well-defined built ordering, a “a space of illusion that exposes all real space, all the
emplacements in the interior of which human life is enclosed and partitioned, as
even more illusory”.9 Among the heterotopic coordinates, Boyer elects to read this
project through its critical mirror role within the architectural production process: the
architectural projection as last critical reflexive resort, last contestatory demarche. In
other words, the heterotopias assumes the role of the court jester, capable to unveil
the absurdity of all demarches, to signal the flaws and to question the decisions of
the ordering power; a concealed voice of reason, capable to reveal the truth through
an absolute reversal of normality, even if just a virtual one (what if ), in the form of
the non-materialized project. However, this project also allows an alternative inter-
pretation, from the perspective of the built heritage.
Although the built heritage is not the main focus of the Koolhaas/Zenghelis
project, the imagined new city is created through constant referencing to and over-
lapping the old one; a process of selection determines the built heritage objects that
are to be kept and reused—however most are banished outside the ‘desirability strip’
and abandoned to decay (“London as we know it will become a pack of ruins.”).10
The new architecture creates new monuments whereas the heritage-monument is
condemned to ruin, reversing their status. The “decay of the [excluded] old town and
the physical splendour of the Strip”11 are to be perceived together, each defined in
contrast to the other. Isolated inside the strip, the preserved fragments of the old city
act as an interchange, a temporary and ‘familiar’ buffer zone for the newcomers; this
enclave of historic urban fabric is removed from its central position, deprived of its
traditional function and readjusted as a new transitional ‘training’ device, emphasiz-
ing it as a space of crisis; the state of crisis of the voluntary prisoners is expressed
through as well as located within the ‘old’ architecture. The descent12 of the volun-
tary prisoners into a carefully staged spatio-temporal enclave (the old city fragment)
symbolizes a spatial and a temporal displacement, established through the contrast-
ing association of the new and the old. The conserved fragments act as obligatory
9 Foucault M., Of Other Spaces, (1968) translated by Lieven De Cauter and Michiel Dehaene, [n
Heterotopia and the city: public space in a postcivil society, ed. Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De
Cauter, 2008, Routledge 21.
10 Koolhaas, Rem, Zenghelis, Elia, with Vriesendrop, Madelon and Zenghelis, Zoe, Exodus or The
Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, digitalized manuscript, 1972, 6.

11 Koolhaas, R., Zenghelis, E., Exodus…, 14.
12 “the escalator descends into the area of London which is preserved […] as a reminder of the past
and as useful housing for migrant visitors and new arrivals (an environmental sluice” Page 8.
points of passage, just as the prescriptive tour of the newcomers acts as a rite of pas-
sage—both heterotopic features. Furthermore, as an ever progressing entity, the tip of
the Strip “[…] is the frontline of the architectural warfare waged on the old London.”,
where the old fabric is processed and consumed by the advancement of the new13 ;
additional fragments of the old city “are incorporated into the zone after a rehabilita-
tion of their questionable purposes and programs”.14 Although all these heterotopic
features can be identified as attributes of the remaining ‘old city’ and implicitly of the
built heritage, they are usually and mainly attributed to the entire dystopian apparatus
depicted in the Koolhaas/Zenghelis project—the Strip. Yet, the heritage monument
is projected here as the utmost other, albeit fragmented and residual, displaced and
disjointed from its ‘natural’ context; its alterity is deliberately created, enhanced and
exploited, although it loses its ‘status’ and its traditionally assigned values. The mon-
ument acts as a mirror, selected and displayed especially for its capacity to reflect
and remind the prisoners of the outside, the rapidly decaying old city. The walls of
the Strip control its access—both physical and symbolic: the fragments incorporated
inside the strip are altered and presented as part of a carefully designed course, while
the excluded old city fabric, isolated outside the walls, remains untouchable although
within reach and within view. In addition, the formal encoding of the monument (its
antiquated architectural language) additionally controls its symbolic access. Another
heterotopic feature derives from the manner in which the monument is displayed,
bearing a not-so-subtle moralizing intention: transplanted within a radically different
background, the monument reflects the illusory nature of the present. This display
also conveys the state of crisis of the old city and illustrates its fabric as deviant,
other. These heterotopic features can be read into Koolhaas/Zenghelis’s project even
if the built heritage is not specifically addressed nor directly named. Interpreted in
this manner, the old fabric of the city/the built heritage appears here mainly as a
different space, a space of crisis, a space of temporal accumulation and a transitional
space.
The reading of heterotopia through the coordinate of the difference is also
employed by Cenzatti: “places in which irreconcilable spaces coexist, but what con-
stitutes irreconcilability is constantly contested and changing”,15 a fact reflected also
in the physical, architectural form, as it is (in various stages and contexts) accepted
and integrated (normality) and alternatively judged as other and subsequently iso-
lated. The author notes the ingression of heterotopia in the everyday space, but not
necessarily as “monumental constructions of heterotopias of deviance”,16 but rather
as spaces of difference created through practice and localized relationships. These
enclaves in the everyday, although defined by and employing the built context, no
longer have the traditional physical delimitation (the limit of the architectural object,
13 “a continuous confrontation with the old city, existing structures are destroyed by the new archi-
tecture”, Koolhaas, R., Zenghelis, E., Exodus…, 18.

14 Koolhaas, R., Zenghelis, E., Exodus…, 18.
15 Cenzatti M., Heterotopias of difference, Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil
Society, Michiel Dehaene, Lieven De Cauter, Routledge, 2008, 75–85, 79.

16 Cenzatti M., Heterotopias of difference, 79.
the enclosure, the wall). They rather crystallize as manifestations of a practice, colo-
nizing—temporarily, permanently or rhythmically—there where it (the built space)
allows this appropriation. Thus, the built space or object can influence or favour the
localization of that difference, but it does not entirely determine it. These colonized
spaces can be visible (occupied public spaces and deviated from the designated func-
tion) or less visible, with an intermediary statute, or in the gray area—case in which
two practices of the same space can coexist. Cenzatti discusses the Foucaultian con-
cept in relation with Lefebvre’s tri-dimensional space—the practiced space, repre-
sentation of the space and space of representation. The third dimension is especially
identified as the correspondent of the heterotopia—space of relations and of jux-
taposition of multiple spatial and temporal dimensions. Cenzatti also analyses the
relationship between the physical space and the social practice, essentially an inter-
conditional relationship: “[…] the physical space of, say, a square does not change
when it is occupied by a market, a political rally, or a carnival. Yet the social relations
taking place in the different instances produce different ‘lived moments’—different
spaces of representation”17 ; the reverse conditioning is given by the configuration
of that respective space, the physical shape itself that determines the nature of the
lived spaces it can contain. In their turn, the spaces of representation leave their
imprint on the built medium (temporary or permanent), as well as on the individual’s
perception of space.18 According to Cenzatti “As soon as the social relation and the
appropriation of physical space end, both space of representation and heterotopia
disappear.”19
Based on this approach, the introduction of the heritage status may be interpreted
as an attempt to affix but also as a normalizing intervention—conferring validation,
visibility, recognition and acceptance—through the protection of a physical space
shaped by the practices of a certain group. The consecration as a heritage space
attempts to attach the vanished practices or event to a specific place. The physi-
cal space is invested with supplementary significance (superimposed over the initial
one, attached to the creative intention and to those accumulated in time) through
which it becomes accepted, and to an extent integrated into normality. Although the
otherness coordinate is apparently dissolved, it gives way to a heritage otherness;
by protecting the material form (the object’s detachment from its natural temporal
flow, the supra-norming of the space, etc.) this new heritage-ordering of the space
attempts to anchor the historic immaterial practice via its material imprint—in most
cases, the last witness of the practice and implicitly of the heterotopic encoding,
17 Cenzatti M., Heterotopias of difference, 80.

18 Cenzatti M., Heterotopias of difference, Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil
Society, Michiel Dehaene, Lieven De Cauter, Routledge, 2008, 75–85, 81; “Conversely, spaces
of representation may leave traces in the built environment and change the physical space. The
traces can then be as light as a few pieces of paper or some placards on the ground, or increasingly
permanent, such as a traffic diversion at certain times, fixed stalls, or tags on walls, if the spatial
appropriation becomes repetitive or permanent. Traces may become even stronger if the social rela-
tionship is institutionalized, as in ‘organized spectacles’ or in the ‘monumentality and constructed
spaces of ritual’”.
19 Cenzatti, M., idem.
essentially ephemeral, according to Cenzatti. This attempt to affix/solidify and insti-

tute the heritage alterity, focused on the built object, is specific to the traditional or
classic heritage perspective. Along with the evolution of the heritage concepts, the
traditional practice of the space selected as heritage becomes as important as the pre-
served physical object; thus, the protection of the material form is accompanied by
preservation formulas for its characteristic practices—both direct, as practices linked
to the actual use of the object, and indirect, or practices connected to the building
technologies. The built object “contains” the memory of the production practices, in
the same manner it retains its occupation, use and even conservation practices, where
historical restoration interventions alter the object in the very process of its transmis-
sion. This idea forms the basis of certain contemporary reconstruction approaches
directed towards the disappeared heritage objects; however, the processes and the
practices are mainly targeted, and the physical object whose recovery is performed
is merely secondary.
For Cenzatti the two perspectives on space—Lefebvre’s and Foucault’s—overlap.
He argues that the spaces of representation disappear the moment of the dissipation of
the social relationships which define them, although these relations most often leave
their (material) imprint; thus, heterotopic spaces would function in a similar manner,
although the ephemeral character of heterotopias is more difficult to localize.20 Cen-
zatti also addresses the visibility of heterotopic spaces as product of certain groups
and of their specific interrelations: “[…] to what extent heterotopias are visible and
can be known depends on their position shifting between invisibility, marginaliza-
tion, assertion of difference, or co-optation […]”21 to the processes of normalization.
A heritage perspective reading can additionally outline this mechanism. One such
space ‘turned’ heritage space acquires visibility (in the presence of but more often in
the absence of the practices which might confer it an active heterotopic functioning)
through the well-defined heritage statute and through its strong norming; these are
inevitably part of a ‘normalization’ process. Nevertheless, the official status is in
most of the cases introduced with the intention to stabilize or affix the informal,
immaterial coordinate. The heritage practice replaces the ‘native’ practices of the
object—either filling the void left by their disintegration, entirely replacing them
or partially alternating them with the purpose of conserving the material substance.
Through the heritage status, the heterotopia of the difference, as it is analysed by Cen-
zatti, is simultaneously annihilated (by normalization) and perpetuated (protected
and preserved): the protected space/object becomes decisively other in relation
to itself as well as in relation to its context. This paradoxical functioning of the
‘heritage mechanism’ is one of the main arguments supporting its heterotopic nature.
Another aspect of the heterotopic space of difference discussed by Cenzatti is
its ‘parentage’, its association with subordinate, marginal groups, often found in
opposition with the official ordering; these spaces belong to the everyday, are inter-
stitial, softly or un-normed, where the narrative of certain groups can crystallize,
finding the coordinates necessary for their initial manifestation. However, Cenzatti
20 Cenzatti M., Heterotopias of difference, Heterotopia and the City…, 81.

21 Cenzatti M., Heterotopias…, 82.
does not exclude from this definition the official spaces of representation, turned into
heterotopias of difference when occupied or hijacked, even if only temporarily. By
assuming these spaces, the subordinate groups redefine them and infuse them with
their own identity.22 Thus “the same physical location can take on different spatial
meanings according to the social groups that occupy it, whether at different times
or simultaneously”.23 The space thus becomes multilayered, accumulating significa-
tions from various groups and implicitly becoming an arena for their confrontation;
this way, it is also a space of negotiation, where the juxtaposition of contradictory
identitary representations becomes possible. This heterotopia of difference is defined
as evolution or perpetual change—as not only the groups of users are always chang-
ing but also the spaces assumed by them,24 thus emphasizing the importance of the
practice in the detriment of the space. Cenzatti connects heterotopia with the notion
of marginal—in social terms, opposed to the dominant ordering, but also in terms
of its representativity and of its spatial positioning. The heterotopia of difference is
read as a space of resistance (the occupation—sometimes incidental—of interstitial,
marginal, weakly defined and normed) as well as a revanchist space (the occupation
is intentional, generally temporary, focused on representative, central and otherwise
strongly normed spaces). Cenzatti believes that the very marginal character of the
group “makes the appropriation of a physical space relevant and gives specificity
to the space produced”,25 but he observes this process from a positivist perspective,
focusing on the produced space (and of the marginal, subordinate identities thus
expressed). Yet, this perspective neglects the destructive potential of such a negoti-
ation, especially from the point of view of the built heritage. Nevertheless, Cenzatti
perceives this potential when observing the motor principle of his heterotopias of
difference: the juxtaposition of opposites and the implicit conflict between these.
In a first interpretation, from a heritage perspective, the selection process
quintessential to heritage outlines a polarity relation, hierarchical, between
us—present—dominant ordering and them—past—different and subordinate order-
ing—since most often the latter is no longer active, and since it is regarded in
retrospect and in a mediated manner. However, this relation is an oscillating one. If
that different other, from the past, represents the absolute otherness in relation with
the present ego (because I cannot simultaneously be him), the safeguarding of the
material witnesses of his existence (cultural, social, political, spiritual) is in itself a
process more or less of assuming this identity, yet it also is a process of self-defining,
assumed and declared as such. Through this appropriation, the subordinate group, in
this case the ego of the present, assumes the identity of the past, through a process of
selection–creation. From this perspective, the relation is present-subordinate, past-
dominant. But, the preservationist process of selection and safeguarding also implies
a retain (include)/release(exclude) process, and the resulting heritage space appears
as a subjective construct, an accumulation of fragments deemed valuable in a given
22 Cenzatti M., Heterotopias…, 83.

23 Idem.
24 Cenzatti, Heterotopias…, 84.
25 Cenzatti, Heterotopias…, 83.
context. Thus, the material witnesses, the “inherited” space is scrutinized, analysed
and decanted—with permanent effects, but through the lens of an alterable value
hierarchy. The selection process treats this inherited space (past) as an interstitial,
softly or un-normed, freely opened and thus vulnerable to the dominant ordering’s
reorganization, of a present that judges. The act of interpreting and recomposing the
past cannot be avoided in the heritage process. The freedom of the initial selection
(e.g. the mediaeval and Renaissance antiquarian’s criteria) demonstrates this very
relationship between dominant/subordinate. A consequence of this relation is the
contemporary issue of identification and (re)definition of values according to which
the heritage is to be and must be judged (selected, restored and used). Often the
implications of this relation are eluded by this perspective of the present, as we are
often tempted to judge (and condemn) the idea of value, the selection, the interven-
tion and the liberties assumed in the patrimonial processes of the past, without taking
into account the context and the hierarchies which defined the dominant ordering
(the context) of that time. In this perspective, the relationship is present-dominant,
past-subordinate. This ratio reveals from a different angle the contradictory and
paradoxical functioning of heritage: although the intention is undoubtedly positive,
the selection act automatically implies a hierarchization, a segregation between
dominant and subordinate. The heritage object may thus be considered marginal, as
it belongs to a group, a time, a community or a culture which are no longer dominant.
Regarded critically, the safeguarded object discloses this paradox, as it is simultane-
ously a preserved fragment and a memory of other abandoned fragments, a composite
image of the orderings that have processed it and which have allowed for its trans-
mission in the present. The incessant expansion of the heritage interest area (from the
artefact/built object to landscape, network, region/areas, modern/recent ‘objects’,
etc.) appears as a compensatory gesture, a struggle to recover and reconstruct as
accurately as possible, and to the extent to which the previous selections still allow it.
In a secondary interpretation, from the same heritage perspective, the coagulation
of Cenzatti’s heterotopias of difference can correspond to a positive (constructive)
process through which the identity of a marginal group is expressed: a process of
investment with (and juxtaposition of) significances, or of a coagulation of iden-
titary spaces, in one word, a creation of a heritage potential. Nevertheless, taking
into consideration the coordinate of the mutability or the ephemeral nature of this
heterotopia of difference, emphasized by Cenzatti, the process rather suggests the
localized event, a temporary superficial or soft modelling of a space—more similar
to the notion of intangible heritage rather than to the immobile one. One of the tradi-
tional transpositions into heritage of an event appropriation is the consecration of the
memorial monument; this material body binds into the physical space a purely sym-
bolic encoding, otherwise incorporeal, often singular and isolated; the significance
is thus imprinted into the materiality of the respective space.
3.2 Heterotopic Space—Tertiary Space—Space

of Mediation
The contribution of the two editors, De Cauter and Dehaene, aims to

determine a general theory of heterotopias starting from the ordering struc-
ture of the polis of Antiquity. The two analyse the five divisions attributed
to Hipodamus (emporium, oikos, agora, acropolis and necropolis),26 and
the deriving tripartite structure, with the two main economic (oikos) polit-
ical pole (agora) and the third intermediate pole, “the inclusive realm
of all ‘other spaces’: theatre, stadium, palaestra, hippodrome, gymnasium,
etc.”—27 or the tertiary space. The same analogy of functions, theatre/play-
performance/games—sports/dance/music is also discussed by Schechner.28
This third space “[…] is neither political (public) nor economical (private) space,
but rather sacred space, or hieratic space”,29 category which is interpreted by the
two as the “cultural sphere: the space of religion, arts, sports and leisure”.30 De
Cauter and Dehaene place it between public-visible and private-hidden, an interme-
diary space whose status is “often weakly or only partially determined”,31 and which
functions according to special rules and, implicitly, to specific temporal orderings.
The two authors mainly define heterotopia according to the (dominant) temporal
coordinate—as break in the continuity of the temporal flow—and, subordinate to
this, according to the spatial coordinate—again, as a rift of a physical continuity, in
the form of the differently built object. When overlapping these two discontinuities,
temporal and spatial, De Cauter and Dehaene identify as heterotopic space the archi-
tectural object harbouring leisure functions; they resort to the definition of the het-
erotopic space according to its functional profile but also to its defining practices.
The leisure spaces are read as heterotopias given they have the role of interrupting the
everyday time and space, a heterotopic coordinate which appears in various manifes-
tations in the majority of the Foucaultian examples (hospital theatre, library, museum,
etc.). The two authors propose the interpretation of the heterotopia as a space of the
mediation, where these “other-spaces are alternative spaces, altered spaces, and
often also alternating spaces” between different spaces and times,32 hybrids which
allow the (re)combination of opposing spaces and temporal fragments. De Cauter
26 About the preexistence of these structuring (Egyptian, pre-Hellenic cities) which appear with and
are attributed to Hipodamus discussed by Giovannoni, Gustavo, in Old cities and the new urbanism,
ed. Gemma, Bucharest, 2016.
27 Dehaene, De Cauter, The space of play—Towards a general theory of heterotopia, in Heterotopia
and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, Michiel Dehaene, Lieven De Cauter, Routledge,
2008, 87–102, 90.
28 Schechner, Richard, Performance Theory, Chap. 1. Approaches, 1988, revised edition Taylor &
Francis e-Library, 2004, 7.

29 Dehaene, De Cauter, The space of play…, Heterotopia and the City…, 91.
30 Dehaene, De Cauter, The space of play…, 91.
31 Idem.
3.2 Heterotopic Space—Tertiary Space—Space of Mediation 163
and Dehaene analyse the space of the theatre in general—as tertiary space which
mediates and alternates between real and virtual—as well as its defining practice,
the performance of the dramatic play. It is explored as the quintessential mediating
device, as it juxtaposes public and private, the social roles attributed to sexes as well
as the real and the possible ordering—where the latter has a ‘reality-compensational’
purpose.
The two authors also discuss the characteristic action and actor of this ‘third
space’—in connection with the ceremonial, ludic and festive nature of the space:
the play (the theatrical and ritualized set of actions) and, respectively the homo
ludens, along Huizinga’s interpretation33 ; both the actor and his space share several
defining features of the concept of heterotopia: the ritual associated and the ritual
integrated into the process (of the performance/play)34 ; the contrast between the
apparent freedom of the action and the limiting, strict coordinates; its positioning
outside the everyday but directly/symbolically referencing it; the lack of a ‘tradi-
tional’ purpose (i.e. direct or material, a coordinate that is nevertheless arguable);
its unfolding within a dedicated time and space, governed by specific rules and its
association with a often hidden, specialized organizational structure.35 The unfolding
of the play creates its own time and space, a découpage or a “pocket”, a spatial and
temporal enclave of otherness in its surrounding context. It creates a delineation with
an exclusive character and with a fragile internal dynamics. However, as Foucault’s
definition and the selected example (the theatre) suggest, these enclaves are never
completely ‘detached’, isolated and self-sufficient in relation to their context; they
are rather securely attached to it and even dependent on it: they continuously process
and produce ‘data’, that is, they themselves adapt and adapt, or influence, in their
turn the context. The stage thus appears as a mediator, well defined in space and time
(through practice), or a link to an-other space which simultaneously reflects and
informs/shapes reality. The mechanism can also be read through Foucault’s absolute
heterotopic space—the mirror. The parallel is based on the notion of performativity,
33 Huizinga defines the concept of homo ludens, as an instance of humanity; according to the
historian “civilization arises and unfolds in and as play”, and thus the game is not just a simple
“biological phenomenon” but must be understood as a “cultural phenomenon”. In addition, he links
play and culture: “in its earliest phases culture has the play-character”, and that subsequently “the
play-element gradually recedes into the background, being absorbed for the most part in the sacred
sphere. The remainder crystallizes as knowledge: folklore, poetry, philosophy, or in the various
forms of judicial and social life.” Huizinga J., Homo Ludens—A Study Of The Play-Element In
Culture, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1944 (1st edition.), Foreword, p.5, 46.
34 More on the relationship between ritual and theatre in Turner, Victor Witter, From Ritual to The-
atre: The Human Seriousness of Play, PAJ Press, Baltimore, 1982, and Alexander, Jeffrey, Cultural
Pragmatics: A New Model of Social Performance, the centre for cultural Sociology, Yale Uni-
versity, Working papers, 2003, http://iscte.pt/~apad/prisoesfct/prisao%20de%20nao%20nacionais/
cultural%20pragmatics%20Alexander.pdf, accessed January 2015; also on the translation of the
two onto the social scene: Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual,
ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, Jason L. Mast, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
35 Dehaene and De Cauter base their approach on the coordinates identified by Schechner:” (1)
a particular and specific temporal ordering, (2) a special value attached to the objects, (3) non-
productivity in terms of material goods, (4) rules”. Schechner, R., Performance Theory, 8.
in J. L. Austin’s definition36 : starting from linguistics, he identifies the capacity of

language (and of its conventional signs) to constitute reality, in certain situations;
although he identifies the ‘constatative’ language (which describes reality) as differ-
ent from the performative language (which creates reality), in practice, the two cannot
be separated37 ; just as the language, the work of art or the architectural object can be
interpreted as performative, through their capacity to simultaneously describe and
create reality and to transmit encoded information. Similarly, the heterotopic space
of the mirror can be interpreted as a performative function space—a space that is
other than the physical reality, but capable to mould it. Its performative capacity is
‘activated’ by the presence of the ‘audience’ or of the ‘gaze’—through which the self
simultaneously becomes actor and audience—but also through action or the practice
implied by this real space/reflected space binomial relation.
Extrapolating this interpretation into the heritage sphere, the listed built object
and the sum of its characteristic practices, actively assumes the mirror role or that
‘tertiary space’ role (in Dehaene/De Cauter’s reading): an intermediary between past
and present, a temporal and spatial enclave though which reality is simultaneously
and continuously reflected and moulded. The simple presence of the encoded infor-
mation transfer function (emitter—receptor) suggests the performative character of
the heritage space. In this capacity, the space functions as a mediator through which
us, “as a culture or society we reflect upon and define ourselves, dramatize our col-
lective myths and history, present ourselves with alternatives, and eventually change
in some ways while remaining the same in others”38 ; still, as Alexander notes, this
“nostalgic” perspective39 is counterbalanced by the pessimist-pragmatic approach
of Erving Goffman—who sees the modern performative act as having the sole role
“to describe in a convincing manner its own ideal values as isomorphous with those
of the other, despite the fact that such a complementarity is rarely, if not at all
true”,40 because, in the end, by convincing its audience, the actor may achieve his
own pragmatic purposes. Moreover, for Goffman, the performative act is a “manner
of behaviour which may characterize any activity”,41 not just the dramatic play. In
the case of the heritage space, the two perspectives overlap and interpenetrate; its
36 Austin, John Langshaw, How to do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at
Harvard University in 1955, 1962 (eds. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà), Oxford: Clarendon Press.
37 von Hantelmann, Dorothea, The Experiential Turn, in On Performativity, ed. Carpenter, Elizabeth,
Living Collections Catalogue, vol. 1., Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2014, http://walkerart.org/
collections/publications/performativity/experiential-turn, accessed January 2015; also Austin, John
Langshaw, How to Do Things with Words, Clarendon Press, 1975, 4–5.
38 MacAloon apud. Jeffrey Alexander, Cultural Pragmatics: A New Model of Social Performance,
the centre for cultural Sociology, Yale University, Working papers, 2003, 5, http://home.iscte-
iul.pt/~apad/prisoesfct/prisao%20de%20nao%20nacionais/cultural%20pragmatics%20Alexander.
pdf, accessed January 2015, last accessed March 2018; Alexander, Jeffrey C., Chap. 1. Cultural
pragmatics: social performance between ritual and strategy, published in eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander,
Bernhard Giesen, Jason L. Mast, Social Performance Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and
Ritual, 29–90, Cambridge University Press 2006, ISBN-10 0-511-16835-7.
39 Alexander, Cultural Pragmatics…, 5.
40 Alexander, Cultural Pragmatics…, 5.
41 Schechner, Richard, Performance Theory, 22.
3.2 Heterotopic Space—Tertiary Space—Space of Mediation 165
performative character is linked to its contextual relationing. Different actors emerge

(the museum institution, the wider heritage institution, the governmental bodies and
varied other stakeholders) as well as different means to convey meaning (discourse,
image) yet, all referencing to and employing the built object as their main medium or
stage, etc. In order to identify the main instances of the built heritage object, I propose
the Jeffrey Alexander’s structural analysis and its performative process components
as a starting point.
3.3 Performativity
The cultural performative act (performance) is defined as a social process through

which the actor (as individual/group), performs in a plausible as possible manner,
the “meaning of their own social situation”, with the deliberate or involuntary aim to
convince its audience, before which the act is unfolded.42 In order to stage the per-
formative act the actors appeal to a cultural background, or systems of collective
representations: series of symbols/signifiers “patterns of signifiers whose referents
are the social, physical, natural, and cosmological worlds within which actors and
audiences live. These worlds provide the background symbols for social perfor-
mances, and some subsets of them become the scripted referents of performance
texts”43 ; those symbols are associated in order to create chronological narratives and
codes, meant to “configure social and emotional life in compelling and coherent
ways”.44 The actors who support the performative act assume in accordance with
their own cognitive and expression skills and their capacity “to display (express)
moral assessments”45 ; these assessments condition both the theatrical and the social
interpretation, and in their turn these condition the very transmission of the signi-
fied. The role of the audience, or the final receiver of the signified, is not that of a
simple passive observer, as it is actively involved in decoding the actors’ interpre-
tation or, moreover, to (inter)actively participate in the performative act. Alexander
identifies three operational coordinates of the performative act—the means of sym-
bolic production, the mise en scene and the social power. In the exploration of the
performative act in the heritage sphere, out of these three, the means of symbolic
production are of utmost interest. Commonly, in terms of the dramatic field, these
correspond to the very tangible props; these objects ‘occupying’ and delineating the
stage function as iconic representations, carriers of a symbol. Alexander also includes
in this category the physical space of the performative act—from the ‘void’ space of
the stage, and the mobile symbolic objects, capable of suggesting and building any
other space, to the (heritage) built scaffolding. This is localized (‘anchored’ in space)
and carries its own strong identity, often deliberately chosen for its coordinates: as an
42 Garfinkel apud. Alexander, 6.

43 Alexander, 6.
44 Idem.
45 Alexander, 7.
iconic and suggestive background representation. Thus, Alexander approaches one

of Schechner’s concepts: environmental theatre or the performative act (inseparable
from) specific to the site.
3.3.1 Performativity and Urban Space
The interpretation of the urban space (the street, the square)46 and especially of
architecture “as the space of participative performance”,47 as stage or frame48 of
human activities is not new (Vitruvius, Serlio). The relationship audience–actor
defines the space of the stage and, applied in the case of the Renaissance urban
space, for example, conditions its perception and even its construction: as the real
space is visually perceived in perspective, the representation becomes a model for
the stage decor-imitation of the ‘real’ architectural context; this reflection of the
real, an architectural stage-set, influences in its turn the actual construction of the
city—which thus becomes the stage or the background constructed by the architect
(the architect-director or scenographer, according to Lefebvre’s city text interpreta-
tion). According to Borys, the urban space and the built object (of the Renaissance
period) are assembled as an ensemble scenographic device operating a “reorder-
ing of perceptions of space and also of time”.49 In another interpretation, archi-
tecture appears as a “cathartic event” (Vitruvius; the architecture as an object part
of the ritual, and which mediates/conditions the unfolding is the event), or even as
a space-event, beyond its functional role, defined by and impossible to dissociate
from the performative act to which it is dedicated.50 Pérez-Goméz proposes an addi-
tional reading, that of the “performed architecture”, where “[the architect’s] work
was a ‘performance’ of the original idea, always an interpretation, never a mere
46 Ann Marie Borys notices: “the street and the stage represent interchangeable ideas in the Renais-
sance” and even more: “the street and the urban small marketplace were in the centre of the Renais-
sance development of the theatre”, marking public events accompanied by temporary, elaborate but
ephemeral scenographies—dedicated exactly to the simulation of an alternative, spatial or temporal
ordering, contrastingly superposed in a very real context and, above all, known to the public—the
city. The author also notices the paradoxical evolution of the city stage idea: the city is temporarily
turned into an imaginary (and even fantastic) variant of itself, whilst the stage of the theatre play
must illustrate the image of the city exactly in order to create that illusion of truthfulness. Ann Marie
Borys, Through the Lens: Image and Illusion at Play in the Ideal City, în Read G., Feuerstein M.,
Architecture As A Performing Art [e-book], 97–112, Burlington: Ashgate; 2013, eBook Academic
Collection Trial, Ipswich, MA. accessed April, 2015, 100.
47 Pérez-Goméz, Alberto, Architecture as a Performing Art: Two Analogical Reflections în Read
G., Feuerstein M., Architecture As A Performing Art [e-book]. 15–26, Burlington: Ashgate; 2013,
eBook Academic Collection Trial, Ipswich, MA. accesat Aprilie, 2015, 16.
48 “Architecture is fundamentally characterized by its capacity to frame such [performative] events,
rather than by a particular style, materiality, or design method”. Pérez-Goméz, Alberto, Architecture
as a Performing Art…, 16.
49 Ann Marie Borys, Through the Lens: Image and Illusion at Play in the Ideal City, 99.
50 Pérez-Goméz, Architecture as…, 17.
3.3 Performativity 167
transcription, regardless of the material medium […]”.51 Yet, in this argument, the
performed architecture would correspond to the historical architectural production
(from pre-Renaissance onwards),52 gradually diluting towards the modern phase,
when it becomes a “technological practice” or a “reduction of architecture to a sci-
entific (geometrical) operation”.53 The architect is imagined as an actor performing
his role—the actual architecture practice—and his entire activity should be observed
exhaustively, and should be
[…] valorised as a lifelong trajectory with a discernible plot, the performance of a public
function […] a process driven by ethical imperatives, by a sense of compassion for others
and our shared human heritage, rather than be judged through some subjective aesthetic
merit attributed to fashion or novelty applied to a particular work.54
In this definition of architecture as a performed process identified by Pérez-

Goméz—and its implicit call for a restoration of a different, more meaningful mode
of producing architecture—the utopian undertones are hard to ignore.
3.3.2 Performativity and Museum Space
Nevertheless, the reading of the architectural object as receptacle space, a blank sub-
structure stage, either in itself a carrier of meaning or furnished and invested with
meaning through mobile symbolic objects (similar to the classic props) shares a series
of coordinates with the museum space. This interpretation directly references the
new museum spaces, eremitic,55 or ‘opaque’ towards the exterior and neutral inside,
in order to create the optimum medium for the ‘valuable exhibit’. The design of the
interior usually avoids creating a competitive relation with the exhibit; consequently,
the stronger design elements are concentrated in intermediary areas—like the recep-
tion area or circulation nuclei. The dominant attitude behind this category of museums
supports the proposed hypothesis—of the built object as stage, or background and
support for the exhibited object. This easily mouldable character of the stage space is
reiterated in a similar manner in the case of the museum’s ‘interior’ exhibition space.
Through various additional means of symbolic production—mobile elements, light-
ing and sound, projections, installations, etc.—the narrative is constructed (or the
proposed interpretation) which accompanies the exhibited object. These techniques
mirror those of the theatrical mise en scène. Most often, the exhibited object is isolated
51 Pérez-Goméz, Architecture as…, 20.

52 Here “an architecture [was] performed by expert architect/builders educated through appren-
ticeship, endowed with conceptual and manual skills that were traditionally the manifestation of
embodied wisdom” and the architectural representation equalled the meaning it harboured, and the
process of construction was seen as a “translation of intentional, symbolic traces” through which it
would reach its fulfilment. Pérez-Goméz, Architecture as…, 21.
53 Pérez-Goméz, 22.
54 Pérez-Goméz, 24.
55 Vais, Gheorghe, Architecture programmes, U.T.PRESS, Cluj-Napoca, 2008, 195.
within neutral alveoli and staged as a part of a thematic, chronological, comparative,

narrative. This presentation, in itself a new encoding with meaning, has as its goal,
beyond the conservation itself, the ensuing of a most efficient reading of the initial
encoding of the object (belonging to the object’s creators)—and thus the clear trans-
mission of the signified. In this case, the Alexander’s proposed structure is partially
reversed: although the instance (the actors) that encodes, interprets and transmits the
signified is fundamentally a binomial one (corresponding to the original encoding
and respectively to the museal encoding), it is almost always absent in this form;
the performative act is reduced to an essential and the interpretation and the trans-
mission rely upon secondary means of symbolic production. The presence of the
actors, as well as of the museal (re-) encoding is in most cases only suggested; this
is done with the aim to minimize the potential errors characteristic to any mediation
process, but especially in order to position the original encoding in the forefront and
ad litteram in the spotlight. This approach attempts to recover the initial direct rela-
tion between the audience and the signified. Still, the museum re-encoding is almost
always necessary due to the spatial-temporal and/or cultural rift between the audi-
ence (contemporary and very diverse) and the initial creative instance, author of the
initial encoding. However, this ‘second-degree’ museal encoding is variable, subjec-
tive and aware of its subjectivity—even if in a constant endeavour towards objectivity
(truth, authenticity, and equalitarian perspective, etc.—all witnesses to its essentially
utopian demarche). The aforementioned ideal recuperation of the direct audience-
signified relation is not always the assumed objective, and true to its utopian filiation,
it can be hijacked: thus, the museal encoding can become the vehicle of subjective,
incomplete, biased or distorted narratives.
3.3.3 Performativity and Patrimonial Space
Just like the museum space, the heritage built object can acquire a stage function, a
non-neutral background with symbolic load and simultaneously a means of symbolic
production for the performative act—simultaneously fulfilling the role of the exhib-
ited object and the role of a simple recipient. Through the performative act, the object
can acquire a new layer of significance (temporary or permanent, positive or negative,
etc.). The performative act can thus function as a process of (re)interpretation and
transmission of the object’s signified, or as a re-encoding, attaching to the object a
new signified. Along with the built object’s listing as a heritage space, it automatically
becomes a performative space, mainly dedicated to the ‘heritage’ or ‘museal’ perfor-
mative act—with the aim of revealing, reiterating and transmitting the sociocultural
values and significances attached to the object. A ‘non-patrimonial’ performative act
unfolding in one such heritage space can assume countless forms—involving other
actors, other roles assumed by or assigned to the audience, as well as additional means
of symbolic production. Moreover, in this binomial pairing—non-patrimonial per-
formative act and heritage space—the dominant tendency is to place at the forefront
the social power coordinate, as either contested or confirmed. In other words through
this performative act, the power relations of the context are reflected (“the distribution
of power in society—the nature of its political, economic, and status hierarchies, and
the relations among its elites—profoundly affects the performance process.”).56 The
heritage built space may be hijacked and re-encoded, (re)used as means of symbolic
production in another narrative, other than a heritage one.
Of the two instances of the heritage space as stage and means of symbolic produc-
tion—for both a heritage and a non-patrimonial performative act—the first suggests a
more fruitful exploration. What has been identified so far as a ‘heritage performative
act’ was also previously explored the museum theatre field (museum theatre, or the
theatre play with a historical subject); this domain presupposes “the use of theatre and
theatrical techniques [or hybrid variants of them] as a means of mediating knowledge
and understanding of the past in the context of museum education”.57 This approach
veers towards a reading of the performative act as dramatic play (participative or
not), proposing a more specific approach than Alexander’s complex perspective; this
can serve as an analysis tool for multiple categories of event or social practice which
presuppose a flow of encoded information, different instances that assume roles cor-
responding to the emitter/receptor schema (fixed, fluctuating, alternative role, etc.),
an encoded message, symbolic décor-paraphernalia, a mise-en-scène and the overall
infusion of this ensemble with the power relations of the context in which it functions.
Thus, the perspective of the museum play/spectacle supplementary defines the
performative act and allows the identification of several interpretative procedures:
the technique of the living history, the “live” interpretation, the first-person or third-
person interpretations, the museal theatre (on the classic structure of the dramatic
play, but performed in a museum environment), the historical reconstitution, the
historical role playing and the historical narration. Almost always, its purpose is
educational or ‘moulding’, similar (and in completion) to the exhibitional museum
narrative. Most of the coordinates of museum theatre would suggest its reading as a
simple act of entertainment, especially in the light of the commodification process
of culture. Nevertheless, the museal performative act, much as any performative act
as posited by Richard Schechner,58 stands in between ritual and theatre or, between
the efficiency (or utilitarian) and entertainment, their separation being often prob-
lematic. The author associates efficiency of the ritual (but does not match them), as
it has a very clearly defined function, aims to obtain a specific effect and is con-
sidered necessary. Entertainment is linked to theatre, by virtue of the participants’
56 Alexander, Jeffrey, Mast, Jason L., Introduction in Social Performance Symbolic Action, Cultural
Pragmatics, and Ritual, eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, Jason L. Mast, Cambridge
University Press, ISBN-13 978-0-511-16835-2, 2006, 7.
57 Jackson, Anthony., and Leahy Rees, H., Seeing it for real: Authenticity, theatre and learning in
museums, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, Vol.
10, no.3, 2005, 304, apud. Jackson, A. and Kidd, J., Performance, Learning and Heritage. Report
2005–2008, Centre for Applied Theatre Research, University of Manchester, Great Britain, 2008a,
11.
58 Schechner, Richard, From Ritual to Theatre and Back: The Structure/Process of the Efficacy-
Entertainment Dyad, Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Dec 1974), pp. 455–481, ed. The
Johns Hopkins University Press, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3206608, accessed January 2015.
knowledge and appropriation of the dramatic convention, and thus the mechanism
is recognized and appears as optional, non-compulsory. In other words, in the case
of the ritual, the participants depend on the unfolding of the event, whilst in case
of the theatre, the event depends on the participants.59 Schechner does not equate
these relations (efficiency equalling ritual and entertainment equalling theatre) but
uses them as reference points, in such a manner that the performative act will be
obligatory occupy an intermediate position—“whether one calls a specific perfor-
mance ritual or theatre depends on the degree to which the performance tends toward
efficacy or entertainment. No performance is pure efficacy or pure entertainment”.60
Thus, in the case of the museal theatre, the intention of shaping the individual
and society (underlying the association of the performative act with the museum
institution, as well as the heritage protection), brings it into the sphere of ritual. A
series of markers can be identified in support of the ritual instance of this performative
act: the achievement of a concrete result (identity constitution through knowledge
of the past, and audience’s transformation and engagement), the creation of the
connection with an absent other (from the past), the constitution of a symbolic
time (a hybrid temporal enclave, superposed over the audience’s present), or the
audience’s involvement. Especially through the techniques which directly involve
the audience, the museal performative act inclines towards the efficiency pole and
thus towards ritual. Projects such as those previously mentioned (Jackson, Leahy,
Seeing it for real),61 which focus onto the museal performative act, showcase the
involved mechanisms and the efficiency of their application, or the impact on its
audiences, and thus bringing it closer to the theatre. Depending on the addressed
audience category, on its degree of involvement into the act, on the location of
the act—or, as Schechner notes, to the perspective from which it is analysed—the
performative act can occupy any position on the spectrum defined by its two poles,
the ritual and the theatre.
Thus, if the initial role of the performative act is a quantifiable educational one
(in a classical sense of knowing the history, art, culture, etc.), a second role, implied
59 In addition to these divisions and to the efficiency/entertainment binomial pairing, Schechner also
identifies several other markers which define the ritual and the theatre: result versus leisure/play, the
connection with an absent Other versus the exclusive focusing onto the present ones, the abolishing of
time and the symbolic time versus the emphasis on the present, the participating audience versus the
observer audience, the forbidden criticism versus the encouraged criticism, the collective creativity
versus the individual creativity, etc. Schechner, R., From Ritual to Theatre…, 467.
60 Schechner, R., From Ritual to Theatre and Back: The Structure/Process of the Efficacy-
Entertainment Dyad, Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Dec, 1974), pp. 455–481, The
Johns Hopkins University Press, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3206608, accessed 02/12/2010, 468.
61 The project Seeing it for Real, led by Tony Jackson and Dr Helen Rees Leahy (co-investigator),
Paul Johnson, (financed by Arts and Humanities Research Board, between 2001 and 2005), investi-
gates the efficiency of the theatre and of the dramatic techniques in museums, as means of conveying
information/meaning; the observed case studies are the Imperial War Museum, London and People’s
History Museum, Manchester, Great Britain. In Jackson, A. and Kidd, J., Performance, Learning
and Heritage. Report 2005–2008, Centre for Applied Theatre Research, University of Manchester,
Great Britain, 2008b, and in Jackson and Rees Leahy, ‘“Seeing it for Real?”: authenticity, theatre
and learning in museums’, in Research in Drama Education, 10.3, November 2005, pp. 303–26.
or attached to the first, targets the transmission of greater values like the virtue,
truth, equity, tolerance, empathy, etc.—the entire mechanism seeking to shape the
individual and society. When analysing the museum institution in itself, the per-
manence of this mechanism can be observed; yet, although permanent, it is in fact
ever-changing, following the evolution of the ‘acknowledged’ hierarchies of val-
ues. Although the narratives and the structure of museal exhibiting (and, in a wider
perspective, the answer to the question “what do we preserve?”) change in time,
the mechanism remains the same: it mirrors and at the same time it constructs and
strengthens the dominant social structures of the epoch, of its contemporary official
ordering. Although the museums no longer subscribe to their traditional definition, as
“authoritative repositories of knowledge and truth”,62 and their historical collections
are presented as—inevitably subjective and even distorted—a constructs of their
own epochs during which they were constituted, the modelling/shaping intention
mechanism persists. The presentation of secondary narratives, previously excluded
and marginal, represents one of the main objectives of introducing the performative
act into the ‘heritage space’, especially since those identities often have too little
preserved material evidence. Thus, the museum performative act has a double com-
pensatory role: first, it compensates for a disappeared context, which has ceased to
exist, reinstating into the present a past time and its social orderings; second, it stands
in for an invisible, previously excluded narrative, whose existence and manifestation
were prohibited in its own time, thus endowing it with a ‘voice’ in the present—often
as its only means to acquire visibility. For many such secondary identities, the pre-
served artefact (the quotidian/extraordinary object) represented, in the absence of a
performative act, the only medium, often incomplete, of their visibility. Through it,
the subordinate identity (contracted into the trope of its representative individual)
is restored its “[…] human stories that give life, meaning and context to those col-
lections”,63 bringing back into focus the very purpose of conservation, collecting,
cataloguing and the role of the museum institution.
This interpretation sheds light onto Dehaene and De Cauter’s approach. If the
performative act defines and determines a spatial-temporal enclave, a ‘pocket’, or
a tertiary space (intermediary positioned, between public and private), the museal
performative act can transform its corresponding institution, the museum, into such
an enclave or it can temporarily construct inside such enclaves within it.
62 Jackson, A. s, i Kidd, J., Performance, Learning and Heritage. Report 2005–2008, Centre for
Applied Theatre Research, University of Manchester, Great Britain, 2008a, 73.
63 Jackson, Kidd, Performance…, 73.
3.3.4 The Museum, Patrimonial Space—Between Two

Temporary Instances. Performativity of the Heritage
Space
The museum is listed among the Foucaultian heterotopic examples, presenting a

strong enclave character. The museum functions, just like the library or the archive,
according to the principle of time accumulation; yet, a less explored coordinate
is its museal performative act—understood as a temporal and temporary interval
(linked with the fair, festival)—which positions the museum in the second hetero-
topic instance of the heterochronia described by the philosopher: the ephemeral event.
The dynamics between the two instances (accumulative and ephemeral/performative)
and their dynamics with their context can be simultaneously contestatory and com-
pensatory. The museum, as a collection of signifier/signified pairings, has an evident
compensatory role in the context of its own constitution but most of all in its contem-
porary instance. It can also assume an contestatory role (with compensatory valences)
when it assumes a position different from the official discourse—as the case of the
self-proclaimed Creation Museum of Petersburg, Kentucky, U.S.A., which “brings
the pages of the Holy Bible to life”, and displays among the ‘exhibits’ “Adam and
Eve living in the Garden of Eden. Children playing and dinosaurs wandering close
to the Rivers of Eden. [Whilst] the snake cunningly curls in the Tree of Knowledge
of Good and Evil”,64 or other similar museums which assume alternative narratives.
Increasingly common, such museums dedicated to secondary, alternative or until
now minor narratives simultaneously reflect and shape reality.
If the museum is constituted as an enclave in the everyday fabric—defined as a
material expression of its temporal otherness—the performative act constitutes in
its turn, albeit temporarily, an enclave in the ‘fabric’ of the museum. This can be
done either interstitially (when the actors’ play ‘fills in’ and activates the ‘empty’
spaces or the museal framework, through the reconstitution of narratives which “dis-
ambiguate”, support and communicate the artefact’s and the building’s signified)
either juxtapositionally (when the actors’ play superposes to the present, creating
incongruences perceived by their audience). The performative act has the capacity to
compensate narratives that no longer exist but also narratives that have never actually
existed—of the individuals/groups deprived of visibility, whose main mediums of
expression were unwritten/non-materialized, or narratives deliberately or acciden-
tally deprived of a material media. The performative act expressing official historical
orderings’ narratives can contribute to their (re)consolidation in the present, through
reactivating and reiterating them within the space chosen as stage: the museum or the
heritage site—simultaneously a recipient and a product of these orderings. However,
by reiterating in the present an official historical ordering, the performative act auto-
matically positions it in contrast with the reality in which it is staged; together with
and mediated by the material witnesses (artefact and building) the illusory character
64 Creation Museum, Petersburg, Kentucky, S.U.A, About the Museum, http://creationmuseum.org/
about/, accessed January 2015.

of the official historical ordering is ‘posthumously’ unveiled—with its norms, struc-

tures and value hierarchies—and by refraction, of that of the contemporary dominant
ordering.
The interpretation proposed by Dehaene and De Cauter considers as tertiary
spaces—and hence heterotopic—the spaces dedicated to the dramatic performative
act, the two focusing their analysis on theatre; yet, observing Schechner’s performa-
tivity theory, this category can be extended to include, besides theatres also arenas,
stadiums and even churches. Their profile presupposes an intermittent and occa-
sional development of the performative act (an event detached from the everyday),
an architectural expression which ‘announces’ the otherness of the space (and of
the harboured function) within the physical and symbolic context, and a specific
strongly normed spatial ordering, which enhances the roles required by the dra-
matic performative act. This spatial structure—the defining flows, the functional
destinations, the public/private (visible/hidden) separation—irrevocably affixes the
participants’ roles. The experimental or avant-garde theatre, requiring the participa-
tion and even the ‘real-time’ transformation of its audience, attempts to draw nearer
to the ritual—an endeavour that is automatically reflected onto the spatial structures
it employs; the ‘classic’ structuring of the theatre space can be altered or completely
eliminated, as the case of one of Schechner’s examples,65 where the classic spatial
delimitations become fluid or are erased. Attesting to this mechanism is the perform-
65 Schechner’s example, focuses on the performative space of the play The Tooth of Crime by Sam
Shepard performed by the company The Performance Group (TPG); although it uses the pub-
lic/private and the audience/actors separations both are adapted: the groups mix, move between the
two stages—the public stage, where the onlooker “is meant to be there, judging what is happening”,
as a participant in a public event, respectively the private stage, where the onlooker spyes or glances
onto events occurring in a so-called private space; thus “by the time of the third scene—around the
breakfast table [the central décor of the scene]—spectators were sitting in a close semicircle on the
floor around the table; others were crowded onto the galleries or peering down […], few specta-
tors actually remained sitting on the bed during scenes that were played there” (82–3). Schechner,
Richard, Performance Theory, Routledge, 1977, republished 2004. Another albeit historical exam-
ple uses décor as a means to create a single space, without the audience/actor division: the theatre
designed by Scamozzi, for the ideal citadel Sabionetta (1588–90, probably arch. Pietro Cataneo)
commissioned by the Duke of Gonzaga; “Stage structure and seating structure occupy either end of
a unified space—there is no division between audience and action”, and “lateral surfaces are fres-
coed to visually link the illusory architectural elements of the stage and the constructed elements
of the loggia atop the seating risers. The painted architectural elements of the fresco form monu-
mental arches that appear to open onto bucolic landscapes punctuated with monuments of Rome”,
and “above the painted arch, a continuous painted balustrade is populated with [painted] animated
theatre goers”; the only excluded, segregated position in this schema is that of Duke himself, whose
loggia is partially separated, detached from this unified space of illusion. The entire mechanism
(created through “science, mathematics, optics, and perspective”) is meant to mimic “the illusion
of an ideal city [Rome] in a box located at the centre of an ideal city [Sabionetta]”, or a miniature
version of an ideal city placed inside the ideal city par excellence, Rome—”further dilating the
re-ordering of space, and also of time”. Ann Marie Borys, Through the Lens: Image and Illusion
at Play in the Ideal City, in Read G., Feuerstein M., Architecture As A Performing Art [e-book],
97–112, Burlington: Ashgate; 2013, eBook Academic Collection Trial, Ipswich, MA., accessed
April, 2015, 102–105.
ing of experimental plays in traditional theatre spaces where unable to (re)shape the
given space, they simply employ it in alternative and paradoxical ways.
Finally, in the case of the heritage or museal performative space the classic spatial
structure of the theatre is not always present, and a stage space is adapted in relation
to the nature of the performative act. The classic structure is reiterated, with its audi-
ence/actors strong segregation: the audience area, arranged for seating, is oriented
towards a free space dedicated to the performative act; a backstage or adjacent spaces
(delineated through various divisions, other rooms or even in the exterior) mediating
the actors’ access. This structure is characteristic to new museum buildings, some-
times reiterating ad litteram the classic schema of the theatre hall. In the case of
the listed monument buildings which included in touristic circuits and adapted as
museums, the fitting in of a stage space may be problematic; as the examples anal-
ysed by Jackson and Kidd suggest,66 the spatial constraints often contribute to the
adoption of a participative performative act (or its various hybrids). The often limited
dimensions of the spaces, the difficulty in introducing a clear physical delimitation
between audience and actors/stage, the very function and the structure of the his-
torical building/ensemble, at times the absence of the material witnesses and, in the
case of the exterior sites of historical events, the vast terrain or the poor conservation
of the material witnesses—all of these can contribute to the initial adoption of a
museal performance and then of a participative performative act. This allows for
the concurrent “narration”, through a single medium, of the “When? Who? Where?
How? Why?” (space, event, characters, etc.), as well as the audience’s immersion in
the “action”—eliciting an emotional engagement, and thus contributing to a more
efficient transmission of the signified. However, regardless of the audience’s degree
of participation—and regardless of the dilution of the dramatic convention and of
typical spatial structures—the norming attached to the object’s heritage status remain
active. These regulations limit the participant’s interaction with the stage and with
the means of symbolic production regardless of the role or roles he assumes. The
heritage norming once introduced (limitations, interdictions, obligations generally
related to use) dominates and conditions the performativity coordinates of the respec-
tive space—impartial of the presence or absence of the classic performative segre-
gations.
If, as Schechner notes, “there is a tendency in orthodox theatre to segregate actors
from audiences in order to maintain an illusion of, paradoxically, fictional actuali-
ty”,67 similarly the protected status enhances the ‘segregationist’ coordinates of the
heritage space in relation with its context—marked by a temporary dislocation—and
in relation with itself —illustrated by a “functional” dislocation, annulment or alter-
ation of the practice(s) characteristic to the respective space, with the aim of conserv-
ing the original material substance. Similarly, the participative museal performative
act creates the illusion of a direct spectator–stage (or means of symbolic production)
interaction. The paradoxical purpose is to create engagement and to communicate
66 Jackson, A. and Kidd, J., Performance, Learning and Heritage. Report 2005–2008, Centre for
Applied Theatre Research, University of Manchester, Great Britain, 2008a.

67 Schechner, Richard, Performance Theory, 84.
exactly the fragility of the heritage object and the necessity of its preservation—these
paradoxically indicating the very interdiction of direct interaction. This heritage-
introduced double segregation, serving the purpose of preservation of both signifier
and signified, has an illusory function similar to that indicated by Schechner, and
even more complex, mirroring a heterotopic coordinate. Thus, this segregation cre-
ates “a space of illusion that exposes all real space, all the emplacements in the
interior of which human life is enclosed and partitioned, as even more illusory […]
on the contrary, creating another space, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous,
as well arranged as ours is disorderly, ill construed and sketchy”.68 It endows the
space, through its entire illusory mechanism, with a compensatory function. In other
words, just as the classic theatre norms employ the audience/actor segregation, the
heritage status also introduces a similar segregation, which constructs multiple and
juxtaposed delimitations, in accordance with the varied roles and actors involved.
Nevertheless, if the experimental theatre (analysed by Schechner) tends towards the
elimination of those segregations, in the case of the heritage spaces, such a dilution
could condition the very existence of the protected object (and, implicitly, that of the
significances it carries). In the search for the authentic experience, (or of the recov-
ery of the ritual?) the performative act freed from the constraints of the dramatic
convention calls for participation, immersion, invokes the intuitive, the emotional
engagement, and a holistic approach—a set of tendencies which can also be identi-
fied (mediated and partially) in some heritage spaces, in a continuous effort to raise
heritage awareness. Still, these tendencies do not replace, but rather adapt (at least in
theory) to the heritage protective ordering: both interaction and participation, where
they are introduced, remain subordinate to the object’s protection. The audience’s
re-involvement beyond its usually detached position, the nurturing of an identitary
belonging (through regional/local/area/community heritage branding) and the wish
to reclaim one’s own heritage—can be identified as attempts to reconstruct a more
direct connection between individual and significance.
However, the performative act can also be identified in the everyday practice of
the heritage spaces—the sum of actions unfolding in heritage spaces, complying
to its specific regulations but not necessarily programmed (i.e. other than museum
theatre practices as historical re-enactment, interpretations, historical subject plays,
etc.). This interpretation performative act—practice of the space completes the
previously approached interpretations, by bringing to discussion the social power
coordinate proposed in Alexander’s scheme.
The practicing of the heritage space and the performative act share a similar con-
figuration; the first can be read as a performative act without exaggerating Goffman’s
affirmation, according to which any activity contains a performative structure. Unlike
the previously discussed instances, the performative structure of the heritage space
is dominated by ‘the mandatory’. In other words, the practice of the heritage space is
strongly regulated—the actors perform given roles, prescribed between certain coor-
dinates. The performative structure specific to heritage spaces, and especially that
of museums, is normed, well defined, clearly and even emphatically signalled. The
68 Foucault, Of Other Spaces…, 21.

performative acts are also clearly determined (allowed/forbidden), unequivocally

attributed to certain roles and these are assigned exclusively to certain actors. The
means of symbolic production are employed for conveying the regulations, inform-
ing the actors on the roles and nature of the performative act—allowed or expected
for the respective space. Beyond the apparatus employed in heritage spaces as visible
conventional expression of regulations, there is also the scenario which coordinates
the entire performative space.
The domain of the heritage management (HM) operates not only with the her-
itage performative structure but also forms, partially, the functioning scenario. HM
operates with a network of relations similar to that discussed by Alexander, Turner
or Schechner, involving actors, assigned or assumed roles, the audience—at various
levels, local, national, regional or supranational—a context, a means of symbolic
production, the stage (as actual space or a conceptual one), a signifier and a signi-
fied. This brings forward the two components: the operations, strategy and objectives
which in the end assure the transmission, as efficiently as possible, of the signified,
and the economic coordinate—or the means which make possible the perpetuation of
the signifier. However, if the management strategy can be considered a functioning
scenario for the heritage objective, the latter refines and adapts to specific condi-
tionings an enframing performative structure. In general, in the European space as
elsewhere, this structure can be identified in the direct and very concentrated instance
of the legal document of the heritage protection. Whether this is understood as the
set of legal scripta defining and norming the protection of historical monuments
or as the non-legislative documents concerning the administration of the heritage
site/objective—the overall regulation and prescriptive practicing of the patrimonial
space adhere to a similar ‘performative’ structure. For example, the documents which
regulate the UNESCO69 heritage sites allow for the identification of a similar set of
coordinates, determining and regulating, in broad lines, the involved actors (insti-
tutional, but not only), the audience/public, the roles and the actions (scientific,
legal, administrative, fiscal and technical measures) attributed to them, establish the
means of symbolic production and determine the exact spatial delimitation or the
stage—the object/site built with heritage value and status—and the poles and the
levers at the disposal of the social power, etc. Generally, the normative script con-
structs the schema of involved actors and the limits within which their performance
must unfold—essentially assembling an overall functioning scenario, the networks
of relations and their mediation method (i.e. the consequences of norm infringe-
ment, assigned responsibilities). Based on this, each situation is evaluated in its
own context, and (ideally) receives a specific functioning scenario (the management
plan)—whose elaboration, application, adjustment and monitoring are assigned to
specific actors. This general scenario regulates the practicing of the respective space
but, just as Schechner’s previously mentioned case study, regardless of the strictness
of its application (if implemented as norming document or as a material intervention)
69 The texts of the 1972 World Heritage Convention, Budapest Declaration on World Heritage,
the thematic Resource Manuals of the Advisory Bodies of the World Heritage Convention, the
Management Guidelines for UNESCO World Heritage sites, etc.
the performative act/the practices occurring in reality can exceed the scenario’s pre-
scribed course; this deficient functioning generates, of course, direct consequences
on both the signifier and the signified. The daily practicing of the heritage status
space is the most often a ‘non-heritage’ one, and the variations are correspondent
to the categories in which the object is officially listed (local, national, universal
importance, rural/urban, historical/modern, etc.) and, above all, corresponding with
its use-regime (‘heritage-friendly’ functions). A reinforced official heritage status
can ideally dictate, but in reality strongly influence the interaction between actors,
audience and the protected space.
A paradoxical relationship between these coordinates results from the introduc-
tion of the heritage status in contradiction or conflict with the traditional everyday
practice of that space. This antagonistic nature of the protective rationale, and with
a paradoxical result, was observed and analysed in the case of the adjoining Tran-
sylvanian churches—70 a conflict arising from the original substance preservation
incentive. The introduction of the heritage status inhibits the traditional performative
act, the roles and the ‘traditional’ interaction between involved actors and with the
respective space (the stage and the means of symbolic production); it finally and
involuntary leads to the constitution of new receptacles for the displaced traditional
practices. However, this can be considered a positive solutioning, given that in similar
situations, the common answer is the complete annulment of the traditional practices
of the space. In the case of the adjoined churches, the traditional practice underwent
minimal mutations, preserving unaltered its overall structure; the new receptacle
spaces showcase multiple compensatory coordinates, legible however only in the
presence of this paradoxical spatial binomial pairing, the listed church and the newly
built one. Whether it originally includes them or not, the space acquires a set of per-
formative coordinates along with the heritage status, adding to, replacing and most
often exceeding the prescriptions inherent to the space’s initial function.
Although the performative coordinates of a heritage space can vary from case
to case, a common profile can be outlined. It includes the elements of Alexander’s
schema: the performative act, the systems of collective representations, the actors,
the audience and the roles assumed by these, the means of symbolic production, the
scenography and the mechanisms of social power—all attached to and subordinated
to the interpretation of the signifier, and employed for facilitating the transmission
of the heritage signified.
Amongst these, the issue of the role assumption and role alternation by the main
actors involved will be further explored. The performative act, which can be inter-
preted first of all as a theatrical (dramatic) act, as previously demonstrated, can also
correspond to the everyday practice of the space. The roles assumed by the actors
and by the audience are alternated, and they become interchangeable: the role of
the heritage object visitor can oscillate between actor—with various degrees of par-
70 Spânu, Smaranda, The Heterotopic Nature of the Built Heritage. The Sacred Wooden Architecture
of Transylvania and Its Practices, Part 3: Spirituality and Decay in Architecture, in Time and
Transformation in Architecture, Series: At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries, Volume: 100,
Editor: Tuuli Lähdesmäki, Brill Rodopi, Publication Date: 30 August 2018, ISBN: 978-90-04-
37679-3.
ticipation—and simple attendant; same as in the case of the museum spaces, the
individual who represents the ‘protective’ entity (curator, guardsman, guide, even
restorer/conservator, etc.) can also assume the audience role, in front of whom the
signified transmission process develops. The acquiring of a role in itself has a specific
temporization: it corresponds to the access into the heritage space or to crossing of
officially designated limits for the respective space—most often these delineations
are material or at least visually signalled (announced). When such delimitations are
absent or insufficiently visible, the roles required through the functioning scenario
and by the status of the space are, in turn, diffuse and most often remain un-assumed.
Inherent to the nature of the architectural space is the existence of spatial delimita-
tions, as in the case of leisure or sacred spaces discussed by Dehaene and De Cauter
(where the performative act has an ‘endemic’ space, clearly determined, hierarchized
and signalled).
Finally, the heritage status introduces a new set of delimitations (part of a larger
ordering structure), at times enforcing, at times replacing the existing ones, essentially
creating for these (enclave) spaces an additional “system of opening and closing that
both isolates them and makes them penetrable”.71
3.3.5 The Ritual as Practice of the Patrimonial Space
Another heterotopic coordinate, identified by Foucault next to the spatial mechanism-

enclave, is also the ritual which conditions the access within that space. In the philoso-
pher’s interpretation, the term has a more essentialized meaning, not necessarily
corresponding to Schechner’s interpretation of term ritual; still, for Foucault the
ritual can be equated to a process, a set of actions through which a designated role
is endowed/assumed. The spatial delimitation and the closing/opening mechanism
construct and are part of the access ritual, preparing the individual for the appropri-
ation of the role. In this very point, the two interpretations of the ritual (Foucault and
Schechner) intersect: for both the purpose of the ritual is identified as the individual’s
transformation, the mediation between two conditions or instances—where Schech-
ner imagines the passage/initiation ritual in an anthropological key (from an inferior
condition to a superior one), and Foucault imagines, more generally, a mutational-
ritual which operates with and mediates the individual’s otherness. As a side note,
Foucault briefly addresses in his heterotopias of crisis Schechner’s interpretation of
the term.
In the case of the heritage space, this ritual is constructed from a series of actions
which facilitate or confirm the individual’s rallying to the rules of the respective
space; his access is announced, encoded (through a conventional, encoded language)
and channelled (route), sometimes mediated by a neutral buffer space in which the
individual is prepared for its role. Thus, the access in the heritage space depends
on the ritual: for a historical centre, it may be giving up the personal vehicle, for

an architecture monument, it may be the temporary resignation of certain personal

objects (cameras, luggage, certain types of footwear, etc.), or, on the contrary, the
assumption of a specialized equipment (protection equipment, video, audio, photo-
graphic devices, etc.). In its most condensed form, the ritual act consists of procuring
and validating the access ticket (sometimes accompanied by a recognizable sign, an
‘insignia’). Along similar lines, for the second dominant actor involved—the repre-
sentative of the heritage institution—the access is also mediated, albeit by a different
ritual: the other routes, different access/control points, separate buffer spaces, inac-
cessible to the other actors, and almost always accompanied by specific insignia,
which announce the assumed role. All these indicate the other actors involved, the
statuses, the functioning rules and the hierarchized ordering of the space. Worth men-
tioning are some relatively recent approaches—not necessarily for the ad litteram
annulment of this hierarchization of heritage space, but rather for the dilution of its
visibility: the showcasing of specific processes which are not normally visible to the
public (i.e. restoration/conservation interventions—in which the visitor–outsider can
engage and interact with the ‘displayed act’, the intervention in itself becoming a
performative act and the restorer an actor); then, there is also the complete cancella-
tion of the audience/exhibit separation, where the visitor is encouraged to become an
actor and interact exactly with the otherwise off-limits heritage object. This category
also includes ‘open day’ events when normally inaccessible spaces become tem-
porarily accessible to the outsider; the permanent or temporary re-functionalization
of certain heritage spaces, where the role of the visitor–outsider becomes diffuse
(despite the fact that the heritage space norms continue to be active), and superposed
with one or more other roles—the case of events that are not directly connected with
the transmission of signified of the respective heritage space (conferences, courses,
private celebrations, etc.).
Dehaene and De Cauter assign to their analysed spatial-temporal enclave space,
the leisure architectural object, a liminal and implicitly, a transitional character—-
due to its state of equilibrium. The two authors position the play (dramatic but not
only) after the physis (natural, unregulated) and before the nomos (law, conven-
tion, norm), as “a profoundly ambiguous terrain marking both the moment of man’s
imprisonment within the norms of culture and the threshold of liberation or, more
likely, temporary transgression.”.72 The space they analysed (the theatre) can thus be
identified together with—and, as I would add in the light of the previously brought
arguments, above all conditioned by—its characteristic dominant practice (the dra-
matic performative act), as heterotopic. Compared to this space, the heritage space
and its attached practices are highly normed; comparing the heritage performative
act with the dramatic play, it can be considered in its turn an intermediate between
physis and nomos: although apparently free, organic, it is governed by a regulated
scenario; it also comprises the individual’s confrontation with the normative system
of his own culture—capturing the moment of incarceration (as the crossing from the
un-normed to the normed)—but also its confrontation with the normative systems
of the past or with those belonging to other cultures, with a potential to trigger the
liberation and to facilitate transgression through knowledge.
The conclusion of this parallel analysis between the patrimonial performative act
and the dramatic one mainly targets the space in which they are enacted—the built
object, practiced, (re)moulded and regulated in such a way that it can accommo-
date the transmission of the signified. The two—performative act and performative
space—are reciprocally defined, delimitating—in the case of the theatre play, of the
museum theatre and of the act of visiting—even if temporarily a heterotopic enclave.
The ‘stage’ and the means of symbolic production produce the signified only through
their ‘activation’ in a given interval—through their reading, through the assumption
of roles, etc. For the heritage space, the scenario, the roles and the performative acts
are imagined as permanently active—even after ‘closing time’ it is necessary for the
convention to remain active, at least in the ideal way. However, practice depends on
the space, and the space depends on its practicing. Thus, the heritage practice can be
considered as a substitute practice which perpetuates—in the absence of or in sup-
port of the original practices—the transmission of the significations attached to the
heritage object; the entire performative arsenal is placed in the service of the heritage
practice which, by regulating but also adapting to its protected space, constructs a
heterotopic enclave.
3.4 Heterotopia of Crisis. The Cemetery—The City

in a City
Analysing the last purpose of the heritage protection and looking back on the recent
and numerous losses of material and immaterial heritage, its spaces resemble more
than ever Foucault’s heterotopias of crisis. Depending on the patrimonial performa-
tive act, understood as a sum of the heritage protective practices, is the maintenance
of the encoded information flow, contained in the heritage object. The heterotopias
of crisis—“privileged, sacred or forbidden spaces, reserved only for the individuals
who are, in relation with society and the human environment in which they live, in
a state of crisis […]”—73 lend their definition to heritage spaces which, privileged
and regulated themselves, appear as refuge spaces, meant to shelter narratives or to
solve, repeatedly, the identity crisis of society.
However, this heterotopia of the crisis is more often identified in the instance of
specific functions. Dehaene and De Cauter recognize it in the form of the ceme-
tery. Even if it eludes their chosen functional category (leisure as tertiary space), the
two authors argue that a leisure-like functioning is suggested (‘eternal rest’), also
essentially associated to the idea of refuge.74 The same role of refuge, yet in relation
with memory—the past and its material vehicles—is discussed by Pierre Nora in the

74 Johnson, Peter, The Geographies of Heterotopia, Geography Compass 7/11 (2013): 790–803,
https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12079, 798.
3.4 Heterotopia of Crisis. The Cemetery—The City in a City 181
instance of those subordinate lieux de mémoire “sanctuaries of spontaneous devo-

tion and silent pilgrimage, where one finds the living heart of memory”.75 These
lieux de memoire, dependent on the will to remember, are simultaneously mirror
devices, refuge enclaves and intermediate spaces between present and past. Nora
also includes in his definition the cemeteries,76 alongside other functions, reprised
in the Foucaultian repertoire of heterotopic spaces. The cemetery showcases a medi-
ation instance between “the world of the living and of the dead, between future
and past”,77 between present and memory but also between two readings of tempo-
ral ‘déroulement’—be it the eternal/ephemeral present time, be it the cyclic time,
always renewed. Yet eternal time is not simply unfolded and presented to the gaze
of the one accessing the space; it appears as illusory (a characteristic also noted by
Nora: lieux de memoire as illusions of eternity) and, in a play of reflections, the
characteristic is also cast back upon the present.
Johnson analyses the cemetery as heterotopia focusing on the functional aspect.
He observes the ambivalence (seen/unseen, displayed/masked) and the heterogeneity
which characterizes the space of the cemetery—both in its historical instance and
in its contemporary one; Johnson goes as far as to consider it the utilitarian hetero-
topia par excellence,78 due to the multiple heterotopic principles it embodies and its
specific purpose. Dehaene and De Cauter read the cemetery as the heterotopia that
interrupts the continuity of time and space, similar to Nora’s reading—via those lieux
de memoire whose constitution require the rift, “the irrevocable break”, or the coag-
ulation of a “consciousness of a break with the past”.79 However, Johnson believes
that heterotopia in general, as well as in particular in the case of the cemetery, is not
the complete break, the radical otherness and the absolute enclave where normality
is suspended, but rather it is manifests as spaces that, “when we enter, we step into
a world that mirrors, condenses and transforms the space outside, [simultaneously]
offering opportunities and dangers”.80 As main coordinates, Johnson assigns to the
cemetery-heterotopia the (functional) heterogeneity and the capacity to generate dif-
ference—which can be explained through the relational character of the heterotopia
(its input/output reference to the cultural, social, political context)—just as the exam-
ples proposed by Johnson and Gandy suggest.81 The cemetery would thus be a mech-
75 Nora, Pierre, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire, Representations, No. 26, Spe-
cial Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory. (Spring, 1989), pp. 7–24, 12, http://links.jstor.org/sici?
sici=0734-6018%28198921%290%3A26%3C7%3ABMAHLL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N, last accessed
May 2018.
76 Idem.
78 Johnson, P., The Geographies…, 799.
79 Nora, Pierre, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire, Representations, No. 26,
Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory. (Spring, 1989), pp. 7–24, 7, http://links.jstor.org/sici?
sici=0734-6018%2819892%290%3A26%3C7%3ABMAHLL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N, last accessed
May 2018.
80 Idem.
81 The isolated example analysed by Gandy—Abney Park Cemetery, London, proposes the analysis
of practices and a spatial analysis through a new perspective, resulted from the combination of
anism, a dispositif : “[…] concentrating and illustrating what Foucault describes as a

new form of technical–political object of administration and governance […]”.82 In
the context of Johnson’s analysis, observing the transformation of the cemetery insti-
tution in the nineteenth century, as reflected in Loudon’s projects but not only, this
space assumes a series of alternative functions. From these, the recreation function,
and partially the educational one, correspond to the interpretation of the cemetery
as park or even botanical garden—linking two contrasting programmes via Dehaene
and De Cauter’s leisure function.
3.4.1 Petersson—The Cemetery Between Mnemonic Device,

Leisure and Social Hierarchization
This superposition of cemetery and garden,83 as well as that cemetery city, are also
discussed by Petersson, also in a heterotopic key. However, Petersson opens the
analysis towards other similar and connected spaces—the ossuary, the incinerator
and attached to it “the gardens of remembrance”—84 these themselves strongly
conditioned by the reading within their natural context, invested with religious
two previously unconnected domains, the sexual minorities studies and ecology. Gandy, Matthew,
Queer ecology: nature, sexuality, and heterotopic alliances, Environment and Planning D: Society
and Space 2012, volume 30, 727–747, https://doi.org/10.1068/d10511, published online 10 May
2012. Johnson’s example is a wider one: the influence and the public cemeteries projects (Bath,
Cambridge and Southampton) of John Claudius Loudon, (1783–1843), Scottish architect and land-
scape designer), also Bentham’s disciple and the reformer (according to sanitarian principles) of the
cemetery concept and its functioning during the nineteenth century. Johnson, Peter, The Changing
Face of the Modern Cemetery: Loudon’s Design for Life and Death, June 8, 2012, http://www.
berfrois.com/2012/06/foucault-and-the-cemetery/, accessed March 2015, fn.
82 Johnson, Peter, The Changing Face of the Modern Cemetery: Loudon’s Design for Life and Death,
June 8, 2012, http://www.berfrois.com/2012/06/foucault-and-the-cemetery/, accessed March 2015,

fn.
83 In this association cemetery garden, Petersson notes a series of intentions, beyond the hygienist
one, according to which the green space is linked to the expulsion of the cemetery outside the city,
and it is assimilated to other functions-devices of sanitation such as the “water and sewage pipes, new
streets, parks or hospitals” [Göran Lindahl, Grav och Rum: svenskt gravskick från medeltiden till
1800-talets slut (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell 1969), 208, apud. Petersson, 29]. Petersson also
notices the romantic taste for the natural scenery (the English garden)—which contradticts, through
the “informality of the scattered sculptural monuments in the cemetery’s wooded park”, (Petersson,
31), the Cartesian ordering grid attributed by Johnson to the cemetery of the nineteenth century, as
it is the dominant principle. And, alongside these, the spiritual intention as well—the isolation and
location in an untouched natural environment would mediate a meditative state, “the trees and herbs
planted in these park-like cemeteries would serve as reminders of infinity through their perpetual
cycle of growth, death and regrowth.” (Wall, Gravskick I förändring, 7, apud. Petersson, footnote,
31). Petersson, Anna, The Presence of the Absent. Memorials and Places of Ritual, Lund Institute
of Technology, Lund University, Department of Architecture, 2004, Dissertation Thesis, ISBN:
91-7740-072-0, 29–31.
84 The gardens of remembrance are spaces similar in style to traditional parks and gardens but
reserved to the spreading of the incinerated remains.

(nature—holiness) and therapeutic valences (nature—peaceful, comforting). Next to

these functions, additional one can also be identified: the instructional/educational
role, as place of a community/society memory but also as botanical “living muse-
um”85 ; the aesthetic moral cultivation of the individual, through associative relation of
physical hygiene principles (space, illumination, ventilation) with (and as a source of)
moral hygiene, but also through the control of the individual’s free time—the ‘rational
recreation’ in specifically designated spaces as a means of improving one’s health and
morals and even for a cancelling of potential protestatory intentions. A less obvious
function is the democratizing demarche, as individual inhumation replaces common
inhumation; despite this, the cemetery retains the equivalence between social hier-
archy and spatial hierarchy, as well as the equivalence between the external (living)
hierarchy and the spatial hierarchy of the cemetery. In contrast, the control function
emerges from the same intent for a rigorous spatial ordering; this paradox constructs
the space’s heterotopic character—where the mechanism of equality and freedom
(the spatial grid) is also a panoptical mechanism of control and surveillance, which
locates each individual in a fixed position, specifically assigned and clearly delim-
ited, eliminating the ambiguity, here perceived as the equivalent of a lack of control.
The educational capacity as well as the memory transmission capacity, linking the
cemetery to the museum, is identified as a heterotopic argument by Johnson: the
cemetery is no longer the witness of a radical break, the eternal/present or life/death
dichotomy but, on the contrary, a link between these and a mnemonic tool, a guarantor
of continuity.86 The cemetery, just as the museum, can be interpreted as enclaves and
receptacles for the passage of time. Observing the alternation of functions assigned
to the cemetery and of the associated perceptions in successive historical contexts,
Johnson distinguishes its heterotopic relational character: the attitude towards death
channelled by Loudon (later to became the characteristic of the nineteenth cen-
tury cemetery) resembles that of the mediaeval phase, through a familiarity and an
acceptance of death as a normal fact of life; nevertheless, in that specific context,
this approach represented a radical rift from dominant understanding of death and
the cemetery—associated with degradation, the irrational, anxiety and uncertainty,
insalubrity and rejection.87 Space perceived as banal—via that familiarity—allows
a multifunctional use, as it fulfils, amongst other functions, the originary one. For
both Johnson and de Boek, this alternation between familiar/unfamiliar, related to
the context in which it manifests, constructs the cemetery as a heterotopic space.
In the example analysed by De Boek, (the cemeteries of the Congolese capital
Kinshasa, Kinsuka, Kintambo), he notes a full blown transformation of attitudes,
practices and the unequivocal heterotopic functioning of the cemetery. The com-
plex triggering aspects emerge from the context: the omnipresent violence, the crisis
(political, economic, social, cultural, etc.), and the general and easiest response to
85 Johnson, P., The Changing Face…, fn.

86 Johnson, P., The Changing Face…, fn.
87 See the digression of Foucault’s text related to the historical evolution of the cemetery (Of Other
Spaces, 18–19); see the evolution of the funerary practices, with the approach of the peculiar
Swedish space of Petersson, Anna, The Presence of the Absent. Memorials and Places of Ritual,
Lund Institute of Technology, Lund University, Department of Architecture, 2004, Dissertation
Thesis, ISBN: 91-7740-072-0, 26–33.
this crisis—the appeal to religion, in this case the dissemination (on a precolonial
‘barbarian’ background) of the fundamentalist Christian church, which “has imposed
its [morality], logic and its temporality onto the city”.88 All these endow the capital
with the title of “cemetery city”89 and position it in an “apocalyptic interlude”,90
preceding the biblical end, and essentially signalling an inevitable transformation of
the significances of and attitudes towards death. More than in Johnson’s case study,
for Kinshasa, the upturn of normality and the familiarity of death imposed through
violence, as the resulting multifunctionality, are pushed to extreme—as the ceme-
tery space and its entire arsenal of significances, practices and attitudes are hijacked.
The ‘traditional’ separation disappears: the funeral practices penetrate and occupy
the urban space.91 The attitude towards death—traditionally hidden and invisible,
and restricted to certain time frames, time flows and spaces—in this commonly
assumed instance (for the European twentieth century),92 is in this case contested.
The funerary event, radically altered from its traditional variant,93 becomes an occa-
sion for “political contestation”, of contesting and reconfiguring (even if only tem-
porary) the political order and of authority, but also a moment of dissociation “from
the religious time-frame of the church”94 ; the characteristic practices are diverted
and transformed, as De Boek notes, in “emerging social imaginaries that deal more
broadly with notions of the sacred, ancestrality and existing structures of authority
88 De Boek, Filip, ‘Dead society’ in a ‘cemetery city’. The transformation of burial rites in Kinshasa,
în Dehaene and De Cauter, Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, Routledge,
2008, 297–308, 298.
89 Cité cimetière, necropolis or capital of the “thanatocracy”, peopled of société morte. De Boek,
Dead…, 299, 301.

90 De Boek, Dead society…, 298.
91 This type of ingression of the funeral practices into the urban space also appears in the Roma-
nian space, albeit not unique to it, but in a similarly familiarized instance: the funeral monuments
placed on the side of the road, marking the place of a death resulting in accident. Although the
detaching of the funeral monument from its traditional context would usually be unsettling and
disconcerting, its main role is a mnemonic one and at times cautionary. Petersson also includes in
this category the spontaneous memorialization (temporary or permanent) and the memorial attached
to a crime scene. In all these instances, the funeral practices colonize the urban space, setting up
enclaves of otherness in the everyday fabric and landscape, with a strong spatiality. The creation
of a funeral monument also translates as institutionalization. See Petersson, A., The Presence of…,
48–50; see also Przybylska, Lucyna, Solidarity and Identity in Memorial Crosses in Gdansk, lecture
delivered during the Interdisciplinary Conference- Solidarity, Memory and Identity, Gdansk, 20–21
September, 2012, University of Gdansk, session D: Symbols and Ethics.
92 Petersson notices that modern death is “[…] rationalised, medicalised, and secularised, often
contrasted to supposed natural attitudes towards death in pre-modern society […]”, Petersson,
Anna, The Presence of the Absent. Memorials and Places of Ritual, Lund Institute of Technology,
Lund University, Department of Architecture, 2004, Dissertation Thesis, ISBN: 91-7740-072-0, 43,
45.
93 “[…] the dead are brought into the street. […] Streets are blocked and palm leaves placed at their
entrance. As such, the dead, also because they are so numerous, have taken possession of public
space and have reconfigured its meaning”—an unimaginable practice for the kinois community
some decades back, as the author notes. De Boek, Dead society…, 299.
and gerontocracy”, paradoxically recovering the “more ‘traditional’ forms of ‘ritu-

als of rebellion’ and [tapping] into moral matrixes with much older roots, thereby
inventing a future for traditions that are themselves already reinvented in the urban
context”.95 The cemetery space itself reveals its acquired multifunctional profile,
contradictory and disconcerting too: it is the habitation substitute (with its full range
of connected activities)96 for street children who irreverently cohabit and compete
for the same space with the dead; it supports an “informal economy”.97
This juxtaposing of the dead and the living observed by the author is not a unique
situation. Similar takeovers of the spaces reserved for the dead have already been
documented in the Philippines.98 Within a dominantly catholic society, the practices
traditionally attached to cemetery spaces (burial, mourning, specific celebration-
related visits) coexist and intermingle with the everyday life of some very poor
communities. Unable to find affordable housing they resort to these “self-built com-
munities”,99 where work, family life, play and daily tasks all occur within the precinct
of the cemetery. As a preferred alternative to living in even poorer, overcrowded
slums, the families occupy the mausoleums and the spaces in between them, on top
and among the graves and grave stones, constructing makeshift, mostly single level
one room dwellings which house several generations. For some of these individuals,
the cemetery is the place they were born and raised in, their workplace and home and
will eventually be their final resting place, in a paradoxically circular unfolding. The
boundaries between life and death seem to blur or, according to Dean, to become
“porous”100 ; for those few how inherit or can afford to buy a burial place, their life
above ground will continue below, alongside their families—a belief that coexists
untroubled with the catholic faith in a heavenly afterlife. In a tainted political context,
95 Idem.
96 “[…] groups of very young children and older boys and girls are walking along the graves, playing
cards, drinking beer or smoking marijuana, or dancing and singing. Some have turned the cemetery
into their home, sleeping, eating and making love on the tombstones. The resemblance between
these children and the dead that lie buried there is striking: both have been abandoned by society.”,
De Boek, Dead society…, 301.
98 City of the Dead. A neighbourhood destroyed by Duterte’s war on drugs, Euan McKirdy, Pamela
Boykoff and Will Ripley (reporting), Edi. Amanda Wills, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/

mar/21/cemetery-slums-life-manilas-graveyard-settlements-philippines; Living with the Dead in
the Philippines, AlJazeera, 04 Jan 2018 07:46 GMT, https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/
101east/2017/12/living-dead-philippines-171230100057899.html; Living with the dead, Joel Tozer,
Ana Maria Quinn, Airdate: Tuesday, October 31, 2017—21:30, Channel: SBS, https://www.sbs.
com.au/news/dateline/story/living-dead; Adam Dean, Hard Life Among the Dead in the Philip-
pines, June 25, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/25/world/asia/manila-north-cemetery-
philippines.html.
99 Lynzy Billing, Overstretched cities. Graveyard living: inside the ‘cemetery slums’ of
Manila. In the poorly serviced capital of the Philippines, the poorest citizens have taken
to living where no one else will—alongside the dead, The Guardian, Wed 21 Mar
2018 11.00 GMT, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/21/cemetery-slums-life-manilas-
graveyard-settlements-philippines, paragraph 4.
100 Adam Dean, Hard Life Among the Dead in the Philippines, June 25, 2017, https://www.nytimes.
com/2017/06/25/world/asia/manila-north-cemetery-philippines.html.
verging on totalitarianism, there seems to be no governmental initiative to alleviate

the living conditions of these communities; the officially considered but not enforced
actions are the displacement and eviction of the communities, however, the communi-
ties appear to be tolerated by the authorities. However, this particular situation needs
to be understood contextually; in the opposite side of the economical spectrum, a
similar set of practices occur; for some of the middle and high segments of society,
the cemetery retains a similar encoding, with similar blurred delineations between
the living and the dead, albeit for different reasons: the mausoleums resemble vil-
las, endowed with otherwise redundant spaces for the cemetery function (kitchens,
bathrooms, bedrooms and TV living rooms, terraces, etc.); although these spaces are
meant to allow the living to occasionally rejoin their lost relatives, the mausoleums
slowly become permanent homes. The case of the Chinese cemetery in Manila, now
dubbed the ‘Beverly Hills of the Dead’, initially developed in the nineteenth century
on the basis of a displacement of religious practices (the exclusion of the Chinese
community from the catholic burial grounds).
Similarly to Johnson’s example, in the Congolese variant as well the cemetery
receives contrasting urban functions, mirroring and even functioning as a city. De
Boek’s analysis is focused on the practices attached to the space of the cemetery
(as they create “an alternative political and also moral landscape”),101 and on its
functioning, rather than on its spatial or more material coordinates. He argues that
in this instance, the cemetery is for the kinois community an essentially heterotopic
space, showcasing multiple such coordinates. First, the blurring the borders of the
space through practices, despite the fact that the traditional physical delimitation of
the cemetery persists; the cemetery is used as an everyday, common fragment of the
city (habitation, trade, a.s.o.), essentially an infusion of the urban exterior practices
within the enclave. This process is mirrored, as the specialized practices overflow
into the streets of the city. This process illustrates the fifth principle of heterotopia,
the closing/opening mechanism; the kinois example can be identified as one of those
spaces that “look like pure and simple openings, but that, generally, conceal curious
exclusions”.102 Second, the example illustrates an interesting combination of two
heterotopic principles: the juxtaposition of contradictory emplacements in a single
physical, real space (as a city of the living overlaps with the city of the dead) respec-
tively the heterochronia principle,—an overlapping of the heterotopia of temporal
accumulation (the cemetery museum, ‘human archive’) with the heterotopia of the
ephemeral (given by “the corporeal dimension of these juvenile vocabularies of self-
realization celebrates vitality and life, and forcefully posits the city in the immediate
time-frame of the moment, the now”).103

102 Foucault,Of other…, 21.
3.4.2 Brossat—The Graveyard and the Activation

of the Heterotopic Character Through Practice
Another approach to the graveyard as heterotopia was proposed by Alain Brossat.

He analyses, in a personal key, one of the potential heterotopias mentioned by Fou-
cault—“this amazing cemetery from Menton, in which the great victims of tubercu-
losis from the nineteenth century, who have come to rest and to die at the Côte d’Azur,
were buried: another heterotopia”.104 Brossat discusses this place alongside the mil-
itary cemetery Rebuquet, from the same settlement, both of them watching over
and mirroring upside-down the city they border. Both are “extraterritorial spaces”,
enclaves delimited from the city physically and symbolically, but also deeply con-
nected to it, creating “an inversion of all common signs of urban life”.105 Beyond
the already discussed interpretation of the cemetery as an alternative city and of the
cemetery as an enclave of non-transitive time, the author also proposes its interpre-
tation from the perspective of the binomial pair of the two cemeteries: the old one,
reflecting “an eternalized and fossilized era of tuberculosis”, and the more recent mil-
itary cemetery, representing an anti-society, constituted “not by descent, alliances
and kinship systems”,106 but by a common mark—in the first case, tuberculosis, and
war, as well as local or national identity, in the second.107 Hence, the graveyard is
not just an alternative space, but a space that is “dedicated to difference”, exposing
the illusory and the transient aspect of the living city; an egalitarian space,108 as
opposed to the hierarchical space of the modern city; and a space of freedom, due
precisely to its capacity of non-hierarchically accommodating diversity, in contrast
with the strict hierarchical norms of the living world—an organization derived from
“our wish to escape to these spaces of another kind”.109 In the context of his discus-
sion of the cemetery as a heterotopia, Brossat also states the essential heterotopic
coordinate—“the condition of the location to be occupied (colonized) by a differ-
entiation process, at the end of which the inhabited territorial unit will disintegrate,
and the continuity will substitute the play of oppositions between the familiar and
104 Foucault, M., Le corps utopique, les hétérotopies, ed. Lignes, 2009, apud Alain Brossat, Le
cimetière comme hétérotopie, Appareil [En ligne], Articles, https://www.cairn.info/revue-le-sujet-
dans-la-cite-2011-1-page-121.htm, published 29 September 2010, accessed on 14 Aprilie 2014, 1.
105 Brossat, A., Le cimetière…, 4.
106 Brossat, Le cimetière…, 6.
107 Brossat, Le cimetière…, 8.
108 “venus de tous les horizons, de toutes les langues, de toutes les conditions, de toutes les croy-
ances auxquels les a arrachés un fléau ou un autre—la tuberculose, la guerre mondiale—, opulents
commerçants d’Europe centrale, dame de compagnie de l’impératrice russe ou aussi bien pau-
vres conducteurs de troupeaux des plateaux malgaches, bergers de l’Atlas marocain—tous me sont
proches, dans leur condition d’acosmiques, d’expatriés venus reposer sur le promontoire de cet
autre cimetière marin […]”, Brossat, Le cimetière…, 13.
109 “plus rigoureusement nous sommes «territorialisés» , assignés à une multitude de tâches, de
fonctions, de définitions, de normes, et plus est impérieux notre désir d’échappée vers ces «espaces
autres» .” Brossat, Le cimetière…, 15.
the strange, the shared and the secret, the common and the extraordinary, etc.”,110
capturing the essential character of both praxis and function, along with the role
played by the material form and by the impact it supported.
This assembling of the heterotopia discussed by Brossat would hence be subse-
quent to the actual establishment (and construction) of the place. The subject thus
‘furnishes’ with heterotopic functioning a preexisting space, about whose hetero-
topic coordinates Brossat does not mention anything else than their preexistence.
Even the three secondary (personal) examples he offers are heterotopic before their
practice/reading in this key by the author. Recalling perhaps the performative act and
its dependence from the assumption of the role or from the presence of the receiver,
Brossat proposes the idea of the “personal” heterotopia. In order to exist, the hetero-
topia has to be practiced by the individual or by the group, who create their own het-
erotopias, taking on the heterotopic perspective, creating delimitations, and thereby
consecrating the spaces thus established as different. In other words, they create, read
and practice the difference. Brossat’s interpretation detaches itself from those pre-
viously mentioned. The former interpretations consider that heterotopic functioning
in general and the case of the cemetery in particular—in spite of the radical alter-
ity/difference carried in its very definition—cannot only be intermittent, temporary
and dependent on the agent willing to read and practice the space as heterotopic.
For these interpretations, however, the place also has to enable the setting up of the
difference, through its heterotopic profile—in this case, via the ‘fixed’ coordinates of
the cemetery that do not depend on the author’s practice/reading/perception. Hence,
are these ‘heterotopic spaces’ or emplacements (Foucault)—also translated as sites
or places—finally not just heterotopic modes of functioning? Or ad hoc constructed
alterities, temporary (relative) and dependent on the transformation of the context?
Can the common coordinates ‘remaining’ after the dissipation of the relationship to
the context still constitute the heterotopic profile that ‘urges’ to difference? From
the perspective of Brossat’s argument, the answer is affirmative: we seek to “experi-
ence our capacity, our power to differ from ourselves—and from the world”111 ; we
create—individually or as a group, officially (institutionally) or unofficially.
These examples—each of them analysing another variation of the heterotopic
functioning of the cemetery as an institution in various spatial and temporal con-
texts—may also enable my current approach to additionally outline some heterotopic
coordinates, as well as a potential manifestation algorithm. Imagined and projected as
self-sufficient, isolated and well-defined (signalled and delimited) spaces, the exam-
ples mentioned above—of Johnson, De Boek, Petersson, Brossat and also the initial
one, proposed by Foucault—are mainly discussed from the perspective of two hetero-
topic coordinates: the second principle—multifunctionality conceived as the capacity
to tolerate new kinds of practices in different contexts, but without radically chang-
110 “[…] condition d’être saisi par un processus de différenciation au fil duquel l’unité du territoire
habité va se briser, la continuité va faire place à des jeux d’opposition entre le familier et l’étrange,
le partagé et le secret, l’ordinaire et l’extraordinaire, etc.” Idem.
111 “[…] nous éprouvons notre capacité, notre puissance de différer d’avec nousmêmes—et le
monde.” Brossat, Le cimetière…, 15.

ing their initial role/function, and the fourth principle—the heterochronic character
of the temporal enclave that is detached from its traditional temporality. However,
the other principles may also be easily attributed to it (consistency in most civiliza-
tions, the ability to juxtapose multiple and incompatible spaces in a single actual
place, the closing/opening system and the illusory character). From the common
profile of these examples, it is multifunctional character—as the ability of assuming
new roles, but also of juxtaposing multiple contradictory spaces—and the enclave
character that allow a more complex reading. The use of the cemetery space in a
different way than according to the original intention presupposes the existence of a
transgressive act. In the case discussed by Johnson, that of the cemetery designed by
Loudon, we have the ‘normalization’ of the transgressive act performed by the dead:
the new formula, more rational, hygienic and spiritual (Petersson), corrects specif-
ically this (inter)penetration of the funeral space into/with everyday urban space
and its contamination. The expulsion of the cemetery outside the city represents a
restoration of “normality”, where the difference to the other, that is radically differ-
ent from us, receives a better defined spatial expression, along with the withdrawal
and consolidation of the enclave, while the later association of other functions—the
cemetery/garden/museum juxtaposition—may be considered an act of transgressing
the day-to-day and of the realm of the living, in a space defined by the presence of
the other—an act characterized, again, by ‘normalizing’ aspects of (re)mediating
the cemetery’s radical alterity. These other multiple roles conferred to the ceme-
tery—perhaps also connected to the coagulation of an uncertainty of the afterlife, as
pointed out by Foucault—may be also interpreted as a reintroduction of the familiar
element—and of the rational—where it is completely missing, to a place of absolute
alterity and of the unexplainable. The transformation of the cemetery between the
thirteenth and the nineteenth centuries—treated as a phenomenon by Foucault and as
a particular case by Johnson—captures precisely the negotiation process of this spa-
tial typology’s alterity, along with its entire arsenal of meanings. The transgressive
act thus appears as the instrument through which the limits are tested, i.e. the very
point (meaning) of the existing and of the potential, and thereby implicitly also the
validity of the existing and potential orderings. This interpretation refers us back to
the reading proposed by Hetherington—the heterotopia is a laboratory space where
the new social (moral) orderings are ‘tested’—and is consolidated by the paradoxical
effect of the transformation of alterity into normality: the ‘rational’ cemetery, as an
alternative space in the context in which it manifests itself, becomes the norm for
the next century, overturning the relationship.
In the case analysed by De Boek, transgression has a simultaneous two-way
character: the cemetery is colonized by the urban practice, and the city, on its turn,
is colonized by the disinhibited funeral practices. As also noted by De Boek, the
deliberately revanchist character of the marginal group practices has the generalized
crisis situation as its source—as an answer to the overturn of normality, but not a
‘rational’ one, in classical terms (as Loudon’s). Nevertheless, as he also notes, this
answer is an ‘organic’ reinvention of tradition—positioning the Kinois cemetery as a
laboratory space of other social orderings. Again, the transgression and negotiation
of the borders appear as an instrument.
In this context, the spaces from the same category, mentioned by Petersson—the
ossuary, the crematorium and the garden of remembrance—appear as carrying
(latent) heterotopic potential: although sharing the coordinates of the previous exam-
ples (enclave features, conditioned access mechanism, heterochronicity, etc.), the
negotiation process is classified and concluded. If they are considered to be labora-
tory spaces, the alternative ordering tested in them appears as self-circumscribed to
the given delimitation—the transgressive action is not taken by any of the parties,
with or without intermediaries to assume the role. Hence, even in the presence of
the heterotopic coordinates, as long as the practices housed here and the functions
that are fulfilled take place ‘between the given parameters’ and in the absence of a
transgressive act, the heterotopic functioning remains latent and potential. The inter-
nal transformation and/or the relating to the spatio-temporal context may cause the
formation of transgressive practices. The concept of the transgressive act as an instru-
ment of manifesting alterity and requiring specific (heterotopic) spaces in order to
express itself is used by Foucault, as well as by other authors—such as Hetherington
and Turner112 —while being associated with marginality and the liminal space.
3.5 Heritage Space, Crisis, and Transgressive Act
Turning this argumentation toward the domain of built heritage, the identification
of such transgressive practices apparently becomes more difficult. The transgressive
act was generally attributed to the marginal, subordinated, and secondary element
—conceived as a (most often violent) rupture of normality and an opportunity of
challenging the official ordering. McLeod sees this perspective as extremely subjec-
tive, since although it discusses the other, it never raises the issue of the existence
of its own viewpoint.113 Similarly, in order to understand transgression in the terms
of the heritage object, it is precisely this unidirectional perspective that has to be
‘imbalanced’ through analysing it from both (or even from multiple) polarities. Who
does the transgressive act, the colonization and the normalizing intention belong to?
Returning to Foucault’s argument about the transformation of the perception of
the cemetery as well as of death in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, my
analysis proposes the extrapolation of the same dynamic for the perception of her-
itage. Where can its key indicators—the normalizing intention and the transgressive
act—be identified?
If the normalizing intention—resulting from the transformation process of the
context—is aimed at correcting, as I have previously argued, that which is different,
112 Michel Foucault, The order of things, xxvi, Kevin Hetherington, The Geography of the Other,
90, Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, 112, apud Petersson, A., The Presence of the Absent…, 78.
113 “In applauding the rest home, for instance, as a microcosm elucidating social structures, Foucault
never considers it from the eyes of the resident. Insight seems to be the privilege of the powerful”;
the author’s discussion is primarily from the perspective of studies on feminism. McLeod, Mary,
Everyday and Other Spaces, in Coleman, Debra L., Danze, Elizabeth Ann, Henderson, Carol Jane
(eds.), Architecture and Feminism, 182–202, Princeton Architectural Press, 1996, 187.
3.5 Heritage Space, Crisis, and Transgressive Act 191
or the effects of a transgressive act, the act of heritage classification—generated by

the formation of the heritage consciousness and by the regular reconsideration of
the values hierarchies—can actually be interpreted rather similarly. In other words,
heritage classification may be viewed as a normalizing intention restoring the con-
crete and symbolical boundaries of the temporal historical enclave. The built object
becomes ‘valuable’ through the transformation of its context and through accumula-
tion of multiple meaning layers over time, through its practice. It acquires the status
of being ‘worthy to be preserved’ not so much through its actual transformation,
although this can also contribute, but via the transformation of the value hierar-
chy—a prerogative of the sociocultural context. The normalizing response consists
in isolation, or in removal from the flow of day-to-day life that presupposes condi-
tioned adaptation or disappearance: the conservation and transmission of the signified
and the signifier are only possible as long as they are integrated in normality, but
without cancelling the actual characteristics of their alterity. Thus, for instance, in
order to be able to transmit to future generations, the values considered as gener-
ally human (and/or local) inscribed into a specific site/object—and to ‘model’ these
generations, as a utopian aspect—these have to be classified as heritage. This status
works as a recognition of the meanings of the site, but simultaneously also stops
the traditional practice—most often involving the alteration of the original substance
and the ‘destructive’ interaction with it—and the potential addition of new meaning
layers. This development is most obvious in the case of religious spaces, especially
in Romania. The normalizing intention remedies and counteracts a transgressive act
corresponding to ‘natural adaptation’, or to the transformation through day-to-day
use—restoring balance, as well as neutralizing and inversing the absorption of the
fragment in its context. The historical fragment (i.e. the object classified as heritage)
may only survive as a temporal enclave that is isolated and clearly delimited, with
other rhythms of functioning than those of its context. In order to be persevered,
a ‘pocket’ is created for the fragment, which is mandatorily further regulated, and
through which the fragment is included in daily use. However, it is actually precisely
this interpretation that suggests the reverse reading as well, in which the normalizing
intention would correspond to the ongoing transformation and adaptation that charac-
terizes any development process. From this perspective, normalization is interpreted
as a process that smooths out the differences: the object is continuously adapted
in order to serve its function, and when its transformation is no longer possible,
and it becomes other than that which is considered to be the norm, it is substituted
(or abandoned). The most telling example is the case of the preindustrial and then
industrial heritage, although the same protocol can also be identified in the many
variations of the residential category. The ‘non-compliant’ and atypical is seen as
other and as outdated, no longer ‘fitting’ in the present context and reflecting another
time, another mentality, and another rhythm—overall, the reflection of a no longer
existing value hierarchy. If the normalizing intention corresponds to the elimination
of the ‘non-compliant’, then the transgressive act belongs precisely to it: historical
time—difference (through its material testimony) appears as a transgressive presence
interrupting and disturbing the present—normality.
Overlapping these two perspectives, the heritage object seems to function para-
doxically. When the alterity of the object is radical—e.g. when its original function
has no longer any correspondent in the present—it appears as a fragment of a passed
time transgressing into our present, the temporal dimension of the watcher. If its
alterity is moderate—as in the case of the nineteenth-century bourgeois residen-
tial that relatively easily allowed the maintenance of the original function or the
introduction of new, associated functions—the present appears as an operator of the
transgressive act, colonizing and adapting—in a targeted or radical manner—the his-
torical fragment. Nevertheless, analysing the multiple hypostases of built heritage,
the opposing polarities are most often in the minority, in favour of an intermediate
positioning. Most often, the built heritage object is defined as the ongoing negoti-
ation of its boundaries: it is simultaneously a transgressive fragment in the present
and a fragment occupied by day-to-day practice. The approach associated with the
heritage status and, finally, the objective of preservation is precisely the maintenance
of this intermediate situation—neither a fragment perpetuated as a transgressive
enclave (isolated and performing the function of a diorama), nor one occupied and
permanently altered, even the point of the cancellation of its otherness. Hence, the
introduction of the heritage status may be interpreted as a normalizing intention in the
sense of creating a state of equilibrium between the two polarities. It creates a ‘pocket’
for the heritage fragment, stopping its adaptation process, and simultaneously it also
allows and seeks to introduce an occupation of the soft type through functions and
practices different from the original ones, but (ideally) chosen in accordance with
the imperative of preservation.
Extrapolating McLeod’s argument, the categorization as heritage may be consid-
ered a transgressive act and the expression of a normalizing intention at the same
time. From the perspective of those who use the space in the traditional manner—as
alternative or not—its classification as heritage is a transgressive act, as the object
is altered through the introduction of a different ordering, while from an outward
point of view and of the heritage institution, it is the day-to-day/traditional use of the
space that represents a transgression with destructive effects, conflicting with the pro-
tectionist ideal—classification being a normalizing response, aimed at restoring the
balance. The juxtaposition of these two perspectives may be identified in the actions
of the international heritage forums. Nevertheless, both their official discourse and
a series of specific actions also recognize the interdependence between the practice
and the built object—in the case of the artefact and even of the landscape. Hence, the
separation of the two—with disastrous effects even in the contemporary period—has
become an imperative of conservation. The traditional practices, ‘evacuated’ from
the spaces that are modelled, altered or substituted (e.g. with modern technologies)
automatically become more vulnerable and predisposed to disintegration. The use
of the sacred spaces, as well as the traditional-vernacular practices associated with
preindustrial housing or production, lose their purpose—as it has happened in many
cases. The efforts aimed at recovering the practices, where it is still possible, were
partially triggered by the mere necessity to maintain the heritage object and by the
reinforcement of the idea of sustainability—both for the heritage and the contem-
porary architectural object. Similarly, the loss of certain built objects opens up the
3.5 Heritage Space, Crisis, and Transgressive Act 193
perspective of losing their associated practices, as well as of their reconstruction and

revitalization. The capacity of the object to concentrate the practices and the capacity
of the practices, acting as fuel for the object (and its conservation), coexist, reflecting
their interdependence.
Returning to the previous discussion of cemetery spaces, the same negotiation of
delimitation (the normalizing intention and the uni/bidirectional transgressive act)
appears as a marker of the presence of heterotopic functioning. In the case of the
heritage object, the classification resolves—at least theoretically—this negotiation,
seeking to introduce the state of equilibrium between the polarities. Nevertheless,
the generalization of the heterotopic character for the entire, varied category of built
heritage would mean an impoverishment of this ‘heterotopic instrument’, similarly
to its generalization to an entire functional category. The heterotopic coordinates
(the opening/closing mechanism, the conditioning of access, the temporal enclave,
etc.) are present in the case of the heritage object—through the introduction of this
status—in the very same way in which they can also be identified for the mentioned
functions, e.g. cemetery, museum, jail, etc.—through the functional ordering and the
associated practices.
As I argue, these coordinates establish jointly a ‘passive’ heterotopic profile in
a potential state. Thus, for example, cemeteries considered as the entire functional
group have the potential to function as heterotopias. However, this potential is actually
realized (activated) only in specific contexts. This interpretation of the heterotopic
concept comes, first of all, as a response to the argument that invokes the laxity of
the concept of heterotopia (due to the diversity of Foucault’s examples), according to
which ‘anything and everything’ can be considered as a heterotopia.114 Furthermore,
it also seeks to support the critical approaches maintaining that ‘not any space is
a heterotopia’. Hence, the heritage status introduces the heterotopic profile, but the
‘reaction’ of each object is specific and capable of developing in both directions,
i.e., toward cancelling or emphasizing the heterotopic coordinates. For example, the
introduction of the heritage status may lead to abandonment and lack of maintenance
due to economic, political, social, etc., reasons stemming from the particular spatio-
temporal context of the object. These finally lead to the degradation of the mate-
rial substance and form, while the heterotopic heritage profile slowly faces away.
Although the heritage status continues to exist—at least until the declassification of
the object—and thus, theoretically, the heterotopic coordinates are also maintained,
the degradation of the material form causes this profile to lose its meaning. The same
development can also be witnessed in the case of inadequate interventions. Although,
from the legal perspective of the heritage status, the heterotopic coordinates continue
to be present, the extreme alteration of the original substance and material form lead
to the normalization of the object via its assimilation to the context. The emphasizing
of the heterotopic coordinates corresponds to the ‘particular situation’; the introduc-
tion of the heritage status—in which the normalizing intention acts as a perpetuation
of alterity—may generate a special and unexpected answer, most often with a mate-
114 Genocchio, B., Discourse, Discontinuity, Difference: the Question of Other Spaces, in ed. Watson
S., Gibson, K., Postmodern Cities and Spaces, Blackwell, Oxford, 35–46.
rial expression. One of the identified hypostases (to be presented later) illustrates this
emphasis on the heterotopic coordinates as a response of classification in the form
of the displacement of the characteristic practices of that space (see the case of the
Swayambhunath religious complex in Nepal, or, for Romanian examples, the case of
the adjacent churches). In both cases, the heritage status and the associated heritage
practice dislocate and influence with astonishing results the traditional use of the
space. These spaces belong to the category of sacred spaces that, although carrying
common characteristics with the typology of cemeteries that I have just discussed,
represent in themselves the subject of heterotopic analysis.
3.6 Sacred Space as the Space of Mediation: The Temple
Dehaene are De Cauter are among those authors who view the temple as the most
important space connected to the cemetery, interpreting it as a space of mediation
between the divine and the secular, the eternal and the ephemeral, as well as, from
the category of tertiary spaces, between the public and the private. The common
feature of these spaces (i.e. the cemetery and the temple) is their role as mediators,
presupposing the existence of an ongoing exchange, with an intermediary status, or
an assumed imbalance, that, on its turn, requires alternative, special and different
spaces,115 with specific rules of functioning—although, when viewed as a whole,
there are also exceptions.116 The heterotopic character of sacred spaces, and par-
ticularly of the church, has already been discussed,117 with interpretations focused
on different heterotopic functions: as an illusory or a compensation mechanism, a
space of contradictory juxtapositions, a panoptic space of heterotopia/the liminal,
a heterotopia of crisis, and especially as a symbolic and physical (architectural)
materialization of the Christian (Jewish, Islamic) utopia, etc. Sacred space as mate-
115 Dehaene, De Cauter, The space of play…, 94, but also Ioan, A., Întoarcerea în spat, iul sacru,
colect, ia Spat, ii Imaginate, (coord. Augustin Ioan), Paideia, Bucures, ti, 2004b, 5.
116 See the difference noted by Augustin Ioan regarding sacred Chinese architecture, understood
rather as a house sanctified by divine presence than a temple as the copy of an ideal model. Ioan,
A., Întoarcerea în spat, iul sacru, ‘Spat, ii Imaginate’ series, (ed. Augustin Ioan), Paideia, Bucures, ti,
2004c, 73.
117 Mihali, Ciprian, The Right to Live in a Town, http://idea.ro/revista/?q=en/node/41&articol=187,
accessed in December 2013; Tanya Van Wyk, Church as Heterotopia, HTS Teologiese Stud-
ies/Theological Studies 70(1), Art. #2684, 2014, http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/hts.v70i1.2684—The
author also discusses the church as a heterotopia from an ecclesiastic perspective (as a non-physical
spiritual space that enables the reconciliation and coexistence of diversity, of alterities). Hethering-
ton, K., in The Badlands of Modernity, analyses the masonic temple as a heterotopic space—the
materialization of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, a model mentioned as the source for popular lit-
erary utopias since the sixteenth century. This approach, however, opens up the search for potential
heterotopic spaces as the materializations of the utopian ideal (Solomon’s Temple described in the
Bible), with a succinct reading of the transfer process of this utopian model—which generated so
many written, pictorial and also architectural interpretations—from reality to myth and back again
proposed by Umberto Eco. Eco, U., Istoria Tărâmurilor s, i Locurilor Legendare, trad. Sălis, teanu,
O., ed. Rao, 2014, 45–59.
3.6 Sacred Space as the Space of Mediation: The Temple 195
rialized utopia was also discussed by Eliade.118 The utopian model mentioned by
Hetherington, Solomon’s Temple from Jerusalem—with its detailed description in
the Biblical texts—serves as an outline for sacred spaces such as the Byzantine
basilica,119 the synagogue, and the Gothic cathedral, as well as the Eastern Orthodox
church.120 As Hetherington observes—and as already discussed with reference to
the utopia—the same model is adopted in the secular architecture of the seventeenth
century, precisely in order to introduce in society, through architectural ordering,
the sacred, as well as “harmony, knowledge, and order”.121 Hetherington chooses
to discuss the perpetuation of this model in the form of the Freemason lodges—as
a symbolic-immaterial, but also architectural expression122 —along with their intro-
duction, through the actions taken by the Masonic members, in “the design of many
neo-classical buildings of the period, as it was used to symbolize in its architectural
design classical associations of wisdom and order”.123 Although the lodge func-
tions as a temple for a civic religion,124 and Freemasonry places itself in parallel of
and before actual religion,125 Hetherington views the lodge as a heterotopic space,
“an obligatory point of passage, a space of an alternate and novel social and moral
ordering”.126 The lodge represented an ordering that was alternative to the state and,
especially, to the church. It is a normed space, defined by ritual and hierarchy, but
also an expression of freedom, as reflected by its attitude toward the social and moral
context of the eighteenth century. In Hetherington’s analysis, the lodge, as an enclave
118 “This is the idea that the sanctity of the temple is proof against all earthly corruption, by virtue of
the fact that the architectural plan of the temple is the work of the gods and hence exists in heaven,
near to the gods. The transcendent models of temples enjoy a spiritual, incorruptible celestial
existence.” Eliade, M., The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion, transl. Willard R.
Trask, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987, 59.
119 “The four parts of the interior of the church symbolize the four cardinal directions. The interior
of the church is the universe. The altar is paradise, which lay in the East. The imperial door to the
altar was also called the Door of Paradise.” Hans Sedlymayer apud Eliade, M., The Sacred…, 61.
120 Ioan, Augustin, Întoarcerea în spatiul sacru, colectia Spatii Imaginate, (ed. Augustin Ioan),
, , ,
Paideia, Bucures, ti, 2004c, 5.
121 Hetherington, K., The Badlands of Modernity, chapter: Secret virtues, Euclidean
spaces—Freemasonry, Solomon’s Temple and the lodge, Routledge, London, 1997, 74.
122 “Subsequent lodge design was based on biblical description of that Temple and a geometrical
layout that followed the principles of geometry set down by Euclid”, as the succession of spaces
and “the architectural features and symbols of the lodge expressed in its layout and its architec-
ture provided freemasons with a semiotic basis for their moral education.” Hetherington, K., The
Badlands…, 98.
123 Hetherington, K., The Badlands…, 98.
124 Hetherington, The Badlands…, 101.
125 Hetherington discusses the process of “inventing the Freemason tradition”, through which they
have identified their own historical tradition, positioning them in an apparently direct descent
from King Hiram of Tyre, the builder of Solomon’s Temple, as well as with the entire lineage
of builders—since the beginning of time, thus having them indirectly share the credit for the most
important constructions of history—in spite of the mediaeval origins of the guild system. By virtue
of this lineage—as Hetherington notes—for the freemasons themselves, “freemasonry was as least
as old as, if not older than the world religions”. Hetherington, The Badlands…, 106.
126 Hetherington, The Badlands…, 102.
of alterity and as a hybrid between public and private, functions both interstitially
(hidden) and in the interior of the existing ordering (visible). Actually, this ambiva-
lence was the very factor that contributed to its survival and spread, as well as to its
contribution to the formation of the public sphere.
3.6.1 Sacred Space and the Ideal
Beyond this discussion of Hetherington, the temple, as it was proposed for scientific
analysis by Dehaene and De Cauter, or as it was actually analysed by Eliade, is
essentially the sacred space as such. In contrast with the approach of Dehaene and
De Cauter, the Romanian author Augustin Ioan sees the sacred space as representing
something more than a tertiary space, positioned as an intermediary between the pub-
lic and the private. In his view, the sacred space is their basis and the source from which
they “extract their substance”.127 Nevertheless, in all the variety of their expressions,
these spaces have the ideal as a common feature. They reflect the universal ordering,
divinity itself, the relationship between divinity and the real world, or an ideal order-
ing of reality—through reiterating hierarchies and relationships—reflecting in their
spatial orderings the spiritual and moral orderings and hierarchies that the individual
is required only to know, or also to apply and to order his/her existence according
to them—since these spaces simultaneously function as a realized utopia, a model
and, automatically, a mechanism that normalizes and models both the individual and
society. The Archbishop Chrysostomos offers a definition of the Orthodox sacred
space as a building, according to which the church offers a symbolic ordering of “the
things on earth, the things in Heaven, and the things beyond Heaven”,128 with direct
correspondences in the physical space: “the pronaos represents the things on earth;
the nave represents the Heavens; and the Holy Altar stands for the things beyond the
Heavens”.129 These correspondences are supported by the interior conformation of
the spaces130 and, perhaps more easily perceivable, through their ornament use. In
his discussion of the characteristics of sacred space, Augustin Ioan mentions a series
of identifying elements—e.g. delimitation (limit and enclosure), the gate and the act
of moving beyond it, the relationship between the (ideal) model and the copy (i.e.
the heavenly Jerusalem as an ideal city and the Temple/church)—that contribute to
127 Ioan, Augustin, Spatiu Sacru-Loc Public-Spatiu Privat, in Spatiul Sacru, ed. Dacia, 2000, repub-
, , ,
lished in Întoarcerea în spat, iul sacru, ‘Spat, ii Imaginate’ series (ed. Augustin Ioan), Paideia,
Bucures, ti, 2004c, 220.
128 Constantine Cavarnos apud Î.P.S. Arhiepiscopul Chrysostomos de Etna, in Ioan, Augustin, Retro-
futurism. Spat, iul Sacru astăzi, ‘Spat, ii Imaginate’ series (ed. Augustin Ioan), Paideia, Bucures, ti,
2010, 33.
129 Idem.
130 “As a symbol of these spiritual levels, of earth, the heavens, and the region above the heavens,
the nave floor is higher than that of the pronaos, and the floor of the Holy Alter is higher than that
of the navei”, Cavarnos, C., apud Î.P.S. Arhiepiscopul Chrysostomos de Etna, in Ioan, Augustin,
Retrofuturism…, 33.
the reading of this space as a heterotopia. His explanation, according to which the
church condenses the cosmos, as its plan and elevation represents the Heavens, the
profane earth, as well as the axes and rhythms of sacred space, reflects the heterotopic
concept and, in particular, Foucault’s description of two other heterotopic spaces, i.e.
the garden/Persian rug and the vessel/shop. Interpreting the Old Testament, the same
Romanian author identifies the space/practice binomial pair for the sacred space,
as well as the strict norming associated with it: “the adjacent ritual elements are
provided along with the plan as an actual ‘user’s manual’ for the temple […]”.131
The idea of the absolute alterity of the sacred, both the symbolic and the physical
sacred is hardly in need of any additional argument.132 Citing Eliade, Ioan sees the
sacred as “that ganz Andere, the dissimilar, and the radically Other: absolute alterity
that presents itself here and now, a reality of a different order, and a rupture and an
eruption into the ‘lower’ reality”,133 as well as something that is “located somewhere
else”, which is “completely different”, “the radically Other”.134 In Eliade’s approach,
heterotopia can be recognized in the characteristics of the sacred space through
its coordinates (enclave and detachment, opening/closing mechanism, access and
practice based on ritual, delimitations, etc.):
(a) a sacred place constitutes a break in the homogeneity of space; (b) this break is symbolized
by an opening by which passage from one cosmic region to another is made possible (from
heaven to earth and vice versa; from earth to the underworld); (c) communication with
heaven is expressed by one or another of certain images, all of which refer to the axis mundi:
pillar (cf. the columna universalis), ladder (cf. Jacob’s ladder), mountain, tree, vine, etc.; (d)
around this cosmic axis lies the world (=our world), hence the axis is located ‘in the middle’,
at the ‘navel of the earth’; it is the Centre of the World.135
Ioan, however, differentiates between sacred space and sacred place, where the
latter is a projection of the former,136 concluding that “sacred space is composed
of a place where the epiphany event unfolds, as well as of the vertically located
spatial aura […] of the tunnel, whose dynamic contains the link uniting that which
lies ‘under’ with that which is located ‘above’, or […] ‘beyond’”.137
131 Ioan, Augustin, Întoarcerea în spat, iul sacru, ‘Spat, ii Imaginate’ series, (ed. Augustin Ioan),
Paideia, Bucures, ti, 2004c, 98.
132 “For a believer, the church shares in a different space from the street in which it stands. The door
that opens on the interior of the church actually signifies a solution of continuity. The threshold that
separates the two spaces also indicates the distance between two modes of being, the profane and
the religious.” Eliade, M., The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion, transl. Willard R.
Trask, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987, 25.
133 Ioan, A., Spatiul Sacru, Dacia, 2000, in Întoarecerea în.., 213.
,
134 Ioan, A., Spatiul Sacru, 214.
,
135 Eliade, M., The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion, transl. Willard R. Trask,
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987, 37. Eliade discusses the sacred space especially with reference
to traditional societies.
136 “[…] the sacred is a depth quality of space, it is a vertical depth that is projected as space”, Ioan,
A., Spat, iul Sacru, op. cit., 214.

137 Ioan, A., Spatiul Sacru, op. cit., 216–7.
,
3.6.2 A Heterotopic Reading of Sacred Space
The essential materialization of this sacred space is, according to Ioan, the tem-
ple. On the basis of the ‘primary factors’ identified by him, it lends itself quite
well to a reading from the perspective of the concept of heterotopia. Accordingly,
the temple is: (1) “the territory occupied by any place of prayer”,138 where the act
creates/circumscribes the (revealed) space, referring to the heterotopic principle of
‘universality’, of the manifold manifestations within many civilizations, but also to
the interdependence between practice and place; (2) the interior space that is sacral-
ized through “its contamination by the presence of the Lord(’s name) in its interior”,
suggesting the delimitation, the spatial circumscription and the enclosure; (3) the
transcendent model “for which it seeks to be (or should be) the most faithful pro-
jection”, referring both to the capacity of juxtaposing multiple spaces in a single
emplacement, as well as to the heterotopias as materialized utopia; and finally, (4)
“a vertical communication channel between the original and the copy, which is sup-
posed to be kept open by the rituals performed in the temple; in the case of the
church, this channel is the gaze of the divine eye inspecting the sacred Space”.139
This latter coordinate opens up a triple heterotopic reading for the sacred Space:
(1) communication, presupposing an act of practice, on which the very existence of
the space is dependent, the heterotopias being both (simultaneously and interdepen-
dently) place/emplacement and practice140 ; (2) then, the presence of the ritual that
is associated to building141 and also the access and the interior ritual—regulating
and conditioning the functioning of the space—correspond to the fifth heterotopic
principle; and, finally, (3) that which Ioan attributes in particular to the church, “the
gaze of the divine eye” and the act of “inspection” or even surveillance—opening up
the reading of this emplacement to the panoptical—although the ubiquitous gaze is
both protective and saving, as well as punitive and normalizing, ensuring the appli-
cation of the ritual characteristic for the functioning of the heterotopic space. Behind
138 Ioan, A., Spat, iul Sacru, op. cit., 217.

140 Ioan revives one of the heterotopic examples proposed by Foucault—the Persian rug or the prayer
mat—in order to demonstrate this ability of the sacred space—of being mobile, “deterritorialized”
or ephemeral, and not just fixed and attached to the built object; the interdependence between
praxis-place/sacred—heterotopic—space is demonstrated again. Ioan, A., Spat, iul Sacru, op. cit.,
227.
141 Ioan considers the act of building, but also that of everyday praxis, as ritualistic acts, from the
selection of the site, “on the basis of its special characteristics […] recommending it as a chosen
place”, through the epiphany of the (intuited/revealed), to the actual construction (the “architectural”
act) and to the rhythmic everyday events—the latter functioning as a “reinvestment with the sacred”,
interpreted by Ioan as a “reminder of its presence”. The cyclicity/rhythmicity of the practice, the
“routine” following the epiphany or the life of the built object allows the interpretation of the
everyday built object (of habitation, according to Ioan) as a mnemonic mechanism; these suggest
the ability of the built object to accumulate memory through practice, not only from the initial
edifying act, but also the dependence of this memory from the rhythmic presence of practice. Ioan,
A., Spat, iul Sacru, op. cit., 219.
this mechanism, there is the same intention of modelling the individual/society—a

coordinate of the applied utopia.
Ioan also offers an interpretation of sacred space/heterotopias, identifying the
paradoxical multifunctionality, or the incongruent juxtaposition of the functions ful-
filled by the same space, as a source of heterotopic character. His examples—involv-
ing sacred spaces whose sacredness is ‘overlaid’ upon and coexists with the original
function—appear in a discussion about the public–private binomial pair and in the
positioning of the sacred within it.142 Here, the heterotopic spaces (or, as Ioan refers
to them, the ‘heterotopes’) begin to function through the introduction of the sacred
‘function’, creating a hybrid between the public or the private, or the ‘tertiary’ space
discussed by Dehaene and De Cauter, positioned between the public/visible and the
private/hidden.
Thus, sacred spaces are and also require a ritual—as a recipient and simultane-
ously as an expression of worship. Their practice is almost always strictly normed
and localized, with the deliberate intention of removing the individual from “the
rhythm of the everyday movements, the norms of talking and communicating, and
the worldly ways of knowing, moving him toward something new”,143 not in spite
of but due to cyclicity.
3.6.3 The Sacred Space as a Mnemonic Device
Hetherington, similarly to Ioan, who views the church as an architectural archive,

also recalls the mnemonic role of architecture. In the case of sacred architecture,
this function is almost always adopted by the architectural expression and its details,
or ornaments, irrespective of whether it concerns atemporal memory (of the divine
creation and, implicitly, of the individual’s position toward it) or temporal and histor-
ical forms of memory (of events, historical periods, or past generations—recorded
through painting, sculpture, inscriptions or additions, remodelling, overlays, etc.).
Ioan carries the argument referring to the mnemonic nature even further, attributing
to the sacred space a capacity of conserving collective memory that is superior to
the public commemorative monument. An already well-known example is that of
the paintings found in the Transylvanian wooden churches: while mandatory for the
ritual (including their positioning) and homogenized by the so-called hermeneias
142 His examples are hybrid and almost accidental spaces, in the sense of an unprogrammed
result of local (and personal) adaptation processes: the micro-churche graves from graveyards
(the grave/church overlap), chapel- or church-type spaces dedicated to a specific community/group
(barracks, hospitals, concentration camps), the cohabitation of chapel and administration in one of
the rooms of an apartment building, and the chapel installed in a shipping container positioned or
rather ‘abandoned and lost’, between apartment buildings. Ioan, A., Spat, iul Sacru, op. cit., in the
chapter: Publicistică, in Public/privat pe teritoriul sacrului, 333–335, 334.
143 Î.P.S. Arhiepiscopul Chrysostomos de Etna, in Ioan, Augustin, Retrofuturism…, 35.
(in Romanian: herminii),144 the scenes from the life of Jesus, his parables and other
representations are sometimes used for purposes of social criticism. In the Romanian
village Ticu-Colonie from Cluj County, a military saint fights an adversary in Austrian
military uniform in the nave of the Church of St. Varvara. A similar situation consists
in the presence of anachronistic elements, most often in clothing (e.g. in the church
from Tăut, i in Cluj County and in the wooden church from Deses, ti in Maramures, ).
Some of these representations fulfil an already known normative-moralizing Bibli-
cal function, such as the theme of the Judgment Day, with its multiple variations
(position: interior/exterior, composition, structure, etc.). As Ioan Godea notes, in the
wooden churches from the north-western part of Romania, this scene is painted at
the porch and is dominated by the representation of “the apocalyptic devil with his
seven heads, standing guard in Hell, in this chaos of sinners and devils, each with their
own specific form of torture”,145 with sub-topics including Sin, Envy, Pride, Inci-
vility, Laziness, Theft, Avarice, Hatred and Falsehood, also illustrating the specific
punishment for each sin. Godea also notes the punishments assigned to individual
occupations146 and also more specific punishments, ‘derived’ from the main ones
(e.g. providing false testimony, intemperance, smoking, women spinning on Satur-
day evenings, suicide, infanticidal mothers, etc.).147 For the church from Deses, ti,
Betea comments on the positioning of this scene in “the last liturgical space crossed
by the believers on their way out from the church”,148 i.e. in a position fulfilling the
function of the memento mori—on the one hand, signalling the end of the ritual, as
the last image imprinted in the mind of the individual before re-entering the every-
day (secular) space and time, while, on the other hand, also reflecting the outward
reaching normalization tendency of the church. Along with, and due to, the liturgical
ritual, the space that is thus encoded symbolically operates a transformation “of the
earthly into the heavenly […] through the integration of the earthly into the heavenly
order, reconciling them”,149 as explained by the Archbishop Chrysostomos of Etna.
The space becomes thus, apparently only temporarily, a hybrid between the two. The
practice, however, understood here as dogma or tradition (cyclical practice), models
144 ERMINÍE (‹ Modern Greek) feminine noun 1. Interpretation, explanation of a religious text. 2.
Manual of Byzantine church painting, dedicated especially to the canons of theological iconography
(scene composition, representation of the faces, the position of the accompanying suite of texts,
etc.). The best-known ‘hermeneia’ belongs to Dionysius of Fourna (eighteenth century). These
works have circulated in the Romanian countries both in the mediaeval and in the modern period.
DE (1993–2009), http://dexonline.ro/definitie/erminie/673668, accesat ianuarie 2015.
145 Godea, Ioan, Biserici de lemn din România. Nord-Vestul Transilvaniei, Meridiane, ‘Comori de
artă din România’ series, 1996, 93.

146 Bosorcaia, the witch who steals the milk of the cows, has the bucket with the stolen milk hanging
from her neck, the miller his millstone and the vessel used for taking his dishonest share, while
the innkeeper has to carry the barrel and the bottle. Godea, Ioan, Biserici de lemn din România.
Nord-Vestul Transilvaniei, Meridiane, ‘Comori de artă din România’ series, 1996, 93.
147 Godea, I., Biserici de lemn…, 93.
148 Betea, Raluca, Biserica de lemn din Desesti, Mega, Cluj-Napoca, 2007, 15.
,
149 Î.P.S. Arhiepiscopul Chrysostomos de Etna, in Ioan, Augustin, Retrofuturism…, 35.
the space that it occupies—although, as Ioan also notes, there are several examples
for the space operating, in the reverse order, transformations of practice.
3.6.4 Heterotopic Coordinates of the Sacred Space
The interior and the exterior spatial ordering, as well as the ornaments and the specific
practices deliberately construct an alternative space that, maybe even more illustra-
tively than any other ‘type’ of space, most eloquently embodies the heterotopic
coordinates. The multiple materializations of sacred spaces generally allow the iden-
tification of the heterotopic profile. In the following, I will succinctly offer parallel
analyses of two such heterotopic profiles, of the Eastern Orthodox wooden churches
and of the Saxon fortified churches, both from the region of Transylvania. According
to the first principle, the heterotopia is a place/emplacement found, in different forms,
in the spatial production of every civilization. The two major types that may be drawn
from this coordinate are the heterotopia of crisis and the heterotopia of deviation.
The sacred space in general and the different forms and particular spaces proposed
for analysis seek to fulfil a function of protection and refuge, providing asylum for
those in crisis. This role has an immediate symbolical reading of spiritual protection
and of repositioning and reintegration of the individual in the cosmic order that is
generally common to sacred spaces and illustrated both by the wooden churches
of the small Romanian communities and by the fortified churches of the Transyl-
vanian Saxons. The physical space of the church temporarily—but with maximum
intensity—becomes, for the time of the liturgical ritual, the privileged sacred refuge
that is completely separated from the everyday and radically different, enabling the
periodical rehabilitation of the individual. However, this role is maintained even in
the lack of the liturgical ritual, representing the attenuation/solution process of the
crisis of both the individual and the community, a period in which the signalling and
the supporting of this function is (exclusively) overtaken precisely by the physical
coordinates (architectural expression, spatial ordering, ornaments, etc.).
3.6.5 The Fortified Church
As also noted by Ioan, this sanctuary character of the church is (symbolically) rein-
forced through the presence of the fortifications. Their pragmatic encoding, read in
the historical context, is that of isolating the community in a stage, or state of crisis,
represented by, e.g. the Ottoman invasions, the attacks of the imperial and mercenary
troupes, etc. More specifically, in this crisis period (marked by sieges), the space of
the fortification becomes a microcosm, i.e. the entire village, in its restricted form.
Nevertheless, as Hermann Fabini puts it, even beyond the crisis period, “the [church]
fort/village becomes the identification space for the members of the community”150 :
the community is the church fort/village—the places in the church are reserved by
name, any encroachment being punished by the village ‘laws’,151 and the church is
even endowed with features such as epitaphs, votive flags, commemorative crates,
etc.152 In a reversed interpretation, the fortified church is a heterotopia of devia-
tion: the refugee community becomes, through refusing subordination, precisely
that other, isolated and under siege in an actual fortified enclave, as well as in a
symbolical one, in front of the enemy invader. In the history of the fortified churches
described by Fabini, these often appear as surviving enclaves in a devastated land-
scape.153 Ioan, however, also proposes a perspective of regional and European scale:
although these fortified churches appear as islands of Christianity, defined by the
walls of the fortifications, with the concentric reverberation starting from the church
as its nucleus, they also erect a “‘Christian limes’ in front of the advancing Mus-
lims”.154 Hence, they may be considered, in themselves, an us-them delimitation
between the ‘inside’, the Christian world, and the hostile ‘outside’. Nevertheless, as
reflected by Fabini’s preamble, it was the economic interest that prevailed over the
religious, as the Ottoman occupation finally allowed the right to “the free practice of
religion”.155 Furthermore, the fortification had to cope with very diverse attacks, in a
succession of redefinitions of the enemy other. From the perspective of the colonial
status, its space is always a (heterotopic) space of crisis where, depending on the
point of view of the onlooker, normality is permanently renegotiated. For the Saxon
colony spaces, alterity is permanently assumed and maintained. The differences are
continuously fuelled and the physical and symbolic separation between us and the
other—since the traditional Saxon ‘unit of measurement’ is not the individual, but
the community—is established to such a degree that, at the moment of the Saxon
communities’ dissolution, the remaining heritage was not, and is still not completely,
assumed by the other who remained.
150 Fabini, H., Universul cetăt, ilor biserices, ti din Transilvania, MONUMENTA, Sibiu, 2009, 36.
151 Fabini, Universul…, 33.
153 One of Fabini’s examples is the invasion of Transylvania in the summer of 1658, as reflected
in the report “Sibienbürgischer Ruin, 1658–61”. The attackers were “the Turk Silistri Pasha, the
Tatar Khan, the voivod princes of Moldavia and Wallachia, and the Kazaks”, who robbed, burned
and killed, so that “the most important villages were burned to the ground”, as they “set fire to
everything in their path”. It is in this context that Sibiu is also mentioned: “the fire was seen in
all the villages surrounding Sibiu […] no single village has remained untouched […]”, Graffius,
Johannes, Siebenbürgischer Ruin, 1658–1661, apud Fabini, H., 30.
154 Ioan, A., Spatiul Sacru, op. cit., Publicistică, Dincolo: Acasă, 344–349, 345.
,
3.6.6 Variations on the Use of the Sacred Space: Dealu

Frumos, Arcalia, Viscri
According to Foucault’s second principle, the heterotopic place may act differently
(in an alternative manner) and can be invested with different, even contradictory
functions, overlaid upon and coexisting with the original, however ‘precise and deter-
mined’ it may have been.156 The two materializations of the sacred space proposed
for analysis may both assume, similarly to the sacred space in general, such a func-
tioning. Museification or heritageization (‘patrimonialization’) may also be some
of these potential alternative and even contradictory operations. According to Ioan,
museification may bring about a disintegration of the sacred,157 although, at the same
time, it actually shows its capacity for development; moreover, he regards this process
as definitive. The case of the wooden churches, however, demonstrates the opposite.
Although these are classified and receive a new and different function—interfering
with and prohibiting elements of the actual traditional practice—the sacredness of
the place often does not completely dissipate. These classified churches are fur-
ther used as liturgical spaces, even if intermittently—especially in the more isolated
rural areas, depending on the distribution of the priests, on the possibility of con-
structing a new church, on the state of conservation, etc., the day of the church’s
patron saint and sometimes the major holidays are regularly celebrated. Beyond this
alternative function, implying a radical alteration of the built object’s status, several
alternative functions, assumed by the wooden churches in various contexts and for
various intervals, may be identified as well. Such an additional function, no longer
surprising, consists in the role of the secular and not just spiritual nucleus of the
community, which often imprints itself into the architecture of the object, physically
overlapping the profane meaning with the sacred. This role, however, is ‘activated’
through specific practices of the community, regulated by, and organized around, the
sacred ritual (i.e. the Sunday service). Thus, the two ways of functioning are overlaid
upon each other and/or alternatively inhabit the same object. The initial normative
function, concentrated on ethics, morals and community relations, is subsequently
complemented by a normative and legislative function, since the churches are used
as places of judgment. This secondary function will also be imprinted in the archi-
tecture of the object. Its manifold manifestations include the much-debated presence
of the towers at the corners of the helm,158 as well as a pillory device—the perindele,

157 Ioan, A., Spat, iul Sacru…, op. cit., Publicistică, Două construct, ii, 336–341, 341.
158 In general, the four smaller towers are considered to be a Gothic (see Godea, Bisericile de
lemn din România. Nord-Vestul Transilvaniei, eMeridiane, 84) or Saxon influence (see Petranu,
C., Noiu cercetări s, i aprecieri asupra arhitecturii în lemn din Ardeal, M.O., Imprimeria Nat, ională,
Bucures, ti, 1936, 14). However, there is also the argument that this ornamental structure was used
for signalling a legislative rank: “These small towers at the corners of the helm are a charac-
teristic element for the churches of the Lăpus, region and a sign that the village had a Council
of Elders/Judges” (Florin Pop, Nicolae Scheianu and Marius Campeanu, Bijuterii ale României
în Patrimoniul UNESCO, 10.10.2008, http://www.descopera.ro/descopera-in-romania/3287507-
bijuterii-ale-romaniei-in-patrimoniul-unesco-vii,), the right to self-determination—“Legal auton-
belingheriul or perindeul—identified by Godea in the wooden churches from the

T, ara Cris, urilor region of Romania, as spaces dedicated to the punitive function of
the church. The judgment through the perindele “is a form of Saxon law, located at
the borderline between custom and written law, a semi-institutionalized judgment
form”.159 Perindele represents the space invested with the role of moral and psycho-
logical sanctioning (normalizing).160 The community member found guilty is put in
shackles and exposed to the gaze of the community. The place of his/her sanctioning
may be attached to the church, forming a common body with it, or in its proximity,
right on the church site. The sanction does not have an actual physical character, but
is rather of the moral kind: the individual is exposed not only to the gaze of the entire
community, but demonstratively also exhibited to the superior perspective of God,
as a punishment that corresponds to the liturgical events.161 In this context, Godea
distinguishes between ‘calling out at the church’ (associated with this type of space
and probably with the temporal interval of the service) and ‘calling out in the village’
(associated with the day of St. George).162 Both practices have a sanctioning role163 ;
although the system presents spatial and nominal variations, their common feature
consists in the proximity to the church (being carried out on the church ground).164 As
Godea puts it, in general, “the church served as a place of refuge of people who were
on the run […], but it was also the Church’s ‘merit’ to have applied the barbarous
judgment of the ordeal (ordalie, i.e., humiliation, torture, and mutilations)”,165 thus
reuniting apparently contradictory functions.
Hence, depending on the context (and on its use), the place of the church may
function in different ways. In the case of the Saxon fortified churches, this hetero-
topic principle requires almost no further argumentation, as the very act of forti-
omy was symbolized by the high tower of the church or of the town hall, decorated with small
towers at the four corners of the helm. Hence, they used to be a symbol of the freedom of Tran-
sylvanian settlements, later adopted in the architecture of the wooden churches built in the eigh-
teenth century” (http://www.ro.tezaur-romanesc.ro/arhitectur259-539259r259neasc259/-bisericile-
de-lemn-simbol-al-geniului-popular-romnesc-i-al-unitii-neamului)—or the “right to bear arms”,
i.e. to judge and apply capital punishment—ius gladii (or droit de l’épée, Fr.) (http://patrimoniu.
sibiu.ro/biserici/evanghelica/53), accessed in February 2015.
159 Godea, Ioan, Biserici de lemn din România. Nord-Vestul Transilvaniei, Meridiane, ‘Comori de
artă din România’ series, 1996, 121.

160 Godea, I., Biserici de lemn…, Meridiane, 1996, 118.
161 Although the position was uncomfortable, the procedure excluded physical mutilation: the head
and the hands of the punished individual were fixed between two wooden beams with recesses,
so that they were exposed to the gaze of the community to the outside, while their body remained
inside the space. According to Godea, this practice was used between 1697 and 1818, according
to the records and the remodelling interventions on the Assumption Church from Totoreni, Tărcaia
Township, Bihor County, see Godea, Biserici…, 118.
162 Godea, Biserici…, 118.
163 “People were put in pillories on holidays, when the village community gathered at the church.
[…] It is said that, as they were leaving the church, people threw words of abuse and admonishment
at them, and children touched their hands with nettles.” Godea, Biserici…, 118.
fication, along with the presence of multiple architectural features, announces the
‘secondary’166 role fulfilled by the same space. The sanctuary function of the church
is actually duplicated, as it now ensures both spiritual as well as physical protection.
Although it may not appear as such in the present, due to the high number of relevant
examples, the simultaneous presence of the combative elements and the sacred is
essentially paradoxical, with openings fitted for throwing rocks, hot tar, and boiling
water on the enemy, shooting holes, and the ramparts as some of the more prominent
architectural elements blurring, more or less,167 the boundary between church and
military building. Since we are used to reading the overlap between the two roles
(the sacred and the military) in a historical key, they do not seem to us as paradoxical
as they might be (re-)revealed from the perspective of a contemporary interpretation.
Although less surprisingly for the contemporary observer, due to the prominence
of the topic in recent years, this fortification is also identified in the case of the
Saxon house. Its basic function coexists with a defensive role—for obvious colo-
nial reasons—due to which the dwellings receive tall, impenetrable enclosures, with
strengthened access points and a minimal number of vulnerable openings. The street
becomes thus the first line of defence, even before the fortified church, protecting
it with its compact house fronts. Similarly to the situation of the fortified churches,
this ‘secondary’ function had a major impact for the Saxon houses as well. Not only
did it leave a physical imprint on the built expression, but has even come to model
the construction, becoming its defining feature.
Although one can identify several other secondary roles of the fortified church,168
its heritage function deserves more detailed examination. At the first reading, this
166 The attribute ‘secondary’ is, nevertheless, redefined at each alternation of the context—the pro-
tective/sanctuary function of the fortification becomes secondary only after the Ottoman danger
has ceased.
167 The official presentation of the ensemble identifies three distinct fortification categories: I.
Churches with fortified interiors (defensive installations are generally arranged in the interior, while
the church is less, or not at all, fortified; Prejmer). II. Fortified churches (both the church and its
interior are fortified; the church undergoes a series of radical transformations: the lateral naves of
the church are abolished, and a protective floor is built upon the nave; the western tower is trans-
formed into a redoubt—or into an autonomous fortification—, while the choir receives a bastion
in the upper part; Valea Viilor, Biertan, Viscri, and the Székely fortified church from Dârjiu). III.
Redoubt churches (late fifteenth century) and the formula identified as its last evolutionary stage
(the church is already built with multiple defensive installations, while its interior is less fortified;
Saschiz). http://patrimoniu.gov.ro/ro/monumente-istorice/lista-patrimoniului-mondial-unesco/17-
monumente-istorice/unesco/91-sate-cu-biserici-fortificate-din-transilvania, accessed in November
2014. Beyond the prosaic explanation, these levels of fortification may also suggest the degrees
of imprinting of the ‘secondary’ function in the physical form of the object; finally, they express
degrees of functional juxtaposition, or mixing.
168 These fortified churches are invested with additional meanings, beyond the spiritual, and without
cancelling it out, continuing to concentrate the community, similarly to the earlier discussed wooden
churches; the defensive function, becoming obsolete in the eighteenth century, leaves these specific
features behind, to be re-functionalized and thus conserved. These nuclei concentrate “within or
around themselves the buildings of common use as well as those dedicated to special purposes of the
communities: the mayor’s office, the religious school, the common room, the Evangelical parsonage,
and the preachers’ homes, etc.”, outlining new forms, as well as ultimately also keeping the core role
role seems to ‘chase away’ not only the sacred—as suggested by Ioan—but also
the typical (traditional) practices, due to its strict specific norms. Nevertheless, in
the case of the Saxon fortified churches, the heritage status has operated a double
transformation. One the one hand, it stopped a number of practices that could be
regarded as part of the organic use, ultimately ensuring, up to a point, these build-
ings’ conservation. This organic use, re-functionalization, or adaptation to the needs
of the community, can be viewed as a beneficial input, as long as the (sacred, sym-
bolic, social, etc.) meanings continue to coexist; while, with the disintegration of
the communities, the same process of adaptation to new needs and essentially to a
new (transformed) community may become a negative input.169 This development
can be seen in the case of the fortified churches as spaces whose multifunction-
ality is given ‘by design’ (i.e. according to the original conception), even if it is
manifested intermittently, since the multifunctionality is activated especially during
sieges. In a first stage, when the need for fortification disappears, some of these
spaces acquire different roles. For example, due to its physical coordinates (orienta-
tion, lighting, humidity, etc.), the defence tower begins to be used for food storage
(as the ‘bacon tower’). This re-functionalization is organic and intuitive, reiterating a
function not completely alien to this space—since the temporary crisis residence has
always required food storage—as well as, even more importantly, non-destructive
and active, requiring its permanent use. Its input is positive, especially for the state of
conservation, as the space is continuously used, maintained and ‘present’ in the life
of the community. However, a similarly organic, but modern, re-functionalization
may easily have a negative input, as the storage or various items (construction mate-
rials temporarily stored indefinitely, elements that are decommissioned, or turned
into reserve, etc.), coupled with discontinuous use, turns into a source of degrada-
tion, due to the accumulation of organic material as a biological and bacteriological
degradation factor, to the lack of regular control, and to the general lack of mainte-
nance, etc. At the same time, the space (intended for storage) is gradually isolated,
becoming inaccessible and excluded from everyday life, especially when the latter
also requires the presence of the outsider, the tourist. Nevertheless, in the case of the
fortified churches, the heritage status did, in fact, coexist with the sacred. Similarly
to the overall European situation, the traditional religious practices of these spaces
are already diluted, or substituted, at the introduction of heritage status. The com-
munities that have used and administered these spaces are also radically transformed
through a chain of demographic phenomena: emigration, low natality, and the ageing
of the population. Cornelius Zach dates the phenomenon of Saxon emigration back
to the 1930s, motivated by the approach to Germany and its potential benefits,170 fur-
of the community. http://patrimoniu.gov.ro/ro/monumente-istorice/lista-patrimoniului-mondial-

unesco/17-monumente-istorice/unesco/91-sate-cu-biserici-fortificate-din-transilvania, accessed in
November 2014.
169 One of the elements of this adaptation process consists in the adaptation and in the improper
use of space—conceived as any use that profoundly damages the physical form and may cancel the
associated meanings.
170 According to Zach, the Transylvanian Saxons’ orientation toward the national socialist Germany
and its Renewal Movement brings numerous advantages, such as the allocation of financial resources
ther increasing in the 1980s and 90s. According to Wagner, although, after 1966, in
Romania, “many people began to declare themselves to be Germans who previously
did not [i.e. immediately after the Second World War, due to the disadvantages of
pro-German associations]”171 —a trend motivated by the prospect of Western immi-
gration—the number of Saxons went into decline. In his opinion, the diminishing of
the German population is exclusively connected to emigration, although he mentions
another potential reason as well: the assimilation process—based on the statistics on
declared native language.172 Although not directly addressed, the dynamics of ethnic
structure are quite visible in Wagner’s analysis. Additionally, the statistical data also
reflect the progressive increase of the Roma population in parallel with—and, in
fact, at the expense of—the decrease of the Saxon. The differences between the two
types of habitation, living standards and occupational profiles are undeniable. Nev-
ertheless, the degradation phenomenon affecting the sacred spaces has become more
complex. If the overall degradation affecting the common (residential) built heritage,
i.e. households and the associated spaces (public space and farmed environments),
may be explained by the displacement of the Saxons and the disappearance of their
specific way of life, followed by the repopulation with Roma ethnics, other phenom-
ena, primarily affecting sacred spaces, are omitted. Paradoxically, these phenomena
manifest themselves in connection to and in spite of the protected status, those major
destructive effects including inadequate restoration work—often with the loss of
the original substance and the misrepresentation of the authentic image—and the
unlawful alienation of mobile and semi-mobile pieces.173
(for churches and schools), respect for the nation considered as winning the war, ethnic solidarity,
higher status within the state, etc. Nevertheless, there are also some disadvantages: the concentra-
tion of the decision factor (previously attributed to the community group) in a narrow and finally
external elite (the Central Office for Ethnic Germans/Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle or VoMi, Berlin),
an orientation that rendered “the cohabitation with the nation-state within the Romanian home-
land increasingly problematic, if not impossible”. Zach, Cornelius, Sas, ii între tradit, ie s, i noi opt, iuni
politice: 1930–1944, 171–183, in Transilvania s, i Sas, ii Ardeleni în istoriografie/Din publicat, iile
Asociat, iei de Studii Transilvane Heidelberg, Sibiu, editura hora, 2001, 195.
171 Wagner, Ernst, Minorităti etnice si religioase în Transilvania potrivit recensământului din 1992,
, ,
184–199, in Transilvania s, i Sas, ii Ardeleni în istoriografie/Din publicat, iile Asociat, iei de Studii
Transilvane Heidelberg, Sibiu, editura hora, 2001, 195.
172 There is a decrease of 18.5% between the 1966 census—at which 97.4% of 382,600 ethnic Ger-
mans declared German as their native language—and the census of 1992, at which their proportion
will be as low as 78,9%—with 11.2% declaring Romanian and 9.7% Hungarian as their mother
tongue. Wagner observes, regarding the north-western region of Romania (Satu Mare County), based
on the data of the same census (1992), the discrepancy between the percentage of those declaring
themselves ethnic German (that tripled or has increased even sixfold) and the low percentage of
those who consider German their native language (37.9%), observing an increased Hungarization
trend (59.3%). However, the ascending curve of the German population in 1992 in Satu Mare
County becomes a descending slope at the two subsequent censuses, in 2002 and 2011. Wagner,
E., Minorităt, i etnice…, 195, and the National Statistics Institute of Romania (Institutul Nat, ional de
Statistică).
173 The objects most frequently stolen from wooden churches are icons, fragments from the temple
of the altar, and cult objects manufactured from precious materials. However, in the case of the
fortified Saxon churches, the entire collection of mobile elements becomes prey, including the
Nevertheless, the rising number of nongovernmental associations and organi-

zations, of the (national and international) foundations and institutions involved in
promoting and safeguarding—mobile, immobile and intangible—Saxon cultural her-
itage, along with the gaining of international (UNESCO) recognition, has led to the
improvement of visibility, with awareness raising as its most important effect, in the
form of the assuming of this heritage by the local public, the only one responsible
for the most problematic and often ignored stage of restoration work, i.e. the post-
intervention maintenance or long-term conservation. There are numerous positive
examples, but they are still insufficient when compared with the speed of the degra-
dation processes and to the large number of monuments, sites and Saxon architectural
ensembles.174 In the case of the fortified churches, in which the restoration interven-
tion has brought one or more new functions, these cohabit with the sacred, within
determined intervals, where the sacred remains a mere imprint into the material
form. Where there can be no more functioning as a sacred space, the new functions
occupy the space with sensibility toward this memory, as most eloquently in the case
of the fortified mediaeval Saxon (Lutheran) church in Dealul Frumos-Schönberg, an
architectural ensemble held in a bailment agreement of 25 years by the Ion Mincu
University of Architecture and Urbanism (UAUIM) from Bucharest. The univer-
sity’s engagement began in 2003 with research, monitoring and diagnostic activities,
followed by conservation, renovation, and restoration work. Then, the ensemble
receives an educational-teaching function, focused on conservation and restoration,
and sanctioned by the establishment of the UAUIM Centre for Vernacular Archi-
tecture Studies from Dealu Frumos (2003), the 2003 establishment of the UAUIM
Centre for Studies in Vernacular Architecture from Dealu Frumos, the organizer of
subsequent academic activities (student practice, collaboration with the restoration
college of the Sibiu branch of the UAUIM, international workshops and summer
universities, creative camps, etc.) and cultural manifestations (festivals). However,
as noted by project coordinator Sergiu Nistor, the revitalization project may be con-
sidered an example of good practice, but not as a replicable model:
[…] we cannot foresee a Transylvania whose heritage is saved by dedicating it fully to
academic activities or to university workshops, even simply because there are not enough
universities that could overtake the conservation responsibilities and make use of more than
200 fortified churches.175
furniture, the painted wooden back pieces of the altar, lighting and cult objects, carved panels and
even the bells or the tower clock. Although there is a public database for the inventory of these
objects, most alienated objects are never declared and are stored only in the collective memory of
the community (e.g. Sibiu County is completely missing from this inventory) or are declared to
have been destroyed, as thefts—in particular in the case of wooden churches—are disguised through
arson.
174 SeHerman Fabini, Atlas der Siebenbürgisch—Sächsischen Kirchenburgen und Dorfkirchen, Vol.
1, 1998 (Hermannstadt): the author names 527 individual colony settlements and settlements inhab-
ited by Saxon communities.
175 Nistor, Sergiu, chapter IX, in TRANSILVANIA. Un patrimoniu în căutarea mostenitorilor săi,
,
Centrul de Studii pentru Arhitectura Vernaculară Dealu Frumos-Schönberg, Editura Fundat, iei Arhi-
text Design, Bucures, ti, 2010, 162.
Two other similar projects, initiated by academic institutions—the Technical Uni-

versity (UTCN) and Babes, -Bolyai University (UBB), both from Cluj-Napoca—are
worth mentioning. The project of UTCN’s Faculty of Architecture, with the support
of the Transylvanian Chapter of the Romanian Order of Architects (OAR), proposes
a similar approach to the Ion Mincu University, on a smaller scale, with the rehabili-
tation and use of the Metis, -Martinsdorf architectural ensemble (Mihăileni Township,
Sibiu Country), dedicating it to educational and teaching purposes. Consisting of the
fortified church, the parsonage, and the more recent school, the architectural ensem-
ble was leased for a period of 10 years. Following the damage studies, proposals
on the use of the site were designed in the framework of a postgraduate programme
and workshop series, also complemented by an archaeological study. Although the
project obtained some visibility,176 hitherto, there were no restoration or development
interventions.177 Although also initiated by the Babes, -Bolyai University, the reha-
bilitation project of the Arcalia castle (Şieu-Măgheruş Township, Bistrit, a-Năsăud
County) differs from the two previously mentioned projects in its selected typology,
interventional type and, partially, the proposed use,178 but can still be viewed as a
positive example. However, it is probably the UAUIM project that brings together in
the most exemplary manner the coordinates of heterotopic juxtaposition as part of
the nature of the intervention and of its ordering principles, as well as of the specific
(formal and symbolic) nature of the object. It cannot be regarded as a ‘disowning’179
or as the alienation of Saxon heritage by the communities in whose care it was left.
The project carries out a re-actualization in the present and a projection into the
future of the initial encoding, along with the entire arsenal of its juxtapositions. As
emphasized by Nistor, the restitution to the community is undertaken as a moral
duty that is also supported by contractual obligation. However paradoxical and con-
trasting, the new functions reiterate the initial ordering as the reflection of an almost
disappeared identity. Far from ‘chasing out’ the sacred—even if the religious prac-
tice has all but disappeared from the site—the heritage status and practice appear
as the key driving factors of the entire procedure. Thus, in the framework of this
heritage space, consecrated through the presence of the heritage status, that initial
juxtaposition of seemingly incongruent spaces is not blurred, but, on the contrary,
reiterated and sustained through the introduced re-functionalization. The heritage
176 The results are published with the support of the Romanian Order of Architects (OAR) and
presented at the Annual Meeting of Saxons in Biertan (2009).
177 The initial proposals included: retracing/signalling the church’s enclosure wall, preserved in a
small area (demolished in the nineteenth century); the renovation of the parsonage and its extensions
in order to accommodate course and exhibition as well as guestrooms; the restoration of the V tower
and of the church, along with the didactic reconstruction of the watch road; and the arrangement of
the architectural ensemble, including the churchyard and the parsonage. The project included the
rehabilitation of the school, built in the early twentieth century, with subsequent post-war extensions.
178 The Babes-Bolyai University took over the Bethlen castle from Arcalia in 1963, originally allo-
,
cating to it a unitary didactical function as a research base of the Biological and Geological Research
Centre until the 90s and then a more complex function, including accommodation, catering, con-
ference and reading rooms as well a (Francophone) library, etc. http://www.ubbcluj.ro/ro/structura/
sport/arcalia, accessed in May 2015.
179 Nistor, S., chapter IX, in TRANSILVANIA. Un patrimoniu…, 162.
status facilitates the addition of a new meaning layer—as a super-juxtaposition of

meanings. In other words, the heritage status may be read as ‘just’ another, different
mode of functioning, attributed by society to “a heterotopia that exists and has never
ceased to exist”,180 thus perpetuating its character.
The well-known case of the fortified ensemble from Viscri, along with the entire
settlement, already demonstrates the capacity of patrimonial status to act as a revival
principle of organic practice and community. The ambition of this model is the recov-
ery of the traditional sciences, in order to put them to use for the safeguarding of
a valuable built heritage and of the cultural identity that is represented. In order to
be able to carry out any restoration and conservation work, as well as, especially,
for the sake long-term preservation—as the principle of sustainability—the Viscri
case demonstrates the necessity of traditional technological practices, whose recov-
ery can probably most easily find its raison d’être (based on the economic argu-
ment). These may be able to partially reconstruct the initial ordering and thereby
also to set themselves up as an ‘adherent’ basis enabling the subsequent fixation of
other traditional practices that will be recovered, some of them maybe secondary
or (increasingly) less motivated from a financial perspective, finally perhaps even
followed by the traditional sacred practices. The form and the material expression of
the churches and fortifications carry the imprint of that ‘historical’ juxtaposition of
symbolic spaces, fulfilling roles of spiritual and physical protection, moral and social
norm-setting, as well as identity-giving. Furthermore, the heritage status adds a new
layer, intervening in the dynamics of that space and simultaneously also taking on
a framework function, as it stages—sustains, mediates and interprets—the initial, as
well as the historically acquired, encoding, thus “juxtaposing in a single real place
several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible”.181
3.6.7 Sacred Space as Heterochronia
According to Foucault’s fourth principle, heterotopic space functions as a tempo-

ral enclave, or a heterochronia—a place of temporal alterity against the established
time; a relationship that also appears in Eliade, in the form of the duality between
sacred space—non-homogenic and discontinuous—and profane space—the normal
duration, containing fragments/episodes of sacred time.182 This coordinate may be
interpreted in two different ways in the case of the wooden and of the fortified
churches as different expressions of the sacred. As an eminently other, intermediary
and tertiary space (cf. Dehaene, De Cauter), and as an incomplete representation and
materialization of divine on Earth, the church’s temporality cannot be but different
from the traditional human time and the divine/mythical time that it interprets and
180 The second heterotopic principle. Foucault, Of Other Spaces…, op. cit., 18.
181 Foucault,Of Other Spaces…, op. cit., 19.
182 Eliade, M., The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion, transl. Willard R. Trask,
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987, 69.

schematically projects, promising it through ritual and its space. The ritual, or the
celebration, accesses that mythical time: “religious participation in a festival implies
emerging from ordinary temporal duration and reintegration of the mythical time
re-actualized by the festival itself”, as sacred time is non-historical, recoverable and
repeatable—“it does not constitute an irreversible duration”.183 The temporality of
the sacred space (whatever it may be, e.g. temple, church or cemetery—the exam-
ple proposed by Foucault himself) is thus detached from the traditional time and
simultaneously also contained in, and connected to it, as sacred time is accessed
from the inside of the everyday-profane temporality. Materialized in the profane
present, mythical time takes its (imperfect) form as celebration, event, duration or as
a temporal rhythm that is well defined and structured.
In the case of the wooden Eastern Orthodox churches, temporal alterity is pri-
marily the result of the projection of the sacred that it houses and represents.
Heterochronicity is activated through religious practice (via the ritual and the event)
and also imprinted in the physical form. Some physical coordinates mediate the
formation of temporal alterity: accessibility, position, orientation, opacity, illumi-
nation, etc. However, the detachment from the everyday/normality presupposed by
the sacred space operates primarily through practice, at the visual, auditory, tactile
and even olfactory level, carrying in themselves a temporal coordinate: the gradual
discovery of the church space in a series of times, the discovery of certain spaces
(e.g., the altar) reserved for specific moments, acoustic signals announcing initiation
and stages of the liturgical ritual, ritual gestures and words, as well as their rhythmic
repetition, etc. The structure of the ritual, containing predetermined stages, gestures
and words, carried out in a precise temporal structure, is superimposed on the reg-
ulated and rigorous structure of the church’s physical space. As shown by Eliade,
both the sacred practice and the sacred space are undeniably accompanied by an
alternative temporality, as an intermediary between the sacred-mythical time that
they interpret and mediate through the festival, and everyday-profane time, in which
they are located.
In the case of the Saxon stone churches, as suggested by the overlap between
several temporal hypostases, their durability recalls the permanence and multifunc-
tionality deeply imprinted in the physical form. These stone churches juxtapose that
hybrid of sacred time characteristic for sacred spaces (i.e. the festival and the ser-
vice) with the exceptional temporal interval of the siege with its specific physical
coordinates, attached to the practices required by the nature of the attack. The two
temporal hypostases overlap in exceptional cases, and only at the moment of siege,
even if their physical expressions continuously cohabit within the same object.
However, both types of sacred space have accumulated an additional temporal
hypostasis attached to the heritage status. It is the ‘temporality of the historical mon-
ument’ that confirms, maintains and legitimizes the monument, or its heritage status
as such. This temporal coordinate is introduced in Brandi’s theory of restoration,
as already pointed out earlier. Adopting his arguments, Kovács also considers the
interval of past time to be necessary (but not sufficient), as it contributes to the for-
183 Eliade, The Sacred…, 69.

mation of cultural consensus regarding the completion of the monument’s process

of becoming: from now on, any further transformation cannot be but destructive.184
Thus, the recognition as heritage (or as a monument, in the terminology of Brandi
and Kovács) suggests an interruption of developmental time, a becoming that is now
consummated, and the introduction of a new temporality, an inactive and stagnant
time that no longer allows the destructive becoming. The intention is to detach and
to withdraw the everyday object endowed with heritage value from everyday tem-
porarily, assembling for it another, essentially utopian, temporality. Seen from this
perspective, the ‘materialization’ of this intention cannot be but heterotopic. The
temporality of the monument is an alternative time that, although inseparable and
included in our temporality of transformation and becoming, operates separately,
according to its own rules. This alternative time is an incomplete and intermediary
representation between the ideal/suspended and the active/real time as a delayed tem-
porality. Nevertheless, the development that consummates itself continues to exist
in a hybridized form in the object and fully in its entire context as against which
temporal alterity is defined. In its intention, this heritage time allows the cohabita-
tion of all temporalities attached to the object—including sacred temporality—and
essentially reflects the same desire regarding the material substance: the cohabitation
of all meaning layers conferred to the object by successive interventions and uses.
The heritage status thus emphasizes a heterotopic coordinate, the temporal enclave
of the object.
3.6.8 The Compensatory Role of Sacred Space
The sixth heterotopic principle raises the issue of the illusory and compensatory
function of heterotopia, which it can assume in relationship to its context. This func-
tion creates “a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of
which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory […], or else, on the contrary,
their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as metic-
ulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled”.185 Sacred
space appears in both of these hypostases as compensatory, having the function
to re-establish a disrupted order or balance and to remind the believer of the van-
ity of reality and the Edenic promise. According to Eliade, the establishment of a
new sacred space (through an epiphany/revelation or the designation of a centre as
axis mundi) involves a compensatory intention of introducing order and cancella-
tion of chaos (i.e., the ordering of the profane space).186 The same compensatory
role may be identified within the spatial structure of the church—in the ordering
and alignment of the spaces, each with its own well-defined function, specific rules,
184 Kovacs, Kazemer, Timpul monumentului istoric, ‘Spat, ii Imaginate’ series, Paideia, Bucures, ti,
2003, 124.
186 Eliade, M., The Sacred…, 21, 78.
and conditioning—and in the structure of the characteristic practice, i.e. the liturgi-
cal ritual, whose conduct—with its various stages and predetermined gestures and
speeches—is organized into a trajectory whose end (and finality) is both known and
assumed. Together, they compensate for the turmoil and uncertainty of everyday real-
ity. In the wooden churches, the interior painting contributes to this compensatory
function as an explicit mnemonic device. In the case of the Saxon stone churches,
the same mechanism is overturned: the absence of icons and the sobriety introduced
by the Reformation are meant to illustrate, without any intermediaries, the ‘per-
fect, meticulous, and well-ordered’ space, in contrast with, and compensating for,
the everyday/profane space. On the basis of this Foucaultian interpretation of the
‘compensation mechanism’, the sacred space also reveals an additional heterotopic
encoding: the modelling intention as an attribute of the utopia. Hence, its role goes
beyond compensation and completion of an ‘ill constructed’ (mal agencé) reality.187
It is rather re- and counterbalancing, similar to the gesture of establishing a sacred
space through revelation.
In conclusion, one of Ioan’s observations is worth mentioning. According to him,
compared to the western ‘sisters’, ‘the little churches of the Orthodox East’ fulfil
their function much more efficiently,188 harmonizing (juxtaposing) the two different
symbolic worlds, the sacred and the profane, in a radically different space. Seen from
the perspective of Augustin Ioan’s arguments, a final heterotopic principle may be
identified in the sacred space of the church: the attribute of the ship. Since Ioan sees
the developmental necessity of the church space, mandatory due to the projection of
tradition into the future,189 the church appears as a mobile microcosm, or as a Noah’s
ark.190 Although maintaining the prescribed ordering, it also ‘navigates’ through
time, reinventing its expressions and assuming different instances and even different
functions. In this interpretation, the heritage status fragments the object’s navigation
through time, seeking to conserve its individual defining framework as varied (spatial
and temporal) expressions of universal values (in this case, the conceptualization of
the sacred and the individual’s relationship to it).
The above analysis, based on the heterotopic coordinates, appears to be quite brief,
due to the complexity of its subject, i.e., sacred space. A more complex argument
can be found in the works of Augustin Ioan, opening up and developing the subject,
without systematically offering a potential heterotopic characterization in the sense
of Foucault’s definition. On the whole, nevertheless, the author constructs a solid
and diverse argumentation for the alterity of sacred space and its varied architectural
expressions, including the ones discussed above.

189 Via the architectural expression of retrofuturism, considered necessary for the contemporary
project.
190 For more on the Temple—as an architectural object and a symbolic manifestation—see Augustin
Ioan, Arhitectura în Biblie, chapter 2, 69–109, especially the first two subchapters (Templul s, i Casele
Regilor, Casele Zeilor, 71–99), in Întoarcerea în Spat, iul Sacru, ‘Spat, ii Imaginate’ series, Paideia,
Bucures, ti, 2004a.
3.6.9 The Sacred as an Enclave—The Monastery Cloister
A final formula of sacred space to be mentioned, the monastery cloister, although

not included among Foucault’s own examples of heterotopia, would nevertheless
deserve a more extensive analysis. The Romanian author Ioan Pânzaru proposes
such a reading, concentrating his analysis on the mediaeval monastery and offering
as a case study a discussion of Clairvaux Abbey from France. As a created object
and a cultural construct with its also constructed sets of relationships, “the mediaeval
monastery, derived from a foundational saga and armed with a normative text, is no
more a marginal case, identified through an analogy with the standard examples of
this concept, but the very archetype of Foucaultian heterotopia.”191 As a first het-
erotopic coordinate, the author mentions isolation and especially self-isolation, an
element common to all Foucaultian instances of heterotopia. Pânzaru then discusses
the delimitation from the symbolic and physical context, which does not, however,
turn into radical separation. The voluntary monastics are essentially part of normal,
‘outside’ society, in relation to which they choose to become different through iso-
lation. This relationship even appears as reversed if seen from the inside.192 The
author offers an interesting reading of the causal relationship associated with the
mediaeval monastic space. The gesture of isolation and the construction of a differ-
ent, sui generis physical space are essentially a response to the functioning of the
dominant ordering. Pânzaru actually introduces a subtle differentiation here between
the monastery as a negative heterotopia (with the minus sign in front), in the sense
that it does not produce (+) or provide a segregation, but is the result of an already
existing segregation in the context in which it is constituted. Moreover, considering to
the Foucaultian principle according to which the heterotopia suspends, neutralizes or
reverses its generating reality, context, and relationship network, Pânzaru reaches the
conclusion that the monastery that was created to shelter the segregation relationship
of mediaeval French society will finally function as a uniting mechanism.
From the point of view of the regulating and punitive mechanism, the monastery
(especially the Cistercian) corresponds to different prototypical models of hetero-
topic deviation, i.e. the psychiatric clinic/hospital and the prison, with which it is fre-
quently involved in a relationship of cohabitation, or even of determination. Pânzaru
succinctly points out their common coordinates: the (voluntary/forced) renunciation
to personal freedom, the absolute power relationship,193 the dilution of the individual
191 Pânzaru, Ioan, Le Monastère comme hétérotopie chez Bernard de Clairvaux, in Espaces et
mondes au Moyen Age, Actes du Colloque international tenu à Bucarest les 17–18 octobre 2008,
Editura Universităt, ii din Bucureşti, 2009, 123–135, published online at http://www.unibuc.ro/
prof/panzaru_i/Le_monastere_comme_heterotopie_chez_Bernard_de_Clairvaux.php, accessed in
September 2012. The original French quote: “[…] le monastère médiéval, issu d’une saga fonda-
trice et muni d’un texte régulateur, serait non plus un cas marginal, identifié par analogie avec les
exemples standard du concept, mais l’archétype même de l’hétérotopie foucaldienne”.
192 “It is not society that contains the monastery, but the monastery extends itself in such a vast [sym-
bolic and spiritual] space that society becomes fully contained in it.” Pânzaru, I., Le Monastère…
193 “In his treatise entitled De praecepto et dispensatione, where he teaches the Benedictines from
la Saint-Père de Chartres how to listen, Saint Bernhard emphasizes the absolute and unlimited
in a community body, the panoptic and punitive system, the strict regulation of the
internal relationship network and of the outside relations, etc. The author also notes
that, in its historical context, similarly to other monasteries of this period, Clairvaux
takes on a central and polarizing—social, political and, evidently, religious—role.
The ordering of the monastic space, deeply imprinted into the practice-dictated spa-
tial ordering of the built object, requires no further explanation. Moreover, we also
have the utopian encoding, also mentioned by Pânzaru, with the monastery as a
Jerusalem, an Eden and a sanctuary, as well as the materialization of an ideal order-
ing with a modelling objective of spiritual salvation and redemption of society’s sins.
Pânzaru’s discussion, especially in its conclusion, recalls Hetherington’s analysis of
heterotopias as laboratories of new social ordering. Animated by the Benedictine
ideal, the mediaeval Clairvaux Abbey functioned precisely as such a laboratory,
modelling and radically influencing the course of society.
Yet another interpretation, proposed by Dehaene and De Cauter, juxtaposes three
hypostases of the concept: heterotopia a space of sanctuary—the inviolable space
of refuge—in opposition to the extreme of the heterotopia of the concentration
camp—an “embodiment of the state of exception, the place of the ban, where the
law is suspended”,194 which stands, on its turn, in opposition also to the heterotopia
of the refugee camp—“a refuge from the state of exception […], a sheltered space in
which normality is reinstated or maintained”.195 On the one hand, the first hyposta-
sis reunites all the heterotopic characteristics at the superlative level, as a space
where all other spatial and temporal orderings are interrupted, implicitly formed as
an intermediary space between the public and the private. On the other hand, the
heterotopia of the camp represents an alternative ordering, in which the difference
between the public and the private is completely cancelled and deleted. This space no
longer mediates, but, on the contrary, attempts to ‘smooth out’ the actual otherness
contained in it.
3.7 Mediated Space: Between Public and the Private
Dehaene and De Cauter also address the economic and political aspect of heterotopic
space, or its relationships with the two extremes between which it is located, i.e. the
oikos and the agora. They emphasize that, although anti-economic in its nature—as
an interruption of the economic (and political) everyday life—the heterotopia also
carries this economic aspect, which can be (and often is) easily overlooked, since
“its economy lies outside the economical ‘interest’ or profit typically associated with
character of the abbot, who is an image of God.” Pânzaru, Ioan, Le Monastère comme hétéro-
topie…, Ed. Universităt, ii din Bucureşti, 2009, 123–135, published online on http://www.unibuc.ro/
prof/panzaru_i/Le_monastere_comme_heterotopie_chez_Bernard_de_Clairvaux.php, accessed in
September 2012.
the economical sphere”.196 In other words, their functioning is not motivated by the
material benefit, but rather “the public good”,197 as also noted by Hetherington and
Pânzaru. This is the source of the cultural nature of institutions and of the functions
chosen as examples: the museum and the library. Nevertheless, the authors also
notice the modern/contemporary process of the “economization of heterotopia or a
heterotopianization of the economy”198 through the forming of a cultural industry
and the proliferation of its associated economic services as an imposed interference
of culture and economy.
Regarding the economic functioning of these heterotopic spaces, Dehaene and
De Cauter also raise the issue of the users’ rights, returning to the tension between
the public and the private. Between these two extremes—contested public space and
close private space—there are many forms in which equilibrium, as well as states of
tension and indeterminacy, manifest themselves as forms of a simultaneously semi-
public and semiprivate space. The authors mention two such hypostasis categories
of space: local public spaces—accessible to a restricted public due to their location
(playground, utilities, etc.) and club-type spaces—both as conditionally accessible
spaces (with opening/closing mechanisms—e.g. gated communities, brotherhoods,
clubs) and as “spaces that accommodate all voluntary organizations and common
interest groups” (scouts, nongovernmental organizations, open access clubs).199 In a
similar interpretation, as an intermediary space between the public and the private,
the club as a heterotopic space also appears in an essay of Ciprian Mihali, as “a place
of separation, offering a different experience than that of production and consume of
objects or services in day-to-day life”.200 Here as well, the club is a space of refuge
(similar to the sacred), while also showing its heterotopic aspect (the heterotopia of
illusion and compensation) through the relationship with its contexts, the day-to-day
world that it reflects in a distorted manner, reinventing its mediocrity through excess.
Mihali proposes a reading of these spaces based on their assumed role as media of
social expression for ‘intermediary’ messages that cannot find their place anywhere
else but between the public (official) and the private (intimate). These intermediate
spaces thus take shape as outlets, created by, or coagulated around, the practice, and
especially the generating need, not satisfied by either pole (the public or the private)
due to their faulty (re)construction, particularly in post-socialist Romania. Mihali’s
case study, the clubs established in the underground spaces of buildings located in
the historical centre of Cluj, also enable a reading from the perspective of the het-
erotopia of heritage. These essentially private and reclusive spaces are transformed
through their re-functioning, especially for economic reasons, in parallel with the
lack of above-ground central space and also due to the attraction of the underground
as such, as a ‘city below the city’. The juxtaposition of functions and, implicitly,
197 Idem.
198 Idem.
199 Idem.
200 Mihali, Ciprian, The Right to Live in a Town, essay published online, IDEA, Issue 15–16, 2003,
http://idea.ro/revista/?q=en/node/41&articol=187, accessed on 6 December 2013.

3.7 Mediated Space: Between Public and the Private 217
of practices, as well as of opposite temporal hypostases (i.e. the ephemeral and the
accumulated time) in a temporal and spatial enclave with conditioned access, spe-
cific boundaries and access rituals, are all heterotopic coordinates that are reinforced
and confirmed by the ordering of heritage, although most often with radically dif-
ferent intentions. Although the re-functioning and the arrangement of these private
spaces as public and isolated in a different manner—with the partial conservation
of the restricted connections with the outside, public world, the hatches and supply
corridors—may perpetuate a conflictual situation, it can simultaneously also enable
their consistent use and, finally, even their conservation. The tension that defines
this intermediary space is part of the heterotopic functioning, in which the normal-
ization, or the resolution of the conflict would mean the cancelling of either the
heritage instance, through the radical transformation of space and its normalization
or absorption into the everyday at the expense of the original substance and of the
meanings accumulated over time, either at the expense of the practicing of the space,
via the reestablishment of the private status and of its isolation, and the cancelling
of its visibility and accessibility, which ultimately may engender a potential for sim-
ilar transformative interventions. This specific case of the cellars from the historical
centre of Cluj confirms the hypothesis of Dehaene and De Cauter: the heterotopic
functioning corresponds to the intermediary, semi-public and semiprivate status, the
defining coordinate of the heritage space.
This public–private relationship and the negotiation of the users’ rights are one of
the tension-creating coordinates within the heritage space in several hypostases, in
the form of the conflict generated by private property (individual/private) with public
protectionist interests and also its reverse, between the public interest (the instance
of the community) and the ‘private’ restriction of the protective (often muzeal) insti-
tution regarding the access to the protected object. The conflict situations resulting
from these public–private overlaps are most often ‘solutions’ of the tension, or the
tilting of the balance toward one of the two poles, with negative impact on the built
heritage object. One example is the already notorious ‘rehabilitation’ of the Râs, nov
fortress (between 2002 and 2007)201 with its series of inadequate interventions (with
the deliberate loss/destruction of the original substance, additions not based on the
argument of pre-existence, interventions without the mandatory archaeological dis-
charge, or not complying with the laws for construction safety, etc.)—as an essentially
private initiative, initially implemented in the absence, or with the tacit agreement
of the official public institutions, and subsequently in spite of the public commu-
nity reaction.202 While the involved poles were clearly established in the first stage
of this negotiation, also supported by the argument of the ‘foreign investor’, the
boundaries have become more blurred during the subsequent development. A series
of interventions from this stage (entering the fortress with racks, the building of
201 For addtional details, see Radu Lupescu’s essay published online: http://www.cetati.medievistica.
ro/pagini/Castelani/texte/Rasnov_Lupescu/Rasnov.htm, accessed on 14 March 2014.

202 Castellology Camp 6–19 July 2009, Râşnov Castle, Râsnov City Hall, and History Department
,
of the 1 December 1918 University of Alba Iulia; interventions of the ‘castellological’ community,
published online on the website medievistica.ro.
a theme park in the immediate vicinity of the heritage object, the continuation of
previous inadequate interventions, etc.) reflects precisely this ambiguity, revealing
a hidden neo-liberal mechanism behind the protectionist discourse. Thus, although
the discourse that characterizes this second phase is permanently reported as positive
compared to the previous phase, the interventions that are implemented are of the
same nature, affecting the immediate image of the protected architectural ensemble
and its conservation state, as the amenities that are foreign to the character of the
architectural ensemble contradict the idea of the protected context and of the cultural
landscape, while the rehabilitation interventions of the typecasting nature produce
an effect of uniformization (similar to the case of the historical centres rehabili-
tated according to the ‘recipe’), alongside the ‘labelling’ with capital letters, as it is
applied to certain cities and other objectives (Bras, ov, Deva)—an almost ad litteram
application of the commodification process.
The ordering of heritageization may be interpreted as a legitimation formula for
the intermediary character of the space. Through its regulating structure, it consol-
idates the public/private hybrid and (at least theoretically) enables the further use
of the space (its traditional use in an altered form, or new kinds of uses), as well
as the conservation of the accumulated meanings. The case of the Râs, nov fortress
and other similar examples from the national and international domain present the
effects of the dilution of that intermediary status in favour of one of the two poles.
Although its status continues to be protected (as well as a symbol of the accumulated
multiple meanings), the object begins to function increasingly as a private space. The
decisions affecting it belong to a single authority and are insufficiently (or not at all)
filtered through the collective (public) perspective. The heritage object is handled as
a private, exploitable resource and it is the private authority that finally sets the limits
of this exploitation (beyond and despite the specific jurisdiction)—most frequently
at the expense of the state of conservation and of the monument’s authenticity. As
a ‘reversed’ example, one could invoke the (previously discussed) restoration the
Dutch Rijksmuseum. In this case, the involvement of the community has modelled
the profile of the entire process, and especially of the adopted solution, imposing the
value hierarchy of the community (an identity expressed through a certain lifestyle),
and thus of the public, at the expense of the institutional, private one. The lengthening
of the decision process and of the intervention itself, the search for an alternative
solution, and the repeated consultation of the community signal the existence of the
mediation process between the two perspectives.
3.8 The Cultural Economy and Its Effects on Heritage.

Between Public and Private
Still, the intermediary character of space, oscillating between public and private, may
be considered as inherent to the heritage space, as the result of the juxtaposition of
meaning layers. The multifaceted character of heritage enables it to carry different,
3.8 The Cultural Economy and Its Effects on Heritage … 219
often contradictory and competitive stakes, both for the public and the private domain.
The very plurality of the (sometimes even divergent) definitions attributed to her-
itage reflects the multitude of perspectives of its reading and the variety of the agents,
both public and private, who operate with it. The economic reading of heritage, espe-
cially of built heritage, represents one of these perspectives, which is nothing new,203
involving precisely the issue of the public–private relationship. Ashworth identifies
this plural nature of heritage as essential and defining, proposing for it an economic
interpretation (heritage as ‘consumable experience’, a contemporary product for con-
temporary needs, and not a group of objects or sites).204 As Michael Watts notes, “in
the name of development, culture must be instrumentalized”, a process he terms as
the “economization of culture”.205 For Ashworth, heritage is “produced by multiple
agencies in the public and private sectors for multiple objectives, conveyed through
multiple media, and consumed for multiple reasons”,206 most often accumulating in
an overload of the heritage-place/objective through “the multi-use often of the same
resources, even at the same location; the multi-consumption of diverse heritages,
produced by diverse agencies, by different consumers for different purposes; and the
polyvocality of the messages being conveyed and received”.207 Even in this interpre-
tation of the concept of the production/consumption-type heritage process, plurality
and the public/private negotiation appear as its defining coordinates. According to
Ashworth, the commonly accepted heritage concept is thus overturned: we now have
“a place [that] has many possible heritages, which may be experienced [for produc-
tion and heritageization purposes] by different consumers”,208 and not a heritage
place that, through its juxtaposition of meaning layers, allows multiple readings
of multiple ‘readers’—a perspective concentrated on the object as receptacle and
on its symbolic encoding. According to the perspective proposed by Ashworth, the
object carries significance only in its capacity of sustaining the production and con-
203 This study area is mentioned under several different names—cultural economy, economy of cul-
ture, economy of arts and human economy. It began to be outlined as an autonomous field of research
at the end of the 60s in America. “Cultural economics deal with the entire cultural spectrum: perfor-
mances (opera, ballet, concerts, theatres), cultural industries (edition, television, cinema, records),
museums, art galleries, festivals, exhibitions, visual arts (painting, sculptures), and cultural built her-
itage.” The analyses focused on the latter first emerged only in the 80s, through publications “with
an accent on the economic effects of conservation and rehabilitation, often with a strong financial
taste”. Report on Economics of Conservation. An appraisal of Theories, principles and methods,
Christian Ost, Nathalie Van Droogenbroeck, Centre for economic research SIEGE, ICHEC Brus-
sels Business School, ICOMOS—International Economic Committee, December, 1998, paragraphs
4–7.
204 Ashworth, G. J., Heritage and Economic Development: Selling the Unsellable, in Heritage and
Society, Vol. 7, No. 1, May, 2014, 3–17, https://doi.org/10.1179/2159032x14z.00000000015, 6.

205 Watts, Michael, Culture, development, and global neo-liberalism, in Culture and Development in
a Globalizing World. Geographies, actors, and paradigms, 30–57, ed. Sarah A. Radcliffe, Routledge,
2006, digitally republished for Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006, 30.
206 Ashworth, G. J., Heritage and Economic Development…, in Heritage and Society, Vol. 7, No.
1, May, 2014, 3–17, https://doi.org/10.1179/2159032x14z.00000000015, 12.

207 Ashworth, G. J., Heritage…, 12.
sumption of heritage products/services and ‘experiences’, with its authenticity finally

becoming irrelevant. Moreover, if it is freely ‘consumed’ (in the form of complex
landscapes, historical centres, façades, urban structures, etc.), or “can be experienced
by residents, investors or visitors, who reap a “dividend” (Ashworth 2008), without
incurring direct cost”,209 and who only spend money (“the direct costs of selection,
maintenance, accommodating collections, promotion, interpretation, marketing and
consumer site-management”),210 the heritage object is seen as an obstacle to devel-
opment211 due to its strict protectionist regulation. Nevertheless, he perceives the
theming, or branding, of cultural heritage as negative, due to the deliberate cancella-
tion of heterogeneity (or plurality), through which “the subtlety and diversity of local
cultures is lost as particular expressions of diverse local heritages are promoted at the
expense of all the rest”—212 a process that belongs to the model of consumer society
and that is, in itself, a commodification strategy. Although Ashworth’s arguments
gravitate around this absolute commodification of the heritage product, minimizing
and even cancelling the role of ‘real’ (material, movable or immovable) authenticity
in favour of the heritage experience,213 he also captures the presence of the pub-
lic/private hybrid in the multiple roles attributed to the heritage place: as a basic

210 Ashworth, Heritage…, 13.
211 Conservation and protection seen as an ‘additional cost’ involved by heritage—a perspective that
is especially characteristic, according to Bewley and Maeer, to those outside the heritage sector.
Bewley, Robert, Maeer, Gareth, Heritage and Economy: Perspectives from Recent Heritage Lottery
Fund Research, Public Archaeology, Vol. 13, Nr. 1–3, 2014, 240–49, W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2014,
https://doi.org/10.1179/1465518714Z.00000000063, 241.
213 This terms denotes a process subsidiary to the commodification of culture (and heritage) and to
the phenomenon of mass tourism, already hinted at in the 70s (Adorno) and increasingly emphasized
in toward the late 80s (Hewison), in order to be finally implied in and attached to any contact with
heritage; the heritage experience presupposes the shifting of the centre of gravity of the perception
and the internalization process of heritage (and culture): ‘real’ authenticity is substituted by the
authentic experience, in which “the authenticator is the end user” (Ashworth, op. cit., 9). Such
a reading of heritage (as well as of culture) is no longer about the object/meaning, but about the
spectator and his/her emotions, experiences and pleasure. Such an experience, which is commodified
for consumption, thus represents a staged or created authenticity that is also read accordingly; or,
as Hannabuss puts it, the receivers “know all the time (but are prepared to pretend not) that the
authenticity of the tourist experience is likely to be bogus”. According to Hannabus, this ambivalence
represents a postmodern conditioning, whose economic impact is generally positive, but its effects
on heritage are rather negative, manifested in phenomena such as theming (uniformization and
simplification), branding (simplification), super-hierarchization (the exceptional and the authentic
remove their competitors from the scene), and 2-h tourism (superficiality, collecting, and consuming
images at the expense of reading and internalizing meanings), etc. Even where real authenticity
exists, this kind of consumption imposes its ‘packaging’, in order to be recognized as such, and its
doubling (or even replacement) with the created experience. Going even further, Wang identifies
three kinds of authenticity related to the touristic experience (objective, constructive and existential
authenticity—as “a justifiable alternative source for authentic experiences in tourism”, p. 365.).
Adorno, T., The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, Routledge, London, 2001
(republishing texts written between 1972 and 1981); Ashworth, G. J., Heritage and Economic
Development: Selling the Unsellable, in Heritage and Society, Vol. 7, No. 1, May, 2014, 3–17, https://
doi.org/10.1179/2159032x14z.00000000015, Hannabuss, Stuart, Postmodernism and the heritage
resource for “economic enterprises producing heritage products, often as part of a

wider set of creative cultural industries producing heritage goods and services for
sale”214 ; the role of providing attractive/repulsive potential to an environment, moti-
vating the locating of individuals as potential residents, as well as of companies; the
constituent role in the identity of the place and, through transfer, also in the identities
of the involved parties, i.e. individuals, communities and companies; the lead role
in the branding strategies, thus exceeding the local level and involving additional
agents (both from the public and the private domain); the role of heritage in local
generally urban regeneration and rehabilitation strategies, introducing new activities
and functions, “many of which have little or nothing to do with heritage”.215 Ash-
worth defines heritage as “an ideal economic resource [non-finite and with unlimited
resale capacity] and [a frequent] component of many development strategies”,216 as
well as a resource from which a relatively high level of productivity and benefit is
legitimately expected, in the author’s opinion. This equivalence between heritage and
marketable goods is an extreme neo-liberal interpretation, reducing the objective of
protection to the economic aspect, which thus appears as the only means to validate
the existence of heritage.
However antagonistic, reductive and negative Ashworth’s approach might seem,
it is inevitably associated with the heritage object, especially in the contemporary
context. The reading of heritage is certainly defined by its spatial and temporal con-
text, and the perceived heritage (selected, restored and conserved, interpreted and
presented) is essentially a construct or a cultural creation (cf. the concept of imag-
ined pasts)217 that is automatically subjective and incomplete, through which we
as a society assemble, via (selective) reflection, our own identity. Precisely because
we have this conscience of subjectivity, the procedure should be led by the actual
definition of heritage, rejected by the author from the very start, as an “expression
of timeless, universal, immutable values”.218 Even if this approach might some-
times enable (political, economic, ideological, etc.) diversions—the initial motiva-
tions being obscured by other interests219 —of the heritageization procedure, due to
its assumed subjectivity, it nevertheless maintains its idealistic, utopian aura.
experience, in Library Management, Vol. 20, Iss: 5, 295–303, Emerald Group Publishing, Limited,
1999; Wang, Ning, Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism Experience, in Annals of Tourism Research,
Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 349–370, 1999, https://doi.org/10.1016/s0160-7383(98)00103-0.
216 Idem.
219 Delafons, John, Politics and Preservation. A Policy History of the Built Heritage, 1882–1996, E.
& F. N. Spon—Chapman & Hall, London, 1997, online edition, Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005,
1.
3.8.1 Conservation Versus Economic Neo-liberalism
The opposite approach, based on the principles of neo-liberal economy, completely

eliminates this ideal. Here, the exploitation of the cultural product and the calculated
obtaining of ‘dividends’ conditions the very existence of heritage, accompanied by
a completely unapologetic discourse. The differences between this development and
exploitation of heritage and the industrialization of heritage condemned by Hewi-
son in the late 80s220 lie partially at the discursive level and in the variety of the
exploitable sources, significantly more numerous today. The importance attached to
the original substance and to authenticity, the application of strict protectionist norms
(seemingly only against development, as suggested by Ashworth), and even the steps
taken toward identifying and recognizing the many expressions of these values, or
the attempt to ‘distribute’ this heritage equally and democratically, through represen-
tative lists—all these factors demonstrate that heritage is, and should be, more than
a mere commodity. The tension identified by Ashworth between the protectionist
approach and development defines the contemporary dominant attitude toward the
heritage object that is considered either an exploitable resource or a “barrier to devel-
opment”.221 In both cases, the heritage object becomes vulnerable, either exposed
to degradation through “exploitation, overexploitation, and over-commoditization to
the detriment of conservation and survival”,222 with interventions aimed at increas-
ing its commercial potential (e.g. typecasting restorations, reconstructions aimed at
maximizing the available space, the exposure to trends,223 or to the changing tastes
of the consuming public), most often sacrificing integrity, original substance, image
and authenticity in favour of the expected benefits, or exposed to degradation, due to
the failure to recognize values, as well as to the absence of conservation interventions
(abandonment and intentional destruction).
Nevertheless, the polarity discussed by Ashworth is not always fixed and clearly
defined. As Zan notes on the basis of a reverse analysis (from ‘terrain’ toward
theory), the conservation/restoration/valorization intervention, considered as posi-
tive according to all canons—as a soft re-functionalization, in accordance with the
restoration–conservation principles, and as the model preservation of the architec-
tural form—may act contrarily, “[…] destroying the social fabric while preserving the
buildings and the material structure […]”, while an artificial reconstruction (replica)
may draw away mass tourism, decreasing the pressure on the sensitive area and thus,
finally, acting as an efficient protective measure for the preservation of the heritage
220 Vezi Hewison, R., The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline, Methuen, Londra,
1987.
222 Zan, Lucca, Economic Discourse and Heritage Conservation: Towards an Ethnography of
Administrations, Heritage and society, Vol. 6, No. 2, November 2013, 167–184, 173, apud. Caddi-
son, A.C., Disappearing World. Collins, London, 2007.
site (“while leaving substantially untouched (not visited) the old part of the village,
where old social and economic activities still go on.”).224
In the contemporary context, the activation of heritage with economic purposes
appears as a universal solution within the development strategies. Heritage is increas-
ingly often judged in economic terms, as a result of the approach aimed at attaching
a ‘palpable’ value to it and at quantifying its impact. Additionally, there is the even
more pragmatic attempt at determining whether the conservation/restoration inter-
vention is ‘worth it’ from a financial perspective (involving, again, the cost–benefit
analysis), placing heritage in a direct competitive relationship with new projects. The
principle of sustainability, involving energy efficiency certificates (viz. the building’s
carbon footprint) also contributes to this competition, in spite of these systems (i.e.
the LEED standard)225 constantly trying to adapt their criteria to the requirements
pointed out by the preservationist approach.
The economic approach puts the heritage object under the same umbrella as the
everyday one, comparing (through various methodologies derived from the economic
domain) their potential developmental contribution. However, all these factors rele-
gate to the background the very objective of conservation as such (i.e. the transmis-
sion of a heritage of meaning), simply because of the impossibility to evaluate and
quantify this set of intangible values (or non-use values) in an economic language.
As Mason observes, “historic preservation is typically judged to be a sound invest-
ment”226 that is generally (albeit not necessarily)227 more profitable than a new con-
224 Zan, L., Economic Discourse and Heritage Conservation: Towards an Ethnography of Admin-
istrations, heritage and society, Vol. 6, No. 2, November 2013, 167–184, 175.
225 For example, the evaluation criteria of LEED offer a certain amount of points for recycling the
materials of a building. Thus, buildings with historical value may obtain a higher score, for instance,
by replacing the original wooden floor with a new bamboo floor, since the growth rate of bamboo
positions it close to the standard of easily recyclable resources. Hence, the criterion acts against
conservation, in spite of the positive intention of minimizing the environmental impact. This argu-
ment is mentioned, along with other inconsistencies of the relationship between sustainability and
conservation, at the conference For the Greener Good. Historic Preservation versus Sustainability
(speakers: Maria Casarella, AIA, Cunningham, Quill Architects; Anna Dyson, director, Center for
Architecture Science and Ecology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Skidmore, Owings and
Merrill; Martin Moeller, senior vice president, National Building Museum (moderator), Brendan
Owens, Vice President LEED Technical Development, U.S. Green Building Council; Eleni Reed,
Chief Greening Officer, Public Buildings Service, U.S. General Services Administration) 24 March
2011, National Building Museum, https://youtu.be/awFBEQawGDs, accessed in May 2015.
226 Mason, Randall, Economics and Historic Preservation: A Guide and Review of the Literature
(A Discussion Paper Prepared for the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program), The
Brookings Institution, 2005, Executive Summary.
227 Mason, R., Economics and Historic Preservation: A Guide and Review of the Literature, The
Brookings Institution, 2005, 5–6. However, as proven by the contemporary evolution especially in
fringe spaces of the EU, including Romania, a new construction is increasingly perceived to be the
more feasible and economically profitable option, despite the numerous advantages of reutilization.
In the Romanian territory, this trend is the direct result of a construction upsurge, after the 2008
crisis; rehabilitation and restoration of a heritage object has come to be perceived as cumbersome,
more expensive and less profitable in comparison to the more facile, less problematic authorization
process of a new construction—especially given that the ‘best-selling’ product is the residential
apartment building.
struction,228 with generally positive direct and indirect effects on the economy.229
The rehabilitation of built heritage continues to be used as leverage in the revival of
historic centres (as a trigger of the gentrification process), in spite of the negative
secondary effects: the substitution of traditional everyday life with the seasonal and
trend-dependent fluctuation of tourism, “effects of displacement (imbalanced labour
market, reduced profitability for some of the companies from the area, etc.), the wear
of heritage elements due to the access of visitors and the necessity of infrastructural
investments (in order to provide adequate services to the tourists drawn into the
cultural heritage area)”.230 However, the positive generalizing hypothesis outlined
by Mason is destabilized by alternative developments, as in the alarming case of
the monument buildings of Bucharest, deliberately abandoned in order to recover
and maximize the economic potential of the land. The mechanism is not new: the
depreciation of the building almost always results in the declassification of the object
(considered to have lost its value), and the process ends with its demolition and the
clearing of the land. This phenomenon has aroused strong reactions in the specialized
academic sector as well as in the media, leading to the implementation of several
mapping and documentation, media coverage and even restoration projects.231 In
spite of the increasing prominence of the arguments supporting preservation in the
media and in the (physical and virtual) public space, the general orientation is, for
the time being, more favourable to new interventions than to conservation.
Hence, Mason also notes the adversarial and tension-generating aspect of this
hybrid public–private character, as heritage (and its preservation, as a process) rep-
resents both symbolic meanings and values (cultural significance, aesthetic and his-
torical values, the spirit of the place, identity, etc., as a humanistic perspective on
value232 ), associated with the public sphere, as well as economic values, along-
side derived goods and services, with the capacity of producing “measurable, often
228 This position is also supported by Donovan D. Rypkema in his many lectures.
229 Mason, R., Economics…
230 Iorgulescu, Filip, Alexandru, Felicia, Creţan, Georgiana Camelia, Kagitci, Meral, Iacob, Mihaela,
Abordări privind evaluarea şi valorificarea patrimoniului cultural, 13–31, in Economie teoretică şi
aplicată, Volumul XVIII, No. 12(565), 2011, 18–19.
231 The ‘Case care plâng’ (Crying Houses) project, initiated independently in 2006 by third-
year architecture student Loredana Brumă (Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanis-
m—UAUIM, Bucharest) and by the Rhabillage team, an association established in order to support
the project, had a major impact, increasing the visibility and even managing the restoration of a
heritage that was extremely exposed due to the housing market of the Romanian capital. The ini-
tiative was later backed by a mirror project, ‘Case care nu mai plâng’ (Houses that are no Longer
Crying), the presentation and mediatization of the successful projects, according to the principle of
the ‘good practice model’, in order to raise awareness about the rehabilitation/restoration process
and about the positive impact of the recovery of this heritage. Nevertheless, the guidelines prepared
by the association also illustrate the general Romanian attitude toward this type of intervention; as
market analyst Adrian Prisnel put it: “It is no longer profitable to renovate. It is easier to build from
scratch, since there are no uncertainties and the execution risk is lower.” Ghidul RePAD, Asociat, ia
Rhabillage, Imprimeria Arta Grafică, Bucures, ti, 2013, 101–102.
232 Throsby, David, Economic and Cultural Value in the Work of Creative Artists, 26–31, in Values
and Heritage Conservation. Research Report, eds. Erica Avrami, Randall Mason, Marta de la Torre,
The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, 2000, 28.
subsidiary benefits which are expressible as market values”,233 most often associ-
ated with the private sphere. Built heritage can be read as a common good, “non-
competitive and non-exclusive in its use”, with free access and external or secondary
effects, in the benefit of a wide public and maintained at the community level (depen-
dent on public funds).234 A similar reading is proposed by Basilico, according to
whom heritage is “a common resource, accessible to everyone, with the same enti-
tlement as air, or public circulation space, briefly, as a ‘universal public good’”,235 in
an interpretation that almost immediately allows the identification of the public–pri-
vate conflict of heritage. At the same time, the built heritage is also a private good,
generating direct and quantifiable use values (tourism, performing arts, education,
etc.). As a public good, it generates very diverse and hardly measurable values, e.g.
aesthetic, spiritual, social and historic, authenticity value, “altruistic feelings asso-
ciated with the knowledge that other people may enjoy cultural heritage”, or “the
desire to conserve cultural goods for future generations”.236 The solution generally
proposed by the preservationist community is mixing237 and finding the balance
between the two sets of values, i.e. the economic and the symbolic preservation-
ist. Increasingly more evaluation methods are adopted to this end (the method of
the declared and the demonstrated preference, such as the method of contingency
value),238 in order to economically quantify the symbolically unquantifiable. At the
same time, this approach may also be interpreted as an attempt to ‘translate’ alter-
ity (i.e. the symbolical within an economic context) into the dominant (economic)
233 Mason, R., Economics and…, 2.

234 The assessment of the heritage object’s value exclusively in economic terms and the dependence
of a large category of such objects on the financial support of the state render heritage extremely
vulnerable to “many destructive development projects [that] are implemented on the grounds that
they appear to generate higher financial benefits.” Mourato, Susana and Mazzanti, Massimiliano,
Economic Valuation of Cultural Heritage: Evidence and Prospects, 51–76, in Assessing the Values
of Cultural Heritage. Research Report, ed. de la Torre, Marta, The Getty Conservation Institute,
Los Angeles, USA, The J. Paul Getty Trust, 2002, 53, 54.
235 Basilico, Sandrine, Redefinir le Patrimoine culturel à l’heure de la globalisation. Des cultures
et des Hommes. Clefs anthropologiques pour la mondialisation, L’harmattan, Collection Logiques

sociales, 15 pp., 2005, 5. Original quote: “définir le patrimoine comme une ressource commune,
accessible à tous, au même titre que l’air ou l’espace public de circulation, bref comme un «bien
public mondial»”.
236 Mourato, Susana and Mazzanti, Massimiliano, Economic Valuation of Cultural Heritage: Evi-
dence and Prospects, 51–76, in Assessing the Values of Cultural Heritage. Research Report, ed.
de la Torre, Marta, The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, USA, The J. Paul Getty Trust,
2002, 51.
237 Bewley, R., Maeer, G., Heritage and Economy: Perspectives from Recent Heritage Lottery Fund
Research, Public Archaeology, Vol. 13, Nr. 1–3, 2014, 240–49, W. S. Maney & Son Ltd. 2014,
https://doi.org/10.1179/1465518714Z.00000000063, 244.
238 Co-authors Mourato and Mazzanti review the methods of these two categories—on the one hand,
the methods of revealed preference/what an individual does in a specific context: the method of
hedonic prices, transportation costs, and maintenance costs, and on the other hand, the methods of
stated preference/what an individual declares that he or she would do in a specific context: the method
of contingent value and choice modelling. Mourato, S., Mazzanti, M., Economic Valuation…, 52.
terminology, as also noticed by Throsby in the very definition of cultural goods239

that distance themselves, through the values they represent, from the usual economic
goods. Hence,
[…] neglecting to take into account the economic value of cultural heritage conservation and
the full costs and benefits of policies, regulations, and projects with cultural components can
lead to suboptimal allocation of resources in the sector, investment failure, and continuous
degradation of the world’s cultural assets. Clearly, these are complex issues that need to
go beyond the financial aspects and be understood in the wider context of raising adequate
financing for conservation and renewal, while, at the same time, reaching out and encouraging
a demand to visit and appreciate cultural heritage.240
In other words, the two approaches can and should coexist, at least from the per-
spective of the preservationist community—the same relationship being also trans-
ferred in the binomial pair of conservation versus development, generally viewed as
antagonistic. The same attitude was already adopted in the late 90s by the ICOMOS
organization: “the necessity of attributing an economic value to things can be jus-
tified, it remains that, particularly in the case of CBH [cultural built heritage], the
economic view is complementary to the others, and only contributes to the global
picture of CBH”.241 A review of these methods, specific for the economic domain
within the sphere of heritage, can be found in Iorgulescu et al.,242 while their detailed
presentation—along with structuring models for the analyses, methodologies, cri-
teria and international examples of implementation—is contained in the Report on
Economics of Preservation—ICOMOS (1998)243 and in the now unanimously rec-
ognized collective volumes edited by Avrami-Mason-de la Torre.244
In the conclusion of Ashworth’s argumentation, his answer to the question whether
we should ‘sell the past’ is limited to an economic cost–benefit analysis, completely
eliminating the ethical issues and the weight of the cultural/symbolic value. The
heterotopic argument, as interpreted by co-authors Dehaene and De Cauter, may
outline an answer here: the tension between conservation and development, “[…]
239 Throsby, David, Economic and Cultural Value in the Work of Creative Artists, 26–31, in Values
and Heritage Conservation. Research Report, eds. Erica Avrami, Randall Mason, Marta de la Torre,
The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, 2000, 26.
240 Mourato, S., Mazzanti, M., Economic Valuation…, 52.
241 Report on Economics of Conservation. An appraisal of Theories, principles and methods, Part
1, 1.1., Introducing economics of conservation, ed. Christian Ost, Nathalie Van Droogenbroeck,
Centre for economic research SIEGE, ICHEC Brussels Business School, ICOMOS—International
Economic Comitee, December 1998, paragraph 23.
242 Iorgulescu, Filip, Alexandru, Felicia, Creţan, Georgiana Camelia, Kagitci, Meral, Iacob, Mihaela,
Abordări privind evaluarea şi valorificarea patrimoniului cultural, in Economie teoretică şi aplicată,
Vol. XVIII, No. 12(565), 2011, 13–31.
243 Report on Economics of Conservation. An Appraisal of Theories, Principles and Methods, ed.
Christian Ost, Nathalie Van Droogenbroeck, Centre for economic research SIEGE, ICHEC Brussels
Business School, ICOMOS—International Economic Comitee, December 1998.
244 Assessing the Values of Cultural Heritage. Research Report, ed. de la Torre, Marta, The Getty
Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, USA, The J. Paul Getty Trust, 2002, respectively Values and
Heritage Conservation. Research Report, eds. Avrami, Erica, Mason, Randall, and de la Torre,
Marta, The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, USA, The J. Paul Getty Trust, 2000.
a difficult trade-off between preserving and using, a sort of compromise between

different imperatives”,245 in which both options may lead to negative extremes for
the tangible as well as for the intangible heritage, may not be resolved by tilting the
balance toward one of the two poles. The removal of the idealizing desiderata and
the strict preservationist regulation, the heritage object of the neo-liberal economic
development loses its meaning and becomes instantly replaceable with any other
contemporary construct, packaged and presented under the attractive heading of
heritage value. Museification or the ‘freezing’ of the heritage object represents an
extreme case of the implementation of protective regulation. The conservation of
the object, even with the activation of the entire arsenal of restrictions, allows its
valorization, although it can reduce its breadth/scale and efficiency. A possible answer
might be identified in the strengthening of the intermediary character, as the hybrid
carries the characteristics of both the public and the private good, albeit within the
limits that condition the existence of the object (i.e. the preservationist norms).
In his analysis of the economic interests converging around the heritage space,
Ashworth—similarly to Throsby246 —finds that the existence of this ongoing negoti-
ation between the public and the private reflects the intermediary (and, according to
Dehaene s, i De Cauter, also heterotopic) character of heritage. Although both authors
identify in it the main source of the evaluation difficulties, Ashworth supports the
polarization toward the economic—the private evaluation of the necessary heritage
object, which will be subsequently also reflected in its exploitation/valorization pro-
cess. At the same time, Thornsby argues that the value carried by heritage is emphati-
cally multidimensional, with the consequence of “[…] expose the futility of attempt-
ing to reduce cultural value to a single economic measure […]”,247 suggesting the
need for the separate evaluation of these two polarities whenever the evaluation of
these hybrid goods is considered.
3.9 The Political Function of Heritage—The Mediator

Character of Heterotopia
According to Dehaene and De Cauter, the intermediary position and mediating role
define the heterotopia in its relationship with the economic (oikos) and the political
(agora) pole. Symmetrically to the economic, the heterotopic space is also endowed
with this political aspect, although, prima facie, it may appear as being outside
the political, as its enclave or interruption. This a-political image of heritage is
245 Zan,L., Economic Discourse…, 174.

246 “Inmost cases, cultural commodities occur as mixed goods, possessing both private-good and
public-good characteristics. In such circumstances, the difficulties in arriving at an economic value of
the good within the theoretical confines of the neo-classical economic paradigm are compounded.”,
Thornsby, D., Economic and Cultural Value in the Work of Creative Artists, 26–31, in Values and
Heritage Conservation. Research Report, eds. Erica Avrami, Randall Mason, Marta de la Torre, The
Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, 2000, 28.
247 Thornsby, D., Economic and Cultural Value…, 29.
increasingly diluted, even in the approaches of scientific conservation, where the

heritage object is most often viewed in an abstracted manner, from the perspective
of its constituent techniques and materials.
The heterotopic space, defined between these two poles of oikos and agora,
remains to be looked for in the polis, most often considered as a political organism.
Here, it is worth mentioning how, for Virilio, although he prioritizes the relationship
with the armed conflict, politics is primarily about the polis, and the polis is essen-
tially defined by the political: “[T]he relation to the city, for me, is immediately a
relation to politics. Furthermore, urbanist and politician, etymologically speaking,
are the same thing”.248 Thus, “all human geography is ultimately a product of war-
fare, because space is always imagined as the zones of defensive barriers and/or
offensive operations”.249 The limit and the delimitation, the enclosure or the bar-
rier defining the occupation and appropriation of space by human society appear
as expressions of “different orders of military power, knowledge and technological
organization”250 in Virilio’s interpretation. Considering this approach, the polis, in
all its forms and components, is a political and economic construct. But where is
then the place of the heterotopic space, defined by Dehaene and De Cauter, as a-
political, infra-political, para-political and proto-political? If the polis is political,
then heterotopia may occupy the interstitial and marginal, or ‘subterranean’ spaces
(‘below the polis’). Nevertheless, Dehaene and De Cauter identify it within the polis,
as functioning simultaneously with it and interwoven with the space of the everyday.
Heterotopia thus appears as an enclave within and constantly (re)defining itself with
reference to the political, constituting itself as an alterity in relation to it, while, at the
same time, also using its techniques. As confirmed by the Foucaultian definition, the
heterotopic ordering develops as an alternative to the official (dominant) ordering,
with reference to which it defines its coordinates.
Dehaene and De Cauter identify, from the social perspective, a series of roles
that constitute the political nature of heterotopia as “para-political, proto-political,
or infra-political”, i.e. “experimental terrains where ‘special societies’ gather their
forces to maybe one day break ground in the full daylight of the ‘space of appear-
ance’”,251 —into visibility and normality, or into the dominant ordering. Thus, het-
erotopia is constituted—according to Dehaene and De Cauter—by the multitude of
spaces defined as tertiary or ‘the third sphere’, “besides, outside and in between
the public (political) and the private (economical) sphere”,252 and especially through
all the connections between these two poles, producing additional hybridizations
248 Virilio,
P. and Lotringer, S. Pure War, New York: Semiotexte, 1983, 2–3, apud Luke, Tim, O
Tuathail, Gearóid, THINKING GEOPOLITICAL SPACE, The spatiality of war, speed and vision
in the work of Paul Virilio, in Crang, Thrift, Thinking space, 360–379, Routhledge, London, 2000,
361–2.
249 Luke, Tim, O Tuathail, Gearóid, THINKING GEOPOLITICAL SPACE, The spatiality of war,
speed and vision in the work of Paul Virilio, în Crang, Thrift, Thinking space, 360–379, Routhledge,
London, 2000, 365.
250 Luke, O Tuathail, Thinking Geopolitical Space…, 365.
3.9 The Political Function of Heritage—The Mediator Character … 229
of the heterotopic spaces. Seen from the heritage perspective, this preservationist
ordering is, in spite of the visibility that is gained, an alternative one, opposed to the
dominant ordering. As also demonstrated by the previous discussion of the economic
argument, this preservationist ordering is located inside (and even at the epicentre)
of the dominant ordering, as the set of relationships between the two is not only
diverse, but pluri-directional. The preservationist ordering may be viewed as a chal-
lenge to the dominant, neo-liberal, essentially political and economic, ordering, since
its approach often contradicts the objectives of the latter (development at any price,
economic profit, the maintenance of economic disparities, heritage ‘elitization’, etc.).
As previously argued in the case of the economic, the preservationist ordering adopts
the instruments and techniques of the political in order to construct itself and to func-
tion within the dominant ordering. Nevertheless, the dominant ordering often hijacks
the preservationist ordering, mainly (but not exclusively) through discourse.
The political aspect of the heritage space, similarly to its economic side, outlined
above, represents in itself a fertile research area with many angles of approach. The
political role of the heritage, and especially of the built heritage object, oscillates
between the ritualistic and the polarizing aspect (i.e. the construction of identities
and communities) and its function as background and instrument of ideological
constructs, as well as, generally, its role as a source of political capital. The historical
approach—the coagulation of protectionist policies and their particular developments
on the international, national, and even regional level—represents a starting point for
the discerning of the relationship of the political to heritage.253 Here, I will propose
a summary approach to this relation between the heritage and the political, in order
to identify its heterotopic nature.
This triad (para-political, proto-political or infra-political), characteristic for the
heterotopic space, may be conceived within the heritage space through the conserva-
tion/restoration practice. If the selection of heritage is ideologically and politically
influenced, deliberately assembling a cultural construct, then the following conser-
vation/restoration intervention may appear as free from any political influence, as
supported by the doctrinal texts on conservation and restoration theory, as well as by
a large scholarly bibliography. In other words, while the selection act cannot be a-
political, the actual conservation, or the “treatment”, of the already created collection
of objects is purely scientific and a-political, exclusively concentrated on the physical
wellbeing of the material object (artefact or building), basing its choices and decisions
on scientific analysis and data, thus drawing closer to objectivity. However, this clear
separation is not possible, since the conservation practice reflects the heterotopic, a-
political, and para-political hybrid, simultaneously connected to, conditioned by, and
included in, the political. Through its principles, restoration theory seeks to control
and to limit the subjectivity of the intervention. Nevertheless, the objectification of
253 See Delafons, J., Politics and Preservation. A Policy History of the Built Heritage, 1882–1996,
E. & F. N. Spon—Chapman & Hall, London, 1997, focused on the UK, Jokilehto, J., A History of
Architectural Conservation, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2002, and the basis for this publication, his
PhD thesis, The Contribution of English, French, German and Italian Thought towards an Inter-
national Approach to the Conservation of Cultural Property, Institute of Advanced Architectural
Studies, University of York, 1986—for the European area.
the restoration intervention and, generally, of the heritage perspective is—as previ-
ously discussed—a utopian ideal whose realization cannot be but incomplete (a main
heterotopic coordinate). The selection of restoration methods, techniques, and mate-
rials, as well as the determination of the limits of re-functionalization, even if guided
by the principles of restoration—condensed and essentialized in the abstract space of
theoretical discourse—can be subjective, allowing for interpretation. As such, they
have to be adapted to the particular situation, represented separately by each individ-
ual heritage object. The models of best practice (“a-historical and a-contextual”),254
even if abstracted, remain (or should be)255 at the level of a general guide. In most
cases, their implementation depends on the human, subjective, and political factor,
as well as on the context and on the coordinates of the (already politically oriented)
target heritage. Thus, the conservation/restoration intervention may be interpreted
as a hybrid, simultaneously outside and included in, as well as conditioned by the
political.
3.10 The UNESCO Selection Mechanisms—Between

Preservation, the Economic, and the Political
Nevertheless, the reading of the political encoding attached to the heritage object
reveals a complex set of relationships. Overall, a primary political role belongs to
the built object, deliberately impregnated into its expression and structure, or as a
multiple role acquired over time. This ‘primary’ political role is most often estab-
lished and recognized through the protected status, on the basis of the documentary
and historical motivation. The political relations of the built object may take on many
forms. Its projected status and its granting may have a political encoding, as in the
case of the selection and establishment of the UNESCO World Heritage List.
In a response to Greg Terrill’s critical analysis of the UNESCO selection mecha-
nism, Tamás Fejérdy remarks, first of all, that the establishment of a “balanced and
representative list”, including various regions as well as heritage categories (natural,
cultural, and later, mixed) appears as an objective that was stated and assumed rela-
tively late by the organization,256 as a politicizing orientation and as an essentially
254 Zan, L., Economic Discourse…, 181.

255 As also mentioned by Ashworth, the examples of good practice are almost always more visible
and present in the public sphere than failures of transmutation and application of these models
in countless other situations (see Ashworth, G. J., Heritage and Economic Development: Selling
the Unsellable, in Heritage & Society, Vol. 7, No. 1, May, 2014, 3–17, https://doi.org/10.1179/
2159032x14z.00000000015, 11). The almost exclusive mediatization of the successes attributed to
them the status of reproducible models. Such a negative example from Australia, of “those locations
and strategies that have failed, stalled or been more ambivalent in their results”, is discussed by
Brabazon, T. and Mallinder, S., Branding bohemia: community literacy and developing difference.
City & Time 4 (3): 2, 2010, [online] url: http://www.ct.ceci-br.org, accessed in March 2015.
256 This objective is stated in the Global Strategy of 1994, an organization established already in 1945,
while the World Heritage Convention (WHC) dates back to 1972. Fejérdy, Tamás, Commentary on
3.10 The UNESCO Selection Mechanisms—Between Preservation … 231
impossible goal. According to him, the balanced and uniform distribution of the
exceptional heritage objects within the territory of the member states cannot be but
artificially created and will not reflect reality. Although his observation is pertinent
in this interpretation, this balance may also allow an interpretation different from the
‘numerical’ (as the equality of the classified properties), referring rather to equal-
ity of the chances to access the classification process. Fejérdy further remarks that,
although “the WH Convention—while its original mission officially remained the
same—has evolved in other ‘additional directions’”, hinting precisely at this political
détournement of an organism that, according to its initial intention, was imagined
as a-political: “[the] States Parties have been seeking a better (more efficient) use
of the List (Convention) for national prestige and/or have been looking for domestic
political or economic benefits.”257 —an approach explained by the (primarily eco-
nomic) success of the list. The solution, that would also entail the ‘de-politicization’
of the list (as far as possible), depends—according to Fejérdy—on the definition of
the concept and on the identification methods of the OUV (outstanding universal
value) through an upstream type process258 that would have to be applied responsi-
bly and with respect for the fundamental principles of the Convention. Nevertheless,
based on his critical analysis of the attitudes of the UNESCO organizations and of
the acceptance and inclusion of this concept into the classification systems, Terrill
remarks a progressive politicization of the institution: “The Committee appears to
be moving from an approach that follows, mostly, an elaborate set of rules, to one
that sees these rules as a backdrop to helping States Parties achieve their aims.”259
This attitude, although contested—as also noted by Terrill—easily finds its expla-
nation in the “rebalancing of geopolitical power resulting from the global financial
troubles of recent years”,260 also explaining the increasing attraction of heritage as
an exploitable economic resource. The centralization of decisional power—coupled
with the removal of the consulting organisms from the nominalization process—and
the transfer of the nominalization capacity strictly into the competence of the mem-
ber states—within the outlined economic and political context, as well as under the
Greg Terrill’s Article, the Forum section in Heritage and Society, Vol. 7, No. 1, May 2014, 83–88,
ed. Maney and Son Ltd. 2014, https://doi.org/10.1179/2159032x14z.00000000023, 83.
257 Fejérdy, T., Commentary on…, 84.
258 The term defines a process of progressive listing (Kishore Rao, A New Paradigm for the Identi-
fication, Nomination and Inscription of Properties on the World Heritage List. International Journal
of Heritage Studies 16(3):161–172, apud Terrill, G., 63), or a set of “processes and practices that
occur prior to inscription (or otherwise) by the World Heritage Committee, of a property on the
World Heritage List. These processes and practices include activities that take place at the national
level before a property is included in the tentative list, those processes associated with the tentative
list, the processes of submission of a nomination and its evaluation, and the consideration by the
World Heritage Committee of a nomination.” Convention Concerning the Protection of the World
Cultural and Natural Heritage (WHC-12/36.COM/8B.22), apud Terrill, Greg, “Surprise!” Is Not
Good System Design: The Upstream Process for Nominations to the World Heritage List, Forum,
Heritage and Society, Vol. 7, No. 1, May, 2014, 59–71, 59.
259 Terrill, Greg, “Surprise!” Is Not Good System Design: The Upstream Process for Nominations
to the World Heritage List, Forum, Heritage and Society, Vol. 7, No. 1, May, 2014, 59–71, 68.
260 Terrill, G., “Surprise!”…, 68.
pressure of the play of influences—would cause the upstream process to lose its
relevance, and the “[…] boundaries [outlined by the original set of rules] may begin
to more consistently follow political convenience rather than the expression of OUV
and management effectiveness”.261
This conflict situation noted by Terrill shows the presence of the inevitable political
and economic encoding of heritage, especially emphasized due to the global level
of the stake (i.e. UNESCO fame). The structure of the World Heritage List,262 the
establishment and then adoption of the upstream process—in itself, a balancing
response to the politicization of the decision process—as well as the signalling of
the need for improvement/adaptation of this process within the discussion triggered
by Terrill’s paper,263 and even his article in itself, appear as proof of the conflictual
relationship derived from the hybrid—simultaneously a-political, para-political and
infra-political—character of heritage. Regarding this process of UNESCO listing, the
author defines the two poles in tension as the political versus (heritage) expertise,
while, in spite of the ‘depressurizing’ mechanisms, such as the upstream process,
also noticing the increasing dominance of the political pole.264
In this interpretation, the tension and the conflictual functioning is generated by the
simultaneously infra- and para-political character of heritage, placing it at the inter-
section of these two strong directions, in a ‘tertiary space’. This intermediary charac-
ter is also a coordinate of its heterotopic nature, since the conceptual space of heritage
is simultaneously de-politicized (a-political—as the conservation of human heritage
exceeds the sociopolitical—national, ethnic and cultural—or physical boundaries)
and political/economic, as an organization composed of the representatives of polit-
ical organizations, which, in order to function, integrates itself (through its structure,
regulation, operation, etc.) into the official ordering. The heterotopic heritage space is
simultaneously a-political and political, as well as both non-economic and economic,
without fully positioning itself at either of these poles. The heterotopia outlined in
the first part of Foucault’s Of Other Spaces supports this interpretation, as these
spaces “have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but
in such a way as to suspend, neutralize, or invert the set of relations designated,
261 Idem.
262 The original text of Greg Terrill, “Surprise!” Is Not Good System Design: The Upstream Process
for Nominations to the World Heritage List, the response of Denyer, Susan, Commentary on Greg
Terrill’s Article, Badman, Tim, Commentary on Greg Terrill’s Article, of Fejérdy, Tamás, Commen-
tary on Greg Terrill’s Article, and of, Upstream Process Response, published in the Forum section
of the journal Heritage and Society, Vol. 7, No. 1, May 2014, ed. Maney and Son Ltd. 2014, https://
doi.org/10.1179/2159032x14z.00000000023.
263 Terrill notes: “There is a deeper sense of politicization conveyed by the shape of the World
Heritage List. Around half of the world’s heritage, as represented by the World Heritage List, is in
Europe. Almost 20% of all the world’s heritage is in just five European State Parties. Almost 9%
of the world’s heritage is of just one type of building in those countries: Christian churches and
cathedrals. A system that arrives at this point after a few years of operation might be considered
unbalanced or in need of a Global Strategy; a system that has looked like this consistently for
40 years is political.” Terrill, Greg, Upstream Process Response, Forum, Heritage and Society, Vol.
7, No. 1, May 2014, 89–94, 93.
264 Terrill, G., Surprise!…, 70.
3.10 The UNESCO Selection Mechanisms—Between Preservation … 233
mirrored, or reflected by them”.265 The conceptual space of heritage as heterotopia

is thus connected to all other places (its political, economic, social, historical, etc.,
context), contesting, reversing and reflecting them upside-down, or at least alterna-
tively. While the conceptual space of heritage corresponds to practice and to the sets
of relationships, the correspondence of the place of heritage it defines—the object
(monument, site, ensemble or even landscape)—is with the material emplacement
that is different from the places it relates to, and which are reflected by it.
Following further the definition of the Foucaultian concept, the resolution of the
tension, or of the conflict presupposed by the heterotopic space, would be equiva-
lent to normalization, also entailing the cancellation of the heterotopia, diluted and
resorbed into that which is defined as normality/norm. Reflecting this functioning
on the heritage space, the absolute resolution of the conflict would also mean the
cancellation of the polarity in favour of its poles, chosen to represent normality.
An alternative solution, emerging on the basis of the actual Foucaultian principles,
consists in the perpetuation of the heterotopic character. The polarity is conserved,
but the conflictual relationship is not solved and eliminated, but placed at the ser-
vice of the heterotopic space: the conflictual relations between preservation and the
economic, as well as between preservation and the political—where the dominance
of one of the poles would condition the very existence of the other—thus become
dynamic, ‘open negotiations’, mediating and creating an ‘intermediary’ between the
essential and exclusive objectives of these poles (the conservation of heritage, as well
as its exploitation as an economic/political resource). Terrill notices specifically this
necessity of establishing a balance between the two poles—as the perpetuation of the
hybrid and heterotopic character—an approach also found in various formulations
in Fejérdy and Throsby. Hence,
[…] the challenge is not to remove politics—that cannot be done. Political interest, if properly
harnessed, could be a driver to find much-needed resources. The challenge is rather how to
retain the value of World Heritage in an environment that is political in different ways
from previously—to use the energy that politics brings, while finding ways for it to co-exist
with rules-based decisions. It is incumbent upon heritage experts to chart a new future that
realistically addresses new challenges.266
In the case of the classification process of the UNESCO, outlined as an exam-

ple, various interventions are proposed, including the reordering of the system, the
redrawing of the areas of competence, the control (transparency) of the processes,
and the definition of the additional organisms/processes of mediation. These can be
interpreted as means of consolidating the preservations pole and rebalancing the
polarity of economic (political) and preservation.
These two aspects of the heterotopia, the economic and the political, are rife with
fertile research directions. Their analysis in the hypostasis of heritage outlines many
possible relations, arising mainly from the polarity formed with preservation, from
265 Foucault, M., Of Other Spaces (1967), in ed. Dehaene and De Cauter, Heterotopia and the City.
Public Space in the Postcivil Society, Routledge, London/New York, 2008, 17.
266 Terrill, Greg, Upstream Process Response, Forum, Heritage and Society, Vol. 7, No. 1, May,
2014, 89–94, 93.

the relationship to the context, as well as from the particularities of each analysed
heritage object. The example discussed earlier sketches out such a relation between
the political and actual preservation, as well as its intrinsic conflicts—manifested at
the highest level of the heritage structure. Even if not related to specific situations
(i.e. classified or proposed sites), the process is observed as a common and recurring
phenomenon. On this basis, the relationship may be extrapolated to lower heritage
levels, subsequently opening up to a case-by-case analysis.
From this point of view, the heterotopic character reveals itself as hybridization,
‘intermediarity’ and conflictual constitution—the result of the pressure exercised by
two poles, one of which is always an expression of the preservationist ideal.
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2007
Chapter 4
Architecture and the Heterotopic
Concept
Abstract The present chapter proposes the outlining and identification of the main
instances of the concept of heterotopia as it has been employed and observed in the
field of architecture and urban planning, or in other words, the conceptualisation
of alterity and the methods in which it is employed. Thus, whether it is a design
methodology or an architectural composition technique, it is deliberately employed
so as to create alterity; it can also operate as a device for compatibility or inter-
connectivity, as a centralizing formula, or simply not only as a go-to solution for
creating iconic objects, but also as a mnemonic dispositif. The attempts to identify
an architectural heterotopic profile have managed to pinpoint as heterotopic either
architectural typologies, specific architectural languages or certain functions, either
have led to the condensation of specific design methodologies (deliberate creation of
alterity), engaging numerous advocates (Porphyrios, Jencks, Teyssot, Tafuri). From
a strictly formal reading of heterotopia, as a deliberately created architectural dis-
continuity (volumetric, spatial)—as seen in Porphyrios—the approaches gradually
steer towards a more nuanced interpretation—as seen in Jencks, the heterotopia as
an organism (architectural and urban form as well as functioning). The annulment
of alterity is discussed in the context of urban planning. Throughout the chapter, the
relations developed by the heritage space as well as by the heritage object have been
steadily observed, be it a built object, built ensemble of the area and recognized or
not within the official heritage frame. The heterotopic spaces are finally identified
in the stance of the heritage object. These approaches reflect different degrees of
relating to and intervening in the historic fabric, yet all sharing the necessity of its
conservation, for its capacity to act as a reference point, as a source for its own
postmodern expressions (local/regional typologies) and as the already crystallized
context in which the postmodern intervention must be accommodated. Shifting the
focus onto heritage, the issue of authenticity is discussed, in relation to the postmod-
ern architectural search and expression of traditional types. Assimilated and similar
until indiscernible, the intervention in the heritage built fabric, the very context it
values and it invokes as model and source. This sensitive issue of the heritage object
and fabric is discussed in relation to the architectural production and the discourse of
postmodern architecture (Quinlan Terry, Christopher Alexander and others) as well
as through the connected issue of authenticity or reconstruction. Based on these, the
research has pursued the identification of the heterotopic character of the heritage

240 4 Architecture and the Heterotopic Concept
space, along Foucault’s coordinates and through the restoration intervention—which

ultimately reflects the perception and conceptualisation of heritage. The analysis of
the various interpretations of alterity and of the concept of heterotopia unfolded in
this chapter, focus on the identification of a space-oriented and heritage-oriented
reading. The evolution of the attitudes towards heritage as well as its perceptions—-
given its transition towards a more objective “gaze”, the accumulation of meanings,
the creation of and the relationship with the heritage ideal, the impact of the official
status previously analysed—can explain the way in which the heritage object and
the heritage space acquire heterotopic coordinates.
Keywords Architectural heterotopias · Other spaces · Intentional alterity ·

Historicist language · Philosophy of conservation · Heritage as heterotopia ·
Reconstruction
4.1 The Heterotopic Character as an Architectural

Blueprint
When analysing the introduction and the appropriation of the concept of heterotopia
within the field of architecture theory, Henry Urbach recognizes in his 19981 article
that, despite the accumulation by then, of a decade of discussions, “[the concept’s]
meaning has remained slippery, and its utility limited”.2 Identified by Urbach in his
analysis, the main explanation for this phenomenon targets the very manner in which
the concept was appropriated and translated, namely, through its de-politicization;
several of the defining features of the Foucaultian heterotopia, such as the fortuitous
and the political aspects are entirely eliminated.3 Thus he concludes, this appro-
priation is strictly formal: the architectural space is heterotopic through its uncom-
monness, distinctness and “significantly different” from its context.4 More precisely,
heterotopia is defined in the architectural field as a series of formal characteristics
that make up a “stable essence”, a profile or a model, present or not in a built object
or space. By 1968, this propensity for the formal profile interpretation of heterotopia
within the architectural field was noted by Foucault as well; in an interview,5 he
pins the faulty translation of the concept on the limited focus of architects onto the
built objects, which are fundamentally only the background or recipients of social
1 Urbach, Henry, Writing architectural heterotopia, The Journal of Architecture, Volume 3, Winter
1998, 347–345, 347.
2 Urbach, Writing architectural heterotopia, 347.
3 Urbach, Writing…, 347.
4 Urbach, Writing…, 347.
5 Foucault and Rabinow 1984, 178–9.
4.1 The Heterotopic Character as an Architectural Blueprint 241
relations6 ; along the same lines, Boyer considers this incapacity to progress from
a formal approach towards a critical conceptualisation as the “architects’ obsession
for the [built] object”.7
As Urbach observes, the contingent character of the concept is entirely lost; “the
manner in which a building is, was or could be heterotopic, within one frame of
analysis”8 isn’t initially considered by the architects concerned with the Foucaultian
concept. This one-sided approach, favouring the strictly formal perspective to the
detriment of the incidental and causal character, has dominated the architectural dis-
course until the beginning of the twenty-first century. From this stage on, space and
spatiality are reconsidered, with a particular focus on the public space. This acts
as a rebalancing in favour of heterotopia as a causal characteristic is supported by
several developments: the evolution of interdisciplinary studies, the “proliferation
of urban studies, and [new] discussions on such vague notions as ‘urbanity’”,9 the
actual transformation processes of the public space—or alternatively its hybridisa-
tion—as well as the reconsideration of the private–public dichotomy (the retracing
of the boundaries between private and public space). Under the influence of these
changes, the concept of heterotopia makes an appearance again in the architectural
discourse; the initial, strictly formal interpretation of heterotopia as an architectural
space is partially replaced by more nuanced readings, extending towards the social,
economic, aesthetic and cultural space—yet all subordinated to the architectural
physical framework.
Although the variety of architectural configurations, programmes and scales in
which heterotopia can manifest is evident in the very principles described by Fou-
cault, the initial tendency in the architectural field was to identify an architectural
“heterotopic profile”. This would be used as a conceptual basis or blueprint for spe-
cific architectural designs and even design methodologies (Urbach). Similarly, this
profile would be used as a means of identification and commendation of specific
objects, projects and places.10 This interpretation assumes a disjointed version of
the concept, disconnected from the context of the original essay (Of Other Spaces)
as well as from the ampler Foucaultian context, deprived of its reading within the
network of power–knowledge relations.
Urbach proposes the analysis of several architectural discourses that have used
in this manner the concept of heterotopia—belonging to Porphyrios, Jencks, Tafuri
and Teyssot. According to these interpretations heterotopia is assumed as a design
methodology or architectural composition technique through which the alterity is cre-
ated (Porphyrios) as an all-encompassing formula that legitimizes and norms archi-
6 Boyer, Christine, M., The many mirrors of Foucault and their architectural reflections, 53–73, in
Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, eds. Dehaene Michiel, De Cauter,
Lieven, Routledge, 2008, 57.
7 Boyer, The many mirrors…, 57.
8 Urbach, H., Writing architectural heterotopia, 347.
9 Dehaene Michiel, De Cauter, Lieven, Heterotopia in a postcivil society, in Heterotopia and the
City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, eds. Dehaene Michiel, De Cauter, Lieven, Routledge,
2008, 4.
10 Urbach, H., Writing…, 349.
tectural compositions otherwise incompatible in themselves or with their context, in

terms of their meaning. Heterotopia is also interpreted as a “matter of [architectural]
formal language”, a means to represent alterity through standardized formal ele-
ments (Tafuri). Finally, heterotopia is interpreted as an institutionalized (controlled)
medium embodying formal discontinuities within a society—or spaces that function
according to different configurations, other in relation to their context (Teyssot).
Porphyrios reads heterotopia through the architectural production of Alvar Aalto,
endowing the concept with an “extreme degree of formalism”11 ; for Porphyrios,
heterotopia identifies those other “organisations of the architectural space, disconti-
nuities of volumetric combinations, [or] unusual combinations of materials”,12 that
manifest in Aalto’s projects as an alternative to or opposition to modernism’s homog-
enizing character (Urbach).
The second approach analysed by Urbach, belonging to Jencks, locates hetero-
topia in the urban space. For Jencks, the new urbanism—whose tools are the alterity,
the hybridisation and the use of the informal—represents the next evolutionary phase
of the heterotopias—“these potent seeds” (the hospital, the prison and the other Fou-
caultian examples) are isolated islands, city fragments or “growing cells that are
tolerated by the body of the city, exceptional spaces that might be exclusion zones
at first but, later on, become welcomed sub-cities”.13 On a closer inspection, Jencks’
take on the Foucaultian concept contradicts Urbach’s classification that places the
author in the realm of formal approaches. Jencks’ heterotopic built space is defined
by of both the physical form and the “process[es], the complex activities that go on in
these counter-sites”—14 in other words, the alternative practices that develop within
the limits of an alternative place. Jencks offers several examples as “expressions
of difference”: the first rural hippie commune of the United States, Drop City—an
ensemble of geodesic domes, built from recycled panels of car roofs, an experi-
mental prototype for alternative and self-sufficient housing; similar examples are
Covent Garden, London, Faneuil Hall, Boston, the historical areas of San Francisco
or Amsterdam, and the mixed districts of Greenwich Village, New York. Through
these examples, Jencks discerns not only the sheer variety of [built] formulas but
also their evolution processes; these isolated spaces, islands or enclaves positioned
in contradiction to the dominant paradigm, offer an appealing alternative due to their
contestant profile and alternate ordering. Yet this very appeal turns them into targets
of gentrification and,15 in a subsequent phase into models: these alternate ordering
enclaves are recoded (reinvested with meaning) and reshaped, receiving new func-
tions, new practices and functioning rhythms and new contexts. Whether they are
taken over and reshaped or built anew based on the initial self-organized model, the
aim is to turn their appeal into revenue (Jenks).
11 Urbach, 349.
12 Idem.
13 Jencks, Charles, The Story of Post-Modernism: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in
Architecture, ed. John Wiley and Sons, 2012, via Google Books, no pg no.
14 Jencks, Ch., The Story…, no p. no.
15 Idem.
4.2 The Impact of Gentrification on the Other Spaces 243
4.2 The Impact of Gentrification on the Other Spaces
“Renewed and defended”,16 these enclaves are gradually recolonized: the local pop-
ulation, along with its practices, is progressively displaced, yet despite this, Jencks
still sees it as a positive process: these enclaves ultimately have the capacity to
“change city design in positive ways even if the local population and economy are
largely sacrificed for upscale consumers”.17 In terms of the historic fabric, the recol-
onization and gentrification processes might add new layers of meaning, yet it can
also entail radical transformations of the built form, such as rehabilitation through
insertions, extensions, remodelling and even demolition and replacing of the old
city-fabric. The capacity of these enclaves to focus interest, to receive and sustain
this re-colonization as well as several meaning reinvestments are arguments of its
heterotopic nature—especially in the case of the historic built fabric. Such enclaves
can prove their resilience within multiple subsequent cultural contexts, their capac-
ity to cumulate and juxtapose meanings, cultures, added material expressions etc.
However, Jencks observes this same tactic applied in the case of the newly built
object (buildings as micro-cities): the same principles are structured and used as
a prescribed formula with the deliberate purpose of creating an autonomous self-
sufficient enclave; its appeal is artificially fashioned by mimicking the features of
the initial model (the local character, the organic character, the informal), yet adding
up to a rendered safe and oversized, deliberately iconic commodified product.
The discovery that the alternate ordering and the alternative material expression
are fertile sources creating appealing enclaves, as exemplified by Jenck’s examples,
and that they are capable to initiate and support gentrification processes (Greenwich
Village, Drop City), is promptly adapted into a method or development strategy,
where the deliberate creation of ‘pristine’ enclaves aims for maximum revenue with
minimum (economic) losses, bypassing the ‘ugly side’ of gentrification. In the first
instance the alternate ordering is self-generated and develops organically, moving
from the unofficial/informal towards becoming an official ordering (bottom-up evo-
lution); the second instance, the top-down evolution, the alternate ordering is delib-
erately generated, and usually to the detriment of the existing (even historic) built
fabric. These examples place side by side two (extreme) tendencies that have shaped
the evolution of the built fabric. From the manifestation as an isolated phenomenon,
as a “localized urban anomaly” to a “profoundly generalized urban strategy”, the
gentrification tactic is based on “the flight of capital away from certain areas of
the city—depreciation and disinvestment—[and] has devastating implications for
people living at the bottom of the urban class structure.”18 ; after the first stage of
the gentrification process—the pressure and the local population displacement—the
second stage continues with the renewal of the existing built fabric, in the form of
16 Idem.
17 Jencks, The Story…, no p. no.
18 Slater, Tom, Rose Street and Revolution: A Tribute to Neil Smith (1954–2012), Edinburgh, Octo-
ber 4th 2012 School of Geosciences, The University of Edinburgh online article, available at: http://
www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/tslater/tributetoNeilSmith.html, accessed January 2014.
densification, restoration or its partial or complete replacement. Yet, the unfolding

of this conflicting process can be a soft one—the bottom-up, more organic instance,
with a more diffuse separation and sometimes even temporary juxtaposition of the
social classes involved; or a more aggressive one—the ruthless, top-down instance of
gentrification as a development strategy, where the separations of social classes are
radical and even brutal. Looking exclusively at the built environment, the impact of
the gentrification process appears to be a dichotomic one: on one side, the appeal of
the rediscovered urban fragment entails attention and implicitly investments directed
specifically towards the built fabric, followed by the uncovering of its value, safe-
guarding and conservation; yet, the impact can simultaneously be a negative one,
due to the necessary degree of depreciation of the built fabric (ultimately leading
to fragilization and even loss)19 in order to be perceived as advantageous along
the cost-benefit rationale. Quite often the deliberate depreciation/destruction of the
built object or fabric can be encountered as an “integral part of the reinvestment
process”.20 Another negative impact on the built fabric is the destructive potential
of inadequate interventions, usually associated with the attempts to maximize the
profit: densification of the urban fabric and the improper adaptation and reuse—such
as the dreaded zoning, or the replacement of the mixed residential profile with the
business or retail profile, leading to the ‘freezing’ of the area (outside the work-
ing hours). Such interventions lead to the loss of both the built fabric and the local
identities. The overstressing of the gentrified areas is another negative consequence;
it entails the overcrowding of the existing built fabric and the increase of the real
estate value, both threatening the integrity and even the existence of the built object.
Smith notes that this process tends to be cyclical, more like an operating algorithm
of the urban fabric. From this perspective, the heritage status—as a cardinal mea-
sure of safeguarding—reveals its ambivalence as well: while attempting to remove
the built object from the cyclical process of investing—disinvesting—reinvesting,
it acknowledges its alterity and contributes to its appeal, and thus simultaneously
focuses the interests that harbour the gentrification process. Once this is triggered,
even an exceedingly strict legislation can only protect the built object to an extent,21
19 Downs, Anthony, Downs, A. (1982) “The necessity of neighborhood deterioration,” New York
Affairs 7, 2: 35–38, 1982, 35, apud. Smith, Neil, The new Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the
Revanchist City, Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005, 189.
20 DeGiovanni, Displacement Pressures in the Lower East Side, working paper, Community Ser-
vice Society of New York, 1987, apud. Smith, Neil, The new Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the
Revanchist City, Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005, 192. Full quote: A detailed survey of building
conditions and an assessment of building deterioration levels might also reveal important informa-
tion regarding the onset of reinvestment, but it is important to remember that reinvestment may
begin substantially in advance of a building’s physical upgrading. Indeed, in a detailed survey of
displacement pressures in the Lower East Side, DeGiovanni (1987: 32, 35) found strong evidence
that physical deterioration may actually be “an integral part of the reinvestment process” as some
landlords actually foster adverse physical conditions “to clear buildings of the current tenants”
before undertaking major refurbishment or resale.
21 Despite this, in numerous large cities the gentrification induced degradation of the built fabric
is paradoxically facilitated by the existing legislation and the economic freedom of the real estate
market. Examples range from the abandoned contemporary buildings of Bishop’s Avenue, London
4.2 The Impact of Gentrification on the Other Spaces 245
and in most cases, it cannot guarantee the conservation of the local character. This
very fragile feature either dissolves gradually under pressure (the disappearance of
the roving markets, small shops and the overall street life in a residential-turned-
business zone), either is artificially sustained, in order to maintain the tourist interest
for the area.
Returning to Jenck’s example—the enclaves contradicting the dominant paradigm
—a specific process can be observed: the alterity of a space automatically implies a
feedback, a reaction from its context, eliciting attention from the ‘outside’—either
negative, as isolation, exclusion, annulment of its visibility, either positive, by focus-
ing interest and involvement and as an emphasizing of its visibility. Similar to the pro-
cess of heritage status assignment, gentrification can be read as a process of meaning
and value (re-)endowment. A common point of the two processes is the normalizing
intention; through the appointment of the heritage status the enclave/object acquires
an ‘official’ name and value, a specific ordering and a functioning rhythm, through
which it becomes an equal part of the category to which it is assigned, regardless
to how specific, unique or different it may be. Similarly, the gentrification process
can be read as a normalization process; what is perceived as other, different, non-
conforming, isolated, peripheral or marginal—either a positive ‘other’ (bohemian or
hip districts, colonies, old town centres etc.) or a negative one (ill-famed districts,
bidonvilles, transgressive or abusively occupied spaces, etc.)—usually focuses inter-
est from the ‘outside’. The parks and streets occupied by squatters are “taken back”
from “those who had supposedly ‘stolen’ them from ‘the public.’”,22 the ‘numb’ city
centres are restored and rehabilitated, ‘improved’ or made efficient, yet deprived of
the otherness that initially had made them interesting.
Following Smith’s account of gentrification, the process seems to be defined as
endemic to the post-war capitalist city, although some isolated and somewhat incom-
plete historic antecedents can be identified. These demonstrate the very capacity of
the built fabric (specifically the urban one) to acquire and accumulate sometimes
antagonistic significations, and to alternate between them. The cyclical nature of the
phenomenon allows the built object to shift from visibility to invisibility and back,
each stage imprinting additional layers of meaning, more than often in its material
substance.
However, the gentrification process and the heritage status appointing process
share another common feature: both are introduced as optimal formulas of safe-
guarding, as final desideratum of the built object. If gentrification at its peak (seen
as an urban regeneration technique) was equated with the ideal approach to urban
problems and used as the tool for rehabilitating non-conforming urban fragments,
its evolution in time ultimately revealed its inefficiency: its adverse reaction meant
(or Billionaire’s Row), to historical houses and estates—see Ipswich city hall (abandoned after
acquisition by a private investor), Hendrefoilan House, Swansea, or the neo-Romanian villas of
Bucharest, Romania, listed and protected although boarded up and left to decay, in hopes of recov-
ering the land for later larger scale development. Another case along similar lines is the city of
Delhi: in 2015 the city’s candidature for the UNESCO status was withdrawn on grounds that such
a degree of protection status would restrict the urban development.
22 Smith, Neil, The new Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, 216.
the emphasising of disparities between social classes. In regard to the heritage sta-
tus appointing, which enjoys a longer history and a more accurate evidence of its
cases, the adverse consequences (such as the museification or the disneyfication
phenomena) have proved the necessity of maintaining an equilibrium between the
conservation of the material form and the flexibility of practices within the protected
space. The expulsion of the object’s practices, whether traditional or new and alter-
native, transforms it into a hybrid. Tolerating total freedom of practice can lead to
an often irreversible physical deterioration of the object, as well as to the distortion
or the impoverishment of its significations.
A convergence point of these two directions can be recognized at the representa-
tional level of the built object. In Jencks’ gentrification-as-tactic or design technique,
employed for the creation of new ‘pre-gentrified’ autonomous enclaves or iconic
large-scale and multifunctional ‘micro-cities’, the promise of a specific lifestyle is
conveyed mainly through design, through recognizable architectural features asso-
ciated to specific ideas and hierarchies of value. If the historic built fabric attracts
attention through the interdependent combination of material form and local tradi-
tional practices, the new deliberately created object mimics this mix by importing
the architectural language. The historic fabric or object is frequently adopted as the
poster-image, quoted as source for the new developments: they propose the best of
both worlds, the new and improved versions of the same known features (the human
scale, the accessibility, the connection with the natural environment etc.) yet in an
idealized form, without compromise or conflict (inherent to the gentrified historic
object); as a result, these developments have an intentional hybrid character.
4.3 Intentional Alterity: The Architectural Object as Other

and the Recurrence of the Postmodern Architecture
as a Heterotopic Profile
The heterotopian label has been repeatedly assigned to the postmodern architectural
object because of its hybrid character (mixture of multiple languages and identi-
ties), mainly evident in its material expression, but also in its functional, conceptual
and discursive configurations. If Jencks identified as the main source of the alterity
the material, the processes and the activities contained and shaped by the post-
modern architectural space, the dominant direction of the critical discourse focused
exclusively on the material—fuelled by the postmodern discourse itself. Postmodern
architecture defines itself in opposition to its antecedent, appointing itself as a chaotic
yet intentional and occasionally light-hearted approach, meant to solve the missteps
of the modernist movement.23 Obstinately intending to manifest this antithesis, the
postmodernist movement reached for the most visible medium, the built expression.
23 Harvey, David, The condition of Post-modernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change,
Wiley, 1989, 115.

4.3 Intentional Alterity: The Architectural Object as Other … 247
Jencks identifies a series of attributes endemic to the postmodern built object: the
ambivalence of metaphors, historicism and eclecticism, contextualism and conjunc-
turalism, the use of multiple and contradicting semantic codes, the playful, ironic or
critical interpretation, the travesty or the “traditionalesque” (Jenks),24 the conscious,
assumed and processed use of the kitsch—all chiefly expressed through design.
The modernist movement, also defining itself as a response to the interwar con-
text, proposed the solving of major problems (employment, providing a housing
stock, post-war reconstruction etc.) by means of mass production, standardization
and large-scale urban projects—efforts that haven’t always had the desired result,
evolved in an unsuspected way or degenerated in radically opposed formulas. Bring-
ing forward exactly these failures, supposedly caused by the “inconsistency of such
a forced democratization and egalitarianism of taste with the social distinctions typ-
ical of what, after all, remained a class-bound capitalist society”,25 the postmod-
ern perspective assumes a saviour role, a response to a “repressed demand if not
repressed desire”.26 The modernist perspective is held accountable for its unifor-
mity, monotony, the fear of diversity, the impersonal character, centralisation and
control, and the glorification of seemingly universal ideals unattainable in reality; in
return, the postmodern perspective offers the fragmentation, the collage, recognition
of multiple identities, languages and tastes of any and every urban community, aim-
ing to be a celebration of plurality ‘built in stone’. In the postmodern perspective the
sameness of modernism had to be countered and it could only be done so through
otherness. Drawing from these theoretical principles, and emphasizing the plurality
of tastes and esthetical preferences,27 the postmodern perspective manipulates the
same “symbolic capital”28 that the modernists aesthetics had supposedly misused and
repressed, deploying it “deliberately to conceal, through the realms of culture and
taste, the real basis of economic distinctions.”29 even if the mechanism isn’t used for
the first time, the postmodern approach succeeds in emphasizing the distinctions and
in over-coding the symbolic repertoire. The architectural language and the ornament
are freely used and in any imagined combinations, in order to reflect micro-identities
as singularized as possible. The “identity must come through symbolic treatment of
the form of the house, either by styling provided by the developer […] or through
a variety of symbolic ornaments applied thereafter by the owner.”30 At a distance
of several decades, Harvey sees this development no so much as a break with mod-
ernism, but rather as its persistence, reoriented towards and shaped by the intense
desire for individuality, circumstantiality, fantasy and singularity. Both modernist
and postmodernist movements created their standardized formal language, decon-
24 Jencks, Ch., A Genealogy of Post-Modern Architecture, Architectural Design 47, 1977, 269,
apud. Berten, Hand, The Idea of the Postmodern, Routledge, 1994, 56.
25 Harvey, The condition of Post-modernity, 80.
26 Harvey, The condition of Post-Modernity, 80.
27 Harvey, The condition…, 77.
28 Term coined by Bourdieu in The Forms of Capital (1989), apud. Harvey, The Condition…, 77.
29 Harvey, The condition…, 77.
30 Venturi et al., apud. Harvey, The condition…, 83.
structable and rebuildable anywhere, yet postmodernity has managed, at least in its
initial phases, to free itself from the normalizing forces. The normalizing tendency
and uniformization identified by Harvey in ‘classic’ postmodern examples (South
Street Seaport, NY, Quincy Market, Boston, Harbor Place, Baltimore) reflects the use
of a common postmodern formal language that, despite the similarities, did not gen-
erate identical results. This is caused in part by the adjusting process of every place
to the newly introduced layer of meaning, allowing the possibility of the emergence
of an alternative ordering, and the superimposition is never absolute.
The historical quote, through which the entire arsenal of the preindustrial (and
even industrial) architectural languages is resurrected, represents one of the features
that played a central role in the construction of the postmodernist built object as other.
Amongst the numerous processes used by the postmodernist technique of multiple
encoding the historicist reference or the historical quote is one of the most visible
and inevitably susceptible to critique.
In the postmodernist discourse the declared motive of its use appears to be a
noble one: providing historical continuity, fuelling the collective memory and sup-
porting cultural plurality; in reality, it is used rather as means of acquiring “historical
legitimacy”,31 or as a pastiche, a superficiality consciously created or a “contrived
depthlessness”,32 and a scenography or projection of a recognizable image as back-
ground for specific activities (consumption, leisure, etc.) or for manufactured identi-
ties (companies, displaced communities). The historical quote is usually employed
in two instances: as a fragment, a part of a larger encoding as a reference to a spe-
cific hierarchy of values, or as a complete simulacrum or scenography, when the
targeted space is equipped and remodelled as a ‘historical decor’ with the purpose
of increasing its appeal and affix specific practices.
Postmodernism’s predilection for the historicist language has evolved along two
distinct lines, specifically interesting for the subject of this research. The first con-
sists of the critical reuse of historic elements, or the interpreted use of the preceding
already established architectural languages; through this process of deconstruction
and reassembling a strongly hybridized architecture is created. The result is a built
product whose collage like image is fundamentally other, radically different from its
context; this would correspond to a built object who claims its heterotopic character
exclusively through its material expression, along the lines of Urbach’s argument.
The second direction, perhaps even more interesting and with a greater impact on the
urban fabric, consists of the increasing interest for the historic built object in itself,
as well as for the historic built fabric and landscapes; this translates into a rediscov-
ered enthusiasm to conserve local and regional architectural traditions, deliberately
in opposition to the modernist internationalism and later on to the ever-growing
globalization. This second direction, bearing similarities to the nineteenth century
31 Harvey, D., The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change,
Blackwell, 1992, 85.

32 Jameson, Jameson, F. (1984b): ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism.’ New
Left Review, 146, 53–92, apud. Harvey, D., The Condition of Postmodernity…, 88.
4.3 Intentional Alterity: The Architectural Object as Other … 249
passeism and even defined as a “broad-based romantic reaction”,33 fuels the general
awareness process regarding the intrinsic value of built heritage and will eventually
generate the establishing of multiple organisations dedicated to heritage monitor-
ing and protection, bearing repercussions until the present. These two directions are
further analysed, in order to trace the outline of the postmodernist understanding of
otherness and its impact on the built heritage object.
4.4 The Historicist Language of the Postmodern

Object—The Hybridization of Architecture as Alterity
This orientation toward the past, considered in the first phase as a regress, insinuates
and asserts itself in parallel with modernism. As an expression of dissatisfaction
with the absolute, standardizing, and universally modernist character, and raising the
issue of the necessity of a new architecture, the anti-modernist countermovement,
not yet dubbed as ‘postmodernism’, bases its sources and viability on two aspects:
on plurality, subjectivity, experience and hybridization, on the one hand, and on
reorientation toward that which has been deliberately ignored by modernism—“the
specificity of regional and historical styles”.34
Another consequence of the same opposition to modernism consists in the aban-
donment of the model—as a “universal product in a neutral space”35 —and in its
substitution with typology, conceived as an archetypal/universal structure that is
eternal, yet strongly anchored in its context (Ellin). Thus, the typology reunites “the
distinctive features of a certain category of objects”,36 and the identification of these
elements requires a remembrance of history—as a process through which the “pieces”
whose resilience thus becomes obvious can be identified. The analysis of the historic
architectural corpus and of its development reveals the typology, as Lynch proposes
in his cognitive analysis of the city,37 or the typologies of functioning/development,
as Mumford argues (through the reorientation toward the historical city and, espe-
cially, toward the polis): “the prospects for great cities lie in recovering the human
drama and interaction at the heart of urban life in the ancient Greek city”.38 The
historical perspective on architecture and its translation as a sum of typologies are
both consequences developed under the influence of structuralism (the source of the
typology) and of destructuralism (from which it borrows the method of fragmenta-
tion and multiple meanings). Hence, architecture—the city itself, read as a complex
33 Ellin, Nan, Postmodern Urbanism, revised edition, Princeton Architectural Press, New York,
1996, 22.
34 Ellin, Postmodern…23.
35 Ellin, Postmodern…24.
36 Idem.
37 See Lynch, K., Image of the city.
38 Meagher, Sharon M., Philosophy and the City: Classic to Contemporary Writings, Late Modern
Readings, Lewis Mumford: Retrospect and Prospect, 125–133, SUNY Press, 2008, 125.
tissue, as well as the architectural object—can and must be ‘read’ as text, with its
typology and morphology as constituents—or the words and phrases that make up the
text, each element endowed with countless meanings and interpretations, depending
on the ‘reader’.
The historicist language is the element that splits postmodernism into two camps,
although the anti-modernist orientation remains as the common and defining element
of both. The appeal to the historical baggage will determine postmodernism to evolve
in two directions, the explanation of which is quite clear from a cultural perspective.
4.4.1 The American Perspective
On the one hand, the American camp, with representatives Venturi and Scott Brown,
takes as its starting point the anti-modernist critique of the urban tissue and of the
‘vices’ of modernism, envisioning a solution in “strategies for injecting complexity
and contradiction into [architectural] design”. In order to emphasize the necessity
of ambiguity and visual complexity, Venturi initially appeals to historical examples,
but, along with the consolidation of the theory, proposes as a source and example
of this hybridization the popular product of capitalist culture (with its paradigmatic
form in Las Vegas), stating that “it is perhaps from the everyday landscape, vulgar
and disdained, that we can draw the complex and contradictory order that is valid
and vital for our architecture as an urbanistic whole”.39 The historicist language
invoked by Venturi is not the one directly cropped out of historical architecture—as
a return to previous historical styles—, but rather the “commercial vernacular of the
city”,40 whose historicist elements are already processed through the interpretation
of the users/inhabitants. Venturi includes in the category of commercial vernacular
architecture both the prefabricated and the typified, but customizable architecture of
the American suburbs (with fixed and reduced house typologies, built on identical
adjacent plots—extended to large surfaces and clearly delimited), as well as the
characteristic architecture of the spaces with commercial function. This vernacular
architecture, ‘tailored’ via and for the taste of a consumerist society, is not only
symbol-carrying, but also becomes a symbol in itself. In the first case, the architectural
object is simplified, reduced to the essentials, and generalized to the maximum, in
order to enable the personalization and the communication through the ornament.
This registers into the object the subjectivity, identity, and meanings envisioned by
the client, and the architectural object thus appears as the reflection of the individual
user, resulting in the decorated shed—the general container developing only through
the applied ornament/symbol, without which it cannot exist or function. Architecture
that is conceived in such a way allows, at least theoretically, for the development of
limitless formal variations—an intense and varied alterity.
39 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 103, apud Mallgrave, Goodman, An Introduction…, 19.
40 Idem.
4.4 The Historicist Language of the Postmodern Object—The Hybridization … 251
In the second case, architecture becomes a symbol in itself; it is exactly what it

seems to be, and nothing else. The example chosen by Venturi and Scott Brown is
telling: the duck-shaped building from Long Island, used for the selling of ducks and
related products, after which this category of objects was named (the duck building).
If, in the previous situation, the object—i.e. the decorated shed—could not func-
tion without the ornament (the sign confirming its function), this second category41
comprises buildings that can never be something else than what they are, as their
form both displays and conditions their function. The building is an ornament in
itself, and it does not require or allow the application of a symbolic ornament. Being
meant to communicate quickly and efficiently the content/use through its exterior
(drawing attention to itself), the ornament-building may take on any form. These
architectural objects represent extreme and intentional formal alterity. However, the
category proposed by Venturi is, paradoxically, extrapolated (in an extreme form)
from the modernist theory of form following function—thus rendering itself as a
continuation of, and not against, modernism.
In both cases (when it is used), the historicist language applies a collage of explicit
symbols as the vehicle of specific qualities. In the case of the decorated shed, the
selectively adopted and juxtaposed historicist fragments make up a particular image
that summarizes a series of assumed qualities thus attributed to the content of the shed.
The function housed in it is reflected on the facade of the shed through the appeal
to symbolic elements, such as the column, the window faming, the portico, etc.
Through its fragmentation and the reassembling and reinterpretation of its elements,
the historicist language allows such a multiple encoding and the manifestation of
plurality, which is also the source of its (excessive) formal alterity.
In the American camp, the denial of the standardizing character of modernism led
to an orientation toward popular culture and its products, as well as to the playful,
ironic, and paradoxical use of historicist language. The historical citation becomes
an obvious ornament, as “an easier, cheaper, more direct and basically more honest
approach to the question of decoration”.42
4.4.2 The European Perspective
The European camp, represented by Rossi, although fuelled by the same spirit of
challenge against the modernist heritage, has gone through a different development.
Its main preoccupation is in urbanism, and the interest for the architectural object is
41 Some of the most often cited examples of this category are replicas of monuments from the
international repertoire, from Las Vegas (the Eiffel Tower and the banks of the Seine, the Arc de
Triomphe, Venice with the Rialto Bridge and Piazza San Marco, the Egyptian pyramids and the
Sphinx, fragments of New York, including the Statue of Liberty, the Soldiers and Sailors Monument,
Whitney Museum of American Art, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Brooklyn
Bridge, Grand Central Terminal, Greenwich Village, etc.);
42 Scott Brown, Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas, apud Mallgrave, Goodman, An Introduction…,
21.
merely a constituent of the fabric. The concentration on the city and the difference
in the application/use of the historicist language, compared to the American camp,
lies in the strongly historicized character of the European city. The built context, or
the reference fund of American postmodernism, was much different and far from
the rich historical tissue characteristic of the European city. Furthermore, with the
‘naturalization’ of American postmodernism, the morphology of the European city
and some historicist or regional languages become a source of inspiration, in spite
of the above-mentioned postmodernist argument of connecting to the local context.
The European historicist language is thus diverted and appropriated, paradoxically,
under the invocation of universal typologies, but strongly influenced by tastes—or
rather, projected through that imaginary museum of the architect and the Ameri-
can client. The intention—that historicist language be filtered and concentrated in
typologies—ends up in creating a formal universalism similar to the modernist. The
historicist language of European postmodern architecture possesses a much deeper
legitimacy and ‘localization’; if European postmodernism cites the direct source, the
quotations of the American are from a mediated, preprocessed one.
Thus, in its critique of modernism, the European postmodern perspective had
an extensive area at its disposal, with respect to which it could position and define
itself. On the one hand, there were the many actual modern interventions (the vari-
ous projects related to the post-war historic centres as modernist reconstructions and
urban systemizations)—all the damage that had to be remedied, and, on the other
hand, the entire historical stylistic repertoire—more or less preserved, transformed,
denied or ignored by modernists, with its representative, the ornament.43 European
postmodernism and its subsequent development are defined by the challenging of the
modernist product and by the recovery of that which had been abolished or eliminat-
ed—the abundant and varied formal repertoire of historical styles. By comparison,
American postmodernism identifies its source, identity and driving force in the denial
of the modernist product. Historical conditioning thus appears as inevitable in the
case of European postmodernism.
According to Rossi, the city is a complex organism, and its essential embodiment
is “the European city, the city defined by its architectonic elements or cultural phys-
iognomy”.44 Its complexity, ignored by modernists, is constructed around resilient
forms, the typologies. The archetypal forms, along with the monuments, are capable
of storing the collective memory of the city, physically anchoring it in the urban
43 From the modernist perspective, the ornament becomes the essence of ugliness and the represen-
tation of cultural backwardness (as stated in Loos’ iconic modernist essay, Ornament and crime):
“not only is ornament produced by criminals but also a crime is committed through the fact that
ornament inflicts serious injury on people’s health, on the national budget and hence on cultural
evolution”. Although the denial of the ornament stems from the revolt against the decorative ‘folía’
of art nouveau, the rejection is en masse, and includes in the ‘prohibited category’ the historical
ornament and thus the historical styles as well. The architectural ideal is defined by a radical aes-
thetic purism and austerity. Loos, Adolf, Ornament et crime et autres textes, trans. Sabine Corneille,
Philippe Ivernel, ed. Payot & Rivages, 2003, 71–87, 78.
44 Mallgrave, Harry Francis, Goodman, David, An Introduction to Architectural Theory 1968 to the
Present, Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2011, 24.

fabric and in everyday urban life, thus contributing to the emergence of the spirit of
the place (genius loci). Through its appeal to typologies, postmodernism sets itself
against the universal, international character of modernism (at least, in its intention),
as these archetypes are, in fact, “elementary institutions of the language and practice
of architecture that live on in the daily life and collective memory of man. These dif-
fer greatly depending on the places where we live and where our spatial experiences
were formed”.45 In Rossi’s opinion, the function cannot define or be responsible
for the formal element—contrarily to modernists’ proposal of form following func-
tion—, because it transcends even the loss or change of the function; the archetypal
form envisioned by Rossi is the one with a character strong enough in itself for
allowing the successive accumulation of meanings without suffering fundamental
transformations. The resilience of these stems from and enhances the spirit of the
place—while being reflected, on its turn, upon the city.
Although Lynch has identified46 five main elements (edges, districts, nodes, land-
marks, and paths), meant to allow the ‘reading’ of the city, as well as the ‘drafting’
of a new, coherent, pleasant, and readable fragment, his analysis was not directed
at the historical heritage, in order to analytically deduce from it a series of coordi-
nates or an optimal functional model that could be recomposed. Unlike both Rossi
and the American camp discussed above, Lynch treats the urban fabric in a uniform,
non-differentiated manner, almost completely devoid of historical coding. Thus, “the
image of the coherent city, inspired by the lesson of the past, (…) was a retaliation
against the lack of visual identity of the functionalist districts”47 —or, in other words,
it lays claim on the historical source only through its opposition to modernism. The
historically built fabric is taken into account only insofar as it is registered in the
minds of the current users, is perceived as an overview—i.e. the perception of a
specific atmosphere, “locality”, or identity—, and registers the common memory
(or “meanings and connections”48 ) of the present user as a benchmark (or collec-
tion of benchmarks). Lynch’s historical examples are not deliberately selected and
analysed in order to identify the validity of the hypothesis (the above-mentioned
formal elements, including the hub, the limit, etc.), but for simply exemplifying his
hypothesis. Lynch recognizes the “special intensity”49 of Florence, but limits himself
to discussing its “visibility”50 , and finally, the formula of its typologies cannot and
does not seek to describe/identify the source of this alterity. His typologies are the
result of the formal analysis of the image of a city, formed by the overlap of individ-
ual and joint perceptions. Thus, every city has a “public image”, composed of “the
overlap of many individual images”51 and of common images (of a group, specific
45 Portoghezi,P. apud Ellin, Postmodern…, 27.

46 Lynch, Kevin, Image of the city, MIT Press, MA, USA, 1960.
47 Caciuc, Cosmin, Supra-teoretizarea arhitecturii, Paideia, ‘Spatii imaginate’ series, Bucuresti,
, ,
2007, 107–8.
48 Lynch, Kevin, Image of the city, MIT Press, MA, USA, 1960, 92.
49 Lynch, Image…, 92–3.
50 Idem.
51 Lynch, Image…, 46.
communities, etc.). Otherwise, the author short circuits all other image-modelling
elements—“such as the social meaning of an area, its function, its history, or even
its name”52 —and concentrates himself strictly on the formal aspects. Lynch recog-
nizes the role of political, historical, and cultural factors in shaping the image of the
city—where the historical fabric is a “visual evidence”53 and source of identity—,
but does not use the historical character for an archetypal character in order to endow
his typologies with, or establishing their, archetypal character. Their validity and uni-
versality are in an exclusive and concentrated manner grounded through the analysis
of the individual’s or the group’s perception of the urban fabric. Lynch’s typologies
are derived from a sociological analysis of built fabric (in general) and they expressly
do not consider other “aspects of spatial quality, related to the signifying/historical
and to the cultural sector”.54 Although both Lynch and Rossi appeal to typological
analysis, with Lynch’s even preceding Rossi’s, the deliberate focusing on the histor-
ical fabric as a source of formal archetypes, potentially carrying the essential truth
of architecture, recoverable through typological analysis, only appears in Rossi’s
theory.
Hence, for Rossi, historical architecture becomes a focus of interest and is sub-
jected to a thorough analysis and “deconstructed” in order for its elements to be
classified, so as to allow for the identification of archetypal typologies. Their recov-
ery also means the recovery of the essence of architecture, Rossi’s “main argument”,
since it is only through their coaction that new architecture—different from the pre-
vious, dehumanized modernist antecedent—can be mediated. Rossi’s ideal is the
“analogous city”—modelled upon an “architecture whose referents and elements
are to be abstracted from the vernacular, in the broadest possible sense”.55 The forms
of this vernacular (or, more generally and correctly, of historical architecture, since
especially Rossi appeals particularly to the formal classical language, due to its mon-
umentality) are essentialized and reassembled—juxtaposed and correlated—in order
to recompose a city (and urbanism) simultaneously connected to, and detached from,
the past. On the one hand, the continuity with the past is ensured through the appeal to
the historical repertoire, wherefrom the typologies are ‘extracted’, and on the other
hand, due to the radical difference between the past and the present, the break is
not only inevitable, but even sought and expressed through the abstraction—inter-
pretation and essentialization—of formal typologies. This technique of architectural
projection via abstraction—in its intention, an objectivation process compared to the
formal, to the aesthetic of architecture and to its formation process—goes under the
term of neo-rational architecture. Nevertheless, although the intention of recovering
the essence and of creating a new, true language of architecture, reminds of the past,
the abstraction proposed by Rossi is meant to produce a new architecture, with a
52 Lynch, Image…, 46.

53 Lynch, Image…, 92–3
54 Caciuc, Supra-teoretizarea arhitecturii, 108.
55 Frampton apud Ellin, Postmodern…25.
severe and monumental result, strongly graphic56 and geometric in its character of
the pure, simplified, and austere forms.
The approach proposed by Rossi—in The Architecture of the City, his theoretical
reaction to the modernist reconstruction of the European urban fabric—considers
the city and the human body to be similar, both “being the creation of a unique set of
experiences. A city remembers through its buildings, Rossi argues, so the preservation
of old buildings is analogous with the preservation of memories in the human mind.
The process of urban change is the domain of history, but the succession of events
constitutes a city’s memory and this is the preferred psychological context for making
sense of the city.”57 Although the solution envisaged and applied by Rossi consists in a
new, abstracted architectural style and in a new formal language, his initial argument,
in favour of the rehumanization of architecture and of the return to the origins,
determines the coordinate of reacceptance and allows “historical considerations back
into architecture”58 for European postmodernism. On this basis, a parallel movement
will develop, focusing on the historical and patrimonial heritage of the city. Hence,
following the heritage coordinate, outlined in successive and interdependent steps
through the (European) postmodernist intention, the following elements may be
identified: (1) self-definition via the denial of modernism (the recovery of the element
eradicated by modernism, i.e. the ornament), (2) the reconsideration of the past
as a source of historical ordering (continuity) and the identification of archetypal
typologies (the gaze toward the past), (3) the correction of modernist interventions
and the (reclaiming and) recovery of the traditional city. All these represent the basis
for the Movement for the Reconstruction of the European City, identified by Elling
as the Northern European development of the urban component of neo-rationalism.
4.4.3 The Postmodern Historicist Language

and the Movement for the Reconstruction
of the European City
Rossi’s theory superimposes itself on a European conceptual background dominated

by a vague feeling of dissatisfaction with the former modernist solutions. The impact
of the two World Wars and the following reconstruction interventions (primarily, the
introduction of the great driveways and functional zoning) generated a situation con-
sidered in urbanism and postmodern architecture as one of crisis; both the urban and
the rural fabric were radically transformed, and not for the better. Modernism and
industrialization were held responsible for sustaining and triggering a phenomenon
of commercialization in architecture: the architectural object and project are subor-
56 Boddy, Trevor, apud Ellin, Postmodern…, 27.

57 Crinson,Mark, Urban memory—an introduction, in Urban Memory. History and amnesia in the
modern city, ed. Mark Crinson, Routledge, 2005, xiii.
58 Mallgrave, Harry Francis, Goodman, David, An Introduction to Architectural Theory 1968 to the
Present, Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2011, 24.

dinated to economic interest and to profit. Furthermore, “the radical commercializa-

tion of urban land becomes now even a menace to the architectural profession”, with
architects as “ruthless executors of the building industry”.59
In The Reconstruction of the City, Léon Krier, the most prominent representative
of the Movement for the Reconstruction of the European City, points out the effects
of modernist principles on the city and, more generally, on the urban and rural fab-
ric: the totalitarian modernist perspective gave rise to an isolated (or even autistic)
architectural object in its relation with the urban context, thus leading to a first abo-
lition of public space; “the overstressing of the historical centres through peripheral
growth and the following breaking up of their structures by the mechanical means
of transport(as a result of zoning) have enforced the decomposition of the city as a
complex spatial continuum”.60 Furthermore, the modernists’ preferred technique of
urban composition, i.e. functional zoning, is, according to Krier, rather a technique of
segregation, abolishing once more the public space. This “concentration in clinically
controlled and policed [functional] zones […]” ended in the “the destruction of the
dialectical nature of public and private, of individual and anonymous, architecturally
of the street and square, of monument and urban fabric”.61 Modernist zoning leads
to the ultimate and fatal disintegration of the city’s structure, cancelling out any
oppositional and conflicting tendencies, and instituting instead an amorphous sub-
urbia.62 This political implication of the modernist project—through its intentions
of ordering, supervision, and control, as well as through the method of dissolving
the traditional structure of the city—was already foreshadowed by the totalitarian
French intervention, since the Hausmanian project of modernization was, in fact,
directed at controlling the Paris revolts. His perspective on zoning as a control and
consumption mechanism will be discussed here later in further detail.
Another contribution of modernism, the (exacerbated and revered) phenomenon
of industrialization, contributed equally to the break from tradition, as well as to a
gradual degradation and, finally, to the loss of traditional modes of production. The
industrial architectural product represents, according to Krier, a regress compared
to the traditional—whether classic (the monument) or vernacular (the urban fund
or minor architecture). New architecture, as simultaneously an alternative and a
reparatory process, depends on the “recuperation of a dignified mode of production”
and on the traditional urban culture.63 However, Krier does not establish a phasing of
the industrial phenomenon, neither does he take into account the stages confirmed by
architectural history. According to him, industrial society is defined by production
for short-term consumption and innovation as an end in itself: when society produces
59 Krier, L., The reconstruction…, 38–39.

60 Krier, The reconstruction…, 38.
only in order to consume and to produce again, and innovation substitutes itself for
moral and aesthetic principles, the rupture from traditional society occurs.64
Léon Krier’s intention, manifested in The Reconstruction of the European City,
is, on the one hand, to signal the outlining of this alternative direction (represented
by Rossi), and on the other hand, to propose—almost in the form of a manifesto—a
theory and a method for this new architecture, strongly tilting the scale toward the
traditional. He argues for the necessity of identifying archetypal typologies, also
emphasized by Rossi, and for the orientation toward the past is the only method of
accessing these, since “the history of architectural and urban culture is seen as the
history of types. Types of settlements, types of spaces (public and private), types
of buildings, types of construction”.65 Additionally, he states that architectural his-
tory, so far conventionally (“the bourgeois concept”) understood as the history of
monuments (i.e. the history of representative objects), must also include minor and
traditional architecture, the entire “typological complexity of the urban fabric, of the
anonymous buildings forming the flesh of the city, the skin of its public space”.66 The
identification of typologies is absolutely necessary for Krier, since they are the basic
unit of the traditional city, which is a complex set of typological combinations.67
Hence, in order to access and meaningfully use them, the new rational architecture
emphasizes the following main issues: “1. The physical and social conservation of
the historical centres as desirable models of collective life; the concept of urban
space as the primary organising element of the urban morphology; 2. The typologi-
cal and morphological studies are the basis for a new architectural discipline; 3. The
growing conscience that the history of the city delivers precise facts, which permit
to engage an immediate and precise action in the reconstruction of the street, the
square, the quartier; 4. The transformation of housing zones (dormitory cities) into
complex parts of the city, into cities within the city, into quartiers which integrate
all the functions of urban life; 5. The rediscovery of the primary elements of Archi-
tecture, the column, the wall, the roof, etc.”68 The recovery of the past appears as
a necessity and main preoccupation of neo-rationalism and even of postmodernism.
In order to overcome the vices of modernism, the value of the historical product and
of the preindustrial city, as well as of the knowledge that fashioned them must to
be recognized. For this purpose, Krier recommended for architects the “imitation
of the most beautiful preindustrial examples in their proportions, dimensions, and
morphological simplicity, as well as in their mode of production aiming at the usage
of traditional materials and craftsmanship rather than industrialization”.69 Although
64 Krier, L., Tradition—Modernity—Modernism: some necessary explanations, Architectural
Design, vol. 57, 1987, Jan–Feb, 38–43.

65 Krier, L., The reconstruction…, 41.
67 Idem.
69 Krier, L., Culot, Manifesto: The Reconstruction of the European City or Anti-Industrial Resistance
as a Global Project, ed. Counterprojects, Bruxelles, AAM, 1980, apud Ellin, N., Postmodern…, 30.
positioning himself against modernism, Krier also proposes a “comprehensive and

radical” model or solution,70 as a response to the crisis generated by modernism.
In his own projects, Krier applies the previously outlined themes, while also
demonstrating the subjectivity of his perspective on traditional typologies and on the
process of architectural production.
The first example is the project proposed (but not carried out) by Krier in 1970, of
the reconstruction of Warsaw’s historical centre. According to his plans, the centre
would have become the materialization of an ‘imaginary museum’, consisting of
archetypal typologies, but also deeply personal and subjective, reflecting rather the
traditional idea of a historical city than the particular character of the Polish his-
torical centre, recovered via the academically inspired intervention that was finally
chosen. A second example consists in the retracing of Bremen’s (Germany) histori-
cal centre in 1979, for which “Krier proposed converting warehouses into housing,
narrowing streets that had been widened to accommodate increased traffic, closing
certain squares and constructing new ones, redesigning 1950s housing and 1960s
public buildings to appear more traditional, and building new ‘monuments”’.71 In
the case of the third example, Léon Krier collaborates with his brother, Robert also
an architect by training; the urban reconstruction project targets the restructuring
of Amiens’ historical centre (France), won in competition by Rob Krier (1984).
Rob Krier’s solution applies the same principles of rational and traditional archi-
tecture laid down by Léon: the return to the typical density of the historical area,
the unification of urban space (through typologies), the reuse of formal traditional
architectural language, and the cancelling of modernist functional zoning—all in the
service of recovering the memory of the place and of “erasing the memory of wartime
destruction through creating a new urban fabric, similar to the original, at the same
location”.72 Rob Krier will address three main issues through his project: “the scale
of the old town, the relations of its public spaces, the traditional typology of local
constructions, and their combinations”.73 Their proposals will be aimed at mixed
use—especially of the classic urban functions (commercial, cultural, etc.) with the
residential, imperatively necessary for the resuscitation of the historical centre; at
identifying local typologies and their reinterpretation, since they will represent “the
new face of Amiens”74 ; solving the issue of midtown traffic through compensating
for the number of (both public and private) parking spaces; and the recovery of the
picturesque through urban development interventions (plantation). One of the main
issues of the urbanism project consists in the treatment of the historical town square,
the location of the famous Notre-Dame d’Amiens cathedral, already classified as a
70 Ellin, Postmodern…, 34.

72 Krier, R., Dewey, B., Geiswikler, M., Muller, C., Rowenta, A., Trzeja, B. (co-authors), Amiens. La
reconstruction du center historique, Le Projet Krier, A.A.M Editions, Bruxelles, Belgique, 1987,
47.
73 Krier, R. et al., Amiens…, 47–48.
74 Krier, R., et al., Amiens…, 48.
UNESCO-monument at that time (1984).75 The plan proposed by Krier, influenced

by the similar situation maintained in the case of the Strasbourg cathedral, is aimed
at “restoring the Notre-Dame square closer to its mediaeval limits and redefining the
scale in such a way that the cathedral is highlighted”.76 However, this restoration
means the closing both of the square’s main front and the cathedral’s parvis—a rad-
ically different intervention from the previous trend in the restoration of historical
monuments of such scale, i.e. their freeing up in the name of an optimal perception.
For Krier, the closing of the front means a recovery of the cathedral’s traditional
instance and a return to the authentic form: “it is not the framework in which the
French cathedrals were built. Enclosed in a dense urban fabric, they were meant to
be contemplated from the distance, from the other end of a street or a square, simi-
larly to later town halls and courts. They were discovered suddenly, after turning a
street corner, so that the surprise and the contrast in scale contributed to increasing
the grandeur of the monument.”77 Léon Krier proposes three alternatives for closing
the town square, where a volume—with different grades of fragmentation—closes
the long and direct perspective on the cathedral. Another building proposed by Krier
(1988) “commemorates the location of the former slaughterhouse”78 of Amiens. The
specific character of the building consists primarily in the interpretation of formal
typologies: the volume reproduces the historical practice of furnishing bridges and
the resulting constructive typology, as it is directly located on the canal Les Bras des
Tanneurs, and the 12-meter high roof with four slopes and a gradient of 72° suggests
the high bridges of mediaeval craft buildings, also providing its name: La Pyramide
de Tuerie; second, the transmission of particular character is achieved though the
historicist architectural language used in the treatment of the facades and via the
details (bossages, arches, mouldings, etc.). Léon Krier also proposes a new House of
Marriages in Amiens (1988), on the northern side of the cathedral, at the location of
the former Archdiocese Square. His architectural language mixes classical elements
(symmetrical layout, columns, impressive slopes, bossages) and mediaeval features
(high and pointed pediments, exposed bricks, and lead as covering material). Ellin
describes another proposal of Krier for Amiens, in which he “placed a church and
bell-tower in the centre of the town, saying that even if people don’t go to church
anymore, it is important to have such a public space, a landmark which is always
open to all and fulfils mystical and symbolic functions”.79 All these projects of indi-
75 One of the largest cathedrals of the thirteenthth century, the Cathedral of Amiens is among the
few examples of a restoration, completion or reconstruction project carried out in a uniform style,
with relatively few interventions, and of a reduced scale. According to the UNESCO listing, its
current aspect is identical with the one from the late Middle Ages. The cathedral was proposed
and accepted as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981. Cathédrale d’Amiens, Département de
Somme, Picardie, http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/162/, accessed in April 2014.
76 Krier, R. et al., Amiens…, 48.
77 Krier, R. et al., Amiens…, 52.
78 Krier, R. et al., Le Nouvel Amiens, Institut français d’architecture, Collection Ville, ed. P. Mardaga,
1989, 433.
vidual buildings proposed by Krier for the ‘new’ Amiens were not built and remained
plans—as well as testimonials of the architect’s theoretical principles.
In the 1980–1987 period, Krier takes part in the IBA (International Building
Exhibition in Berlin)—an extensive programme of urban revitalization of periph-
eral areas—with a proposal for the Tegel district. The red thread common to all
of the participant projects—eventually materialized—is the postmodernist “critical
reconstruction” as a return to the already sanctioned or certified pre-war architec-
ture. Krier proposes “a densely built fabric to mark the edge of the city, including
public buildings which serve as points of reference and perimeter buildings which
define blocks”.80 The area, or the proposed cultural center, “consists of eight typo-
logical components: library, church, town hall, art gallery, sports hall, theatre, and
swimming pool are dispersed throughout the quarter, avoiding traffic congestion and
more importantly, symbolic and functional congestion”.81 These eight components
are conceived in such a way that they “occupy the foci of the main vistas, avenues,
and public spaces”82 of the four independent blocks—each with “its own consti-
tuted morphological, typological, and geometric order”83 —proposed in the general
development plan. This project represents a reaffirmation of Krier’s confidence in
the recovery of the city via the typology-morphology formula and through the reori-
entation toward the past, as well as a new alternative for advocating “the city within
the city”—the scheme of a polycentric urban fabric, in which suburbia becomes a
nucleus in itself, relieving the old historic centre of the city.
These examples belonging to Léon (and, partially, Rob) Krier’s work have been
selected and discussed here due to their context in which they operate—the historical
fabric. This type of intervention presupposes the analysis of the historical context, the
identification of local/traditional typologies, and their interpretation process in built
form, to be ultimately inserted into the urban fabric of the historical city. The good
relationship between the historical background and the new insertions (or between
the historical monuments and the new context) is, according to Krier, one of the con-
ditions for the functioning of the city as well as for providing a certain life standard
and aesthetic satisfaction. Although interpreted and contested as promoting the aes-
thetic function of architecture, Krier’s approach is more nuanced, with the aesthetic
aspect appearing as a natural and typically human manifestation associated with the
necessity of permanence: “You can only love objects which are beautiful; that is also
why you want them to be with you as long as possible and finally to outlive you.
How could you possibly love an ugly object? Ugly objects do not want permanency,
they want to be used and thrown away.”84 Interpreted thus from the traditionalist
perspective, the aesthetic of the architectural object is associated rather with the
80 Ellin,Postmodern…, 35.
81 Krier, Léon, The architecture of community, eds. Dhiru Thadani, Peter J. Hetzel, Island Press,
Washington, 2009b, 169.
82 Krier, L., The architecture…, 112.
83 Krier, L., The architecture…, 113.
84 Krier, L., How Industrial Society Destroys Culture (1982), published as “The Reconstruction of
the European City”, in RIBA Transactions, vol. 1, no. 2, 1982, 36–44.

ecological arguments in its traditional sense, the aesthetic is the wish for eternity,
stability, and durability. That which is interpreted by Krier’s critics as superficial-
ity, formalism, and gratuitous aesthetics, is in fact the symbolic traditional coding,
manifested through the aesthetic as an investment with meaning. Hence, Krier does
not advocate a mere subjective beautification/aestheticization of architecture, but the
necessity of returning to a traditional process of architectural production, aimed at the
continuity (interrupted by modernism) and at the stability based on the historically
certified formula.
The postmodern typologies, although interpretable from the perspective of their
design, and even subjective, are, at least in their intention, sincere. According to
Rossi, the typology, although derived from the vernacular formula, is interpreted as
the sustained form and perpetuated in spite of the loss of their meaning and function.
Juxtaposed and mixed, these forms compose the—deeply subjective—architectural
expression of the neo-rationalism proposed by Rossi. Similarly, Krier identifies the
source of the typology in the vernacular form, confirmed by its perpetuation, but only
due to the registered meaning. Hence, for Krier, the form (typology) is synonymous
with meaning. The typology expressed in the built form can never legitimately be
anything else than what it represents, and the meaning attached to the actual form
cannot be cancelled through functional change, as also illustrated by Krier in a
visual demonstration85 : a church, a mosque, a power station, a ship, a warehouse or
a plant are all typologies with well-defined architectural expressions, solidified in
the viewer’s conscience. Hence, these cannot be but pastiches when rebuilt with new
functions (or associated with the country house, the pumping station, the cultural
palace—an allusion to Piano and Rogers’ Centre Pompidou in Paris—, the club, the
chapel, and the parliament—Niemeyer’s parliament building in Brasília). The form
must reflect the content—according to Krier’s truthful traditional formula. If the
formal expression differs from the content, the result is a pastiche, the form lacking
in the original meaning. This association is meant to elevate a mediocre content
through adopting the qualities and meaning accumulated by the form, as a principle
and a technique characteristic for the consumer society (according to Krier).
The use of the typologies and the morphology proposed by neo-rationalism may
ensure an interconnection between the historical fabric and the new insertion, as a
process designed, on the one hand, to maintain the spirit of the place (conservation
of the past), and on the other hand, to realize the transition to the future through a
new architecture. If the spirit of the place (the identity of the historical fabric) may
be conserved and perpetuated through it, then it has met its objective successfully.
As previously mentioned, European neo-rationalism is dominated by a focus on
the urban component (in contrast with the American, dominated by the interest for
the object in itself), and Krier subscribes to this line of thought. From his perspective,
the city—conceived as an organism and as “a network of interrelated public spaces
and buildings, of individuals and groups”86 —may only find its functional and aes-
85 Krier,
L., The Architecture of Community, Island Press, 2009a, 26.
86 Krier,
L., Building Civil Cities, dialogue with Michael Carey, editor-in-chief of the Traditional
Building Magazine (2005).
thetic ideal in the formula modelled after the historical, preindustrial archetype; the
ideal city is not only a utopia, but may also become a “tangible reality”.87 From an
urban perspective, the city may and should be (according to Krier) composed only
of the historically verified elements, i.e. streets, squares, and urban districts—with
their centres, peripheries, and limits—, “development programs and plots; building
methods and architecture, of a certain type, size, character, aesthetic, density”,88
“furnished” with the variety of the traditional mixed use, since “only a great func-
tional complexity can lead to a readable, clear, permanently satisfying and beautiful
articulation of the urban spaces and quarters, of the city as a whole”.89 The historical
city—where this attribute refers, for Krier, rather to a set of replicable, transcendent,
and timeless ordering principles,90 than to actual age—is thus the source of tradi-
tional architecture and urbanism. The principles of traditional architecture and tradi-
tional urbanism transcend the various conditionings of “ages, climates, and culture”,
since they are “practical responses to practical problems”, representing structures
and ideas with universal value.91 The historical urban (or rural) fabric is perceived
as qualitatively superior due to being structured according to these basic principles.
The European historical urban fabric, although evidently manifested in varied local
and religious forms, is based on the fundamental traditional principles advocated by
Krier. Thus, the quality of urban space is, in fact, a composite formed of fundamen-
tal values and their local and regional adaptation, or an equilibrium between the
universal/general and the particular/specific, with its many variations and combina-
tions. On the one hand, knowing the fundamental principles and in possession of
the models of potential particularization (local and regional), architecture and new
urbanism can put forth—according to Krier—the same quality and attractiveness as
the historical fabric. On the other hand, the recognition of these fundamental prin-
ciples and the resulting adaptive variations cannot be sufficient; the conservation of
the varied material forms in which these manifest is also necessary, along with the
expulsion and the ‘healing’ of the effects of industrialization within the inherited
historical fabric.
As a supporter of traditionalism, Krier defines modernism as its radical oppo-
site.92 The resulting human societies, i.e. traditional (or artisanal) and modernist
societies may be read as “historical phases which follow each other, they are also
contradictory forms of organizing human data, work and production. Furthermore,
87 Krier, L., Building Civil…,.

88 Krier, L., Contemporary Perspectives, in Building Cities, Norman Crowe, Richard Economakis,
and Michael Lykoudis, (eds.), Artmedia Press, London, 1999, 40–41.
89 Krier, L., The Reconstruction of the European City, in Léon Krier: Drawings, Archives
d’Architecture Moderne, Brussels, 1980, p. xxv–xxxi.

90 Krier, L., Contemporary Perspectives, in Building Cities, Norman Crowe, Richard Economakis,
and Michael Lykoudis, (eds.), Artmedia Press, London, 1999, 40–41.

91 Krier, L., Contemporary…, 40–1.
92 Krier also repeatedly draws attention to the incorrect use of the two terms, modernism and moder-
nity. “Modern merely indicates time and period, whereas modernist has unequivocal ideological
connotations.” Krier, L., Tradition—Modernity—Modernism: some necessary explanations, Archi-
tectural Design, vol. 57, 1987, Jan–Feb, 38–43.
industrial forms of production [characteristic for modernism] not only replace arti-
sanal ones but they wilfully and fatally mean their destruction.”93 Industrialization is
the main and defining phenomenon of modernity, directly affecting—transforming
and destroying—the traditional environment. Krier goes even further and identifies
the actual process through which the transformations on the traditional environment
are operated, in the form of mono-functional zoning. This “forces one activity to hap-
pen to the exclusion of all other activities. (…) Furthermore a zone is a place either
where everything which is not strictly obligatory is forbidden, or where everything
which is not strictly forbidden is obligatory. It is how you define a prison or a tyranny.
Zoning replaces rights and liberties by commandments and orders.”94
Mono-functional zoning means the fragmentation of the (urban and rural) terri-
tory, the dissolution of the human communities’ complexity, the “wastage of time,
energy, and land. It is by nature anti-ecological”.95 Zoning also entails functional
monotony, translated as a monotony of the architectural expression or as a “symbolic
poverty of current architecture and townscape”.96 According to Krier, the uniformity
introduced by functional zoning may be represented through architectural expression
both sincerely—with a uniform, monotonous, and banal architecture—and falsely,
dissimulating the monotony through a faked variety, inevitably resulting in kitsch
and caricature.97 Although expressly and militantly anti-modernist, favouring the
symbolic richness of the traditional, Krier invokes, applies, and supports one of the
principles claimed by modernists—that of the function reflected in the architectural
expression—i.e. the truthful expression of function. This may appear at first sight
as a gesture of partial support for modernism. Nevertheless, the truthful expression
of function precedes modernism (as a characteristic of traditional architecture) and
Krier’s discourse demonstrates that modernist zoning only managed to pervert it.
The truthful expression of function manifests itself similarly in modernism and in
Krier’s traditional neo-rationalism, although via different formal languages, as the
first relies on a radical and technologized aesthetic, and the second on archetypal
typologies; both the modernist and the neo-rationalist/traditional argument propose
their own perspective as the true, universally valid architecture.
Another consequence of mono-functional zoning is the transformation of peo-
ple’s movement, products, and services into an industrial activity in itself and into a
necessity: “artificial arteries and means of circulation become the necessary exten-
sions of the human body and mind”.98 Mono-functional zoning, characteristic of
modernist urbanism, guarantees and imposes consumption: any social activity is


95 Krier, L., Tradition—Modernity—Modernism: some necessary explanations, Architectural
Design, vol. 57, 1987, Jan–Feb, 38–43.

96 Krier, Tradition…, 38–43.
accompanied and mediated by consumption.99 In contrast, the mixed use and the
natural (organic) restriction of the fabric’s spatial extension—characteristic for tra-
ditional urbanism—enables easy movement (pedestrian access) and the free conduct
of activities, as well as a more economical—and, thus, also more environmentally
friendly—functioning in terms of time, energy, and territory.100 Krier considers that
only the elimination of modernist mono-functional zoning may bring about sustain-
able development, and “only by means of the polycentric reconstruction of the city
with complex and independent urban districts”.101
4.4.4 New Urbanism
The anti-modernist, conservationist, and environmentalist principles promoted by

Krier define the programme of the Movement for the Reconstruction of the European
City and will also generate a new urban design movement, i.e. New Urbanism, more
strongly focused on problems of planning and management of the urban fabric and of
the territory than on the actual archetypal object. New Urbanism (NU) preserves and
develops some of the ideas introduced by the Movement for the Reconstruction of the
European City, including mixed use, diversity (cultural, ethnic, etc.), development
in accessible and autonomous districts and blocks, the human scale of architecture,
increasing urban density, encouraging pedestrian transit, de-motorization in favour
of public and non-polluting means of transport, the equilibrium between public and
private space, promoting aesthetic qualities and human comfort, etc. One of the
ideas presupposed by all these principles, gradually gaining importance with the
development of New Urbanism, is sustainability. The emphasis on current environ-
mental issues, the evolution of urbanization processes (e.g. sprawl, suburbanization,
rurbanization, vertical and horizontal urbanization, counter-urbanization) and over-
population, the increase in regional disparities, social and economic segregation,
etc.—all these cumulative phenomena begin to be counterbalanced by the fact that
“never has there been more attention paid to, and more faith expressed in, the ultimate
sustainability of cities”,102 and this tendency brings the principles of New Urbanism
again into the foreground.
While the postmodernist roots of neo-rationalism brought forth a branch centreed
on urbanism—and the Movement for the Reconstruction of the European City, as well
as, subsequently, New Urbanism—, the same sources also had an offshoot focused
on the formal aspect, i.e. on the actual architectural object and its design. Hence, the
same orientation toward the past, self-described as anti-modernist, generated atten-
99 Idem.
100 Idem.
101 Krier,L., Architectura Patriae or The Destruction of Germany’s Architectural Heritage, Archi-
tectural Design, volume 54 (1984), Jul–Aug, 101–102.
102 Beatley, T., Green Cities of Europe: Global Lessons on Green Urbanism, editor Beatley, Timothy,
in: Introduction, Island Press, 2012, 2.

tion both for the historical city as an organism and for the historical architectural
expression of the functioning of this organism (idealistically perceived as optimal).
Postmodern neoclassicism103 may thus be viewed as a concentration on, and as a
development of, the traditionalist principles of Krier, with a major increase in inter-
est for the formal element. Based on the same inspiration and invoking the same
respect for the past, postmodern neoclassicism introduces the notion of “imitation
being the highest aesthetic ideal”104 and the historicist citation as its main design
technique, adapting both elements to the scale and to the necessities of the modern
object and of urbanism. Neoclassicism—conceived as an appeal to the historically
already sedimented languages—is neither new, nor an actual product of postmod-
ernism. Nevertheless, the declaratively anti-modernist character and the wish to offer
an alternative and a solution to its deficiencies, manifested as orientation toward the
past and as the interest for the existing historical heritage, resulted in postmodernism
becoming the optimal outlet for the traditionalist conception. The new classical style
is the result of an evolutionary process common to many styles; the historicist ten-
dency—or the taste for the historical citation—is manifested in its extreme form
in romantic neoclassicism and in the eclecticism of the nineteenth century, subse-
quently turning into the Arts and Crafts movement (with a stronger emphasis on the
vernacular, compared to the historical-classicizing citation) and then almost com-
pletely losing its visibility in the modernist period. Thus, postmodernism appears as
the optimal framework for the reaffirmation of the historicist tendency.
That which neo-rationalism identified via coded typologies validated through
meaning, neoclassicism employs as a formal language. The ‘classic’ expression
becomes the ideal garment for any function and scale, due to its refinement and
perfection, acquired and demonstrated over time, while the meaning, which was of
such importance for neo-rationalism due to its capacity for validating a form and
transforming it into a typology, loses its position in neoclassicism. While, for Rossi
and Krier, the historical fabric was capable of revealing, through analysis and inter-
pretation, the archetypal typologies invested with meaning, the historical form will
be meaningful in itself for the new classical style. The historical expression does not
require any processing and interpretation, as proposed by Rossi, since the meaning
has become, over time, synonymous with the classical or traditional expression. In
other words, while neo-rationalism needed a process of essentialization in order to
identify its working tools—i.e. the typologies—, new classical architecture only has
to recall the precedents—the entire classical repertoire—in order to identify both its
tools and production process. While neo-rationalism translates the classical expres-
sion, neoclassicism adopts and uses it as a source of monumentality, hierarchization,
and ordering—both at the level of the architectural objects (the classic architectural
expression) and at the urban level (the compositional rules modelled after those of the
103 Postmodern neoclassicism—also dubbed as ‘new classicism’, ‘new historicism’, ‘contemporary
classicism’ or ‘contemporary neoclassicism’, ‘academicism’, the ‘classical revivalism’, ‘romantic

classicism’ or ‘neosocial-realist megaclassicism’ (Ellin, Postmodern…, 37, apud Frampton)—uses
the vocabulary of classical architecture; not to be confused with the neoclassical architecture of the
nineteenth century.
104 Ellin, N., Postmodern…, 37.
classical period). From an urban point of view, both neo-rationalism and contempo-
rary neoclassicism reach similar expressions, although their approaches are different:
on the one hand, the morphological analysis of neo-rationalism, used for the deduc-
tion of traditional typologies (the town square, the street, the block, volumetric types),
and on the other hand, the analysis of the historical model (the Gothic-Venetian or
Palladian-style palace, the Renaissance square, etc.) and the reassembling of the
fragments of the spirit of the place, in neoclassicism. In this sense, Terry Quinlan’s
traditional neoclassicism is a continuation of the traditional ways of building and
thus more organic and natural than both neo-rationalism (Rossi) and postmodernism
(Venturi, Brown), necessarily requiring interpretation and processing through the
critical lens. While, on the basis of the past, the interest of the latter two is expressly
oriented toward the future, neoclassicism, and especially Terry’s conception, is both
based on, as well as oriented toward the past. Krier and Terry share the same attitude
toward the aesthetic, considering it a kind of repository or the mediator of superior,
universal, and transcendent values. “In traditional cultures, fundamental aesthetic and
ethical principles are considered to be of universal value and this is where the con-
troversy lie; namely in the question of a universal value transcending time and space,
climates and civilisation. In traditional cultures, industrial rationale and methods are
subordinate to larger themes, to larger concerns […].”105
The intention inscribed in Terry’s interventions reflects the little hidden desire
to return to the preindustrial past, imagined as a better way of life.106 The utopian
colouring is, more or less intentionally, plainly apparent in neo-historicist and perhaps
even more pronounced in urban-scaled projects.
4.5 The Present-Past Relationship in the Postmodern

Perspective. Three Levels of Interpretation
In the relationship between the orientation toward the past and the new postmodern
architecture, Rossi’s neo-rationalism may be viewed as a first level. The historical
background is cited as a source of inspiration, in order to be subsequently critically
analysed, classified (into typologies and morphologies), and interpreted, with the
aim, and finally, with the result of a new architecture, capable of invoking the conti-
nuity eliminated by modernism, although without resorting to imitation or creating
a pastiche. The solution proposed by Rossi appears as a new kind of architecture
or as a filtered and processed, distant product that is much more than a derivative
variation on the cited historical source. The interpretation is more prominent, and
105 Bouman, Ole, van Toorn, Roemer, O Tempora, O Mores! On the work of Léon Krier, chapter:
Vector of interest: Durée, The Invisible in Architecture, eds. Roemer van Toorn, Ole Bouman,
Academy Editions & Ernst and Sohn, 1994, 36–43, 40.
106 Bouman, Ole, van Toorn, Roemer, Classical Architecture is no Saviour, The Invisible in Archi-
tecture, eds. Roemer van Toorn, Ole Bouman, Academy Editions & Ernst and Sohn, 1994, 74–85,
85.
4.5 The Present-Past Relationship in the Postmodern Perspective … 267
the historical allusion (citation) is more diffuse. A second level is represented by

Krier’s approach. The orientation toward the past is deeper, almost total; both the
architectural language and expression, as well as the historical structures and order-
ing principles are similarly analysed and classified, while also being elevated to the
level of an ideal model. The presence of the past is more noticeable, and the pro-
cess of interpretation is more diffuse, in particular with regard to the urban aspect
(the historic city’s operating principles, as well as the separation between the public
and the private are cited and directly adopted). While for Rossi the conservation of
the historical fabric is important precisely because it represents the access to the
typologies, and thus the formula for the realization of his new architecture (conti-
nuity through conservation), the historical fabric is for Krier all the more significant
as it is simultaneously a source (as the processed and filtered typology) and a model
(the unfiltered, imitated spirit of the place, the expression), the latter most clearly
reflected in the importance attributed by Krier to the aesthetic aspect. Rossi proposes
a new architecture through the processing of typologies, while Krier offers both a
processing of the typologies as well as a remodelling based the historical prototype.
For Krier, continuity is not guaranteed solely by the use of typologies, but requires
something more: the entire ensemble of the historical city as a model—not only a
framing within, but also a return to the historical model. Both for Krier and Rossi,
the conservation of the existing fabric is necessary. Rossi advocates a construction
of the city based on the historical, while Krier promotes the return to the historical
city—its reconstruction according to the already validated model. The interpretation
process is diluted and alleviated through the importance attached to the imitation of
the historical model.
The third level of interpretation is that of postmodern neoclassicism,107 proposing
an even greater dissolution of interpretation. The classical expression is generally
adopted and the interpretation process only consists in its adaptation to the pro-
posed object (primarily in a dimensional and aesthetic adaptation, as well as in the
adaptation to the existing character). The supporters of contemporary neoclassicism
propose the classical ‘garment’, while taking into account its local and regional
forms, as adaptable to the requirements of most, if not all, functions.
According to Quinlan Terry, “the classical style can be adapted to all types of
building”,108 a theory he upheld and practically applied throughout his entire career,
as attested by his various projects. Of these, the Richmond Riverside (1984–1987)
ensemble from London’s Riverside suburb stands out as one of the most comprehen-
sive examples, primarily due to the scope of the intervention, consisting in a series of
buildings grouped around two town squares and oriented toward the river Thames,
as well as by virtue of the mixed use it introduces, including offices, apartments,
107 Itsrepresentatives include Raymond Erith and Quinlan Francis Terry, Robert Adam, Robert
Franklin (Great Britain), Demetri Porphyrios (Greece), Christopher Doyle (Austria), Fridtjof Felix
M. Herzog, Marc Kocher, Christoph Kohl and Rob Krier (Germany), Pier Carlo Bontempi (Italy),
Rafael Martos (Spain).
108 Barber, Lynn, Shock of the old, The Observer, 7 March 2004, published online: The Guardian
website, 7 March 2004, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/mar/07/architecture,

accessed in May 2014.
two restaurants, community facilities, and gardens facing the river.109 The Riverside
architectural ensemble also has two historical buildings whose restoration involved
their refacadization as well. The series of new buildings were deliberately con-
structed in different classical styles that define the eclectic character of British archi-
tecture from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, including Venetian Gothic,
nineteenth-century Neo-gothic, Palladian, Baroque, Georgian, and Greek Renais-
sance. It also features all orders, the Tuscan, the Doric, the Ionic, the Corinthian, and
the composite, in a heterogeneous, but not arbitrary compound kept in the classical
mould. Terry appealed to stylistic, functional, and volumetric mixing in order to sug-
gest, or rather to imitate, the fragmentary and the juxtaposition characteristic for the
organic historical evolution of urban fabric. Thus, although conceived and built as an
ensemble, the Richmond Riverside consists, from a compositional point of view, of
buildings imagined as individual and distinct entities. The desired result is diversity,
even authenticity, character, and the sensation of organicity, or in other words, a
spirit of the place as well as a strongly historicist identity. Similarly to the case of
architectural expression, the urban space of the ensemble is modelled after classical
sources, as in the case of the access arcade to Whittaker Square, whose ornamental
treatment cites Bernini’s window of the Palazzo Chigi-Odescalchi (also found at the
eighteenth-century villa Beningbrough Hall), while the main square (Heron Square)
references the Renaissance Bolognese urban model. The ensemble, completed in
1987, sparked controversy and backlash both from the conservative side, according
to which the project “trivializes and debases”110 the classical tradition as a superficial
pastiche, as well as from the modernist, avant-garde side, which viewed it as retro-
grade gesture and as the promotion of an obsolete architecture. At the same time, the
project—appreciated for its human scale and familiar image—was well received by
the public.111,112 The entire ensemble is considered “a turning point in the history of
architecture”113 , although it has been and continues to be hardly visible and referred
to in its domain, due to its way of adapting the ‘classical garment’ to contemporary
needs and requirements. The new constructions of the ensemble project the classical
image—through their dimensions, proportions, orientation, accessibility, chromatics,
materials, and architectural details—, but also adapt themselves to internal functional
needs of the modern kind, through using interior partitions (open office plans), the
adaption of the structure to contemporary spatial requirements, the implementation
of the necessary air conditioning and lighting equipment, etc. Although incoherent
109 Quinlan and Francis Terry Ltd., Richmond Riverside Development, Surrey. 1984–1987, http://
www.qftarchitects.com/projects/pages/commercial/richmondriverside.php, accessed in May 2014.
110 Miller, Keith, Making the grade: Richmond Riverside, The Telegraph, 12 July 2003, http://www.
telegraph.co.uk/property/3315214/Making-the-grade-Richmond-Riverside.html, accessed in May,

2014.
111 Watkin, David, A New Order for Office Buildings, City Journal, 1996, http://www.city-journal.
org/html/6_2_urbanities-a_new_order.html, accessed in May 2014.

112 Barber, Lynn, Shock of the old, The Observer, 7 March 2004, published online: The Guardian
website, 7 March 2004, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/mar/07/architecture,

113 Watkin, A New Order…
4.5 The Present-Past Relationship in the Postmodern Perspective … 269
at first glance, Terry’s solution is a functional and even progressive compromise

between the traditional and the modern idea of space. Although the interior seems
to be exclusively dictated by modern requirements (modelled after the modernist
concept of function—office, residential, etc.), it continues to follow traditional prin-
ciples—of lighting, ventilation, etc.; thus, when removing modern requirements, the
buildings are able to operate as the traditional constructions. Terry considers that this
compromise, the insertion of a typical modernist space into a traditional construc-
tion, is a reversible process, as the buildings remain, from the traditionalist point
of view, unfinished,114 just unfurnished inside; once the modernist requirements are
removed, the building can fulfil its real potential and be completed. This is no longer
mere facadism, because the traditional principles are deeply integrated into the con-
cept of the buildings, but rather a combination of the two approaches. For those who
seek to motivate and legitimate contemporary neoclassicism, the association of this
compromise with the idea of ‘updating’ classicism is attractive, but not so for Terry,
who rejects it, because classical architecture is, according to him, timeless, unaf-
fected by the passing of time and changing fashions, balanced and comprehensive.
For Quinlan Terry, the traditional way of building (classical architecture) brings a
series of qualities lacking from modernist architecture—durability, the human scale,
hierarchy, atmosphere, organicity, etc.—, but it can also be adapted to contemporary
conditions and refer less to the additions due to technological development and more
to the historical losses (servants’ quarters, stables).115
The solution applied by Terry apparently contradicts the principle of the form-
function truthfulness invoked both by modernists and by Krier and Rossi, definitively
placing themselves both in the anti-modernist and outside the postmodernist camp.
However, the compromise of the traditional in favour of modernity is only partial,
as the previously invoked argument of the incompleteness of the buildings suggests.
The form-function truthfulness invoked by modernism or the neo-rationalists is a
mere filtering of classical compositional and ornamental principles. In other words,
the principles of classical architecture require hierarchies—expressed both via the
ornamental (mouldings, profiles, succession of orders, etc.) and the constructive
(layout, the opaque/clear proportion of the facade, etc.)—mediating the expression
of functions. The classical hierarchization is thus equivalent to functional modernist
truthfulness. The ornament fulfils a functional role—indicating the importance, role,
the destination of an access or a building, etc.—besides the aesthetic. In several
cases, as Terry argues, the modern building “resorts to signs and symbols to guide
the public in the right direction”,116 and finally, to transmit that which the ornament
accomplishes in a way that gives more “pleasure to the eye”.
85.
115 Barber, Shock of the old…
116 Terry, Quinlan, Seven Misunderstandings about Classical Architecture, essay published online,
http://www.qftarchitects.com/essays/essay-seven-misunderstandings/, accessed in May 2014.

Terry invokes a removed, preindustrial lineage. In his opinion, traditionalism is not

and cannot be postmodern, as it does not legitimate itself in relation to modernism, but
precedes and survives it, continuing a—technical, aesthetic, and conceptual—her-
itage that does not need legitimation.
4.6 The Postmodern Perspective and the Problem

of Conservation
According to Rossi and Krier, the conservation of historical heritage is important

due to its capacity of providing the characteristic local and regional typologies and
morphologies, representing the context to which the new object relates itself (Rossi)
and in which it integrates itself without becoming a pastiche (Krier). For neoclassi-
cism, the historical heritage, although remaining the original source and the valued
context, unintentionally loses of its importance precisely through the proposed total
integration: the neoclassical insertion fools the eye by appearing as an equal part
within a historical fabric. Although neoclassicism defines itself through its respect
for the historical fabric and through the declared intention to return to a preindustrial,
uncorrupted, and implicitly idealized past, it is precisely this respect that proves to
be its fatal point. The neoclassical or traditional intervention seeks to contrast itself
as minimally as possible with its context, precisely out of respect for it. The classical
architect adapts the insertion to the existing historical stock, although building it
according to the same architectural principles, techniques, and expressions—raising
him- or herself, if not to the level of the architect of the past, then to an equivalent
position in the present. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the neoclassical
object seems to be its perfect embodiment. Neoclassicism deliberately perfected the
technique of historical citation, even leading up to identification, while the object
may as well be a new insertion, a copy or a new substitution. The rebuttal argument of
Terry—finally confirmed even by the passing of time—comes again to support clas-
sical aesthetics, as the insertion with the utmost historicist and integrative intention,
even in the cleanest classical language, will inevitably bear the sign of its times. “The
Classical architect doesn’t put [historical] time in a building consciously. It happens
accidentally”117 , beyond his control of the creative process. He may imagine the
historical precedent (the Palladian style or the Baroque square), and reconstruct on
its basis, through successive permutations—or “intellectual judgments”—,118 a new
image, expressed in the classical language. The neoclassical or traditional product is
not a mere imitation of a historical precedent or a catalogue of forms; it is the result of
a juxtaposition, adaptation, and transformation process of the ‘pieces’, while respect-
ing the classical principles. The existence of these principles also ensures, according
83.
118 Bouman, van Toorn, Classical Architecture is…, 83.
4.6 The Postmodern Perspective and the Problem of Conservation 271
to Terry, the transfer of the classical expression to new functions, for which there is no
historical precedent. Hence, the neoclassical/traditional product—realized according
to classical principles—is based on the individual’s “knowledge and experience, and
the result will express a number of architectural subtleties”,119 endemic to him, so it
will never be a mere pastiche.
According to Terry, the process of architectural production is a ‘living tradition’
that takes place similarly for the contemporary and the former architect. Nevertheless,
although the traditionalist contemporary architect operates with the same elements
and according to the same principles, his product always illustrates the coordinates of
his time, and will inevitably express, even in classical terms, his own historical period,
specific place, character, and even nationality. The traditionalist neoclassicism pro-
posed by Terry seeks an idealized continuity, and, of the three previously discussed
levels (represented by Rossi, Krier, and finally, Terry), it is this last one that most
closely approximates its attainment, as it is characterized by a maximum dissolution
of interpretation and by the processing of the historical source. Neoclassicism does
not interpret formal historical language, but rather reiterates it, without proposing a
new process of architectural production (similarly to Rossi’s and Krier’s typologies
and reduction to essence), merely reinstating the historical. As also noted by Terry,
interpretation or processing remains inscribed in the final product as an inevitable
feature of its temporal and spatial context, irrespective of the creative intention. Con-
tinuity cannot be perfect, but remains idealized and unrealized, because interpretation
(rooted in the present) continues to be part of the creative process through the very
presence of the creating architect. However, at the same time, continuity is closest
to its realization, since the creative process and the language that is used are purified
of interpretation and reiterated in their original, traditional from.
Although less contrasting in an already sedimented urban historical context, the
product of traditionalist architecture also raises the issue of authenticity. The critics
of traditionalism accuse it of creating a pastiche and kitsch, and even of being an
‘architecture of the amusement park’, while the reiteration of a dead language can-
not be but vulgarization or a blasphemous act. Terry invokes here his legitimating
argument again: new architecture may be pastiche or kitsch only when the creative
language and process are operated in a simple-minded and amateurish manner. He
compares the traditional process of architectural production to a game of chess, in
which the player must have a good knowledge of the individual pieces and of the
favourable moves. Both in architecture and in chess, a good player offers a solid
execution, while the amateur reveals his or her dilettantism. The creative architec-
tural process conceived in such a way allows a plurality of permutations and solu-
tions, each different and unique because each bears the imprint the spatio-temporal
coordinates of its creation, and especially of the intellectual abilities and particular
sensibility of its creator—or their lack. Hence, the architecture proposed by Terry
is not a pastiche but a rebirth; traditionalist building continues organically from the
point where ‘real architecture’, whose principles were validated by the passage of
119 Terry, Q., Seven Misunderstandings about Classical Architecture, essay published online, http://
www.qftarchitects.com/essays/essay-seven-misunderstandings/.
time, was interrupted. For Terry, the historical object is as authentic as the newly
built architectural object, since both are the result of a creative process based on a
series of (technical, constructive, aesthetic, economic, etc.) principles. Even if these
principles correspond, the recent creative process can only be individual and specific,
conveying the same character to the new object as well.
The traditional architectural expression becomes typology only in the form of
the classical vocabulary, according to Krier, the only one that “always occasions a
feeling of nostalgia; for nostalgia is that enigmatic longing for what survives deep
down in most people’s hearts”,120 the archetype and the only balanced, closed, and
sublimated expression (“for classical architecture the notions of progress and inno-
vation no longer exist, because it has solved all technical and artistic problems in
solidity, in beauty, in permanence and commodity”).121 Discussing at the level of
the actual object, Krier’s interpretation of the concept of architecture is also worth
mentioning. One can talk about architecture only in the case of public buildings,
monuments, and public spaces,122 because “architecture is the intellectual culture of
building. As an art, it is concerned with the imitation and translation of the elements
of building into symbolic language, expressing in a fixed system of symbols and
analogies the very origin of Architecture in the laws of nature and in human intel-
ligence and labour”.123 Other categories of objects—domestic structures (or minor
architecture), warehouses, civil engineering works—belong, according to Krier, to
the material culture of building. Unlike architecture, building “is generally concerned
with the erection of the urban fabric, of building blocks which form the streets of the
city, its retaining walls, bridges, etc. Building culture is basically concerned with the
repetition of a few building types and the adaptation to local conditions of use, of
materials and climate”.124 Following the same logical sequence, the monument and
the public space/building—i.e. architecture—may and must have only an architec-
tural expression that is sublimated, balanced, confirmed over time and, most of all,
truthful to the object’s destination. Neoclassicism represents thus the only adequate
language for this type of architecture; “it attains to the highest quality and belongs
to artistic culture”.125 Krier goes even further with this binary classification:
120 Krier, L., Architectura Patriae or The Destruction of Germany’s Architectural Heritage, Archi-
tectural Design, volume 54 (1984), Jul–Aug, 101–102.


123 Krier, The Reconstruction…,.
124 Krier, The Reconstruction…,.
125 Idem.
Architecture Building
Classical language Vernacular language
Artistic culture; art—intellectual Building culture; artisanal—manual
Object; monument Context; urban fabric
Public space Private space
Collective will Individual will
Public and symbolic, institutional buildings Private utility buildings
Res publica—dignity, solemnity and grandeur Res privata and res economica—private
activities, residential, commerce and industry
In spite of this distinction, the two categories are not conceived as opposites but,
on the contrary, complement each other; similarly to the way in which architec-
ture, in Krier’s understanding of the term, is based on construction and manufacture,
the classical language represents an intellectualization of the vernacular. In order
to be sustainable, attractive, and functional, the city must be a composite of these
two categories. This composite may appear either in its historical (ideal) form, in
which the two categories, architecture and construction, are already sedimented, and
offer a model of interdependence, or in its modern form, constructed according to the
historical model and adapted to local identitary, cultural, territorial, climate, etc. con-
ditions. According to Krier, as in the case of the classical and vernacular language,
the historical and the modern city have to harmoniously coexist, and the alterna-
tive he proposes—architecture and urbanism based on neo-rationalist/traditionalist
principles—represents not just a palliative of modernism, but also a solution for
contemporary development.
The same appeal to the past—to historical architecture as a source and model—as
well as to patterns or model typologies as a postmodern technique of mediation, and
the same (self-attributed) role of the continuator of ‘true architecture’ found in Krier
and especially Terry, have been adopted by another traditionalist architect, Christo-
pher Alexander. The approach he proposes—as “an entirely new attitude to architec-
ture and planning”126 —represents a “a modern post-industrial version of the age-old
preindustrial and traditional processes which shaped the world’s most beautiful towns
and buildings for thousands of years”.127
Alexander also attempts to identify and reconstruct a ‘pattern language’, conceived
as regular, intelligible, and recurrent, essential and common set of forms/sequences
that create the genius loci; it is the unity through which an object, building or city gains
life, the perfect balance between utility, eternity, and aesthetics, organically relating
to and interdependent with the human being. Once these patterns are identified, the
unity and the ‘spirit of the place’ may be, at least in theory, recreated. Identifying their
essential characteristics and processes embodied and verified in the old models (cities,
buildings, and historical artefacts), a new product can be conceived and constructed
126 Alexander, Christopher, The Timeless Way of Building, Oxford University Press, 1979, Fore-
word.
127 Alexander, Christopher, The Oregon Experiment, Oxford University Press, 1975, 2.
so as to fit into the existing historical fabric and, especially, to possess the same
qualities (identity, aesthetics, security, coherence, and organicity) as its historical
model.
According to Alexander, an object “will only be alive to the extent that it is
governed by the timeless way”128 —formational and operational processes that pro-
vide attractiveness, life, balance, and mood to the historical fabric—, combined by
Alexander in the expression “the quality without a name”.129 This quality that lends
life and spirit to a place is made up of types and patterns of—natural or anthropic
—events that are recurrent in that space and identifiable, constituting a language.
According to Alexander’s explanation, “the elements of this language are entities
called patterns. Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again
in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem,
in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever
doing it the same way twice.”130 The patterns—numbering, in all, 253—are inter-
connected and create language that allows “an infinite variety of combinations”.131
The language thus developed, although admitting the existence of other languages,
of countless other cultures and individuals, simultaneously assumes the quality of an
archetypal language, common and essential to “all possible pattern languages”.132
In Alexander’s scheme, the patterns structured on dimensional levels are, in fact,
elements mutually conditioning each other. According to the author’s explanation,
a pattern may exist and function—according to the true intention of the proposed
scheme—only as a system, connected to similar patterns and subsuming smaller
patterns.133 Each proposed pattern is formed by the recurrent problem and its solu-
tion, containing a solution that “summarizes a property common to all possible ways
of solving the stated problem”134 . While the problem may be solved in very dif-
ferent ways, its solutions have in common that essential property that cannot be
named and grants life to the object. Alexander offers yet another explanation for
this scheme, according to which each element may be viewed as a tentative working
hypothesis/pattern, a solution that is general, adaptable, and open to interpretation,
as well as, especially, “free to evolve under the impact of new experience and obser-
vation”.135 In other words, Alexander identifies and proposes a series of assemblable
and interchangeable patterns indicating the (general) site where the quality without
a name may be searched for. Depending on the proposed project, there is a selec-
tion of patterns, which are structured into a network, on various levels—from the
macro level, the city and the community, passing through the meso level, the built
128 Alexander, The Timeless Way…, ix.

129 Idem.
130 Alexander, Ch., Ishikawa, Sara, Silverstein, Murray, A Pattern Language, Oxford University
Press, 1977, x.
131 Alexander, Ishikawa, Silverstein, A Pattern Language, xi.
132 Alexander, Ishikawa, Silverstein, A Pattern Language, xvii.
133 Alexander, Ishikawa, Silverstein, A Pattern Language, xiii.
134 Idem, xiv.
135 Idem, xv.
ensembles and the individual buildings, and down to the micro level, the specific
spaces and sites, small-sized interiors and exteriors or constructive details. Each
pattern “is a rule that describes what you have to do to generate the entity which
it defines”136 and, in order to acquire that genius loci characteristic for the histor-
ical architectural object, the new project has to be generated through a sequence
of such patterned. The patterns of the first category—those defining the city and
the community—cannot be directly projected from the beginning. These develop
gradually and organically, through the individual contributions of the community
members. Alexander includes in this category, among others, patterns such as inde-
pendent regions, the distribution of towns, agricultural valleys, the lace of country
streets, country towns, the countryside, mosaic of subcultures, local transport areas,
communities of 7,000 people, subculture boundaries, identifiable neighbourhoods,
webs of public transportation, density rings, education networks, commercial net-
works, height restriction to four levels, holy grounds, access to water, bicycle trails
and parking lots, common land, small squares, etc.137 In this category, the patterns
depend on regional and local policies, i.e. on the user community and not on the
single individual. Theoretically, these reunite the common contributions or represent
the common language of all the involved individuals. Although implemented at a
specific moment, these patterns manifest themselves over time and favour as well as
condition, on their turn, the coagulation of other independent patterns, i.e. the frame-
work of patterns such as “the common land, the clusters, and the work community
encourage transformation of the smallest independent social institutions: the fami-
lies, workgroups, and gathering places”.138 While the patterns of the first category
“define a town or a community”, the second category defines the meso scale, and
“gives shape to groups of buildings, and individual buildings, on the land, in three
dimensions. These are the patterns which can be ‘designed’ or ‘built’—the patterns
which define the individual buildings and the space between buildings; where we
are dealing for the first time with patterns that are under the control of individuals or
small groups of individuals, who are able to build the patterns all at once.”139 These
patterns refer to the placement and adaptation of the object to the terrain, the issue of
accesses, traffic flows, orientation and accompaniment, the issue of hierarchies and
spatial alternation, (internal and external) functional zoning, external dependencies
(location, orientation, function) or aspects of exterior design. At the micro level,
the patterns relate to constructive details and to the form, orientation, modulation,
lighting and furnishing of small, predominantly internal spaces.140 A final category,
the final segment of Alexander’s language, encompasses structural-constructive pat-
terns—“efficient structure”, “good materials”, “roof layout”, “the thickness of the
outer walls”, “columns at the corners” etc.—and patterns related to finishes and con-
136 Alexander, Christopher, The Timeless Way of Building, Oxford University Press, 1979, 182.
137 Alexander, Ishikawa, Silverstein, A Pattern Language, xix–xxiii.
138 Alexander, Ishikawa, Silverstein, A Pattern Language, xxiii–xxiv.
139 Alexander, A Pattern…, xxv.
140 These micro-level patterns include “alcoves”, “storage spaces between rooms”, “internal win-
dows”, “half-open walls”, “open shelves”, etc. Alexander, A Pattern…, xxx-xxxi.

struction details—both interior: “floor surface”, “soft inside walls”, “filtered light”
and exterior: “front door bench”, “climbing plants”, “pavement with cracks between
the stones”. Alexander completes his list with a series of patterns of an explicitly
aesthetic nature: “ornament”, “warm colours”, “pools of light” or personal objects.
These patterns are discussed precisely due to their specific character, providing an
overview of Alexander’s intention. However, the language proposed by the archi-
tect is dominated by abstract or diffuse patterns (e.g. “sleeping in public” (94, xxv),
“something roughly in the middle” (126, xxvii), “master and apprentices” (83, xxiv),
“children in the city” (57, xxii), or the “magic of the city” (10, xx), etc.), addressing
desirable characteristics which may be integrated into the designed space, but organ-
ically manifested in its historical instances. For example, “sleeping in public” (94,
xxv) essentially addresses the safety of public space and acts as a pattern “to create
trust, so that people feel no fear in going to sleep in public and so that other peo-
ple feel no fear of people sleeping in the street”.141 These diffuse patterns negotiate
specific issues of urban planning, of public space design or of architectural design,
etc.
The mechanisms proposed by Alexander, whether specific or diffuse, draw from
the historical example. The referenced models are urban fabrics, objects, details,
institutions, phenomena, and practices characteristic to historic spaces. Alexander
identifies not so much problems characteristic for modernity as their developments
and dysfunctional solutions in modern architecture, urbanism, and planning (e.g.
rurbanization, the “suburban sprawl” phenomenon, ‘dead’ urban spaces, the city “as
a kind of sculpture garden”,142 the urban and social architectural uniformization
phenomenon, technological dependence, etc.). The issues raised are still valid today,
as they stem from the individual’s interaction with his or her environment. Alexander
essentially proposes as a model the solutions (patterns) that survived the passage of
time, demonstrating their validity, as well as the validity of the practices that created
them. “The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples
in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close
to the centre of this way. It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns,
beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except
by following this way. And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for
it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form, as the trees and hills,
and as our faces are.”143
Similarly to Rossi, Krier, and Terry, Christopher Alexander also appeals to the
architectural product of the past, searching for alternative solutions to the problems
to which modernity has failed to find viable answers. Due to this orientation, the
approaches of these four architects are similar, at least in their intentionality and
orientation. The first two, Rossi and Krier, subject the historical product (i.e. the
141 Alexander, A Pattern…, 459.

142 Jacobs,Allan, Appleyard, Donald, Toward an urban design manifesto, Institute of Urban &
Regional Development, University of California, 1982, apud Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism, Princeton
Architectural Press, New York, 1996, 61.
143 Alexander, The Timeless Way…, 7.
urban fabric) to a processing by which they seek to identify a series of archetypal

typologies, an essential common denominator, or in other words, the basic elements
and their connections which, once defined, can be reassembled, recreating the spirit
of the place specific for the historical fabric. Through the application of these typolo-
gies, architecture may once again become meaningful and authentic. Terry discards
this processing and appeals to the classic expression—the only one which, according
to him, reunites signified and signifier, without being in need of mediation into the
present (either as translation or as interpretation). Alexander positions himself some-
how in between these approaches. His method—the proposed ‘pattern language’—is
closer to Rossi’s and Krier’s approach; yet, while for these two the typologies are
rather formal entities, preserving meanings condensed and sedimented over time,
Alexander’s typologies are rather practices or archetypal practices expressed into
the material; his patterns are essentially devices or rather dispositifs. In this respect,
such a repetitive pattern presents some minimal formal variation retaining an overall
similarity across different cultures and historical periods; part of this shared pro-
file is also the dispositif through which it is produced. The archetypal character is
less related to the form than to the practice or to the process through which that
form is imagined and constructed. Thus, the language proposed by Alexander is a
method, an imperfect and tentative language, as he himself admits, and only one
among many other possible languages; yet, it is one through which the individual
can claim and learn anew that “archetypal modality” of imagining and constructing
the world around himself, becoming capable of realizing locations—“cities, build-
ings, constructions”—into which he can integrate himself organically. In this sense,
Alexander’s theory is more akin to Terry’s. While Alexander searches in the past and
reconstructs through multiple manifestations that archetypal way of imagining the
world, Terry discovers it embodied in the classical language, the supreme and succes-
sively demonstrated manifestation of archetypal principles. Another similarity lies
in the semiotic approach, manifestly used by both Terry and Alexander. Similarly
to the way in which the classical language allows countless combinations, capa-
ble of expressing (almost) all that the user aims to illustrate, the pattern language
proposed by Alexander also allows multiple permutations and combinations; thus,
the expression is built gradually and adapted to the necessities and wishes of the
user. The archetypal principles which Alexander seeks to identify have one of their
manifestations in the classical expression advocated by Terry.
All these approaches—Rossi’s, Krier’s, Terry’s, and Alexander’s—have in com-
mon the orientation towards the built historical heritage, in which the (as we have
seen, more or less formal) principles of a new architecture are manifested and from
which they can be derived. According to these theories, new architecture must
unquestionably have recourse to the past in order to regain its authenticity, iden-
tity, and spirit. While in one of the postmodern orientations the past is fragmented,
quoted, and reassembled—through the already mentioned collage technique—, thus
creating a formal and conceptual alterity, a second orientation analyses, compares,
and divides the past into typologies—turned thus into the medium of a new, but essen-
tially identical architecture. Thus, Rossi proposes a new architecture and a new city,
different from the past, but built on its basis. Krier advocates the recovery of essential
types and the comeback to the formal, the construction technique and the image of the
past as a solution and direction of the new architecture. The classical language repre-
sents the ideal and necessary expression of the architecture of the present for Terry.
Finally, for Alexander, such an architecture of the present may only exist through the
recovery of the principles of the past. All four discourses propose as the solution for
the problems of the present a new kind of architecture—essentially different from the
pastiche—, but one that is nevertheless inspired by, recovered from, and modelled
after the architecture of the past—i.e. an architecture analogous to that of the past.
Of the four discourses, the most illustrative in this sense is Terry’s: his architecture’s
alterity lies precisely in its perseverance in remaining the same. As he argues, even
using these techniques, principles, and constituents, the architect will create a new
object, which can only be different, irrespective of the architect’s intention. The four
examples present a wide spectrum of this intentionality. The intention of creating
alterity is the deepest in Rossi’s case. Alterity is less intentional for Krier, although
it inevitably stems from the assembling of historical typologies into an image meant
to suggest the past (e.g. the traditional image of a mediaeval city). In Terry’s case,
the alterity of his architecture only manifests itself in contrast with modernist and
contemporary architecture, repeating the relationship of the historical city with the
new one. Essentially, Terry only continues a certain kind of building, different merely
through the development of its manifestation context (the contemporary city) and
not in itself—a situation in which the resulting object’s alterity may be considered
unintentional. Finally, in the fourth case, alterity is equally unintentional—the result
of the contrast with a corrupted context—and intentional, through the deliberate
reassembling of an archetypal language.
4.6.1 The Postmodern Perspective and the Deciphering

of the Historical City
Another approach to be mentioned, with a postmodern source and character, is that

of Paul Henry Gleye. Inspired by Lynch’s typological analysis and motivated by the
same wish to ‘decipher’ its subject—focused deliberately on the historical city—and
to establish the ‘recipe’ through which it develops its spirit and identity, Gleye iden-
tifies a series of basic elements of the urban landscape that “enhance the sense of
historical identity in a place”.144 His approach is similar to the preceding, Lynch’s,
Rossi’s, and Krier’s. However, Gleye concentrates his analysis on the historical fabric
without seeking to identify archetypal, essentialized, and interpretable formal ele-
ments (Rossi) as the source of a new, legitimate architecture. He rather searches for
the essential, defining coordinates (Lynch) of the spatio-cultural identity perceived
by the public. Hence another similar aspect of Lynch’s approach: his emphasis on the
perception of historical space—the coordinates identified by Gleye as the leverages
through which the operator mediates the image of the historical city. A peculiarity
144 Gleye, Paul H., A Breath of History, PhD, UCLA, 1983, apud Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism, 82.
of Gleye’s approach is that his analysis and the resulting method are intended not so
much for architects and urban planners as for the preservers, providing them with the
mechanism through which they can (re-) “produce this sense of historical identity,
and along with it a sense of security and meaning”.145 Deliberately addressing it to
the preservers, Gleye definitively places his analysis out of the range of architec-
tural projects—thus distancing himself from the objective cited by other analyses,
i.e. of recovering the essence of architecture and attributing a new expression to it.
The seven coordinates proposed by Gleye correspond to sensitive focus points both
of architectural conservation and, more generally, of urban planning: “(1) recon-
struction of major monuments; (2) repetition of traditional architectural motifs; (3)
reaffirmation of the center and periphery; (4) incorporation of historical clues; (5)
retention of perceived city scale; (6) adoption of historical design ordinance (a design
guide); and (7) retention of traditional land uses in the town center”.146 According
to Ellin, this accumulation of leverages may be used for “recalling previous urban
forms and thus lend a sense of historical identity and security”.147 In this regard,
Gleye’s coordinates bear some resemblance to the language proposed by Christo-
pher Alexander in A Pattern Language, discussed previously. The sense of identity
and security are considered and included by Alexander in the scope of the quality
without a name, characteristic for the historical/traditional fabric and architecture.
Beyond the methodological similarity to Lynch’s analysis, Gleye’s approach seems
to be closest to Krier’s in its intention, i.e. recovering the sense of localisation and the
atmosphere specific for the historical fabric. Intervention requires a new architecture
for Krier, reassembled from historical ad archetypal formal patterns, while in Gleye’s
view, it is the recovery of the fabric through protection, conservation, and restoration,
without processing (distillation and interpretation) of the historical forms—just the
recovery of the previous situation.
While the above-discussed approaches sought to identify the sense of the place,
the atmosphere or genius loci characteristic for the historical town, with the aim of
recreating them through the expression of a new architecture, in Gleye’s approach,
the spirit of the place is identified with the intent of being conserved and not repli-
cated. This unreserved orientation toward the protection of the past is an organic
consequence of the conservative disposition—or of the (postmodern) interest for the
past—, represented by Rossi, Krier, Terry, and Alexander.

146 Gleye, Paul H., A Breath…, apud Ellin, Postmodern…, 82.
4.7 The Interest for the Historical Object

and the Commodification Process
The postmodern architectural object—whether neo-rationalist (Rossi), traditionalist

(Terry) or historicist and populist (Venturi)—requires, as shown above, more or less
acutely, but in all its manifestations, the character of difference.
The manifest interest for historical architecture and urbanism is oriented both
toward the past and the future: the need to preserve is brought into the foreground,
in order that, on the basis of the material remains of the past (cadre materiel148 ), the
creation of a mnemonic link or of an organic evolution through (vernacular and his-
toricist) design becomes possible. The (hardly new) principle that the past is superior
to the present gains weight, whether it refers to a kind of romantic nostalgia or to the
objective assessment of the spatial coordinates of the architecture and to the urbanism
of the past. Thus, the postmodern orientation toward the material framework of the
past, especially in the form of traditionalism, may be considered responsible for the
return to a meaning of tradition closer to the original, as the “process of transmitting
culture from one generation to the next […] more useful than the currently more
common one of tradition as something time-honoured and little changing”.149 This
direction is declaratively supported by traditionalist architecture, for which the trans-
mission of the form is conditioned by the conservation of the traditional practice.
Although the concentration on the postmodern historical built heritage had as its ini-
tial aim the development of a new architecture—through the recovery of the ‘correct
(verified) principles’ of architecture and urbanism, the revitalization of the creative
process and, especially, the recovery of identity, all included under the larger heading
of compensating for the ‘evils’ of modernism—, one of the main consequences was
the 180° turn toward the past, with architecture being substituted by its own his-
tory.150 This interest fuels, on the one hand, conservationist movements, a reaction
closely related to the massive destructions, restructuring and reconstruction of the
urban fabric in the post-war period (both in Europe and in the US). On the other
hand, it feeds the recovery of the historicist languages (as revival or eclecticism, as
148 Halbwachs, Maurice, On Collective Memory, ed. Lewis A. Coser, University of Chicago Press,
1992, and Halbwachs apud. Jonker, Gerdien, The Topography of Remembrance: The Dead, Tradi-
tion and Collective Memory in Mesopotamia, BRILL, 1995, 177. The concept “includes the building
skills and other architectural interference of previous generations who determined the townscape
and landscape and constituted, by their presence, a permanent representation of the past”; based
on his particular subject, Jonker identifies “the physical objects which people come into contact
with daily”, or the “hoses, streets, towns, monuments, ruins and landscapes [that] are only slightly,
or not at all, likely to change”—as parts of this material framework, a necessary condition for the
functioning of collective memory (Jonker, 35).
149 Wilson, Chris, Living traditions: the vernacular, revivalism and reurbanization, ed. Nezar
AlSayyad, TDSR—Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Special Edition, The Myth
of Tradition, XXIV, I, The International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments
(IASTE), Berkley, 2012, 12.
150 Muschamp, Fear, Hope and Changing of the guard, New York Times, November 14:H37, apud
Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism, 81.

4.7 The Interest for the Historical Object and the Commodification Process 281
in the case of Terry). Postmodern eclecticism does not radically differ from that of
the nineteenth century, neither on the level of principles nor in the actual architectural
expression. Nevertheless, the main difference lies in the motivating intention itself.
nineteenth-century eclecticism sought a new expression, created on the basis of its
antecedent, but original. The expression was built either through the reassembling
of the various historical styles, in a hierarchical collage, or via the full takeover of a
language, through a revival clearly directed and adapted to the desired functions (e.g.
religious buildings are mostly ‘dressed’ in variations of the Gothic or neo-Romantic
styles, public administrative functions in Greek neoclassical forms, cultural func-
tions in Italian classicizing styles, etc.). Postmodern eclecticism deliberately and
programmatically seeks an expression of the past that is traditional at any price—i.e.
the postmodern, eclectic architectural object must, first of all, present a historical
image; this recovery of the past’s image manifests itself as a remedy of modernism, an
expression of plurals, and a recognition of multiple identities, regardless of temporal
and spatial determinations. Paradoxically, the eclecticism of the nineteenth century
can hardly detach itself from the historical antecedent which is its source of inspira-
tion, creating objects, extensions, and reconstructions similar to their model almost
to the point identity, while postmodern eclecticism, although deliberately searching
for such an expression—integrative and similar to its model almost to the point of
overlapping——, cannot evade—as also recognized by Terry—the imprint of its own
time, remaining always different.
While the postmodern interest for the historical source has left its imprint on
the practice and creative process of postmodernism, to a certain extent, copying the
nineteenth-century phenomenon, the main impact was of strengthening this orien-
tation toward the preservation of built heritage. Through the postmodernist wave,
the conservation and protection of built heritage return to the fore, gaining visibility
and legitimacy, while causing a ripple effect that is persistent and even intensified
over time (academic programs, special legislation and research, European-level rec-
ommendations, etc.). The main contemporary conservationist movements—the pro-
tection of cultural identity, as well as of the urban/rural and the cultural landscape,
critical regionalism, new and traditional urbanism, the interest for urban regenera-
tion—are also indebted to the postmodernist preference for the past.
The refocalization on the heritage object also triggers, beside the unquestionably
positive processes of documentation, conservation, and safeguarding, a process of
commodification, with its negative impact on both the material substance and on the
perception of the built object.
The objects with heritage value and their histories are “redesigned and packaged
for mass consumption”.151 Monuments and sites are remapped for political, cul-
tural, economic, and educational purposes, through amplification and suppression
processes152 affecting or even conditioning their physical form and existence. Those
151 Lasansky, Medina, Introduction, in eds. Lasansky, Medina, McLaren, Brian, Architecture and
Tourism: Perception, Performance and Place, Berg, 2004, 1.
152 Lasansky, Architecture and Tourism…, 1.
remaining on the map of interest of tourism are, paradoxically, subjected to a strong

process of standardization or ‘Disneyfication’.
David Harvey captures the way in which this phenomenon affects the cultural
process (whether material or immaterial, moveable or immovable) from an eco-
nomic perspective. The unique and special character of a heritage object endows it
with added economic value—a monopoly rent that can be obtained by transferring its
right of use. This monopoly rent “arises because social actors can realize an enhanced
income stream over an extended time by virtue of their exclusive control over some
directly or indirectly tradable item which is in some crucial respects unique and
non-replicable”.153 Harvey notes that this sort of monopoly rent “can be extended to
ownership of works of art (…) which can be (and increasingly are) bought and sold
as investments. It is the uniqueness of (…) the site which here forms the basis for the
monopoly price”,154 and the object can be marketed directly (the land, the resource
or the location) or indirectly (the product or the service produced by means of the
land, the resource, etc.). As Harvey also observes, these two overlap in the case of
the object with heritage value, due to the marketing practices of the tourism industry.
Nevertheless, there is a paradoxical algorithm corresponding to the object with her-
itage value, where the uniqueness and its particular character conditions its capacity
to be marketed155 : it may gain additional attractiveness—and a heightened capacity
to be marketed, but it is “too unique”, it may also lose this capacity. At the same time,
the use of marketing and advertising techniques can heighten its market potential,
but the more intensely and aggressively they are used, the more they can reduce its
uniqueness, transforming it into a mere product (commodification process). Harvey
therefore finds that the objective automatically loses its uniqueness as it becomes
commodified: “The bland homogeneity that goes with pure commodification erases
monopoly advantages. Cultural products become no different from commodities in
general.”156 As a counterbalance to the loss of attractiveness and to standardization,
there is a second mechanism that comes into action: the (re)assertion of the product’s
special character and authenticity through discursive constructs, in order “to main-
tain a monopolistic edge in an otherwise commodified and often fiercely competitive
economy”.157 This mechanism is exceptionally well suited to the cultural sector,
where the artefact, the practice or the built environment historically accumulates
special characteristics (uniqueness, authenticity, particularity, specificity)158 —and
coagulates over time as different and unique—, being implicitly able to generate
monopoly rent. Harvey takes up the concept of collective symbolic capital (Bour-
153 Harvey, David, The Art of Rent: Globalization, Monopoly and the Commodification of Culture,
The Socialist Register 2002: A World of Contradictions, vol. 38, 2002, 94.
154 Harvey, The Art of Rent…, 95.
155 Due to its uniqueness, the object may gain added attraction and thus commercial potential as
well. However, if it is ‘too unique’, it also may completely lose its potential for commercialization.
Harvey, The Art of Rent…, 93–95.
4.7 The Interest for the Historical Object and the Commodification Process 283
dieu) in order to designate the “special marks of distinction that attach to some
place”,159 the ‘raw material’ of contemporary tourism and the vehicle of economic
development. Thus, the distinguishing mark—the sum of meanings accumulated in
an object/place—conditions its capacity of generating monopoly benefits, and the
more pronounced it is, the more attractive the location/objective/site for the capital.
Harvey notices a recurrence of the phenomenon: the special profile of the objective
attracts commodification, generating the need of reassertion and reconsolidation of
the distinctive mark, which becomes once again the vehicle of the commodification
process. Nevertheless, the objective that carries heritage value does not remain only
at the disposal of the capital market. As Harvey observes, both the commodification
and the consolidation of a distinctive mark tend to select and display a dominant
identity, often completely removing the multiple identities, collective memories, and
practices accumulated in the symbolical dimension of the architectural object. These
communities, whose identities were deprived of visibility, can claim their recognition
and ‘right to power’ (the recognition of political presence), and the objective thus
becomes contested. Constantly subjected to negotiation, the objective is reinvested
with a new meaning layer. Therefore, Harvey ascertains the following algorithm:
“And if capital is not to totally destroy the uniqueness that is the basis for the appro-
priation of monopoly rents (…) then it must support a form of differentiation and
allow of divergent and to some degree uncontrollable local cultural developments
that can be antagonistic to its own smooth functioning. It can even support (though
cautiously and often nervously) all manner of ‘transgressive’ cultural practices pre-
cisely because this is one way in which to be original, creative and authentic as well
as unique.”160 Through the algorithm of the constant and painstaking search of the
monopoly benefits, the standardization (commercialisation) and conservation pro-
cesses directed at uniqueness and authenticity are in a perpetual mobile equilibrium,
whose disruption directly affects the built environment as Disneyfication, gentrifica-
tion, social segregation and exclusion—when the domination goes to the processes
of commercialization, isolation, social exclusion, degradation of the material form,
gradual loss of some layers of meaning, the creation and recognition of a single exclu-
sivist culture and of a symbolic capital of such specificity that it becomes impossible
to be marketed. In this equilibrium between commercialization and specificity “lies
one of the key spaces of hope for the construction of an alternative kind of global-
ization. One in which the progressive forces of culture can seek to appropriate and
undermine those of capital rather than the other way round.”161 Hence, that which
Harvey identifies as a solution for the commodification process is, in fact, the cultur-
ally determined local initiative, or ‘commodification on its own (cultural) terms’—as
a commitment to the existing meanings and as the object’s or the site’s additional
investment with meaning by the communities whose identities are involved.
According to Harvey, the special profile of the architectural object, its particular
character (i.e. alterity) is based on discursive constructs—the assignment of succes-
159 Harvey, The Art of Rent:…, 103.

sive, juxtaposed, interchangeable or cumulative meaning layers—and not only on the

physical form. Thus, the commitment to, and reinvestment with, meaning is part of
the process of ‘commodification on its own terms’ and is manifested in the first phase
in the form of the discursive construct. If this is strong, it may stimulate the object’s
visibility, functioning to a certain degree similarly to the process of challenging, and
sometimes even triggering it. The discursive construct that is meant to emphasize the
authenticity and exclusivity of an object or a place can, in a first phase, compensate
for the lack of collective symbolic capital, insufficiently strong or lacking visibility,
and ends in constructing the architectural object’s symbolic capital.
4.8 The Construction of Alterity. The Case of Industrial

Heritage
An example for a case in which the discursive construct has led to the construc-
tion of symbolic capital is that of symbolic architecture, whose development from
invisibility to visibility took place (and in some cases still goes on) in the contempo-
rary period. The process is, to a certain extent, different from that of the ‘classical’
historical objects, making up the majority of ‘classified historical built heritage’,
gradually decommissioned due to technological development, but carrying histor-
ical continuity (especially in the still active establishments) and witness to certain
stages of society’s development, as the industrial product162 gains its legitimacy pre-
cisely by means of the coagulated—accelerated and intense—discursive construct
only at the end of the twentieth century. The first conservation and rehabilitation
initiatives of industrial buildings—large-scale spaces, financially relatively acces-
sible to new industrial branches—emerge in parallel with the industrial revolution,
but are motivated by economic pragmatism instead of cultural or historical consid-
erations.163 Another attitude toward the industrial product*164 is represented by the
reactions to the negative impact of industrialization, emerging already at the end of
the nineteenth century and generating new structures—real or imagined (i.e. utopian,
discussed in another chapter)—which are meant to improve both the conditions and
the productivity of the industrial processes: the model cities associated with various
companies and projects such as those of Howard (1902) and Garnier (1904/1917).
The industrial product maintains, however, its negative connotations in public dis-
162 The term ‘industrial product’ is used in referring to all categories determined by the ordering
principles of TICCIHI: “industrial sites, buildings and architecture, plant, machinery and equip-
ment—as well as housing, industrial settlements, industrial landscapes, products and processes, and
documentation of the industrial society”, http://ticcih.org/about/about-ticcih/, accessed in February
2014.
163 Michale Stratton, Industrial Building Conservation and Regeneration, Taylor & Francis, 2013,
9.
164 The term industrial product is used here as a more condensed form to identify the built archi-
tectural object.
4.8 The Construction of Alterity. The Case of Industrial Heritage 285
course165 ; it is perceived as a focus and a cause of social problems, pollution, and

of the traditional landscapes’ and of the vernacular built fabric’s degradation. The
protectionist discourse begins to take shape only in the early 1960s. In its first phase,
it is concentrated in the British area166 and focused on objectives already satisfy-
ing one of the main classification criteria, the age criterion (1800–1850). ICOMOS
assembles “a corpus of international references and guidelines”,167 and the UNESCO
adopts in 1972 the World Heritage Convention—both covering the domain of indus-
trial heritage as well. TICCHI (The International Committee for the Conservation of
Industrial Heritage) is established a year later. Nevertheless, TICCHI will only adopt
its charter of industrial heritage in 2003, the charter of Nizhny Tagil (Russia), as “a
first international reference text of such recognition to guide protection and conserva-
tion in the field”.168 On the basis on these major landmarks, the discursive construct is
consolidated: “of academic courses, specialist publications and research projects, all
seeking to promote a better understanding of the historic industrial environment and
its surviving remains”.169 Hence, by means of the discursive construct, the industrial
product acquires added value, is invested with meaning (social and aesthetic value,
etc.), and potentially becomes protected heritage. The investment process is partic-
ularly interesting since it can be observed almost in ‘real time’. From a relatively
restricted class of industrial objects—mainly defined according to age, aesthetic, or
authorship criteria—, the investment with successive layers of meaning has led to the
identification, establishment, and classification of other categories, modelled after
“the known stages of industrial development (preindustrial, manufacture, industrial,
fin-de-siècle, and hyper-industrialized in the socialist period)”,170 thus extending the
domain’s area of interest.
The disparities between the discursive construct and the reality of the industrial
heritage derive in part from the latter’s negative perception. As shown above, the
protectionist discursive construct reflects a recent (partial) change in public percep-
tion. The discourse regarding the industrial revolution and its product is historically
associated with a negative image. An example of this is British area itself, the birth-
place of the industrial revolution. The association of the industrial environment with
165 The negative impact of industrialization was illustrated in public discourse by actors as varied as
Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, Octavia Hill, Harriet Martineau, Florence
Nightingale, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Louis Blanc, and Émile Zola. Friedrich Engels’ study
on the working and living conditions of the poorer classes in the industrial city of Manchester in
1844 deserves special mention. Garner observes, however, that the negative reaction to effects of
industrialization has created a distorted perspective: “In both lyric and literature, the hardships that
really did occur have been romanticized”. Garner, John S., The Company Town. Architecture and
Society in the Early Industrial Age, ed. John Garner, Oxford University Press, 6.
166 In 1959, the British Archaeological Council urged the government to establish standards for
registering and protecting national industrial monuments. Light, J. D., Industrial Archaeology,
Archaeology—Vol. I, UNESCO-EOLSS.
167 ICOMOS The Dublin Principles, 17th ICOMOS General Assembly, 28 November 2011, 2.
168 ICOMOS The Dublin Principles, 17th ICOMOS General Assembly, 28 November 2011, 2.
169 Industrial Archaeology. Future Directions. Eds. Eleanor Conlin Casella and James Symonds,
Springer, 2005, ix.

170 Iamandescu, Ioana Irina, http://www.cimec.ro/patrimoniuindustrial/, accessed on February 2014.
the images of the poorer classes, unsanitary conditions, pollution and slums, has
served ever since the nineteenth century as an argument for projects aimed at sup-
porting “urban improvement and social engineering campaigns, and they continue to
have continuing currency in the discourse relating to current regeneration philoso-
phies”.171 This negative perception is, according to Malcolm Cooper, a reminiscence
perpetuated until the twentieth century, and part of a discursive construct indebted
to that historical period. Although the industrial product has also gained recogni-
tion in recent years in the British area, being even endowed the title of cultural
archetype,172 benefiting from its older age and a wider spread, its public perception
is more or less still in balance between the two attitudes. The negative discursive
construct that is historically determined and attached to the industrial product begins
to be counterbalanced by the more recent protectionist discursive construct.
Nevertheless, the negative public image persists and manifests itself in the lack
of recognition and official visibility—due to the reduced presence of the industrial
objectives in the lists of classified heritage and to the official attitude of urban regen-
eration, favourable to demolition—, as well as in the attitude of the general public.
From the perspective of the general public, the image projected by the industrial
product is inconsistent with the generally accepted image of ‘historical heritage’
(“village communities and rural idylls”173 ) due to the temporal proximity—“simply
not old enough”174 —and to the radically different (brutalist, technical) architectural
and aesthetic language. The industrial product is generally perceived as “belonging to
a slightly earlier version of us, just beyond living memory, rather than to a pre-modern
period of historical others.”,175 dominated by the historical individual, detached and
different according to its definition, as well as on the basis of the temporal distance.
Beside the negative perception, the disparities between the discursive construct
and reality are motivated primarily by economic pressure. In an urban context, the
industrial spaces and buildings are perceived as rich reserves of land, whose restora-
tion and redevelopment are considered to be much more expensive than their demoli-
tion and reconstruction. As stagnant and neglected spaces of an uncertain status, they
carry the negative potential of becoming centres for extra or illegal activities, while
in the extra-urban context, problems such as decontamination, the large surfaces of
171 Cooper, Malcolm A., Exploring Mrs. Gaskell’s Legacy. Competing Constructions of the Indus-
trial Historic Environment in England’s Northwest, in Industrial Archaeology. Future Directions,
eds. Conlin Casella and Symonds, Springer, 2005, 155–173, 162.
172 McNeil and George, The Heritage Atlas 4. Manchester—Archetype City of The Industrial Rev-
olution, A Proposed World Heritage Site. The University of Manchester Field Archaeology Center
(UMFAC), Manchester, 2002, apud Eleanor Conlin Casella, James Symonds, Industrial Archaeol-
ogy. Future Directions, eds. Conlin Casella and Symonds, Introduction, Springer, 2005, xi.

174 Symonds, James, Experiencing Industry. Beyond Machines and The History of Technology,
in Industrial Archaeology. Future Directions, eds. Conlin Casella and Symonds, Springer, 2005,
33–57, 34.
175 Symonds, J., Experiencing Industry…, 36.
the industrial complexes, their relative isolation and hence the limited possibilities of
refunctionalization, along with the higher necessary investments, render these indus-
trial spaces undesirable, finally leading to their abandonment. Therefore, economic
pressure may overshadow the protectionist discursive construct. Although economic
pressure has the ability to influence even the already established ‘classic historical
heritage’, which it increasingly often does in the contemporary context, in the case
of industrial heritage it conditions its very existence.
Economic pressure requires the identification of a balance between the economic
structure of use and disuse. David Worth defines the economic structure of use as the
answer to considerations such as “the economics of the market place, labour costs,
repairs and maintenance, and economies of scale”,176 while the economic structure
of disuse “requires the assessment of what each structure would cost to demolish,
the value of removable buildings (…), and whether there is any demand for the
land to be reused for anything else. Furthermore, the impact of derelict buildings
on neighbouring communities, and property values, cannot be overlooked.”177 If
reduced to the cost/benefit ratio, the economic potential of the industrial product will
govern its future; even under the heading of regeneration, the refunctionalization
and reintroduction in use of these industrial ensembles with heritage value may
itself “become a motor for the loss of historic fabric”.178 Additionally, the potential
positive impact on the involved communities (area, district, city, region), as the result
of reintegration and refunctionalization, is often difficult to quantify in economic
terms.
Much younger and more vulnerable, without sharing attributes similar to those
legitimizing ‘classic heritage’, associated with an artificially maintained negative
image, and generally lacking the support of the wider public, industrial heritage is in
a process of reinvestment with meaning and validation. Even in the original spaces of
industrialization, such as the British, where the industrial product is undeniably vis-
ible and present, the protectionist discursive construct is still subject to negotiation,
while in the peripheral areas it still is just crystallizing.
4.8.1 The Industrial Object in Romania
In Romania, in the socio-economic context of the ’90s, a series of industrial ensem-

bles—whether intra-urban or attached to urban centres—, some of them still func-
tioning, were privatized and fragmented.179 Along with the rapid decline caused by
176 Worth, David, Gas and Grain: The Conservation of Networked Industrial Landscapes, in Indus-
trial Archaeology. Future Directions, eds. Conlin Casella and Symonds, Springer, 2005, 146–7.
177 Worth, David, Gas and Grain…, 146–7.
178 Worth, David, Gas and Grain…, 148.
179 Iamandescu, Ioana Irina, http://www.cimec.ro/patrimoniuindustrial/, accessed in February 2014.
the transformation of global economy,180 these measures have led to the formation
of disparities, both external—in the local and regional context—and internal—be-
tween the different individual units of the same ensemble. As Ioana Iamandescu
also observes, the protectionist discursive construct of industrial heritage is not yet
formed in Romania. In spite of the rich and interesting industrial heritage,181 steps
toward registering (regarding their typology, number, and value), documenting, and
classifying industrial properties are lacking. Furthermore, there is no specific legal
framework for this category of moveable or built heritage. Thus, Romania’s indus-
trial heritage is extremely vulnerable to economic pressures, and, “due to the lack
of legal protection or out of ignorance”,182 it often falls prey to demolition. Public
perception is split between the two attitudes. On the one hand, the industrial object
is seen as a “symbol of the restriction of personal freedom and of submission”.183
It is not considered valuable (this is especially true for the socialist industrial her-
itage, due to its sociocultural connotations), but rather as a manifestation of dominant
totalitarian authority. Similarly to the situation in the West, the dissociation between
the generally accepted heritage concept and the public image of the industrial object
appears in Romania as well.
On the other hand, for the involved communities, the industrial object is associ-
ated with the pride of their invested “work, patience, inventiveness”, as well as with
“their place of work, to which they dedicated themselves for so many years, even for
generations”.184 Therefore, conservation would mean the recovery and the legitima-
tion of the memory of these communities, no less important than the communities
whose identity is represented through ‘classical heritage’. The opportunity of contin-
ued access to this reservoir of memory and to these living testimonies requires to be
used. The industrial object accumulates in its material form the meanings assigned
by the official authority, but also the personal emotional meanings of the involved
communities, i.e. minor or everyday history, which in the case of ‘classical heritage’
is the subject of careful research and of often unverifiable theories. While temporal
proximity is one of the reasons for which, in common perception, the industrial object
is dissociated from the heritage concept, this is also a positive feature, enabling bet-
ter registering, documenting, and mapping of the minor histories inscribed in built
heritage. Due to the same temporal proximity, the documentary and historical mean-
181 According to Iamandescu, the industrial heritage of Romania is all the more interesting because
it presents all the stages of technological progress—from the preindustrial to the social-industrial—,
as well as due to its conservation state, since many of its elements are still functioning (especially
interesting for the preindustrial and nineteenth-century components, with a particularly strong pres-
ence); hence, in the south-eastern European context, the Romanian industrial heritage presents a
special situation both from the perspective of periodized representation and conservation. http://
www.cimec.ro/patrimoniuindustrial/, accessed in February 2014.
183 Iamandescu, idem.
ings, along with the meanings imprinted in the object by the official authority, are
more accessible, complete, and numerous, enabling, on their turn, a more objective
and encompassing interpretation. While in the case of ‘classical heritage’, the cipher
that enables interpretation is often lost, it is still accessible in the case of industrial
heritage.
Another attitude, also noted by Iamandescu, is that of “company pride and pro-
motion of the concept of tradition”,185 characteristic for the owner/industrialist. The
recovered heritage becomes the motor of economic development: the tradition and
the material form become ‘branding instruments’ or, in other words, tools for creating
monopoly rent. When the owner company of such a space promotes its product and
defines itself through the image of its material heritage, as well as, implicitly, via the
appeal to a tradition of the production process, then there is a meaning assignment
process with direct beneficial repercussions (most often) on the built form, as conser-
vation, restoration, and valorisation. This phenomenon is, in fact, what Havey calls
“commodification on its own terms”, through which the built form is resignified: the
purely functional structure (exclusively defined by production) becomes a symbolic
image and a legitimation instrument. The actual product is commercialized by way
of, and along with, the company tradition; both are used as sources of financial profit.
The assumption of the meanings registered in the heritage object, the recognition of
its value, and its investment with additional meaning make up the discursive con-
struct that motivates, in the first stage, the conservation and restoration of the built
industrial object and subsequently its commodification. The distinctive mark is based
on the image of ‘tradition’, continuity, particularity, and uniqueness; the material tes-
timony—the production halls and related buildings, devices, the original emblem of
the company—is marketed along with the product, representing a guarantee of the
displayed characteristics (quality, efficiency, etc.) and of the product’s uniqueness.
One such example is the first Romanian brewery from Timis, oara. The brand is
built primarily on the concepts of tradition and history, as well as on the uniqueness
of “the first one”. Its logo has the slogan “the story goes on” (with the implication of
a continuous narrative) and incorporates the year of establishment (1718). A series of
images supports the discursive construct: the thematic presentation uses suggestive
typical images, including the figure of the innkeeper, the urban-historicist profile (the
crenelated city wall and the church tower, both appearing against the background of
the online presentation, etc.) as well as the entire range of accessories linked to prein-
dustrial, manufacture, industrial, and fin-de-siècle production, but without reaching
the hyper-industrialized and modern-contemporary stage. The distinguishing mark
is therefore assembled as a visual construct, stereotypically layered images, and
accompanied by the discursive construct, through which value of the tangible and
intangible heritage (tradition) is extrapolated to the product, becoming the mobile of
the monopoly profit. As previously mentioned, the commodification and consolida-
tion of a distinguishing mark tend to select and display a dominant identity. In the
case of the brewery of Timis, oara, the promoted identity is composed and selective:
the discursive construct appeals to tradition, uniqueness, and national identity, while
185 Iamandescu, idem.

the discursive construct refers to the Baroque built object (the church tower and the
citadel), packaged in a ‘mediaevalising’ image in its presentation (colour, pagination,
etc.), so as to correspond to the stereotypical image generally associated in Europe
with this product category. Through the promotion of tradition and uniqueness, and
even by the appeal to the national character, the built heritage is commodified and
its particular character is dimmed down.
Nevertheless, mainly on the basis of the discursive and also on that of the
associated visual construct, the material forms—buildings, warehouses, production
lines—are restored and maintained, becoming the support for the visual. The positive
impact on the built form is, at least theoretically, undeniable. The appeal to tradition
and personal history requires testimonies, supplied in this case by the built form.
If the built heritage is resignified and thus protected and safeguarded through this
commodification process, then the latter may be interpreted as a positive process.
In Romania, however, the industrial heritage is mostly deprived of visibility and
associated with a negative image. Although on the official European (and global)
level, the meaning investment process culminated (at least theoretically) with the
recognition of heritage value, there is the need for a secondary, local and much more
personal resignification process in everyday life. Especially in the case of the Roma-
nian industrial heritage, the transition process from the invisible to the visible state
is, although underway, a difficult one, precisely due to the historical coordinates
also providing its particular character. In a first stage, nineteenth-century industrial
heritage gained official recognition through its inclusion on the list of historical mon-
uments in 1955, by virtue of the principle of age (originating from before 1830).186
In this stage, as also observed by Volker Wollmann, industrial objects are classified
as architectural monuments and historical monuments, without reference to their
specific character or to their membership in a specific functional class. The classified
objects are divided between the categories of civil engineering (bridges, aqueducts),
processing (mostly mills), and extraction (mines). In 1961, the separate category of
industrial architectural monuments is created, but without having its own index or
specialized list/register.
The process of gaining visibility was mainly supported by the detachment of the
monument’s specific, now historical, time from everyday temporality, or in other
words, the accumulation of a necessary temporal distance for the object to be per-
ceived as different. This is partially also why twentieth-century industrial heritage
is still subjected to negotiation. On the one hand, there is local support, in the form
of the attachment to the built object and/or to the background landscape of a spe-
cific stage from the lives of the directly involved communities (i.e. the subjective,
nostalgic perspective). This local attitude is consolidated by the support of external
communities, which even precedes it in some cases, as a result of the objectivation
of their perspective. On the other hand, there is the attitude of rejection or opposition
to the (most often) sociopolitical connotation attached to the architectural object.
Both attitudes are constructed around one of the many meanings inscribed in the
186 Wollmann, Volker, Patrimoniul pre-industrial si industrial în România, vol. 1, Editura Honterus,
,
Sibiu, 2010, 13.
built form. Thus focused, they tend to push to the background and to overshadow
its other meanings. Through this reflection, the object becomes a materialization or
the physical symbol of that meaning. When the material form is identified, up to
merging, with the attached meaning, the effect may be, depending on the context,
the conservation and celebration of the object or its categorical and irredeemable
condemnation—regardless of artistic, aesthetic, documentary-historical or cultural
value.
According to its very definition, the protected status attempts to remove the cul-
tural object from this identification process. As a final layer of meaning and as an
encompassing resignification, based on the argument of absolute or universal value
(expressly stated in the case of the UNESCO), the status is superimposed on, as well
as incorporates and recognizes, the multiple meanings attributed to “this unique and
irreplaceable property, to whatever people it may belong”.187 This requires the clear
detachment, the objectivation and conscious separation of everyday temporality from
the time of the historical monument, also emptied out through this process of the
familiarity of the everyday object, while, from the background, as the container and
the product of daily activities, the object endowed with heritage status becomes an
object of study that is analysed and classified.
4.9 The Threshold of Heritage Perception and the Gradual

Objectivation Tendency of the Perception on the Past
Exemplified by the case of industrial heritage, the objectivation phenomenon is quite

clear: the investment with meaning is, in its first phase, subjective, local or extra-
local, and above all, belongs to and is driven by a smaller (professional, religious, etc.)
community. Subsequently, relying on the object’s accumulated meanings, a process
of objectivation takes form, culminating in the investment with, or the sedimentation
of a final layer of meaning, which legitimizes it and confers its exceptionality: the
protected status. The perspective on time and the gradual objectivation process have
modelled the very evolution of the concept of conservation and restoration, hence
also the connection between the concepts of ‘memory’ and ‘monument’, rooted in the
etymology of the word: the Greek mneme, memory, but also the Latin monumentum
“(deriving from moneo) encompassed political and moralistic issues, intended to
admonish and remind the spectator of the power of the governors.”188 Nevertheless,
the rift between a contemporary and a historical time, lived simultaneously with the
impact of the industrial revolution on the inherited past in its tangible forms (whether
artefacts, monuments or landscapes), is not new. According to Jukka Jokilehto:
187 The General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organi-
zation meeting, Paris, 17 October–21 November 1972, 17th session, http://whc.unesco.org/en/
conventiontext/, accessed in February 2014.
188 Jukka Jokilehto, A History of Architectural Conservation, Butterworth-Heinemann, ISBN 07506
5511 9, First published 1999, Reprinted 2001, 2002, 6.

[…] there has been a fundamental change that distinguishes modern society from the tra-
ditional world. This change is essentially due to a different approach to the past, i.e. the
modern historical consciousness that has developed with the Western Weltanschauung. The
new concepts of historicity and aesthetics, but also the new relationships with culture and
religion, nature and environment, have generated a new conception of time and new value
judgements. These new values of Western society represent a paradigm that has effectively
detached the present from the past and, at the same time, made it difficult if not impossible
to appreciate fully the significance of the heritage.189
Jokilehto identifies such a change of perspective in the Renaissance. With the

detachment of contemporary time from the historical, the built object is gradually
invested with meanings or different values, becoming a relic, witness, model, knowl-
edge source, and aesthetic ideal. The age of Enlightenment or Reason marks such
a threshold, bringing major changes in the perception of historical time and of the
concept of culture,190 as well as, implicitly, “a new relationship of society with tradi-
tional buildings, settlements, and land-use”.191 Mimesis is substituted in favour of the
scientific argument and of the differentiation (Jokilehto), while history begins to be
imagined as a plurality or as “a collective, social experience, recognizing that cultures
of different ages and regions could have their own style and guiding spirit”.192
The nineteenth century marks another milestone in this respect. Historicity is
focused on and observed through the lens of the scientific method and of the objec-
tive knowledge and logic. This also has an impact on architectural creation—through
the rediscovery and adoption of historical styles (neo-); the relationship with built
heritage veers towards paradox yet again: the revered historic styles are idealized and
copied, subsequently leading towards a blurring of the lines between the new and the
old. Along similar lines, restoration is selective (only some monuments/elements are
worth preserving) and governed by the principle of stylistic unity or purity, radically
modifying193 a series of buildings, seeking to “reinstate it [the monument] in a condi-
tion of completeness which may never have existed at any given time”.194 Simultane-
ously, a countermovement emerges—the conservative restoration, or the philological
restoration, sensitive to the age and documentary value accumulated in the monu-
ment—as opposed to the “arbitrary” restoration, seeking “[…] uniformity, order and
symmetry, but [ignoring] the age value […]”.195 These two movements represent
the main antithetical directions that dominated the development and construction of
189 Jokilehto, A History of Architectural Conservation, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999, 6.

190 Jokilehto, A History…, 16.
193 The interventions on the historical monuments of the period may be included in two categories,
both based on the directing principle of stylistic unity: respect for the original style of the con-
struction leads to interventions perpetuating, whether justified or not, the dominant style of the
monument; “the elimination of parasitic additions” in other styles than the dominant one: the medi-
aeval monuments are “purged” of Baroque, neoclassical and Renaissance features, considered as
alterations and even degradations of the original monument’s value.
194 Viollet-le-Duc apud Jokilehto, A History…, 151.
4.9 The Threshold of Heritage Perception and the Gradual Objectivation … 293
the current principles of conservation and restoration, although in practice the atti-
tudes and the interventions are much more diverse and sometimes even intertwined.
This is the case of Camillo Boito, Italy’s “most important theorist, whose writing
significantly predated that of Riegl, Dehio and Dvorˇák”.196 As Kühl notes, Camillo
Boito’s trajectory and attitude in regards to restoration intervention are not linear,
revealing “incoherencies and results of unequal quality in his work”,197 despite the
fact that he later became the figure of the “restauro filologico” (a critical restoration)
and a pivotal figure in the Italian heritage legislation.198 Colavitti notes that Boito
imagined and used “conservation and restoration as operative tools of history”199 ;
while he assumed a more scientific stance towards the restoration/conservation inter-
vention, introducing the ‘hierarchy of intervention’, his approach ultimately reveals
the ingrained subjectivity of the built heritage.
However, the two main ‘camps’—with Viollet-le-Duc and Georges Gilbert Scott
on the one hand, and on the other with John Ruskin and William Morris as their main
representatives—have debated not only the principles of the intervention legitimized
and required by the protected status, but also the involved values and the attitude
toward the temporality of the monument. In the middle of the twentieth century, his-
torical value gains prominence due to nationalism, which triggers a programme of
identification, registration, and protection of everything bearing the mark of a ‘his-
torical’ or inherited identity. The influence of nationalism can easily be identified at
the heart of these two movements: on one hand, the direction supporting the manu-
factured stylistic unity uses the national argument in favour of a reconstruction of a
‘true, inherited identity’ and as a means to celebrate it. On the other hand, the oppo-
site attitude in favour of a conservative restoration, invokes the national argument in
order to accuse the distortion of a historical truth, the destruction of the testimonies
of the past, and finally, the loss of identity, through arbitrary and deeply subjec-
tive reconstructions undertaken by the stylistic movement. Likewise, the national
argument is also put forward in support of the new styles—identified as national,
characteristic, and identity-carrying for their specific territories. The exacerbation of
the national attitude is strongly manifested in architecture, a main (expressive and
durable) instrument for the assertion of identity—both through architectural creation
and the protection of built heritage.
Similar interventions to those introduced by Viollet-le-Duc have maintained a
distorted principle of mimesis and a subjective proximity to the timeframe of the
monument’s author: the ‘original’ style is continued, the architectural object is either
completed, partially demolished or/and reconstructed; the restorer is ‘licensed’ and
even encouraged in his demarche to substitute himself to the original author, while
196 Glendinning, Miles, The Conservation Movement: A History of Architectural Preservation.

Antiquity to modernity, Routledge, ISBN: 978-0-203-08039-9 (e-book), 2013, 155.
197 Kühl, Beatriz Mugayar, Os Restauradores e o Pensamento de Camillo Boito sobre a Restauração,
in Boito, Camillo, Os Restauradores, ed. Filho, Plinio Martins, trad. Kühl, Paulo Mugayar, and Kühl,
Beatriz Mugayar, Atelie Editorial, ISBN 85-7480-112-7, 2008 (3rd edition), 20.
198 Glendinning, M., The Conservation Movement…, 155.
199 Colavitti, Anna Maria, Urban Heritage Management. Planning with History, Springer, ISBN
978-3-319-72338-9 (e-book), 2018, 20.

restoration itself is more than ever an act of creation and speculation. As the restorer
assumes the role of the author, his intervention—as little legible and discernible as
possible—replaces the original. The monument’s temporality is considered subor-
dinate to that of the restoration act, and as a consequence, the meanings imprinted
in the material form of the object are selectively enhanced or discarded, submitted
to subjective judgment. Restoration is understood as demolition and reconstruction,
rectification and improvement, and as revelation of a ‘hidden true value’, while ulti-
mately is it destructive restoration,200 eliminating materialized layers of meaning
according to functional and aesthetic desiderata.
In the opposite camp, the conservative movement marks the start of a different
stage in the perception of historical time; this is seen as intangible, immovable and
stagnant, and irreversible, and thus essentially different, inaccessible, detached and
historically dissociated from the present. Furthermore, the gradual relativization of
the nineteenth-century values and “the gradual abolition of the ideal, universal ref-
erences for art resulted in an emphasis on the artist’s individuality and creativity”201
as well as to the awareness of cultural diversity. Any human activity of the past,
along with its various materializations, is now seen as a conveyor of historical value.
Implicitly, the additions and modifications acquired by the built object now represent
layers of meaning and are conceived as historically valuable witnesses of an identity
built over time. This perception stood in contrast with the generally accepted concep-
tion of historical value in the nineteenth century, according to which the monument
possessed historical value if a “clear recognition of the original condition”202 was
possible or, in other words, if it could be clearly identified as belonging to a specific
historical timeframe or style—ultimately resulting in the sacrificing of authenticity
in favour of an (imagined) stylistic purity. Thus, the criterion of historical value
juxtaposes and overlaps the hitherto used criteria, including the commemorative,
symbolical-religious, and aesthetic/artistic values, which now come to be seen as
subjective and variable. It is only at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of
the twentieth century, under the pressure of technical and social transformations,
that the conservative movement gains support, and the perspective on the relation-
ship between historical temporality and contemporary time changes again: historical
value is yet again substituted by the age value. Any ‘traces of history’ embedded in
the built object enhance its value, even when these are degradations of the artistic
value.203 The differences between historical periods, styles and even monuments,
until then classified as either with or without value, are gradually blurred. According
to the conservationists, such as Morris and Ruskin, the historical distance forces
the viewer to renounce the aesthetic, religious, and even nationalist criteria when
faced with the object’s age. The authenticity of the built form prevails, and modern
(contemporary) man has no right to intervene. The monument’s progressive alteration
200 Jukka Jokilehto, A History…, 156.

201 Jukka Jokilehto, A History…, 174.
202 Jukka Jokilehto, A History of Architectural Conservation, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999, 217.
203 Sidney Colvin, Restoration and Anti-Restoration, 1877, 460, and Morris, W., The Decorative
Arts, 1877, published in 1878 apud Jokilehto, A History…, 183, 185.

processes—seen as either extensions, additions, rectifications or embellishments, and

until then uniform and continuous, is now interrupted, as the separation between the
historic (organic) intervention and the inevitably destructive contemporary restora-
tion becomes clear. The return to the original form of the construction, according to
the principles applied by Viollet-le-Duc, Scott, and the supporters of stylistic inter-
vention, can only produce a forgery, and thus becomes a crime against historical truth,
authenticity, and implicitly against the generations to come. The detachment from
the past is radical: which was built (and has survived) has value in itself and evades
contemporary judgment through its very age, its testimonial and documentary char-
acter, irrespective of artistic, aesthetic, symbolical or religious values, which become
subordinate. The built monument, through its permanence, becomes a repository of
human memory, an insurer of continuity and the basis of national identity,204 inter
alia, as its universal value is recognized.
Although ‘discovered’ through a holistic, empirical, and subjective approach (the
nostalgia and aesthetic pleasure manifested in the Romantic taste for ruins, the pic-
turesque, and the patina of age), the principle of age value objectivated and assimi-
lated, moulding what is now considered as the concept of heritage and conservation.
Through this objectivation process of the age value, it becomes evident for the pro-
moters of conservation that not only the great monuments—religious, memorial,
official and representative of the dominant power—must to be considered ‘historical
landmarks’, and protected and conserved; the memory of humanity is, at the same
time, the memory of the individual, and is equally comprised of ‘minor’ objects, or
the ‘domestic architecture’ of the everyday life. These minor built objects have accu-
mulated age value, similarly, and sometimes even more expressively than the great
monuments valued for the noble picturesque or for their “golden stain of time”.205
Furthermore, minor architecture finally gains recognition for its capacity to provide
continuity for the built fabric as well as context for the major monuments.
Consisting mainly of minor architecture—valuable background of major mon-
uments—, the urban fabric was directly affected by the changes of the nineteenth
century. Concurrently, the urban tissue undergoes a similar, although more diluted
transformation process that is even less apparent and thus less contested. The nation-
alist movement contributes substantially to the awareness of this phenomenon and to
the visibility of minor rural architecture. Outdoor ethnographical museums will be
established as its main result, with a series of long-term consequences (Oslo, Norway,
1870, and Skansen, Sweden, 1891).206 These are conceived as the containers not just
of the material expressions (the actual buildings) but also of the national identity and
the lifestyle attached to them (intuiting the importance of intangible heritage and its
symbiosis with the moveable and immoveable tangible heritage).
The extension of urban centres, the widening of traffic routes, the introduction of
intense modern traffic and public facilities, the construction of new buildings in old
204 Ruskin apud Jokilehto, A History…, 179.

205 Ruskin apud Jokilehto, A History…, 179.
urban centres, private speculation,207 the disappearance of some historical functions,

the lack of a solid legislative foundation and of the local and national authorities’
support have led to massive losses in historical urban fabric. Before the end of
the century, collections of recommendations, guides, and different norms will be
published, laying the foundations for the first protectionist laws. Jokilehto captures in
a detailed analysis the development of the concepts of conservation and restoration,
along with their conscious adoption, as well as the coagulation and evolution of
legislative nuclei, under the influence of the French and British models, whose impact
was felt in most European areas.
The temporal distancing from the past and the break directly impact built heritage,
primarily through redefining and widening the concept, but also through modifying
the actual approach to monuments from the material perspective (allowed interven-
tions, recommended materials, etc.—in short, all that pertains to the methodology of
conservation practice). Protection, therefore, should include “from single works of
art, to interiors, to historic buildings, to the conservative planning of townscapes, and
to the protection of nature”,208 as well as “urban areas having historic and artistic
values”,209 thus encompassing all potential carriers of cultural value. The art object
is redefined along with its status-conferring values. Hence, the modern concepts of
conservation and restoration are built on the basis of the values successively attributed
to the cultural object. One such example is the issue of authenticity. Initially iden-
tified simultaneously with the start of the movement against stylistic restoration,
it remains one of the main guiding principles of contemporary conservation and
restoration. Regarding the attitudes toward the authenticity of the cultural object,
along with the maturation of the conservationist outlook, there is also an increased
emphasis on the objectivation process regarding the cultural object and the mean-
ings inscribed in it. As a result of the objectivation and of the conscious adoption of
the critical attitude, stylistic restoration is gradually replaced by scientific restoration
(restauro scientifico)—based on detailed scientific analysis and on the respect for the
historical stages of the monument, although still permissive in regards to completion
interventions, anastylosis, the selective elimination of additions (even if historical)
and the ‘disengaging’ of the built object from its fabric.210
With the widening of the concept of heritage value, the need for a joint theo-
retical approach becomes obvious. This scientific basis—or theoretical methodol-
207 Jokilehto,A History…, 195.

208 Dvorak apud Jokilehto, A History…, 219.
209 The mentioning and inclusion of urban areas under heritage protection was legislated in 1938 in
Italy. In 1939, a law was published for the conservation of objects of historical interest and another
for the protection of natural sites. Jokilehto, A History…, 222–3.
210 This technique implies the demolition of the monument’s adjacent or neighbouring fab-
ric—‘external’ additions gained over time or simply the result of the surrounding urban fabric’s
evolution—which are perceived as obstructions of the monument’s true value inhibiting its ‘true
perception’; the demolition of early mediaeval or pre-mediaeval (and sometimes nineteenth cen-
tury) constructions attached to the great cathedrals is one of the most notable examples, argued as
a means to “highlighting monuments by clearing vast spaces around them spaces around them”.
(Glendinning, Miles, The Conservation Movement.., 155.).
ogy—could have ensured, according to Brandi and Argan, the coordinates of the
interventions, regardless of the type of the objective. Hence, “restoration should not
have the purpose solely of reintegrating losses, but to reestablish the work of art in
its authenticity, hidden or lost, and thus [to] focus primarily on its material”,211 or
in other words, to focus on its text that is to be revealed through restoration. Brandi
and Argan identify two types of approaches, depending on the impact on the mate-
rial form and on the intended purpose: conservative restoration (or conservation),
requiring protection and maintenance interventions, with the aim of perpetuating
“the status quo of the historic object”,212 and artistic restoration, with a wider range
of interventions, aimed “to reestablish the aesthetic qualities of the object if disturbed
or obscured by over-paintings, poor repairs or restorations, oxidized varnishes, dirt,
or losses (lacunae).”.213 Thus, through adopting a critical approach, the restoration
process is no longer tied to subjective and arbitrary taste judgments, entering the
more specific realm of scientific analysis based on documentation, research, and
recording.
The losses suffered in World War I have imposed the reconsideration of principles:
“pre-1914 concepts in conservation and restoration came under pressure, eventually
leading to a constrained kind of conservationism if not conservatism, just in favour of
conserving ruins or complete ‘reconstruction à l‘identique), or yet rather opting for
a more dynamic integration of valuable historic fabric in an unavoidably changing
environment”.214 The meanings accumulated in the historical object and the context
of its disappearance overwhelmingly impose reconstruction, and both public opinion
and official legislation215 tip the scale against conservation, even in the form of a
“memorial for the destruction”216 suffered in war. The motivation of this apparent
regress stems from the very meanings attached to the heritage object: “the sense of
belonging by which inhabitants were linked to a place, has suddenly been broken, and
its destitution stirs up the awareness of the value they attributed to their home and their
city”.217 Once destroyed or deeply degraded, the historical and documentary value of
monuments, individual houses, and entire areas of urban fabric are recognized their
values and their reconstruction becomes an issue of national identity. As Jokilehto
notes, “destroyed public buildings were to be replaced by equivalent structures, and
211 Argan, Brandi apud Jokilehto, A History…, 224.

214 Nicholas Bullock, Luc Verpoest, Introduction, Living with History, 1914–1964: la Reconstruc-
tion en Europe Après la Première Et la Seconde Guerre Mondiale Et Le Rôle de la Conservation

Des Monuments Historiques, eds. Nicholas Bullock, Luc Verpoest, Leuven University Press, 2011,
9.
215 Reconstruction in its initial, pre-war form was officially imposed in Belgia by the law of 10 May
1919. Jokilehto, A History…, 282.

217 Smets, Marcel, The Reconstruction of Historical Cores in Belgian Cities after their destruction
in The First World War, in Old cultures in new worlds. 8th ICOMOS General Assembly and Inter-
national Symposium. Programme report—Compte rendu, US/ICOMOS, Washington, 776–783.
historic monuments were to be rebuilt to their pre-war appearance”,218 an official

demarche (imposed by law); the private houses are to be rebuilt by their owners, either
as replicas or as reconstructions from their remains.219 Seizing the ‘opportunity’,
the buildings are reconstructed as a scenography, the intervention focuses on the
facades,220 maintaining the general, even stereotypical historical image.221 Modern
technologies are employed in most cases (reinforced concrete for structures and less
visible parts),222 concealed behind the historic image. Stylistic reconstruction, in
the manner of Viollet-le-Duc, is in this case applied especially by private owners.
In Belgium, “transformations that had been previously operated, were dismissed
as esthetical errors. They were corrected with the aim of restoring the city to its
ancient beauty” and as the rebirth of a “glorified past”.223 Marcel Smets describes
the phenomenon in the Flemish region, where, due to the reconstruction, the city
becomes the idealized image of its own, unreal archetypal mediaevalising version,
assembled from recognizable historicised elements or “pseudo-historical models”,224
chosen precisely due to their association with a mythical time. The reconstruction is
carried out as to illustrate the generally accepted concept and image of a traditional
Flemish town, more than its initial pre-war version. However, this gesture is far
from a deliberate creation of a concealed facsimile: the new buildings reassemble
historical elements and repeat established typologies, yet showcase on their façades
their reconstruction year, thus rendering the intervention obvious. Repetition and
reiteration are consciously assumed and bear the mark of interpretation, while the
cultural heritage is reappropriated and becomes “a source of inspiration” and a “place
of shelter”,225 as it is reinstituted as the vehicle of collective memory.
In contrast, in France, even if the identical reconstruction was encouraged after the
destruction of the war, the legislation was lax. Although compensation was paid for

220 The technique used is facadism or facadization, consisting—according to the Larousse defini-
tion—in “demolishing the building and preserving only its street façade”. Aguiar offers a more
general definition, with direct reference to the context of built heritage, as the “demolishing the
inside of old buildings and replacing them with new constructions, causing major typological, vol-
umetric, structural and constructive modifications, while preserving the old façade (in a radically
aleatoric manner), which can thus be reconstructed through a forced imitation of the old one”
[“Démolition de l’intérieur des bâtiments anciens et leur remplacement par de nouvelles construc-
tions, entraînant, de profondes altérations typologiques, volumétriques, structurels et constructives,
avec préservation de l’ancienne façade (d’une manière critiquement aléatoire), celle-ci pourrait être
reconstruite moyennant une imitation forcée de l’ancienne.], Aguiar, Jose, Façadisme est la peur
architecturale de son propre temps, Le Façadisme dans les capitales européennes, Bruxelles, 19–29
March, Colocviu ICOMOS, 1998.
221 Smets, Marcel, The Reconstruction of…, 776.
223 Smets, Marcel, The Reconstruction of Historical Cores in Belgian Cities after their destruction
in The First World War, in Old cultures in new worlds. 8th ICOMOS General Assembly and Inter-
national Symposium. Programme report—Compte rendu, US/ICOMOS, Washington, 776–783.
the reconstruction of buildings lost in war, these sums could be used by the owners in
any way they wished. Thus, “for civil and cultural buildings (…) the compensation
covers the costs for the reconstruction of a building with same character, impor-
tance and destination, offering the same guarantees as the destroyed building”.226
While leaving room for interpretation with the use of the terms identical and sim-
ilar (Voldman), three possibilities were offered for the injured parties: “using the
compensation for an identical or similar reconstruction, accepting it as a financial
compensation without using it, and its reinvestment for other purposes”.227 Further-
more, if the owner could justify the proposed changes (as modernization, sanitisation,
improvement), “the compensations could be used for the reconstruction of a build-
ing with forms and functions different from their initial ones”.228 Severely criticized
after World War II, the 1919 law enabled the radical modernization of several cities,
where the lost urban fabric made room for public and industrial facilities under the
new hygienist rules. In France, post-World War I reconstruction meant the start of
the modern redrawing of urban centres, new districts and axes, i.e. the process of
urban remodelling, which will gather pace only later.
Nevertheless, the exceptional nature of this apparent decline of the principles
of conservation is obvious in post-war theoretical discourse. The first international
document of this kind, the Charter of Athens for the Restoration of Historic Monu-
ments (1931), conclusively established the dominance of the modern conservationist
approach against stylistic and integral restoration, despite numerous instances of
post-war reconstruction. Restoration is reserved for exceptional situations and has
to comply with a series of coordinates that make up the directing principles of the
working methodology: the compliance with all the stylistic layers inscribed in the
object and, in case of need, the application of the principles of critical restoration, the
use of modern technologies for structural stability and their concealment in order to
“preserve the character of the monument”,229 anastylosis and the visibility of newly
introduced materials (Jokilehto).
After World War II, the pressure of urban and industrial development, the lack
of maintenance and arbitrary intervention cease to be the main factors threatening
the conservation and even the existence of built heritage. The shock brought by
massive, indiscriminate or even deliberate destruction in a few years’ time and the
complete disappearance of some monuments, sites, and cities have inevitably led
to the awareness of the built heritage’s vulnerability, definitively tipping the scales
in favour of scientific conservation. Yet, once again, the conservationist approach
would be temporarily suspended in favour of an urgently needed reconstruction of
lost monuments and cities. The motivation was the same as in the case of World War I:
226 The law of 17 April 1919 on the destructions of war, apud Daniele Voldman, La France d‘un
modele de reconstruction a l‘autre, 1918–1945, in Nicholas Bullock, Luc Verpoest, eds., Living
with History, 1914–1964…, 63.
227 Daniele Voldman, La France d‘un modele de reconstruction a l‘autre, 1918–1945, in Nicholas
Bullock, Luc Verpoest, eds., Living with History, 1914–1964…, 63.

228 Daniele Voldman, La France d‘un modele de reconstruction a l‘autre, 1918–1945, in Nicholas
Bullock, Luc Verpoest, eds., Living with History, 1914–1964…, 63.

the recovery of the symbols of national identity, as well as a ‘reclaiming’ of cities and
of the way of life almost lost. The encoding is simultaneously identitary and resistive.
The most eloquent and often quoted case is that of the historical centre of Warsaw.
Destroyed in a proportion of 85% by 1944, it was completely rebuilt (between 1945
and 1966) in an identical form, based on detailed and extensive documentation.
In 1978, it was proposed for inclusion on UNESCO’s outstanding universal value
list, to be accepted in 1980; “the reconstruction included the holistic recreation of
the urban plan, together with the Old Town Market, the town houses, the circuit
of the city walls, as well as the Royal Castle and important religious buildings. The
reconstruction of Warsaw’s historical center was a major contributor to the changes in
the doctrines related to urbanization and conservation of urban development in most
of the European countries after the destruction of World War II.”230 According to
the UNESCO committee’s decision,231 the historic centre of Warsaw is a “symbol of
exceptional identical reconstruction of a cultural good which is associated to events
that have a considerable historical significance.”232 The Warsaw case was a stylistic
restoration: the image of the historic center is reproduced via the facades of the
buildings and via the urban space, based on the pre-war model; however, modern
facilities and structural improvements are introduced, especially in the case of the
interior spaces.
Another Polish example is that of Gdansk (Danzig), whose built fabric was over-
whelmingly destroyed in the final weeks of World War II. Opinions regarding the
city’s reconstruction oscillated in this case as well between two extremes: the faithful
reconstruction of the pre-war aspect and complete modern redesigning. “Proposals
to rebuilt the town on the basis of historical plans were [initially] rejected”, due to
the undesirability of its German heritage in the post-war context, considered to be
“barbaric”, as well as by virtue of “the link to the Teutonic Knights or even the
Nazi character of Gdansk”.233 Consequently, architectural and urban elements of
German influence are consciously and programmatically removed from the city’s
image.234 The nationalist discourse, along with the underestimation of nineteenth-
century artistic and architectural production (characteristic for the context of this
period, cf. Friedrich), has led to the actual removal of the Prussian influence: “the
230 The evaluation sheet of Warsaw’s historical center, Evaluations of Cultural Properties, World
Heritage Convention, World Heritage Committee, 32nd Ordinary Session, 2–10 July 2008, Que-
bec, Canada, drafted by the International Council on Monuments and Sites, http://whc.unesco.org/
archive/2008, accessed in February 2014.
231 WHC report, CC-80/CONF.017/04, 1980, http://whc.unesco.org/en/documents, accessed in
February 2014.
232 WHC report, CC-80/CONF.017/04, 1980, http://whc.unesco.org/en/documents, accessed in
February 2014; original quote: “[…] symbole de la réussite exceptionnelle d’une reconstruction à
l’identique d’un bien culturel qui est associe a des évènements ayant une signification historique
considérable”.
233 Jacek Friedrich, Heritage, Ideology, and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Rampley,
Matthew, Heritage, Ideology, and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe, Boydell Press, 123.
234 G. J. Ashworth, J. E. Tunbridge, Old cities, new pasts: Heritage planning in selected cities of
Central Europe, Kluwer Academic Publishers, GeoJournal 49: 105–116, 1999, 113.
bulky nineteenth-century edifices were removed and the historic city rebuilt”.235
Even if the direction promoted by the official representatives was initially inclin-
ing towards a Polonization236 of the city’s new image, the eventual option was for
a stylistic reconstruction—showing respect toward the historical image and even
employing traditional building methods; however, the Polonization of the city was
not avoided, as it eventually unfolded as a ‘bottom-up process’, illustrated in the
architecture of individual projects237 and in the ornamental treatment of the facades.
Particularly the latter was assumed as an expression of “history and cultural identity
of the city even more explicitly than in the architectural projects”,238 as its repre-
sentations combine different historical stages, historical and literary figures, ethnic
and national, but also European symbols, in order to “suggest connections between
sixteenth-century Poland and the ‘progressive’ values of the wider European Renais-
sance”.239 Although the process should have been one of reconstruction according
to its established image, it was approached in practice as a project with a strong,
programmatic national charge. The character of these reconstruction projects pre-
dominantly depends on the nature of their objective. Similarly to Smets’s Flemish
example, here as well the post-war reconstruction becomes an opportunity to cre-
ate an archetypal space, an idealized version of the city. While the model selected
by the Flemish city was a mediaeval instance, as the very apex of its cultural iden-
tity, in the case of Gdansk, the reconstruction was based on a hybrid ‘Polish and
Italian Renaissance golden age’—ultimately revealing the subjectivity of both inter-
ventions. The Polonization and the reconstruction thus carried out in Gdansk’s case
are also assumed and presented as historical interpretations and not as an authentic
historical product; neither of the two cases employs the ‘concealed facsimile’ device:
cultural heritage is conserved (to the possible extent) and simultaneously employed
as a source of inspiration.
Thus, the reconstruction appears as a stylistic restoration in Viollet-le-Duc’s man-
ner, but its manifest and assumed intention carries the recovery process of identity
one step further. In the case of Gdansk, the reconstruction represents not only the
235 Jacek Friedrich, Polish and German Heritage in Danzig/Gdansk: 1918, 1945 and 1989, 115–30,
in Rampley, Matthew, ed., Heritage, Ideology, and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe, Boydell
Press, 123.
236 The director of the Reconstruction Bureau of Gdansk stated in 1945: “Plans will move towards the
direction of (…) polonizing the character of the town (…) maintaining at the same time, if possible,
the imperishable value of the monumental buildings”), Jacek, F., Polish and German Heritage…,
123.
237 Jacek Friedrich mentions such an example: the reconstruction of the Dlugi Targ Square introduced
a new building front, based on a typology characteristic for the Polish Renaissance, which, although
not present in the original pre-war urban layout, represented the “golden age” of Polish culture, thus
being consistent with the Polish nationalist political discourse. Jacek Friedrich, Polish and German
Heritage in Gdansk/Danzig, 1918, 1945 and 1989, in Heritage, Ideology, and Identity in Central
and Eastern Europe, 115–130, ed. Matthew Rampley, Boydell Press, 2012, 123–4.
238 Jacek Friedrich, Polish and German Heritage in Gdansk/Danzig, 1918, 1945 and 1989, in Her-
itage, Ideology, and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe, 115–130, ed. Matthew Rampley, Boydell
Press, 2012, 123–4.
239 Jacek Friedrich, Polish and German Heritage …, 123–4.
recovery of a built heritage and of lost identity, but also the removal of the historical
German influence. Polish identity is recomposed and ‘history is rewritten’, so that
the ideal (Renaissance) potential can be materialized. Although against the princi-
ples of scientific restoration and conservation—which recognize the equal value of
all heritage layers—and with a profound impact on the urban fabric, the assumed
subjective and mythicized reconstruction of the Polish city is, in fact, a much more
organic manner of defining heritage value. Polish identity is reassembled on the
basis of the idealized past and under the influence of the new context of Polish-
German relations. Embedded in this reconstruction is the very demonstrative intent
of the Polish people to prove their resilience in the wake of the war. In its new
form, the city is more than a recovery of former identity (as was the intention in
the case of Warsaw); it thus acquires a new identity—the result of an assumed and
demonstrative process of interpretation and creation. Seen in this way, this case of
reconstruction—although evidently in contradiction with, and at the expense of, sci-
entific conservation—appears as a much more organic process, and much closer to
the natural formation of cultural values with heritage potential, providing, if not
historical continuity, then at least the continuity of an identity.
A third example illustrates the alternative of reconstruction as intentional fac-
simile. The town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber (Bavaria, Germany), similarly to the
two Polish cases, was badly damaged in World War II, with the destruction of 40%
of its city centre. In the reconstruction process initiated in 1947, the interventions
were carried out here as well in the spirit of stylistic restoration. The fortification
wall (for which the intervention was financed through an ingenious system of private
donations), its many towers and the town hall were reconstructed in such a man-
ner as to reproduce the initial image. There were no interventions on the existing
urban fabric—street gauges and orientations, squares, public gardens, etc.—and the
same alignments were kept. Nevertheless, the intention that guided the intervention
“has been to maintain the urban fabric and the street pattern but to reconstruct the
new buildings as ‘modern architecture’ [and recognizable as such]. The main idea
in rebuilding the damaged Buildings was not to copy them (except in the case of
the town hall and other important buildings) but to construct modern buildings.”240
Therefore, “the task was to rebuild the damaged quarter as quickly and secretly as
possible before the world could perceive the damage. (…) There was the necessity
of building modern housing and at the same time integrating it in the historic cen-
ter”241 —and all of this in a city already established as historical and even considered
in its unity ‘a treasure’ by art historians such as Georg Dehio.242 Reconstruction
introduces a series of new coordinates, with one of them of extremely high visi-
240 Mayr, Vincent, Design of New Additions in Rothenburg after the Year 1945, in: Old cultures
in new worlds. 8th ICOMOS General Assembly and International Symposium, Programme report
US/ICOMOS, 103–110, Washington, 1987, 105.
241 Mayr, Design of New Additions…, 106.
242 Georg Gottfried Dehio (1850–1936), professor and art historian of Estonian origin, “whose name
has practically become a by-word as the author and initiator of the series of standard manuals for
historic buildings in German-speaking countries [Handbook of German Cultural Monuments (1899,
published in 1901)]. He has also been considered the founder of the modern approach in German
bility: the increase of the height of most buildings (with an entire level243 ). The
paradox noticed by Mayr is a reflection of the issue of authenticity, still current,
perhaps even more than ever: “the image of a monument often has a higher value
than the monument itself. The result is that the form can be reproduced if the main-
tenance of [the original] material is economically inconvenient.”244 Although Mayr
sees the reconstruction process as justified, motivated as a respectful attitude toward
the maintained historical heritage, it is, in fact, a deliberate untraceable insertion of
new buildings, constructed in the spirit of the city. In spite of the date of the recon-
struction (between 1947 and 1958), as Mayr himself notes, the created substitute
actually reflects the postmodernist conception—both in its form (as the historicist
language is interpreted and not pastiched) and in its intention (the recovery of the
picturesque and the creation of a scenography)—, where the difference between
the authentic and the new is purposefully unrecognizable; the perceived atmosphere
of the city take precedence over the expression of the original substance. The cre-
ation of ‘facsimile reconstruction’ appears to have reached its goal already in 1987,
when Mayr noted at an ICOMOS conference that “hardly anyone discussed the new
buildings in the historic center [of Rothenburg] because the destroyed buildings have
been superbly reconstructed since 1945 and are now indistinguishable from their his-
toric neighbours”.245 Although the case of Rothenburg’s reconstruction precedes the
postmodernist theories of Krier, Terry, and even Alexander, it is their perfect illustra-
tion. Particularly two of these previously discussed approaches—Krier’s and Terry’s,
although the latter is dominantly manifested in the classicist expression—illustrates
exactly the situation of the Bavarian town. On the basis of previous historical coor-
dinates, a new language, capable of recovering and reflecting the historical image of
the city, already established in public consciousness, is assembled. Without appeal-
ing to some theoretical structure in support of this intervention, and only relying
on the general coordinates, Rothenburg’s reconstruction has sensibly, although not
uncontroversially, solved the issue of maintaining the spirit of the place—i.e. the
conflict between the perceived image and the authenticity of the maintained sub-
stance, or the problem of the actual modern insertion in the historical fabric and its
adaptation to new demands. Rothenburg’s case suggests that precisely the lack of a
highly structured theory (and implicitly of a programmatic processing of the model
image), the immediate necessity of intervention—the national, identitary as well as
cultural destructions that had to be compensated—and the community’s attachment
to the inherited historical character have endowed the intervention with an organic
character, despite its concealed nature.
conservation” [a supporter, along with Alois Reigl, of the age value accumulated in the object].
Jokilehto, A History…, 197, and www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org, accessed in February 2014.
243 The buildings’ increase in height is due to the adaptation to modern standards regarding the
individual height of building levels, higher air volume, better lighting and housing quality, etc.
Another example, from a more vulnerable heritage category, is the Swedish medi-
aeval church of Södra Råda246 ; burnt completely, its reconstruction was decided as a
“pedagogical example to enhance craft practice and historical knowledge of mediae-
val [wooden] churches”.247 Although the reconstruction of the built object is the final
goal of the endeavour, the recovery of the traditional building techniques has become
the focus of the project; furthermore, the reconstruction of the church is deliberately
subjective: although broadly documented, the church was to be rebuilt in its ini-
tial, improved and idealized state, its original fourteenth-century form. In short, the
restoration and rebuilding of the Södra Råda church had become the ‘making of
a church building’ in the spirit of fourteenth century building practices, procedure
located between the “investigations of preserved authentic material [and sources]
and [an] ‘imitative experiment to replicate the past phenomena’”.248
A similar earlier endeavour,249 placing an greater emphasis on reviving/retrieval
of crafting skills, is the well-known French Guédelon project (Puisaye, France): “an
entirely new construction, [with] no vestiges of a former castle in or around the site”,
based on the “architectural canons laid down by Philip Augustus in the 12th and 13th
centuries”250 ; the Guédelon project’s aim is to recreate the mediaeval building site,
more than the building in itself, as a finished tourist product.251
The Södra Råda Church reconstruction is, however, caught in between the tradi-
tional concept of reconstruction and the educational, research-oriented trial-and-error
process of Guédelon, a hybrid of experimental archaeology. Both approached focus
on the recovery of original authentic practices.
In the Södra Råda case, the destroyed built object or its representation remains the
driving force; the built object receives the role of mediator, a means to access knowl-
edge on a more intimate, otherwise inaccessible level. The production processes,
part of the object’s earliest practices, are recovered and reenacted in the absence
of the object. Even if almost all of the object’s everyday practices (its functional
ones: religious, heritage-related), disappear along with the destruction of its material
substance, this very absence (re)generates the production practices. For a provi-
sional extent of time, the practices exist in absence of the space. This (re)generation
246 Structure dated 1309, painting dated 1323 and 1494.

247 Almevik, Gunnar, Melin, Karl-Magnus, Traditional Craft Skills as a Source of Historical Knowl-
edge. Reconstruction in the Ashes of the Mediaeval Wooden Church of Södra Råda, MIRA-
TOR 72–102, 16:1/2015, online source http://www.glossa.fi/mirator/index_en.html, last consulted
16.01.2018.
248 Almevik, Melin, Traditional Craft Skills…, 75.
249 The project is authorized in 1997 and the building site is opened to the public one year later.
Guédelon: Ils bâtissent un château fort, Dossier de presse 2015, www.guedelon.fr, 09.12.2016, last
consulted 14.03.2018.
250 Guédelon: Ils bâtissent un château fort, official site, Architectural and Historical Context,
https://www.guedelon.fr/en/architectural-and-historical-context_81.html, 09.12.2016, last con-

sulted 14.03.2018.
251 The aim at Guédelon would no longer be to simply produce a finished castle, but rather to
observe, in the finest detail, each phase of the construction.”, Guédelon’s building plans, https://
www.guedelon.fr/en/guedelon-s-building-plans_82.html, 09.12.2016, last consulted 14.03.2018.
of practices is mediated by the object’s heritage status. In Cenzatti’s interpretation

the heterotopic space ceases to exist if the practices disappear; in the Södra Råda
church’s case, the heterotopic space persists (even if in a temporary virtual state) in
spite of the disappearance of its everyday practices; furthermore, this object’s very
alterity generates some of its most primary practices. The heterotopic features of this
space can be read within its religious profile (the mirror function, space of crisis,
of compensation, etc.); its heritage status redefines and emphasizes its otherness.
Analysing the case of Södra Råda church through the Lefebvre spatial triad and Cen-
zatti’s interpretation, the following sequence can be identified: the initial practiced
space becomes a space of representation accumulating meanings that in turn, bring
about its recognition as heritage, and additional specific and very different prac-
tices (heritage practices) that replace and represent the original ones; its destruction
temporarily suspends the physical space in a state of ‘virtuality’, as representation,
yet without the disappearance of the heritage practices. These, in turn, engender the
initial practices once again. The representation of the space is distilled and given
a ‘new’ corporeality. The heritage practices stand-in and for the original practices,
allowing the space to endure—as I argue—by instilling it heterotopic coordinates.
The utopian encoding supports this reading. Both cases discussed—Södra Råda
and Guédelon—involve an idealized form, the authentic original or the perfect form.
Whether it is the ‘original’ fourteenth century embodiment of the wooden church
or the twelfth–thirteenth century ‘architectural canon’ of the “château philippien”,
both are to be materialised à la lettre. They both function as ‘laboratories of knowl-
edge’—different in respect that the Södra Råda reconstruction project acts more in
the lines of an autopsy, and less in that of a new creation.
4.10 The Issue of Authenticity
At a first glance and as it has been generally portrayed, authenticity appears as a

definite, clear-cut and readable attribute, attached or not to the heritage object and its
constituting parts; however, its volatile and problematic nature is easily revealed upon
a more meticulous analysis. I argue that the concept of authenticity, its accountability
to time and time passage and to external ‘intervention’—as well as the attribution of
otherness to the heritage object—can be discussed and more effectively illustrated
via the metaphor of Theseus’ Ship, in its Plutarch-Hobbes reading.
“The ship on which Theseus sailed with the youths [to the Minoan Palace of
Knossos] and returned in safety, the thirty-oared galley, was preserved by the Athe-
nians down to the time of Demetrius Phalereus. They took away the old timbers from
time to time, and put new and sound ones in their places, so that the vessel became
a standing illustration for the philosophers in the mooted question of growth, some
declaring that it remained the same, others that it was not the same vessel.”252
252 Plutarch,
Plutarch’s Lives. Theseus and Romulus. Lycurgus and Numa. Solon and Publicola.,
Volume 1, (THESEUS, xxn. 5-xxni. 2), translated by Bernadotte Perrin, The Loeb Classical Library,
This account of Plutarch is also explored by Hobbes who considers even further
this process of continual reparation of Theseus’ ship: this would enable the recon-
struction of the ‘same’ ship form its gradually discarded parts, ultimately leading to
the paradoxical coexistence at the same point in time of two ships—both essentially
‘the Ship of Theseus’ (see Hobbes, De Corpore, part 2, chap.11, 1655). The para-
doxical nature of heritage is perfectly reflected in this metaphor; while the material
form holds value for its inscribed meanings, and not necessarily in itself, one could
easily subordinate the original substance to the meaning, opening the way to more
liberal interventions on the built heritage; not infrequently, the restoration of a built
object—essentially a reconstruction—is conducted as a programmatic and methodi-
cal replacement of authentic parts (bricks, mortars, carpentry etc.) with their modern
more efficient counterparts—in an attempt to prolong that built object’s life (and its
attached layers of meaning), all the while gradually discarding its original substance.
Yet, the inscribed meanings are dependent on the presence and authenticity of the
original substance, and must remain so; if a built object might ‘survive’ such a pro-
cess of transmutation, conserving its initially inscribed meanings, the guarantor of
these meanings (the original substance) is no longer present—the meanings remain
only ‘conventionally’ ascribed to that built object. How many such transmutation
processes could such an object allow until the meanings are completely diluted?
More so, extrapolating the Plutarch-Hobbes argument, would the demolition of such
a reassembled built object be in fact the demolition of a heritage built object, when
it no longer consists of authentic, original parts? Could such an object be rebuilt
anywhere, and even numerous times, since the meaning is no longer attached to
the physical substance? Does the rebuilding process add to the previous layers of
meaning or simply replaces them? When positioned it in this in-between space such
reassembled heritage object, along with its meanings, becomes even more vulnerable.
As Hume observes, “a change in any considerable part of a body destroys its identity;
but it is remarkable, that where the change is produced gradually and insensibly we
are less apt to ascribe to it the same effect. […]”.253 Taking into account several
extraordinary cases (the reconstruction of Warsaw, or the post-Cultural Revolution
rebuilding of Chinese heritage temples) the authentic seems to have been detached
from the original substance, or at least its definition subjected to reevaluation254 ;
however, I argue that the delineations are more subtle.
The issue of authenticity continues to represent an ordering element of the con-
servation and restoration intervention. However, the precedents accumulated after
the two World Wars show that it can take—even if temporarily—a secondary place
edited by E. H. Warmington, Cambridge, Massachusetts Harvard University Press/ London, William

Heinemann Ltd., first printed 1914 reprinted 1967, 49.
253 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature Being. An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental
Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, Book 1, chapter IV. Of the Sceptical and Other Systems
of Philosophy, Sect. VI. Of Personal Identity, 1739, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hume/david/
h92t/index.html, accessed February 2019.
254 Su, X., Song, C., Sigley, G., The Uses of Reconstructing Heritage in China: Tourism, Heritage
Authorization, and Spatial Transformation of the Shaolin Temple, Sustainability 2019, Special
Issue: Heritage Tourism, 11(2), https://doi.org/10.3390/su11020411.
4.10 The Issue of Authenticity 307
or, at least, temporarily become ‘negotiable’. All three examples from above prove,
first of all, the interdependence of (individual, community, national) identity and
built material expression, as well as the fact that heritage is ultimately the sum of
particular situations, which can develop in different ways even under a common
influence. These tree examples of reconstruction, with their nuance differences in
intentions (identical reproduction, interpretation, reediting) and (assumed or hidden)
nature, maintain their heritage value. Their heritage status is derived from “conscious
decisions and unspoken values of particular people and institutions—and for reasons
that are strongly shaped by social contexts and processes”; implicitly, “the meaning
of heritage can no longer be thought of as fixed, as the traditional notions of intrin-
sic value and authenticity suggest”.255 If the inherited identity is destroyed and its
authenticity is lost, the need to recover this identity prevails, being either recomposed,
interpreted or artificially recreated. While in the case of Warsaw the assumed inter-
vention reflects an objectivation related to the built form and the values stored in it,
in the case of the reconstruction of Gdansk and Rothenburg, the intervention is cate-
gorically subjective—assumed and demonstrative in the Polish case and not assumed
in the German. In all three cases, the reconstruction intervention can be imagined as
a manipulation of memory: the oblivion of the losses and the return to the pre-war
aspect of the city is, in the case of Warsaw, although seemingly self-induced amnesia,
the demonstration of the persistence of memory. The sustained damages are removed,
while the memory of the war is maintained. Reconstruction in its initial form is thus
a memorial of the event as well as of national identity. In the case of Warsaw, it is
not meant to transform the war into ‘something that never was’ (deliberate/imposed
amnesia), but on the contrary, to highlight ‘the destruction that the city and implicitly
its people have survived’. The same interpretation of reconstruction also applies in
the case of Gdansk. Here as well, reconstruction is the demonstrative manifestation
of resistance. However, the Polonization and de-Germanization of the city’s image
suggests an assumed, selective amnesia—oriented not toward the event of the war,
but rather towards the city’s identity. The induced amnesia is demonstrative and thus
the reconstruction becomes a memorial of the event as well as of national identity.
However, in Rothenburg’s case, the reconstruction may be interpreted as an induced
amnesia and as the deliberate construction of a facsimile. Both the damages and the
memory of the war are removed, as the war becomes ‘something that never was’,
and the city is restored to a ‘diffusely remembered’ pseudo-initial form.
255 EricaAvrami, Randall Mason, Marta de la Torre, Values and Heritage Conservation, Research
Report, The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, 2000, 6.
The post-war reconstruction cases are numerous,256 illustrating, as Jokilehto

notes, the entire range of alternatives between the two extremes—the reconstruction
as a ‘total’ recovery of the initial image (à l’identique) and the modern reconstruc-
tion, abandoning the historical image in favour of its then contemporary architecture.
Nevertheless, as a result of the industrialization process and the two World Wars that
caused massive losses of built historical heritage (both urban and rural) and of cultural
landscapes, the perception of the concept of heritage value is radically transformed.
The principles of the critical process of conservation and restoration, which began
to be expressed (as tendencies) before World War I, were established and stated as
theories and schools in the interwar period, with the establishment of the main cate-
gories of intervention along with their related methodologies. After World War II, the
paradox created by the necessity of reconstruction and the maintenance of the authen-
ticity of objects with heritage value has led to the reassessment of the principles of
conservation and restoration. On the one hand, it has established the critical method
as the right approach in restoration, while on the other hand it also brought the vali-
dation of the creative act inherent in any intervention on the heritage object.257 Thus,
in parallel with an objectivation process—concentrated on the actual architectural
object—, there is also an increasing awareness of the subjectivity involved in any
process operating with the cultural object. Although the respect for all meaning layers
inscribed in the architectural object is already assumed through the modern defini-
tion of restoration (in which age value dominated the aesthetic taste in the shaping
of the intervention)—establishing the objectivation of the perspective—, the deeply
subjective contribution of the restorer as an individual who leaves his mark on the
object is simultaneously also recognized. Reconstruction, anastylosis, restoration,
and even conservation are thus conceived as profoundly subjective, mainly depen-
dent on the critical sensibility258 of the author behind the intervention. Even while
ordering the actual process of the intervention through intentional-objective method-
ologies, such as the typologies, the intervention remains a subjective operation that
cannot and should not return the architectural object to its initial state, envisioned by
the original author, and will always reflect the (undoubtedly subjective) intentions
of the preservers,259 shaped, on their turn, by their own historical context.
256 Berlin, Cologne, Leipzig, Dortmund, Hanau, Magdeburg, Hamburg, Kiel, Lübeck, Münster,
Munich, Frankfurt, Würzburg, Mainz, Nuremberg, Xanten, Worms, Brunswick, Hanover, Freiburg,
Dresda, Aachen, Rotterdam, Magdeburg, Munchen, Stuttgart, Bremen. Le Havre, Caen, and Saint
Lo (considered to have been completely destroyed), Paris, Orleans, Amiens, Beauvais, Brest,
Caudebec-en-Caux, Dunkerque, Lisieux, Lorient, Neufchatel-en-Bray, Saint-Die, Saint-Nazarre,
Rouen, Valencienes, Vire, Marsilia, Saint-Malo, Louvain (the first two destroyed in the First World
War as well), Helsinki, London, Exter, Bath, Norwich, York, Canterbury (destroyed during the
Baedeker Blitz, the raid for which the targets—historically and culturally relevant cities—were
selected by the Luftwaffe on the basis of their ratings in the Baedeker tourist guides), and Hiroshi-
ma—as the most frequently cited examples, due to their size (mid-sized and large cities), the
magnitude of value loss or the proportion of the damages.
259 Ciccone, Patrick, Introduction, Space, Time, and Preservation, Future Anterior, Volume IV,
Number 1, 2007.
4.10 The Issue of Authenticity 309
However, in the wake of more recent heritage losses, due to conflict and natu-
ral disasters, reconstruction is yet again being redefined. One such approach argues
“that heritage is a renewable resource and that people’s individual and collective
psychological and behavioural tendencies are shaped by their heritage, and that their
heritage is also shaped by them”260 ; although apparently positive and confiding in
local communities’ capacity to replace the lost heritage, it suggests in fact that her-
itage can be and should be equalled to a/any product of human creation, given that
any such product will reflect the identity of its creator, as he automatically endows
it with identitary values. Its positive intention (to rebuild a future) can also be a
détournement of the heritage, restoration and heritage-reconstruction concepts, the
blurring of lines between an affirmation/recuperation of identity (as Warsaw’s case)
and opportunistic economic intervention. I argue that heritage reconstruction should
only go “beyond the visible and tangible towards the invisible, intangible and the
experimental in order to provide a ‘space’ for critical, open-ended and creative prac-
tices”,261 after it has secured the perpetuation of the material heritage object. While
the intangible and the heritage producing communities must remain an important and
clearly defined objective in the heritage agenda, the material heritage—a reflection
of multiple, succeeding such communities—must also be endowed with a voice and
with visibility. While the production of ‘new heritages’ must be supported, the ‘old
heritage’ occupies a more vulnerable position. In this new reading of reconstruction,
the heritage of the past is threatened with losing its otherness, in order to become
same, included among other common exploitable resources. Although the interven-
tion of reconstruction may be initially a positive demarche, it essentially is “a sort of
‘negotiation’ on the part of the users between truth and belief”,262 and its potential to
be hijacked remains, “especially in the light of the current ‘post-truth era’ problem,
such as historical revisionism, manipulation of the recent and distant past and, more
in general, a widespread relativism about knowledge”.263
260 Aljawabra, Alkindi (2018) Heritage, Conflict and Reconstructions: From Reconstructing
Monuments to Reconstructing Societies. ICOMOS University Forum, 1. pp. 1–18, 2, ISSN

2616-6968 [Article] (Unpublished), http://openarchive.icomos.org/1907/1/180825_Aljawabra_
ICOMOS%20Article_with%20images.pdf, accessed October 2018.
261 Soufan, Anas (2018) Post-war Reconstruction, Authenticity and Development of Cul-
tural Heritage in Syria. ICOMOS University Forum, 1. pp. 1–18. ISSN 2616-6968 [Arti-
cle], http://openarchive.icomos.org/1908/1/SOUFAN%20Anas_ICOMOS_Authenticity_SEPT-%
20Sent%20to%20Maureen.pdf, accessed October 2018.
262 Sulfaro, Nino (2018) Reconstruction And Conservation In The Post-Truth Era. Historical Lies,
Authenticity, Material Evidence. ICOMOS University Forum. pp. 1–11. ISSN 2616-6968 [Article],
3, http://openarchive.icomos.org/1859/, accessed October 2018.
263 Sulfaro, N. (2018) Reconstruction And Conservation In The Post-Truth Era…, 4.
4.11 The Objectivation Tendency Toward the Heritage

Object and the Outlines of a Philosophy
of Conservation
In spite of the above, in the English-speaking world (especially in the US), the
modern-contemporary perspective inherits (and preserves even to this day) a theo-
retical, terminological, and practical separation suggesting a different perspective on
intervention. Most concisely, preservation is defined as “the protection of cultural
property against deterioration and damage by providing preventative care [through]:
regulating environmental conditions, practicing sound handling and maintenance
procedures for storage, exhibition, packing and transport, controlling pests, prepar-
ing for emergencies”. Conservation is “the deliberate alteration of the chemical
and/or physical aspects of cultural property, primarily to stabilize it and to prolong
its existence”. Finally, restoration involves “involves treatment procedures that are
intended to return cultural property to a known or assumed state—for example, near
to its original appearance—often through the addition of non-original material. In
current restoration practice, all additions are fully removable.”264
The Romanian legislation, broadly in line with the European,265 and closer to the
principles stated by Cesare Brandi (as we shall see below), establishes the following
264 Nguyen, Ivy, True Colours: Trends in Conservation, Cross-Sections blog of the art conservation
department at Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, March 17, 2011, accessed in April 2014.
265 There are a series of such definitions in European legislation: “conservation means all the pro-
cesses of looking after a place so as to retain its cultural significance”, while “restoration means
returning a place to a known earlier state by removing accretions or by reassembling existing ele-
ments without the introduction of new material”—The Burra Charta, 1979 (Australia ICOMOS
Charter for the Conservation of Places of Cultural Significance); conservation may be defined as
“all operations designed to understand a property, know its history and meaning, ensure its mate-
rial safeguard, and, if required, its restoration and enhancement”—Nara Document of Authenticity,
1994; the most similar to the Romanian framework are the definitions supplied by ICOM-CC (Inter-
national Council of Museums—Committee for Conservation), “preventive conservation”, “remedial
conservation”, and “restoration”, which together constitute “conservation” of the tangible cultural
heritage; “preventive conservation—all measures and actions aimed at avoiding and minimizing
future deterioration or loss. They are carried out within the context or on the surroundings of an
item, but more often a group of items, whatever their age and condition. These measures and actions
are indirect—they do not interfere with the materials and structures of the items. They do not mod-
ify their appearance”; “remedial conservation—all actions directly applied to an item or a group of
items aimed at arresting current damaging processes or reinforcing their structure. These actions
are only carried out when the items are in such a fragile condition or deteriorating at such a rate, that
they could be lost in a relatively short time. These actions sometimes modify the appearance of the
items”; “restoration—all actions directly applied to a single and stable item aimed at facilitating its
appreciation, understanding and use. These actions are only carried out when the item has lost part
of its significance or function through past alteration or deterioration. They are based on respect for
the original material. Most often such actions modify the appearance of the item”. Encompassing
these categories, conservation refers to “all measures and actions aimed at safeguarding tangible
cultural heritage while ensuring its accessibility to present and future generations. (…) All measures
and actions should respect the significance and the physical properties of the cultural heritage item.”
Resolution adopted at the 15th Triennial Conference held in New Delhi in September 2008 by the
members of ICOM-CC.
4.11 The Objectivation Tendency Toward the Heritage Object and the Outlines … 311
types of intervention: “preventive conservation - a set of permanent activities, aimed

at countering the effects of the factors involved in the deterioration and destruction
processes affecting moveable cultural objects, to be carried out by an accredited
conservationist; curative conservation - a set of measures directed at countering
the effects of physical, chemical, and biological degradation of moveable cultural
objects, to be carried out by an accredited conservationist; restoration - a competent
intervention with the appropriate means on a moveable cultural object, carried out in
order to stop the deterioration processes as well as to preserve as much as possible
of the original and of the initial meaning of the object of the intervention.”266
This perspective on the actual intervention and on its philosophy was introduced by
Brandi back in the ’60s. It clearly defined restoration as a ‘historical event’ registered
in the material form of the (art or architectural) object, as a human action involved
in its onward transmission. The restoration intervention has to be situated between
the restoration of the potential unity (the ultimate objective of restoration) and the
maintenance of the object’s authenticity, requiring the maintenance of the patina and
of the historical interventions as legitimate witnesses of its age value. The image
of the object has to be safeguarded—so that it may transmit onward the message it
contains—, but without creating a facsimile. The restoration intervention must be
self-assumed and thus visible, being it itself an addition with historical potential (the
addition of another time than the initial one), but without causing the—physical or
aesthetic—distortion or degradation of the authentic substance or of its perception.
The elimination of historical additions “always requires justification, or at least it
should be carried out so that it can preserve both its own trace and the trace left on the
work of art”.267 The elimination of already carried out acts of restoration requires a
similar justification, as these can be regarded, on their turn, as additions. Restoration
gains its legitimacy from contributing to the achievement of its object’s (inevitably
new) unity. However, in order to achieve this, it is absolutely necessary for unity not
to be equated with the original state, following immediately the object’s creation.
The reconstruction “seeks to remodel the world, intervening in the creation process
in a similar manner to the development of the original creation process. The old
and the new are combined so that they can no longer be distinguished, abolishing
or minimizing the time interval between the two creative moments”.268 In Brandi’s
opinion, reconstruction cannot be anything but a forgery, although, from a historical
point of view, it represents a human activity that is positioned in time, thus being
potentially worthy of recording and conservation. In Brandi’s view, reconstruction
can be viewed as legitimate in two cases: on the one hand, to the extent that it has
an educational purpose, does not (physically) damage the object’s integrity or its
authenticity, through the deliberate intention of creating a forgery, and on the other
hand, if the constituent parts of the object are reassembled so as to form a new unity
and, if it accumulates age value, it also gains ‘the right to be protected’. This is the
266 Government Decree No. 1546, 18 December 2003, Chap. 1, Art. 2.

267 Brandi, Cesare, Teoria del Restauro, Vol. 318, Piccola biblioteca Einaudi, Ed. di Storia e Letter-
atura (1963) 1977, 62.

268 Brandi,Cesare, Teoria del Restauro, Piccola biblioteca Einaudi, Ed. Giulio Einaudi, 1977, 36.
case of historical reconstructions (and additions), when these “have consolidated

themselves in [the] iconography,”269 of the object, and their removal “might mean
reconstituting the historic object ex novo, which is not the scope of restoration.”.270
Brandi emphasizes, however, the necessity of individual case assessment and the
appropriate adoption of the adequate approach, due to the subjectivity and uniqueness
characteristic for cultural objects.
Brandi’s theory, although mainly concentrated on the work of art and on the aes-
thetic aspect involved in approaching it, offers the philosophical basis supporting the
theory of modern restoration. Furthermore, from the perspective on the relationship
between the work of art and the temporality that it introduces, it definitively marks
the detachment of “the historical monument’s time”. In the often quoted approach
proposed by Brandi, he imagines the temporality of the cultural object as an axis
(tempo storico) composed of two segments: the duration of the actual creative pro-
cess and the interval between its end and our present, and, marking the present,
the moment in which the object’s artistic value is recognized and becomes wor-
thy of being protected and transmitted onward. The temporality of the work of art
(which can be extrapolated to the architectural monument) is definitively delimited
in relation to the present time, because “its artistic concept is perceived in human
consciousness, and this can only take place in the present.”.271 Becoming aware of
the object’s artistic value, happening in the present moment, automatically projects
the object into the future, making it necessary to safeguard ‘the imprint of time’, as
well as its conservation and restoration, aimed at transmitting it onward to the next
generations. The perpetuation of the material form creates the optimal condition, or
even guarantees, the perpetuation of the conceptual.
Examining Brandi’s theory, one can see that the objectivation process regarding
the cultural object, shaped during the historical evolution process of the heritage
concepts, culminates in the awareness of the ineluctable subjectivity of human inter-
vention on the cultural object. Any human activity interfering with, or directed at,
the cultural object is inevitably inscribed both in its temporal axis (tempo storico)
and in its material form. The restoration intervention—possible, according to Brandi,
only with the recognition of artistic value and thus necessarily fixed in the present
—will inevitably become historical past and remains registered in the object. The
awareness of this process conditions the intervention in itself, projecting the cultural
object into the future. The objectivation process is best reflected in the principle of the
restoration intervention’s reversibility through the recognition of one’s own potential
subjectivity. Seeking to be as objective as possible, the intervention (understood as
a human action) cannot be assumed to represent unique and absolute truth (as in the
case of stylistic restoration). Furthermore, being automatically inscribed in the his-
torical time of the cultural object, the intervention must necessarily be recognizable,
so as not to generate a forgery (appearing as historical, which it is not), and at the

same time undetectable, so as not to disturb the cultural object’s artistic, historical,
and conceptual unity.
Therefore, the objectivation process, gradually emerging until the modern and
contemporary period (as emphasized above) has essentially detached the historical
temporality of the monument from that of the present, with the cultural-historical
object definitively becoming different. Due to the awareness of the intrinsic sub-
jectivity of any human action involving the cultural object, the temporal distance
is compressed between that which is considered past and that which is perceived
as present. The objectivation process stimulates the search for the potential cultural
value in the many instances of the human cultural product, thus extending its area of
interest from the particular individual monument (the architectural object of partic-
ular interest) to building ensembles, complex sites, minor architecture, urban fabric
(both as a background and in itself—alignments, streets, historical urban facilities),
and landscape. The perspective evolves from a focus on individual monuments to
“historic and artistic work of the past’, in 1931, to also include ‘more modest works of
the past which have acquired cultural significance’, in 1964, and to recognizing, e.g.
Europe’s unique architectural heritage as ‘the common heritage of all her peoples’,
in the 1975 Amsterdam declaration of the Council of Europe”.272
The objectivation of the cultural object is, therefore, an intentional process that
may be translated in a more concrete manner through the successive orderings
(respectively, orderings that are overlapping or doubling already existent ones) grad-
ually adopted within the heritage disciplines.
4.11.1 The Objectivation of the Heritage Object

and the Romanian Situation
The development of protectionist conceptions of heritage on the Romanian territory

is broadly in line with the tendencies and orientations from the European area, regis-
tering roughly the same objectivation process. Nevertheless, the phenomenon takes
a particular form in Romania.
The interest for built heritage and the emergence of a protectionist perspective
manifests itself from the nineteenth century onward, under European influence, and
due to the favourable domestic sociopolitical context. This is also the period of the
adoption of the first legislative measures.273 The awareness of the need for (correct)
restoration is favoured by another factor that must not be neglected: the counteraction
to the manner in which restoration is understood and applied. The prevailing approach
272 Jokilehto,
A History…, 290.
273 In1871, a draft law was proposed regarding the protection of cultural goods without being
adopted (“Law for the conservation of Romanian culture”, V. A. Urechia and Cezar Bollia); in
1874, the Public Monuments Commission Regulation was adopted through Royal Decree No.
754; in March 1892, the “Law for the conservation and restoration of public monuments” was
promulgated through the High Royal Decree No. 3658, with the “Implementing Regulation” of the
law following in January next year.
is characterized by the Romantic orientation, in synchronicity with the European area,

and under strong French influence. The first interventions fall within the category of
stylistic restoration—partially or completely altering the authenticity of their objects
and introducing the neo-Gothic as the preferred style.274 Some of these intervention-
s—although called restoration—are downright destructive, consisting of demolition
and (more or less precise) reconstruction, such as the Alexandru Orăscu’s reconstruc-
tions (of the Metropolis of Moldova, in 1881, or of the princely church in Arges, ,
in 1867—carried out “according to his imagination” and “without any criterion”)275
and the already famous case of the projects of André Lecomte du Noüy, Viollet-
le-Duc’s disciple. Even when the interventions fall largely within the category of
historical restoration, deviations from its principles are maintained, including inser-
tions, demolitions, replacements, and stylistic additions. Curinschi Vorona mentions
in this respect the restorations carried out by Alexandru Băicoianu, Petre Antonescu,
Cristofi Cherchez, and K. A. Romstofer. As also noted by Opris, , the nineteenth
century is characterized by the massive loss of historical architectural objects,276
either as the result of restorations or simply of the demolitions, urban expansion,
remodelling, draining, etc. The “classic restoration corpus”277 is constituted on the
Romanian territory in the interwar period and will underlie the formation of the
Romanian national school of restoration. The value attributed to the heritage object
in this period is mainly historical and memorial—offering an important link with
the past. In line with the European tendency, the heritage perspective tends toward
objectivation.
An interesting feature of the period is noticed by Opris, in the preoccupation
and attention paid to the interdependence between landscape and monument.278 It
is worth emphasizing that this preoccupation still has its echoes within the post-
war Romanian territory (in G. M. Cantacuzino279 ), making a strong comeback in
the twenty-first century at the level of the international heritage forums (see Euro-
pean Landscape Convention, 2000/2004 or ICOMOS 18th General Assembly, 2014,
274 Some of the examples cited by Curinschi Vorona: Bistrit, a Monastery, 1840, total reconstruc-
tion, Tismana Monastery (Gorj), partial reconstruction of the ensemble; Arnota Monastery (Vâlcea),
1856, partial reconstruction (one of the wings of the architectural ensemble); Antim Monastery, neo-
Gothic insertion; the Royal Court of Târgovis, te and the Brâncoveanu Palace of Mogos, oaia—partial
reconstruction; the Curtea Veche (Old Princely Court) Church (Bucharest)—extensions; Radu
Vodă Church (Bucharest)—transformation of the facade and of its proportions through the
plating of the entire building; the Hunyadi Castle (Hunedoara), 1857—neo-Gothic insertions;
St. Michael’s Church (Cluj), 1837–1859—neo-Gothic insertion (tower); Curinschi Vorona, Gheo-
rghe, prof., dr., arch., Arhitectură. Urbanism. Restaurare, Editura Tehnică, Bucures, ti, 1996, 156–72.
275 Opris, Ioan, Ocrotirea patrimoniului cultural, ed. Meridiane, Bucuresti, RSR, 1986, 36.
, ,
276 Opris, I., Ocrotirea…, 37.
,
277 Curinschi Vorona, Gheorghe, Arhitectură. Urbanism. Restaurare, Editura Tehnică, Bucuresti,
,
1996, 170.
278 Opris quotes architect F. Rebhuhn, “the most renowned landscape architect of the interwar period,
,
often consulted for issues regarding the harmonization of monuments with their surroundings”,
Opris, , I., Ocrotirea…, 77.
279 For more information, see Cantacuzino, G.M., Despre o estetică a reconstructiei, ed. Paideia,
,
‘Spat, ii Imaginate’ series, ed. Ioan, Augustin, Bucures, ti, 2001.
under the heading Heritage and Landscape as Human Values, where the centre of
discussion is the cultural landscape (obviously, through the language and definition
of the terms and via the cultural, conceptual, economic, social, environmental, etc.
context). However, the interest for the landscape as a whole, a complex environ-
ment with heritage value, is common to both—although their respective sources
are different. The interwar preoccupation is based on factors such as the nationalist
movement, the image of the rural world in the historical period, and the deepening of
the spirit of national identity—leading to the concentration on a built heritage deeply
rooted in its natural contexts (characteristic of traditional civilizations). The modern
initiative (re-) ‘discovers’ the importance of the landscape from the perspective of
a solid conceptual base of heritage and from point of view of its rapid process of
degradation and loss. This rediscovery corresponds to the objectivation process, or,
in other words, to the transformation of the heritage perspective through the gradual
extension of the scope of application, in order to include “landscapes and ensembles,
including the ‘ordinary’ and recent ones and creating an all-inclusive concept of the
‘historic environment’”.280
Subsequently, in the interwar period, the restoration intervention, reflecting the
approach of the Romanian school of restoration, will be dominated by the princi-
ple of plastic unity—in favour of reconstructions “mostly accepting some degree of
probability”.281 Although the reconstructions may be objectively motivated by the
recovery of the original meaning, lost as a result of the lack of physical integrity,
they carry a negative connotation. The elimination of additions corresponds to a
cancelling of the monument’s actual history (on a subjective basis). Thus, in parallel
with this principle of stylistic unity, there is the principle of historical restoration
that recognizes the historical and aesthetic value of non-original historical additions
(subsequent to the monument’s construction date, but documenting its development).
The counterargument of stylistic unity is best expressed by Horia Teodoru’s ques-
tion: “are we entitled to delete a page from the monument’s history on the ground
that it is not glorious?”282 Likewise, if that which exists should be preserved in the
form in which it was received and subsequent additions are to be clearly delim-
ited as such, the principle of the intervention’s visibility marks the objectivation of
the heritage perspective. As Opris, also notes, in most interventions carried out in
this period, the applied principles do not consequently follow either of these atti-
tudes. The compulsory visibility of the modern intervention coexists with stylistic
reconstructions, sometimes even within the same monument (such as in the case
of the church of the Princely Court in Arges, , restored by architect Horia Teodoru
between 1929 and 1933). The principles governing the use of materials follow the
same tendencies. On the one hand, the use of materials that are inadequate for the
280 Bloemers, Tom (J.H.F.), The Cultural Landscape and Heritage Paradox. Protection and Devel-
opment of the Dutch Archaeological-Historical Landscape and its European Dimension, in The
Cultural Landscape & Heritage Paradox, ed. Bloemers, Tom (J.H.F.), Kars, Henk, van der Valk,
Arnold, Wijnen, Mies, Amsterdam University Press, 2010, 6.
281 Curinschi Vorona, Arhitectură…, 178.
282 Archives of the Historical Monuments Commission, Fund 5.02, Curtea Veche (Old Princely
Court) Dossier, 1929–1933, apud Opris, , I., Ocrotirea…, 117.

construction—concrete, cement plaster, and artificial stone—is condemned, while

on the other hand, reconstructions and consolidations are carried out even with these
materials. The mixing of principles and the lack of clear inclusion in one of the cate-
gories of restoration may be considered, from the perspective of Ambrogio Annoni’s
theory, a case of intervention based on ‘case-by-case’ empirical evaluation. At the
same time, this approach, allowing analogy-based reconstructions and completions
with the purpose of establishing unity, bears the mark of the subjectivity of stylistic
restoration.
One such situation, which continues to be debated, is related to the issue of the plas-
tering of monuments. Although plastering with cement mortar is undeniably harm-
ful to monuments, while lime mortar is an unsustainable solution—the main argu-
ments put forward by S, tefan Bals, and Horia Teodoru (1982)—, these considerations
cannot motivate the radical alteration of the architectural object’s historical image
through the lack of plastering. Nevertheless, in the case of the Kretzulescu Church
of Bucharest, Curinschi Vorona notes that, “considering the beauty of the plastically
completed construction and the technical perfection of the building shell, the Com-
mission opted for the lack of plastering”.283 The monument’s image is altered through
stylistic and aesthetic-subjective intervention, and it becomes fixed in this manner in
public consciousness, rendering new restoration interventions for the recovery of the
original (historical) expression almost impossible and potentially controversial. The
situation is similar with partial plastering, predominantly, but not exclusively, used
for stone buildings (fortified churches, fortress towers, etc.), leaving the masonry
visible at the wall edges and at the intersection of any two vertical planes.284 This
intervention is purely subjective, aestheticizing, and interpretive, with a strong visual
effect on the building, belonging in the category of stylistic restorations. The tradi-
tional plastering of monuments is mainly motivated by the necessity to protect and
proof the walls’ masonry; traditionally, in some cases, on those very areas the plaster
was ornamentally treated (painted motifs) but never exposed to the elements. As an
explanation, a similar process of influence may be invoked: from stone-based mil-
itary architecture, massive due to functional considerations, the symbolism of the
impregnability attached to its image (i.e. the architectural expression) is transferred
to the urban architecture of the institutions of authority (town halls, courts, jails, etc.)
and to aristocratic and then bourgeois residential architecture—gradually exposing
interpreted variations, in which the model of massive stone masonry is transformed
in bossage (embossment) plaster and additionally hybridized through various orna-
mental treatments; the symbolism of the source is diluted, the bossage is kept as an

284 One such example is the Roman Catholic Church of St. Bartholomew in Sebes, : at its most
recent restoration, the stone surfaces on the edge areas (the Gothic buttresses of the altar as well
as the framings of the empty spaces) have been isolated and rendered in contrast through the
plastering. A technically correct intervention with regard to the materials used (lime plaster) and
even a sensitive approach to the elements hidden by the historical changes (uncovering the ogives and
the traceries of the old Gothic openings) thus becomes subjective and aestheticizing—i.e. a stylistic
restoration—due to the use of the lime plaster that stops, even with a difference in thickness, at the
contours of the stone block at the edges of the buttresses.
accent on the volume edges and on the base, thus losing the very semantics of the
initial model. Thus, in the case of the intervention of partial plastering, the only argu-
ment supporting it—the uncovering and highlighting of stone elements as historical
‘witnesses’—is diluted, or completely disappears, due to the strong visual impact
and to the aestheticizing interpretation. The building is no longer ‘read’ as a ‘histor-
ical document’ (i.e. with the intention of exhibiting the ‘witnesses’), but appears as
its aestheticized variation, or as an aesthetic license, reminiscent of Viollet-le-Duc’s
interpretive projection. These examples from the interwar and contemporary period
suggest a different development of the objectivation process on Romanian territory.
The objectivation process of the heritage perspective, while manifesting itself, allows
for the parallel existence (and flourishing) of the strongly subjective perspective. The
influence of the European trends is, however, undeniable; Romanian legislation on
built heritage as well as on restoration and conservation methodology reflects French,
Italian, and Russian models (especially in the case of movable heritage). After the
war, as also noted by Curinschi Vorona, the tendency is of “diversification of restora-
tion solutions”,285 extending the juxtaposition of heritage perspectives. Interventions
aimed at the complete reconstruction of ruins,286 the restoration of potential unity, as
well as substitutions and completions made in order to regain the original state coex-
ist with conservation and consolidation interventions on objects in the state of ruin
and with principles characteristic for the objective attitude (of scientific restoration),
such as the demarcation of the modern intervention and of minimal intervention.
Critical intervention, established after World War II, “should be directed at restor-
ing the potential unity of an artwork, insofar as it is possible, without creating an
artistic or historical forgery, obliterating all traces of an artwork’s transition through
time”287 —according to Cesare Brandi’s definition. Curinschi Vorona attributes to
the Romanian school of restoration the priority in applying the principles of critical
restoration, identifying it in pre-war interventions. Nevertheless, in Europe, critical
restoration will only substitute the stylistic in the post-war period, motivated by the
extensive damage, which make it impossible to apply the principles of scientific
restoration. On the Romanian territory, in the interwar period, the application of the
principles of (avant la lettre) critical restoration does not find such a solid argument
for itself. The criteria of critical restoration are applied partially, juxtaposed with the
principles of stylistic or scientific restoration, while the restoration of the monument’s
potential unity maintains a strong subjective tint. Critical restoration presupposes the
completion of the built object’s unity after the critical act (i.e. the critical gaze of the

286 Curinschi Vorona offers the example of the Potlogi Palace’s reconstruction, completed between
1954 and 1956, by architects S, tefan Bals, and Radu Udroiu, who have applied the technique of
analogy for the missing parts, following a strongly modified model (the Mogos, oaia Palace), leading
to an idealized and non-existent purity of style that was wrongly attributed and distorted the reality
of the monument that was built in this manner. Similarly, the use of reinforced concrete as a building
technique (imposed on the existing ruins) represents, according to Curinschi Vorona, an intervention
that reduces the historical and documentary value of the ensemble. Curinschi Vorona, Arhitectură…,
184.
287 Brandi, Cesare, Teoria del Restauro, Editura di Storia e Letteratura, 1963, 36.
subject located in the present), while balancing the two perspectives—the historical
and the aesthetic, of which, in the case of the interwar Romanian restorations, the
aesthetic seems to have been dominant, as also noted by Curinschi Vorona.
Although the Romanian orientation toward objectivation is in line with the gen-
eral European development, the post-war Romanian restoration intervention is still
subjective. There are two separate orientations that coexist (along with hybrid inter-
mediate formulas), identified thus by Curinschi Vorona. The first is directed at “the
conservation of the original substance, the maintenance of the stages, marking the
intervention of the restorer, and abandoning the restoration of the monuments’ plastic
integrity, i.e. of the aspect of formal continuity corresponding to the initial or to an
optimal stage”, while the second follows “as the fundamental topic of restoration pre-
cisely the restoration of plastic integrity that does not necessarily correspond to the
initial aspect of formal continuity, through reintegration and reconstruction work, by
way of analogy or based on innovation”.288 Both orientations—hereinafter referred
to for convenience as the direction of minimal intervention and the direction of plastic
unity—imply the assumption of the heritage objects’ alterity. According to the first
direction, the monument’s otherness is based on its authenticity and historicity. In
other words, its value as the witness of the past is sufficient for defining its nature of
alterity. The second direction requires an assembling of the monument’s alterity: the
restoration of the monument’s plastic integrity mediates its alterity and, simultane-
ously, is also ‘requested’ by it, without which the architectural object is considered
inferior from an artistic and symbolic perspective—incapable of transmitting its orig-
inal meaning. From the post-war period to the contemporary, under the pressure of
the various involved factors (financial, political, symbolic, etc.—and increasingly
the financial-economic factor), the attitude assumed in the restoration intervention
belongs to that ‘middle way’ also featured in the ‘case-by-case’ theory of Ambrogio
Annoni. As a contemporary tendency, manifested not only in Romania, there is the
dominance of the economic and social interest, but not of the cultural, while the
intervention is defined as renovation or rebuilding, with the abusive interpretation of
the need for maintenance (conservation) and restoration.289
Based on the illustration of these two attitudes in Romania (also present in Europe
more generally, as well as elsewhere in the world), the contribution of the restoration
intervention to the heterotopic functioning of the heritage object will be further
discussed.

289 Luciani,Roberto, Il Restauro. Metodi e strumenti di una “eccellenza” italiana tra arte, scienza
e tecnologia, presentation brochure, under the auspices of the Ministero degli Affari Esteri 2011,
Palombi Editori, Roma, 2011, 9.
4.12 The Heterotopian Character of the Heritage Space as Mediated … 319
4.12 The Heterotopian Character of the Heritage Space

as Mediated by the Restoration Intervention
Both of the previously discussed restoration directions—the stylistic unity interven-

tion and the minimal intervention—propose the same mechanisms in constructing
the alterity of the heritage object, yet some differences can be examined further. The
minimal intervention restoration technique assigns to the restored space the hetero-
topian capacity to juxtapose within a single space several other spaces otherwise
incompatible or antithetical, through the deliberate and meticulous maintenance and
display of multiple evolution phases (or timeframes) of the object, represented by the
additions, the historical interventions, radical occurrences and even other restoration
interventions. This heterotopian capacity is diminished in the case of the stylistic
unity technique: the space is altered, cleansed and artificially reconstructed through
the restoration intervention, and thus readjusted loosed any traces of other narrative,
uses, identities, events or evolutions that might have marked it; the restored monu-
ment thus becomes a seemingly coherent albeit unadulterated and integral variant of
itself. Simultaneously the space’s timeframe—or the time of the monument—is sub-
jectively selected to the detriment of other timeframes or sequences acquired in the
course of its becoming. The capacity to juxtapose several other spaces within a single
space is maintained and manifested only through the relation between the recovered
historic space (expressed through the selected aesthetic unity) and the contemporary
context, perceived by means of the heritage gaze of the viewer. Along the same lines,
the alterity of the monument is additionally mediated through the manipulation of
its temporality; the approach of the minimal intervention reads the monument as
a space of temporal accumulation, where all the additions and alterations endured
along its existence, reflecting its context and its becomings, are conserved and show-
cased within the space framed of the present; this approach allows the reading of
the monuments temporal as well as its signification strata. In respect to the oppo-
site technique of stylistic unity, the juxtaposition of temporal strata is replaced with
a sole temporal instance; the monument is given the unitary image of a particular
timeframe, selected according to an esthetical principle and erasing the witnesses of
other temporal timeframes. The ascribed interventions of reconstruction and reinte-
gration aim to reassemble a specific historic image of the monument, thus shaping the
monument’s alterity in relation to its context. While the stylistic unity intervention
technique doesn’t altogether erase the alterity of the monument (assimilating it in its
everyday context) it can drastically impoverish its repertoire of significations. Both
approaches strengthen the spatial and temporal enclave character of the monument,
initially introduced and affixed through the heritage status. Nonetheless, these two
specific attitudes towards the monument’s temporality simply reflect the complex
and fundamental relationship between heritage and time; the heritage status is both
the expression of the will to abolish the passing of time and its device. The mon-
ument’s mirror role—the reflection of human identity—confirmed and supported
through the heritage status, is nuanced by the two intervention approaches: through
the minimal intervention the monument is enabled to reflect not only human iden-
tity but its becoming as well; through the stylistic unity intervention the monument
is refabricated as a sometimes-idealised reflection of a single span of the human
paradigm.
The visibility of the restoration intervention can also be discussed further. The
visible insertion of modern elements,290 even in deliberate contrast with the original
substance adds a layer of signification and the mark of its own time. Visible or con-
cealed, “every act of restoration is a time-bounded interpretation of a monument and,
after some generations, it’s clearly possible to date the intervention like every other
human creation in the course of time”.291 Such interventions deliberately strengthen
the alterity of the monument in contrast to its inherited (decayed or altered) his-
toric image and in contrast to its present. Such interventions, although theoretically
considered to be sincerer in relation to the original substance of the monument,
can negatively contribute to its perception, by distracting the viewer and even by
distorting the monument’s image and along with it, its meanings. The concealed
intervention—usually associated with a structural role, yet not exclusively—con-
tributes in a decisive manner to the overall image and perception of the monument.
The Athens Charter (1931) readily supports this type of intervention through the
principle dedicated to restoration of materials: the “work of consolidation should
whenever possible be concealed in order that the aspect and character of the restored
monument may be preserved.”292 This attitude towards the restoration intervention
also entails the legitimization of the objective stance towards the heritage object and
its main acknowledged value: its bearing of multiple significances. Although, in the
process, authenticity as a value becomes subordinated is isn’t entirely eliminated.
According to the same charter, restoration is to be considered as the final resort
of safeguarding interventions, mandatory preceded by a “a system of regular and
290 A common less contrasting yet visible intervention consists of the structural reinforcement of
buildings with steel tension ties or rods—their visibility is not so much intentional but unavoidable
in many cases. A different approach consists of the deliberate showcasing of the intervention;
one such case, an interesting intervention gravitating between visible and concealed, is the 70s
Romanian restoration of the Calnic fortress, Alba County: the restoration introduces a perimetric
ring beam along the entire span of the fortification wall, supported by concrete buttress beams, a
large structural system concealed from the customarily tourist visited interior of the fortress wall,
yet highly visible and brutal from the less accessible fenced-off exterior, not included in the tourist
route. This play on visible/not-visible places the intervention in an intermediary hybrid position
between the two approaches.
291 Schadler-Saub, Ursula, Preserving tangible and intangible values. Some remarks on theory and
practice in conservation and restoration and the education of conservators in Europe, in Conser-
vation Turn—Return to Conservation. Tolerance for Change. Limits for Change, Proceedings of
the International Conference of the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee for the Theory
and Philosophy of Conservation and Restoration, 5–9 May 2010, Prague, Cesky Krumlov, Czech
Republic, 3–6 March 2011, Florence, 111–121, eds. Wilfred Lipp, Josef Stulc, Boguslaw Szmygin,
Simone Giometti, Editzioni Polistampa, Florence, 2012, 111.
292 The Athens Charter for the Restoration of Historic Monuments—1931, Adopted at the First
International Congress of Architects and Technicians of Historic Monuments, Athens 1931, A.

General conclusions, IV. Restoration of Materials.
permanent maintenance calculated to ensure the preservation of the buildings”.293

Thus concrete belts, grade beams, floor slabs, columns or posts, reinforced concrete
jackets are either encapsulated or covered, concealed from sight and inaccessible to
the general public. The result is usually a positive one: the esthetical unity of the
monument is reclaimed, and the significations attached to the specific image of the
monument are perpetuated; however, in can also be read as a counterfeiting of the
monument. The structural elements visible to the eye—buttresses, vaults, or the spec-
tacular intersecting transverse ribs of ogival arches—no longer fulfil their functional
role for which they were designed, and they become mere features of a mise en scene.
The final purpose is to conserve the image and its attached significations. However,
this aesthetic intervention does contribute to the monument’s alterity, even if it’s not
through ‘added’ contrast to the original substance (which is deliberately avoided)
but through the support and enhancement of the monument’s historicity, the overall
alterity of the monument in its contemporary context. Regardless of the approach,
the restoration remains in itself a practice of the heritage space and represents an
added signification—a layer of meaning accumulated within the material substance
of the built object. While the concealed intervention allows this layer of meaning to
remain accessible only to the specialist, and the distortion of the overall significa-
tions is either very subtle, or minimized and entirely avoided, the visible intervention
imprints itself differently. The new layer of meaning is very accessible, sometimes
dominant, it can easily divert and alter the original signification encoding of the
monument; the initial layer(s) of meaning moves to a subordinate position, the new
one illustrating the contemporary timeframe and identities becomes the sovereign
one. Both approaches have a potential for ‘high jacking’ of the object’s embed-
ded meanings, so the championed alternative—proven through experience—or the
desired ideal has come to be the middle ground. This is a hybrid, simultaneously
visible (in order to avoid counterfeiting) and dissimulated (in order not to displace
the authentic), aiming for a ‘impartial’ reconstruction of the monument.
Nonetheless, the restoration intervention contributes to the object’s alterity, which
is legitimized through the heritage status. The same category of interventions show-
cases the process through which the heritage gaze becomes objective. The Venice
charter (1964/5) readdressed and rectified the purpose and the nature of the restora-
tion intervention—“to preserve and reveal the aesthetic and historic value of the
monument and is based on respect for original material and authentic documents. It
must stop at the point where conjecture begins, and in this case moreover any extra
work which is indispensable must be distinct from the architectural composition and
must bear a contemporary stamp.”294 These principles allow the use of new materi-
als and technologies whereas the otherwise preeminent, traditional ones cease to be
efficient. The intervention is required to be perceivable and unmistakably contrasting
293 The Athens Charter for the Restoration of Historic Monuments—1931, Adopted at the First
International Congress of Architects and Technicians of Historic Monuments, Athens 1931, A.
General conclusions, I. Doctrines. General procedures.
294 International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites—The Venice
Charter, 1964, 11th International Congress of Architects and Technicians of Historic Monuments,
Venice 1964, adopted by ICOMOS in 1965, article 9.
with the original substance—the chosen definition for a harmonious integration. Any
attempt to manufacture an esthetical unity or to eliminate specific historic features is
strictly forbidden, since all contribute to the monument’s signification and documen-
tary value. Conservation takes centre stage, it precedes and governs all interventions
and its area of expertise is extended beyond the object, to encompass its immediate
context as well. The fundamental principles defined by the Venice charter comprise
the basis of all contemporary heritage regulations and continue to be employed;
moreover, the latest developments in the contemporary pursuit for objectivity of the
heritage gaze invoke this same source. The charter calls for the protection of the
more common (every day or minor) heritage—until then subordinated to the excep-
tional—, of the areas and zones ascribed to heritage objects—until then as individual
monuments; this is followed by the recognition and subsequent protection of cultural
landscapes (acknowledged in 1992 by the World Heritage Committee, and in 1995
by the Council of Europe) and of historic urban landscapes (HUL, acknowledged
in the 2011 UNESCO Recommendations). The preoccupation with the protected
object’s context, either rural or urban, zonal or regional reaches back further in time,
surfacing in the European Charter for the Architectural Heritage (1975), the Amster-
dam Declaration (1975), the ICOMOS Declaration of Xi’an (2005), the UNESCO
Recommendations of 1976 and more detailed in the European Landscape Convention
of 2010 and the UNESCO recommendations regarding HULs of 2011. The Venice
charter addresses the sociocultural aspect of heritage, its immaterial instance, whose
conservation and transmittance are necessary to the safeguarding of the physical
object as well as to the cultural identities it represents. Along these lines and through
many other doctrinal texts and recommendations the pursuit for objectivity of the
heritage gaze can be observed; these texts define, re-evaluate and reformulate her-
itage’s fundamental concepts. Another demarche in this direction is the Charter for
the Interpretation and Presentation of Heritage Sites (2008, Quebec),295 an approach
proposing an ampler analysis: the heritage endeavour isn’t responsible only for the
transmittance of the heritage object, as integral and authentic as possible, but also for
the transmittance of the manner in which it is perceived; in other words, the document
aims to norm and mould the very process of presenting, transmitting and receiving
the meanings of the heritage object—process guided by the principles of diversity,
inclusion and authenticity. The charter unequivocally addresses the importance of
objectivity: “meaningful interpretation necessarily includes reflection on alternative
historical hypotheses, local traditions, and stories”—296 supporting the recognition
of the diversity of involved cultures and their perspectives and narratives, and against
discriminatory and unilateral narratives. The use of the sensitive interpretation, espe-
cially for the heritage considered controversial, of multifaceted interpretation (his-
torical, social, political, spiritual etc.) and of interdisciplinary interpretation. In the
295 THE ICOMOS charter for the interpretation and presentation of cultural heritage sites (also
known as the Ename Charter) Prepared under the Auspices of the ICOMOS International Scientific
Committee on Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites Ratified by the 16th General
Assembly of ICOMOS, Québec (Canada), 4 October 2008.
296 The ICOMOS Charter for the Interpretation and Preservation of Cultural Heritage Sites, Principle
2: Information Sources, paragraph 2.

spirit of the Venice charter, the interpretation “should clearly distinguish and date
the successive phases and influences in its evolution. The contributions of all periods
to the significance of a site should be respected.”297 The charter’s other principles
discuss authenticity, sustainability and social inclusion—while norming not only
the actual heritage object and place but also the way in which is to be perceived,
interpreted and transmitted. Although this play between objectivity and ideal and
their projection in the future is a constant for such texts, the Ename charter stands
out through its intention to shape (or norm) all of the practices associated with the
heritage site; while the preservation and presentation of heritage lies to a large extent
in the competence of the heritage community, its perception by the public is external,
outside its direct reach.
Although the official acknowledgement of the heritage object’s alterity is reliant on
the existence of the heritage status, it isn’t decisively established nor affixed by it, nor
is it a finite process. The heritage status of the object entails a set of protective norms
and usually a ‘processing’ intervention (restoration), endowing it with one or more
added layers of meanings that become juxtaposed to the ones endemic to the object.
Documents such as the Canadian charter previously discussed, which undertake the
presentation and interpretation of the heritage objects, are additionally norming the
objects, addressing its practices and its ‘reading’, or the transmittance/receiving of its
significations. Following the official recognition and the confirmation of the object’s
alterity, the pursuit of objectivity, intrinsic to the heritage gaze, introduces a super-
regulation and a normalization of the heritage object. This pursuit of objectivity
manifests in two ways, through the multiplication of the heritage categories and of
the selection and evaluation criteria, respectively through the broadening and multi-
plication of norms and regulations specific to each (sub)category. The motivation of
the ever-expanding theoretical space of heritage. In other words, several phases of the
process can be identified: the recognition of alterity, its official acknowledgement, its
enhancement (through added significations) and its ‘normalization’; while all of the
phases deal with the object’s hybridity, the last phase is paramount to its existence. It
implies the simultaneous perpetuation of the object’s alterity (its acknowledgement
as other) and of its integration, or assimilation (acknowledgement as same)—since
the protective regulations that norm every aspect of its existence converts it into an
analogous part of the collection of fragments that is heritage.
Looking at the evolution of the selection criteria one can immediately observe the
multiplication of values—from the initial commemorative value and the age value as
sole criteria, to the cumulation of various values (social, aesthetic, spiritual etc.) under
the concept of cultural significance; secondly, one can also observe the multiplication
of ordering structures, based on their area of authority (national, European, global
etc.) or on the specific nature of their targets (material/immaterial, function wise,
constituent materials, historic timeframes etc.). I argue that this very proliferation of
classifications is in fact a inherent to the objectivity pursuit the heritage discipline;
it is in fact a reaction to the intrinsic subjectivity of the evaluation-selection heritage
processes that designate the products of human creation worthy of being safeguarded,
297 Idem., Principle 3: Context and Setting, paragraph 3.

preserved and transmitted to future generations. The creation of these comprehen-

sive value grids allows the assessment the of an extensive and diverse array of items,
ultimately serving as “a vehicle to inform decisions about how best to preserve these
values in the physical conservation of the object or place”298 and of course the sig-
nifications imprinted in their materiality. Avrami, Mason and de la Torre delineate
the two distinct processes involved: valorising, or the act of providing plus-value,
and valuing (closer in meaning to evaluation or appreciation of existing value).299
The valorising process is in itself the active and deliberate creation of heritage, and
is inherently subjective: a community, an institution or an individual submits the
object to one such value grid, selects and then endows it with the heritage quality by
means of discursive constructs. Even if this process is unavoidably subjective, the
object thus selected is to be included in wilful objective scheme—which is delib-
erately constructed as objective through the joint ratification of doctrinal texts. As
reflected by this paradoxical situation, the heterotopic character of heritage reveals
itself yet again, in the play between objectivity and subjectivity implied by the selec-
tion process. The objectivity is essentially utopian in nature, and the process of its
materialization can only be flawed, inherently issuing—as Foucault posits—a het-
erotopic hybrid. The heritage demarche emerges as paradoxical: it acknowledges the
subjective character of the built object (as well as its own) and it aims to maintain
it, yet it strives for objectivity in its processes of selection, restoration/conservation,
interpretation and transmission.
4.13 Objectivation—The Multiplication of Values

and of the Involved Actors
Observing the development of the classification criteria, a multiplication of values

should firstly be noted, from the commemorative value to the age value as sole
criteria, and up to the accumulation (aesthetic, religious, political, economic value)
according to the meaning of the concept of cultural significance. Secondly, there is
also a multiplication of ordering structures—according to the impact of interest—as
national, European and global structures, as well as according to the objectives’ nature
itself (material/immaterial, functions, constituent materials, historical periodization,
location etc.). I believe that this abundance of classifications is, in fact, a part of the
objectivation process’ reaction to the intrinsic subjectivity of the evaluation of the
heritage potential, which designates a human product as worthy of being preserved
for and transmitted to future generations. The creation of this value “matrix” enables
us to establish the importance of a very extensive and varied range of products,
298 Avrami, Erica, Mason, Randall, de la Torre, Marta, Values and Heritage Conservation, Research

299 Idem.
4.13 Objectivation—The Multiplication of Values and of the Involved Actors 325
ultimately serving “as a vehicle to inform decisions about how best to preserve”300
the (subjective) meanings inscribed in the product. Avrami, Mason and de la Torre
distinguish these two processes, i.e. valorising (the addition of value) and valuing (the
assessment of the existing value).301 The valorising process is, in itself, active and
intentional heritageisation, and ipso facto subjective: a community, an institution
or an individual (with decision-making powers), through subjecting the object to
such a value matrix, selects it and invests it with the quality of heritage, worthy of
being saved and retransmitted. Yet, even if thus included in an objective structure302
that recognizes its definitive otherness, the cultural object preserves its subjective
character, enabling different conservation approaches: according to the example of
Avrami, Mason and de la Torre, a built heritage object can acquire new functions
(more or less compatible with its typology, state of conservation or location) and
may renovate in different ways, according to the value that is considered to be the
dominant one.
The coordinates thus granting subjectivity are, first and foremost, the involved
parties (or stakeholders, i.e. the investor, the target group, the owner or the involved
community), but also the context (which can be political, historical or economic—or
even, quite simply, offered by the contemporary trends, as in the case of the reha-
bilitation of town squares and historic centres), which may tip the balance towards
certain approaches—especially regarding the approach to the rehabilitation inter-
vention—, capable of exerting pressure and of heavily influencing the course of the
intervention.
4.14 The Community as Actor—A Decision Factor

in the Conservation Practice
A case in point for the pressure exerted by the target group and by the involved com-
munity, influencing the final intervention, is that of the renovation of the Rijksmuseum
in Amsterdam. The full renovation agreement for the Royal Museum, built in 1885,
was granted in 2000. The renovation work itself, planned for 2003, was begun in
2004, according to the plan of Spanish architects Antonio Cruz and Antonio Ortiz
and of the French designer Wilmotte (for the interior). Although planned for 2006,
300 Erica Avrami, Randall Mason, Marta de la Torre, Values and Heritage Conservation, Research

302 As shown above, the ordering appears—at least by intention—as a reflection of the need for
objectivation when confronted with a vast, extremely varied and subjective field. Such ordering
structures can be found in the national monument classification system or in the UNESCO classifi-
cation system and also in structures used in renovation/conservation processes, aimed at evaluating
factors such as the state of the property, the renovation priorities and the recommended type of
intervention, etc. as objectively as possible. They appeal to universal and absolute values, e.g. truth
(authenticity), beauty, freedom, faith, etc. for their self-legitimisation.
the project was only finished in 2013.303 Among the many issues contributing to the
extension of the intervention to almost a decade304 —“including a catastrophic ten-
dering process, problems with asbestos”305 —, the protests of the cycling community
have proven to be decisive. According to the initial proposal of the two architects, the
nineteenth-century building was to return to its initial historical form, purged all later
additions, with the relocation of all, necessarily modern, technical areas to the under-
ground. The original building “had the so-called Museumpoort—centrally located
gates from both sides of the building and the street passage between them leading
from the Amsterdam Old City centre to then new South area of town—Zuid Ams-
terdam”.306 According to the new architectural plan, the passage was to become the
museum’s reception area, with the actual traverse being turned into an underground
tunnel. The Cyclists’ Union in Amsterdam (Fietsersbond Amsterdam) reacted imme-
diately, taking to the court the fight “to preserve this shortest passage from the Old
City centre to the South”.307 Hence, the local community supported the conservation
of the traverse’s historical use for cycling, thus contributing to the maintenance of
the memory of this place and also of an important Dutch national activity,308 while
the opposite side, the Rijksmuseum, wanted to permanently close the traverse, cit-
ing the undesirable consequences for pedestrians, cyclists and visitors, as well as
to the museum’s staff and security, due to the overcrowding of this museum and
semi-public space,309 along with the interruption of the sightseeing tours by the sep-
aration thus imposed between the two wings, the eastern and the western one. In
spite of the functional and utilitarian argument put forward by the museum, the local
community was to become successful in the legal proceedings: the initial project has
303 https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/renovation/the-renovation, accessed on April 2014.

304 The exceeding of the deadline meant the exceeding of the allocated budget as well. Previously
estimated at 272 million Euros, it ultimately reached 375 millions.
The Reconstruction of Rijksmuseum, http://www.amsterdam.info/museums/rijksmuseum/
reconstruction/, accessed in April 2014.
305 Rijksmuseum to reopen after dazzling refurbishment and rethink, Charlotte Higgins, theguardian.
com, 5 April 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/apr/05/rijksmuseum-reopens-long-

refurbishment-rethink, accessed in April 2014.
306 The Reconstruction of Rijksmuseum, http://www.amsterdam.info/museums/rijksmuseum/

307 The Reconstruction of Rijksmuseum, http://www.amsterdam.info/museums/rijksmuseum/

308 “The bicycle is folkloric in the Netherlands. Touch the bicycle, and you touch freedom.”, cf.
Taco Dibbits, the museum’s director of collections, cited in Rijksmuseum to reopen after daz-
zling refurbishment and rethink, Charlotte Higgins, theguardian.com, 5 April 2013, http://www.
theguardian.com/culture/2013/apr/05/rijksmuseum-reopens-long-refurbishment-rethink, accessed
on April 2014.
309 The argument of overcrowding was based by the Rijksmuseum on a research and analysis project
of the Delft University of Technology’s Faculty of Civil Engineering, concerning the potential
traffic. According to its results, “[a]s threshold value for public spaces, especially in museums, the
level of service should not be worse than level C (maximum 0.71 pedestrians per square meter)”. As
a result of the concentration of pedestrian traffic in the traverse (and not in a larger reception area,
as according to the initial project), the study estimated a pedestrian flow “at level D or worse (0.71
or more pedestrians per square meter )”, especially around the opening and the closing time of the
4.14 The Community as Actor—A Decision Factor … 327
been modified, with the relocation of the visitors’ flow between the two wings to the
underground, “fruit of a hugely complex engineering project”.310 In its final form,
the renovation intervention also reflects the imposition of a certain set of values, i.e.
those of the local community (tradition, national identity and concepts such as the
freedom of opinion, ecology etc.), against the scientific argument of the institution,
based on considerations such as the improved functioning of the museum space, the
fluidization of the internal routes, the enhanced accessibility to the collections and
perhaps even a better reception of the artistic product. The intervention was carried
out according to the value seen as dominant, and “[n]either option can be viewed as a
priori better or more appropriate than the other, as the appropriateness is dependent
upon the values prioritized by the community, or ‘stakeholders’ involved”.311
The value matrices of “individuals and communities—be they conservators,
anthropologists, ethnic groups, politicians, or otherwise—shape all conservation”312 ,
and, within this process, “values […] are not simply ‘preserved’ but are, rather, mod-
ified”.313
This double reflection further explains the historical outlining of the heritageisa-
tion perception and can serve as a guidance tool in estimating its subsequent develop-
ment. For example, the values contained in and attributed to the industrial products*
of the nineteenth century (initially perceived as belonging to an atypical category,
almost contradicting the concept of heritage) is gradually shaping the perception of
heritageisation, ultimately leading not only to its acceptance but also to its approach
as a self-standing category of the ‘official’ heritage (the establishment of expert
groups such as ICOMOS and TICCIH). The heritage value of the object is con-
structed through discursive constructs, which are themselves changing over time,
thus conditioning not only the status but the very existence of the object.
museum, which coincide with the peak for bicycle traffic. TU Delft traffic study, http://www.citg.
tudelft.nl/en/about-faculty/departments/transport-and-planning/traffic-management-and-traffic-
flow-theory/dynamisch-verkeers-management/special-projects/pedestrians/projects/rijksmuseum/,
accessed in April 2014.
310 Higgins, Charlotte, Rijksmuseum to reopen after dazzling refurbishment and rethink,
theguardian.com, 5 April 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/apr/05/rijksmuseum-

reopens-long-refurbishment-rethink, accessed in April 2014.



4.15 Heritage Practices. The Meaning-Assigning Process.

Constructing the Alterity of the Object
According to Avrami, Mason, and de la Torres, the valorisation process, equivalent

to the active creation of heritage, is based—as seen above—on a set of values that
are dominant at a specific time (the official values, or the values of a dominant
community). In other words, through the discursive construct, a dominant community
actively creates (through selection and designation) the heritage in which its active
value constructs, dominant at that time, are reflected.
Schiele proposes a similar reading of this process, but captures more exactly
the relationship between the signifier and its signification-assigning commu-
nity/individual. He sees the cultural good as a receptacle in which the values of
the community or the individual are stored, thus becoming heritage:
heritage is an abandoned (empty) territory awaiting cultural mobilization, or more specifi-
cally, cultural mobilizations, since the extension of the cultural domain has its correspondent
in the extension of the spectrum of actor who will invest it (with meaning). Hence, the
question to be discussed is not of the (multiple) heritages, but of the way in which heritage
meanings are assigned.314
For Schiele, the cultural product possesses the potential of becoming heritage, but
is actually perceived as heritage when, and insofar as, this meaning—or “reference
status”315 —is attributed to it by the interested actors. The process is similar to the
one envisaged by Brandi, for whom the special status of the object is conditioned
by its perception as heritage. The reference status is intrinsically subjective, as it is
assigned by subjective actors and represents their subjective values.
Opris, represents the meaning-assigning process graphically.316 His four
hypostases, indicating groups of involved actors, contribute equally to the legitimiza-
tion of heritage. However, his scheme omits the overlapping and the interconnections
of these sources of legitimacy, i.e. via (historical or religious) tradition, through local
(regional) or governmental (national) decision, or via the decision of international
bodies. These do not contribute equally to the legitimation process—as suggested by
his scheme—and are generally inclined toward a sequential organization (or succes-
sion, from the local to the universal level) as well as toward a partial overlapping.317
314 Schiele, Bernard, Patrimoines et identités, Introduction: Introduction—Jeux et Enjeux de la
Médiation Patrimoniale, Éditions MultiMondes, Collection Muséo, Canada, Quebec, 2002, 2. In

the original language: “le patrimoine est une friche en attente de mobilisation culturelle ou, plus
précisément, en attente de mobilisations culturelles, car à l’élargissement du champ culturel corre-
spond celui du spectre des acteurs qui vont l’investir. C’est pourquoi la question à poser est moins
celle des patrimoines, que celle des mises en patrimoine.”
315 Schiele, Bernard, Patrimoines et identités, Introduction: Introduction—Jeux et Enjeux de la
Médiation Patrimoniale, Éditions MultiMondes, Collection Muséo, Canada, Quebec, 2002, 2.

316 Opris, Ioan, Management Muzeal, ed. Dan Mărgărit, ed. Cetatea de Scaun, 2nd revised edition,
,
Târgovis, te: Cetatea de Scaun, 2010, 119.
317 For example, the legitimisation through the UNESCO listing is almost invariably preceded by at
least one other status, assigned by tradition, or by local or national decision. The UNESCO world
4.15 Heritage Practices. The Meaning-Assigning Process … 329
Davallon captures the essence the process of the meaning-assigning process

through his analysis of a paradox which, in his opinion, characterizes the cultural
heritage object. According to him, the existence and the conservation of tradition
is a condition for the change and the innovation capacity of society, while heritage
(understood in its general sense) is a mediator between the past and the present.
Quoting Pouillon, he differentiates between two types of relating to the past. The
first type presupposes a “creative break,318 characteristic for scriptural societies,
while the second is built on a “cyclic creativity” exclusively specific for oral cultures
and involving the daily reconstruction of tradition. Both appeal to the heritage object
as an instrument for “determining the correct version of tradition”,319 but, especially
for cultures based on writing (i.e. most contemporary societies), heritage embodies
“the difference between them and us, or between a temporal and spatial alterity”320
and the present, being a reference point according to which the present is modelled
and society defines itself. Thus, heritage involves both continuities (through its mere
existence in our present society as well as via the actual process through which soci-
ety relates to it) and differentiation (through its existence as a definitive alterity in
the present, as a past that manifests itself within the present). The break cannot be
total, even in order to ensure the preservation of some specific heritage object; and
even a radical break, as an orientation toward total modernity, would presuppose
the relationship to a pre-existent background against which this modern character
is defined and asserted. Hence, the continuity ensured via heritage is partial, as a
transmission, but not a reproduction of the past.321 Continuity is realized through
heritage status is based on the structuring and functioning of a pre-existing protective framework, as
also stated in paragraph 97 of the organization’s Operational Guidelines: “all properties inscribed
on the World Heritage List must have adequate long-term legislative, regulatory, institutional and/or
traditional protection and management to ensure their safeguarding. (…) Similarly States Parties
should demonstrate adequate protection at the national, regional, municipal, and/or traditional level
for the nominated property”, and in paragraph 98: “Legislative and regulatory measures at national
and local levels should assure the protection of the property from social, economic and other
pressures or changes that might negatively impact the Outstanding Universal Value, including the
integrity and/or authenticity of the property. States Parties should also assure the full and effective
implementation of such measures”; The Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the
World Heritage Convention, WHC, http://whc.unesco.org/en/guidelines, July 2013, accessed in
April 2014.
318 That is créativité-rupture and créativité-cyclique (French), Davallon, Jean, Tradition, mémoire,
patrimoine, in Schiele, Bernard, Patrimoines et identités, Introduction: Introduction—Jeux et Enjeux

de la Médiation Patrimoniale, Éditions MultiMondes, Collection Muséo, Canada, Quebec, 2002,
44.
319 Davallon, Jean, Tradition, mémoire, patrimoine, in Schiele, Bernard, Patrimoines et identités,
Introduction: Introduction—Jeux et Enjeux de la Médiation Patrimoniale, Éditions MultiMondes,

Collection Muséo, Canada, Quebec, 2002, 44.

321 The reproduction of the past can ensure total continuity, possible only—according to Davallon,
Pouillon, and Nora—within societies based on oral culture—through the more objective, organic,
and natural form of collective memory—, where it is not mediated and ‘processed’ through inter-
handed-down heritage that is “already constituted” and whose classification only

confirms the value recognized and perpetuated until the present, which gives us the
stance of depositaries. Through the “new heritage”, whose value and status is recog-
nized, through categorization,322 in the present, current society assumes the stance of
the producer, creating a break—by instituting and recognizing new/alternative value
matrices, worthy of conservation as heritage—and, equally, also contributing to con-
tinuity, through the reiteration of the same process. For Davallon, this phenomenon
represents partial continuity, or continuity through rupture. Once the status of her-
itage is recognized, the link between the past and the present, represented in the actual
object, is reactualized and reactivated through the practice of visiting, or celebrat-
ing, the object, whether movable (e.g. in a museum) or immovable. These practices
mediate “the transition from the old memory (of a social group in the process of
mutation) to a new one”.323 The visit to the heritage site establishes “a social link
between the ancestors and us”—“a symbolical continuity that is constituted around
the object: once its status is guaranteed through scientific research, the relationship
(of continuity) can occur through this mediation (of the object)”.324 Hence, the her-
itage object becomes a “mediator between the two worlds”.325 Due to the fact that its
status is (re-)attributed in the present and has to be proven through interdisciplinary
scientific research (directed at guaranteeing its authenticity), it is implicitly a—sub-
jective—social and cultural construct. Davallon considers that the break, or partial
continuity, between the past and the present, offers the possibility, precisely through
detachment, for the “external examination of history”, and also for the multiple use
of heritage, e.g. “the choosing of ancestors”, or for the process of reverse lineage
(Pouillon).326 In other words, the safeguarding of heritage objects—inherited with
this attached status or newly registered as heritage—is conditioned by (1) the rupture
from the past, or the detachment of their time from the present, through the attribution
of alterity, and by (2) the partial continuity, in which the past (materially and symbol-
ically manifested in the present) is subjected to an undeniably subjective and external
selection process, enabling the “selection of ancestors”,327 both factors being due to
mediaries like documents, libraries, and history, as ordered and subjective constructs indebted to
various doctrines.
322 As was the case with minor, rural, architecture—and is now the case with twentieth century,
industrial, and even with twenty-first century architecture.



325 Davallon, Jean, Tradition, mémoire, patrimoine, în Schiele, Bernard, Patrimoines et identités,


327 Davallon, Jean, Tradition, mémoire,…, 61.
detachment. This is the intrinsic ambiguity in the functioning of heritage, which can
serve “both for the identity claim that produces the authenticity of a transmission
and, simultaneously, for the cultural creation as the invention of a transmission.”328
Once recognized as such, the heritage object can mediate the relationship between
the past and the present, enabling the transmission of the contained meaning. This
transmission, however, is initiated by, and dependent upon, the receiver who, on his
(or her) turn, adds a layer of meaning, whether through authenticating the inscribed
message, or through composing a new one (i.e. via the process of cultural selection,
interpretation, and creation), as the invention of descendance, identity, and history.
Furthermore, the transmission process is constantly repeated and refreshed, just
as (organic, natural—collective) memory is absorbed into (doctrinal, ordered, pro-
cessed—subjective) history, in order to become settled (produced) again, as memory
(Nora, Davallon), while the cultural heritage object, as a reference point of mem-
ory, continues to contain and mediate the initially inscribed meaning, alternating
between, cumulating, and juxtaposing new meanings, or cultural constructs.
In the case of the built heritage object, the successively accumulated meanings
can materially manifest themselves—through additions, extensions, and modifica-
tions—both formally and structurally, through ‘embellishments’ (in respect of the
historically accumulated meanings), but also via returns to previous forms, restora-
tions, and interventions aimed at conserving a specific image of the object and its
context. In both phases of the meaning accumulation process—with the many and
varied hypostases of the historical stages in relation to the significantly fewer of
the modernist and protectionist stage—, the physical form (appearance and condi-
tion) of the object is influenced and even conditioned by the meaning attributed to
it. The meaning accumulation process of the historical period alternates between
the process of formal hybridization (adaptation, addition, accumulation of various
forms), with a relatively organic character, and the radical transformation/alteration
process, while in the modern period it oscillates wildly between radical formal
transformation, even up to hybridization, and the opposite extreme, defined by the
protectionist point of view, of manifestly conserving every layer of meaning. This
situation embodies the rupture between the past and the present through the detached
and deliberate commitment to intervention in a clearly delimited outside, where the
objectivity of the perspective may be claimed. In this case, the intention is to assign
coincident positions to every layer of meaning and to enable the expression of the
involved discourses’ plurality. Yet, these remain an ideal, while the protection, the
restoration intervention, the valorization, and the transmission of the inscribed mean-
ing are always intrinsically related to the dominant discourse and to the discursive
constructs circulated by it.
So, the alterity of the built heritage object is—as I have previously argued and
also according to Davallon’s theoretical argument—a characteristic acquired via
discursive constructs and due to the process of distancing between the past and the
328 Davallon, Jean, Tradition, mémoire,…, 62.

present, simultaneously with the assignment of protected status.329 Nevertheless, the

alterity of the heritage object is almost invariably accompanied by a formal alterity as
well. This physical otherness can be a consequence of the rupture between the past
and the present: when the object category—in its initial function, or regarding the
technology with which it was made—becomes obsolete, or when the object category
has otherwise almost completely disappeared, its remaining instances gain the status
of rare, or even unique, objects.
However, formal alterity may also precede the break between the past and the
present: the object created as an embodiment of intentional alterity possesses, as
previously pointed out, an ‘advance’, or a deposit of meaning, registered in its mate-
rial form simultaneously with its construction, rendering it susceptible, on the one
hand, to accumulating other layers of meaning, intensifying its alterity, and on the
other hand, to maintaining and mediating its initial meaning through time, due to and
by its material form. This development process, between the coordinates of a pre-
existing alterity, is most clearly exemplified in the case of monumental architecture.
Objects that are unique and unmistakable in their construction, carrying distinct (reli-
gious, identity, economic, etc.) meanings, may perpetuate, via their specific material
form, the initial meaning, which is a feature specific for some religious objects, and
may also accumulate subsequent layers of meaning—as in the case of objects that
have entirely lost their function, and partially their original meaning, thus becoming
‘resignifiable’. The material form (architectural, aesthetic or decorative expression,
silhouette, etc.) maintains the association with the initial meaning (castles, fortified
and religious buildings), and the object becomes thus a space that lends itself readily
to refunctionalization and reinvestment with meaning, as well as to being invested
with heritage status. Via this refunctionalization/reinvestment, the initial meaning
and, through it, the community to which that space belongs, are reevoked once again
and projected into the future. Monumental architectural objects, whose alterity is
obvious in their material form, as the manifestation of a prominent symbolic coding
(regarding their original meaning, or the accumulation of meanings), have repre-
sented from the beginning and partially continue to represent, the preferred objects
of heritage protection. These benefit, however, from an ‘intuitive conservation’ and
from a functioning according to idiosyncratic rhythms even before their classification
due to their inscribed meaning(s). I have conceptualized this process following the
functioning of historical buildings and their development over time, as the enabling
factor of meaning accumulation, or the factor that demonstrated the persistence of
the initial meaning.
Nevertheless, this process is not particularly specific for historical development,
but is adopted (repeated) as a modern, or contemporary, strategy, according to which
329 Ihave already argued above for the multiple involvement of the discursive construct in the
establishment of the heritage status, as it precedes and even triggers and motivates the process of
conferring this status, continuing to operate attached to the object, as a reflection of the active cultural
constructs in a specific temporal and spatial interval (i.e. a specific culture); both the discursive and
the cultural construct are subject to change, which is automatically reflected in the protected built
object (and as also seen in the previously mentioned examples of gothic and minor architecture as
well as in the case of industrial heritage).
the architectural object is intentionally constructed differently and consciously aimed

at immediately obtaining iconic status. Through the repetition of the mechanism
of historical development, the modern strategy premeditates and projects, at least
theoretically, the heritage into the future. If the historical object is perceived (in the
present) as being different, unique, particular, and peculiar, it is invested with value
and, hence, protected and perpetuated into the future, then why should the modern
object, capable of formulating and expressing alterity, not do so as well, bringing
the selection process forward?
In the case of these objects, a first layer of meaning—the conceptual motiva-
tion—is attributed in most, or in the best-known cases via the so-called genius loci
(the ‘spirit of the place’) that is invoked in order to motivate alterity and to legitimize
the proposed form, location, and appearance, in an attempt at creating a link between
the newly implanted object and its context. This link is actually invoked as a way
of transferring the multilayered meaning of the context to the proposed object.330
Any process of inscribing the meaning into the material form presupposes a certain
processing, ‘translation’, or encoding into an architectural language and, although
this process is far from being new, the meaning inscribed into contemporary architec-
tural objects seems to elude the ‘reader’. The meaning that was intentionally inscribed
into the object does not correspond to the meaning that is read and interpreted by the
receiver. This is also the source for the wide range of nicknames331 attributed by the
general public, less versed in deciphering post-postmodernist symbolic encoding.
330 One such example is architect Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (1997).
It is one of the most often cited instances also because it introduced on an international scale the
process of implanting an iconic building as a response and solution for the revitalization of the
post-industrial urban fabric, which has become known as the Bilbao effect. The exterior finish
and the irregular-undulated form evokes the spirit of the place—the city’s industrial and harobour
past. Although this was a saving intervention for Bilbao, the promised effect (but not the formal
expression as well) seems rather difficult to be replicated: the Experience Music Project Museum
in Seattle (2000) and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, USA (2003)—both designed
by Gehry—repeat the same architectural expression and formal language, but at different sites.
The pattern, or the “formula”, becomes clear—and even questions the authenticity of the original
concept. Can that spirit of the place that inspired the Spanish museum be the same at two other
locations on the American territory? Furthermore, after the selection process conducted between
2014 and 2015, a third European Guggenheim, after Venice and Bilbao, was announced in Helsinki.
The winning project, entitled “Art in the City”, was designed by the architect team of Nicolas
Moreau and Hiroko Kusunoki (France) and announces a repositioning against the iconic, not relying
anymore on the same formal ‘recipe’, even if the Bilbao effect, capable of significantly heightening
tourism activity, remains just as sought-after. The project proposes “a fragmented, non-hierarchical,
horizontal campus of linked pavilions where art and society could meet and intermingle”. On the
conceptual level, its design is “distinctive and contemporary, without being iconic”—a departure
from the ‘Bilbao recipe’—, engaged in dialogue with the city, facing the sea and the already existing
green spaces. For further details about the winning project, see the official page of the Guggenheim
Helsinki Design Competition, http://designguggenheimhelsinki.org/en/finalists/winner, accessed in
August 2015.
331 These nicknames are also a good indicator of public opinion: Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao
(arch.: Gehry)—‘silver artichoke’; Shard London Bridge (the former London Bridge Tower) (arch.:
Piano)—‘shard’, or ‘glass shard’; Beijing National Stadium (arch.: Herzog & de Meuron)—‘bird’s
nest’; China Central Television Headquarters, Beijing (arch.: Koolhaas)—‘haemorrhoid’; Experi-
The history of recent architecture abounds in such examples and, towards the end
of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, the strategy builds almost
completely on formal alterity and increasingly less on inscribing specific meanings
with the potential of transcending or accumulating new meanings, or on any complex
alterity. The objective of the new insertion is transformed, as the intention of creating
meaning becomes substituted by the intention to create alterity, shock, and exoticism.
The resulting object is also consciously created as materializations of alterity, but
restrict themselves to exposing this otherness merely at the level of the outer layer
that may be motivated by subjective conceptual constructs or by shallow concepts
and incidental references.332
The modern object, although capable of expressing extreme formal alterity—and
maybe even due to this very capacity—suffers from a short circuit or from a break-
down of the signal between the transmitter and the receiver. Although it seemingly
reiterates the characteristic mechanism of historical development—as the conscious
creation of formal alterity—, it omits precisely that interconnection between mean-
ing and material form. In the case of the historical object, the meaning is strongly
enrooted in the material form and confers alterity to it, while the modern object
prepares a formal alterity to which it adds meaning. From this point of view, the
modern object, intentionally created as different, can project itself into the future
only reediting within the creation process the fusion of meaning along with the for-
mal expression that is typical of the historical object, and may thus only aspire to
temporal perpetuation and to acquiring protected status. Nevertheless, its success
remains dependent on the dominant discourse and, implicitly, on its discursive con-
cepts.
4.16 The Heterotopic Character—Beyond Formal Alterity
In The Badlands of Modernity, Hetherington proposes an interpretation of hetero-

topia, or ‘spatial otherness’, in which alterity is translated as incompatibility, or as an
accumulation of incompatibilities. According to him, the heterotopic space “is the
heterogeneous combination of the materiality, social practices and events that were
located at this site and what they came to represent in contrast with other sites”.333
His approach—especially through the first example offered by the author, the Palais
Royal—is closer to the topic of my discussion, i.e. historical architectural space as
an accumulation of historical practices and interpretations (impacting the material
ence Music Project Museum, Seattle (arh.Gehry)—‘blob’ or “haemorrhoids’; Gratz Art Museum
(arch.: sir Cook)—‘friendly alien’, “giant worm’, etc.
332 F. Gehry, Chiat/Day Building, LA, USA, (1985–91), Z. Hadid, Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre
Baku, Azerbaijan (2007–2012), R. Piano, The Shard, London, UK (2009–2013), Herzog and de
Meuron, Beijing National Stadium, China (2003–2008); R. Kolhaas (OMA), CCTV Headquarters,
Beijing, China (2004–2012), etc.
333 Hetherington, Kevin, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering, (Taylor &
Francis e-Library, 2003), 8.

4.16 The Heterotopic Character—Beyond Formal Alterity 335
form), perceived as ‘alterity’ in its own context as well. The heterotopic character of
an object or built space is constituted—according to Hetherington—only through the
‘threads’ connecting it to its context; the material form, its functioning, and the prac-
tices it implies may define it as ‘other’ only in relation to a ‘norm’, or to a context, and
not in itself. Similarly, the built object becomes heritage through the contemporary
perspective on historical, as opposed to contemporary, space, through being defined
and related to concepts such as value, identity, uniqueness, and authenticity. The
alterity of the built object is not exclusively formal, but many-faceted and dynamic
as well, as a ‘response’ to the coordinates of the context in which it is read.
Lefebvre’s interpretation of heterotopia is at least partially also present in Hether-
ington’s approach. Although based on Foucault’s definition, his interpretation moves
in a different direction. Similarly to Foucault, Lefebvre identifies ‘historical’ spaces,
or spatial typologies, specific for (spatially and temporally) localized practices—car-
avanserais, fair areas, ‘themed’ suburbs (according to guilds, functions)—, but also
attributing them a specific functional profile (commerce and exchange) and steering
the meaning of the heterotopic character toward the marginal, the excluded, and the
exterior, while the internalization, or incorporation, of the spaces into the fabric of
the city corresponds to their standardization and normalization, depriving them of
their heterotopic character. Again like Foucault, Lefebvre considers that the existence
and the functioning of heterotopic spaces depends on the context of their function-
ing and on the relationships through which they are connected to it. Nevertheless,
Lefebvre’s interpretation rather presupposes the heterotopic functioning of a specific
space at a specific time, the change of the context automatically involving the disso-
lution of these relationships and the loss of the heterotopic character. In Foucault’s
approach, although defined through the practices it houses and via its context, the
heterotopic space also allows various and even contradictory operations in various
temporal stages, without losing its character of alterity. One of Lefebvre’s examples
is the city itself. On the developmental axis of the urbanization process he proposes,
the city may be regarded as heterotopic only in the context of the political and of
the mercantile society, in contrast with, and in opposition to, a natural context (the
rural). With the self-assertion of mercantile society, grafted on and hybridizing the
political, “the city would no longer appear as an urban island in a rural ocean, it would
no longer seem a paradox, a monster, a hell or heaven that contrasted sharply with
village or country life in a natural environment”.334 The city enters into a dialogue
on equal terms (or even as superior) to the rural and becomes its opposite, i.e. an
equal party of a dichotomy, as opposed to being an unusual enclave of alterity. The
coagulation of the industrial city is then placed on the same developmental axis by
Lefebvre. This city substitutes the previous hybrid, i.e. the mercantile city grafted on
the political, through an “explosion-implosion”—“the tremendous concentration (of
people, activities, wealth, goods, objects, instruments, means, and thought) of urban
reality and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjunct fragments
334 Lefebvre, Henri, The Urban Revolution, University of Minnesota Press, trans. Bonono, Robert,
2003, 11.
(peripheries, suburbs, vacation homes, satellite towns) into space”.335 The author
does not, however, establish whether these fragments are ‘a priori’ heterotopic, due
to their status as an isolated fragments or their (intuited) marginality. The generalized
industrialization process entails a “critical phase” (Lefebvre) that precedes, and rep-
resents the necessary condition for, total and global urbanization, i.e. the urban form
or the urban as such. Lefebvre considers that this phase reinterprets and reutilizes
the previous basic concepts (urban forms, functions, and structures) and consists of
“a renewed space-time, a topology that is distinct from agrarian (cyclic and juxta-
posing local particularities) and industrial (tending toward homogeneity, toward a
rational and planned unity of constraints) space-time”.336 In this new space-time of
the urban, every place and time exists merely as a part of the whole and through its
interrelations with it. Lefebvre introduces three concepts aimed at defining the differ-
ential space of the urban: isotopy,337 heterotopia, and utopia. Thus, in order to ‘read’
the isotopic space, the heterotopic (other and different) space is needed, which is
defined in contradiction, and even in conflict, with the former. Between these spaces,
relative due to the very necessity of their interrelating, Lefebvre places the neutral
element, “the incision-suture of juxtaposed places: street, square, intersection […],
garden, park”.338 Finally, utopia (or the utopian character) is, according to Lefeb-
vre’s definition, as real and concrete as it gets, without being actually situated: it is
the non-localized ‘elsewhere’ and the ‘non-place’ that nevertheless conditions the
urban reality itself as the null vector of urban space, the “symbolized imaginary”
of its inhabitants.339 The heterotopic or isotopic character of a place depends on its
contexts, relationships, and the practices it entails. Hence, the heterotopic place can
become isotopic and vice versa. Lefebvre’s examples are the city as an island or
heterotopic enclave of urbanity in the wide rural context, with the reversal of this
relationship due to the coagulation of the mercantile and the industrial city, and with
the marginal and expelled space of alterity and non-compliance becoming the sought-
after heterotopic enclave, “changed into ‘suburbs’, habitat receptacles, typified by
a highly visible form of isotopy”.340 Heterotopic enclaves may be, in his opinion,
spaces constituted by, and belonging to, the excluded and the nonconformist, or to
alternative or anonymous groups—similar to, but not identical with, the alternative
ordering that is parallel to the dominant one. These spaces “are eventually reclaimed
by the dominant praxis”,341 a process that is equivalent to their normalization, or to
taking on their alternative ordering. Lefebvre redefines both utopia and heterotopia.
335 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, University of Minnesota Press, trans. Bonono, R., 2003, 14.
336 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 37.
337 “An isotopy is a place (topos) and everything that surrounds it (neighbourhood, immediate
environment), that is, everything that makes a place the same place. If there is a homologous or
analogous place somewhere else, it is part of that isotopy”; these are identical spaces and places of
identity (where identity is manifest), allowing for multiple functionality. Lefebvre, The Urban…,
37–8, 128.
338 Lefebvre, The Urban…, 38.
339 Lefebvre, The Urban…, 38–9.
340 Lefebvre, The Urban…, 129.
341 Idem.
4.16 The Heterotopic Character—Beyond Formal Alterity 337
The latter is invested with the main meaning of deviation from the norm—according
to Neil Smith, in a critical interpretation, that also simplifies the rich potential of
Foucault’s theory—, or of a liminal space where alternative (re-)ordering is outlined
as a possibility, in partial correspondence with Hetherington’s interpretation about
the “laboratory spaces” of the new ordering.
Generally, the built (architectural) object, continuously subject to relating its con-
text, becomes ‘different’ when its coordinates no longer correspond to those of the
context that is considered the ‘norm’ or ‘normal’; it is a lack of, or a deviation
from, normality,342 when considered as discordant or excessive343 (again, related
to the context). These definitions of alterity allow the general framing of the archi-
tectural in the so-called “heterotopic profile”, a type formula discussed by Urbach
by examples from modern and contemporary architecture. According to this uni-
dimensional (strictly formal) interpretation, any architectural object considered as
‘different’ is endowed with the heterotopic attribute through its mere deviation from
formal normality, or via the representation of the ‘unusual’ that is, in most cases,
programmatically followed. That is to say, the heterotopic character is simplistically
motivated through the existence of a single ‘thread’ connected to the context, the
formal one, and the heterotopic character is attributed on the basis of this single
coordinate, to the exclusion of all others, such as the space’s functioning, practices,
and perception. I have discussed above the functioning, the possible variations, and
the temporal development of this formal profile. The multitude of forms and aspects
of its possible manifestations suggests the existence of an autonomous category, or
the need for creating one.
This simplified approach has led—as we have seen above—to the proliferation of
heterotopic examples in architecture, in the form of design objects with extravagant
coatings, foreign to and in contrast with the formal context, and also as theoretical
interpretations of everything and anything, not fitting into the proximate (formal)
context and thus interpreted as manifestations of the Foucaultian heterotopia. Never-
theless, a subtle differentiation can be made within the category of the architectural
objects programmatically built as ‘unusual’:
a. the contemporary architectural object that is iconic, conceptualized, and produced
with the single aim of being ‘different’, without any other programme, whose
functioning does not involve a break with the everyday context and it is not
governed by specific rules of functioning, appearing, in its relationship with its
context, a demonstration of the will to be different;
b. the object of modernist or avant-garde architecture that does not particularly seek
the iconic, but rather proposes a new kind of—utopian—ordering, as well as an
improvement of its environment and of the way in which the community occupies
it. This latter subcategory relates to the existing context through criticizing a state
of affairs (absolutism, social unrest, negative industrial impact, etc.) for which it
proposes a solution as a unique and optimal model, implying and including power
relations in its actual material form. This profile of futurism, the modernism of the
342 E. Said apud Hetherington, K., The Badlands of Modernity, 8.

343 Levinas apud Hetherington, K., The Badlands of Modernity, 8.
20s and 30s, and the technocratic modernism of the 60s (Archigram with Walking
City, Instant City, Plug-in City) is already seen in the past tense and as closest to
the concept of heritage-heterotopia. Its models—in many cases, even unrealized
ones—are ‘heritagized’ (or ‘musealized’) primarily due to their creative intention
as well as to the radical, unique, and contrasting character within the historical
and present context. These architectural objects appear as materializations of an
imagined utopian or dystopian future, thus becoming not only heterotopic, but
also ‘musealized’ through the intentionality and especially via the contemporary
perspective relating them to the actually implemented (fulfilled) reality.
c. the representative architectural-historical object that is unique, conceptualized,
and produced with the explicit intent of being ‘different’ in the excessive and
superlative sense, as a demonstration of financial/economic, religious, or techni-
cal power, relating to its contexts through the consolidation of a state of affairs.
In its case, alterity is used as a formula for unequivocally illustrating the absolute
character and the belonging to a superior class—of space, of its owner, or the
institution housed in it.
4.17 Alterity and the Historical Object. The Cumulation

of Meanings
The three categories established above are nothing but instances of programmatically
created alterity. The object created to be different immediately detaches itself—re-
gardless of the underlying creative intention—from its context and, with its change
over time, becomes even more unique and contrasting; the architectural object tends
to modify its content and functioning while (generally) preserving its physical form
—which inevitably comes in contrast with its continuously changing context. The
alterity of the object—associated with the extraordinary and the unique—brings it
into the sphere of interest of heritage. Thus, the heterotopic charge gained over time
is added to the original one.
The heritage status of a built object is established—as seen above—on the basis of
the relationship between the past and the present, through relating it to its context. The
heritage status unites all the previously identified differentiations of alterity through
the very selection criteria of the object of interest (representativeness, uniqueness,
age, and aesthetic value). In turn, these criteria operate in the light of the relationship
between the past and the present, as well as of the rapid degradation and disappear-
ance process of the material (and immaterial) forms, and of individual, community,
national, and global identity. The heritage status represents a recognition of alter-
ity, through which the object becomes that ‘other’ that has to be saved, protected,
and perpetuated. Nevertheless, the heritage status is not exclusively based on the
selection of the objects according to the criteria of uniqueness and, in fact, includes
more than the objects programmatically created as ‘different’. Thus, objects that
have belonged to everyday normality—or even to the background context according
4.17 Alterity and the Historical Object. The Cumulation of Meanings 339
to which alterity was measured—gain value by being related to the current coor-
dinates/context. Everyday architectural objects (e.g. vernacular buildings, auxiliary
housing and constructions, worker accommodations from the beginning of the nine-
teenth century, etc.) become ‘different’—as demonstrated by the entire history of
conservation—without ever deliberately modifying or altering their physical shape
for this purpose. Due to the evolution of their context, they begin to be read as ‘other’,
gaining a primary heterotopic character that can equally lead to their disappearance
or perpetuate their existence under the protection of the heritage status. As soon as
(identity, cultural, or documentary) value is attributed to the object and its perception
is modified, the object is endowed with protected status and its alterity is enhanced.
So, the object becomes heterotopic in the true sense of the word.
The built heritage object thus juxtaposes contradictory aspects resulting from
the relationships between its coordinates—dependent on the original historical con-
text—and the current context, pertaining to the materiality of the actual object (tech-
niques, materials, etc.), its original and actual function, its changing perception within
the local and global community, its officially conferred and unofficially ascribed sta-
tus, due to the current praxis of the community, etc. The heritage object status brings
forward a series of issues and incompatibilities already present ‘inside’ the object
(e.g. the issue of conservation), as well as new problems, such as the standardization
of the specific activities and practices within the space declared protected.
As also suggested by Hetherington, it is precisely through taking on this—for-
mal, functional, internal structural, etc.—alterity, related to its own context, that
the heterotopic architectural space may “challenge our expectations and offer us a
view of an alternative”.344 In this analysis, he defines the heterotopic sites as the
“spaces of an alternate ordering”, opposed to other, partial, meanings that have been
(and are still) attributed to the Foucaultian concept, concentrated on formal alter-
ity, visual contrast, etc. In my view, Hetherington’s interpretation is closer to the
principles set out by Foucault due precisely to the plurality it entails. In Foucault’s
Of Other Spaces, his general definition, principles, and architectural examples (or
spaces) all have in common the criterion of alternative ordering, functioning, and
structuring, irrespective of the adopted forms, while the individual analysis of each
form, although alluring, impoverishes the global meaning of the concept. If a par-
ticular space, or function—jail, hospital, museum, etc.—, is associated with each
of Foucault’s heterotopia principles, the selective ‘reading’ of the concept, which
abstracts for analysis the preferred type of space and generalizes its particular fea-
ture, carries the potential of depriving the global meaning of heterotopia precisely
of its plurality. Nevertheless, approaches in which a specific function, or a particular
architectural programme, is read as heterotopic, due exclusively to its physical coor-
dinates (specific kinds of flow, delimitation, orientation, sequence, etc.), have been
in fact proposed. Similarly, the definition of the concept through a single facet, or
form of manifestation, reduces precisely the versatility of the heterotopic character,
reducing its definition to a series of physical coordinates, or to the already men-
344 Hetherington,Kevin, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (Taylor &
tioned “heterotopic profile”, so often quoted and used both in architectural practice
and theory. Hence, in Hetherington’s approach, the heterotopic space is not only
resistance/opposition, mere marginality, or transgression. The space of alternative
orderings can take all these forms, separately or cumulatively; it can become, or
return to, any of them through its continuous relationship to its context, i.e. through
social practices and perceptions, or via the meanings and layers acquired over time.
So, the heterotopic space is both an alternative ordering as resistance/opposition as
well as an escape from normality and the every day, perceived as a rigid system,
and finally, alternative ordering as a marginal space, in contrast to the central space
associated with normality and sovereignty, and alternative ordering as transgressive
space. The heterotopic space functions according to an internal alternative ordering
presupposing a conflict and an incompatibility, whose solution—or, rather, its lack
thereof—conditions its existence as a heterotopia.
Although the interpretation of Hetherington’s example, the Palais Royal, makes
it possible to identify some basic coordinates of the heterotopic space, his analysis is
less focused on the material and architectural, or physical, form, and rather intention-
ally directed at the practices occupying the object as well as at the perception of the
space’s user community, both modelling the physical form of the object/space. From
the perspective of the materiality of the object in itself, the Palais Royal is treated as
an association of contradictory functions and as an accumulation of incompatibilities,
uniting in itself coffees, gardens, arcades, brothels, and theatres, along with diverse
and incompatible social classes, freedom, and control, “spaces of rational debate”
intertwined with those of “hedonistic pleasure”,345 within a hybrid and intermediary
space. Accordingly, the Palais Royal represents a new kind of spatial ordering and
a prototypical social order, which avoids classification in the accepted typologies,
offering instead a hybrid alternative. Hetherington’s analysis enables us to derive
and extrapolate certain characteristics of this space’s material form: the alternative
ordering is translated as functional juxtaposition and as internal rhythms of alter-
native operation. Although the author’s attention is focused on the social-historical
coordinate of the space under investigation, it also anticipates the next develop-
mental phase: the extrapolation of heterotopic social-spatial characteristics upon the
physical space of the palace and its transformation into a model; more specifically,
“the architectural model for Charles Fourier when he was drawing up the design
for his utopian community which he called the Phalanstery”346 that was to become,
on its turn, the model for another utopian construct, Le Corbusier’s housing unit
(unité d’habitation). Hetherington’s chosen example falls within the category of the
utopian avant-garde object, constructed partly intentionally and partly ‘organically’
as a reaction to its context, interpreted as defective.
The author defines these spaces as “obligatory points of passage” due to their
function of ‘laboratories’ or spaces for experimenting with alternative orderings,
which—both in their physical manifestation and in the social and ethical implica-
345 Hetherington,Kevin, The Badlands..., 16.

346 Hetherington,Kevin, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering, (Taylor &
4.17 Alterity and the Historical Object. The Cumulation of Meanings 341
tions—may, over time, become models as well as new normality, i.e. the norm to
which other spaces are related to, generating, on their turn, other alternative orderings
with compensatory functions.
Utopian models—whether strictly theoretical or actually proposing constructed
formulas—are materialized and, in spite of their underlying intentionality, ‘diverted‘,
thus contributing to the construction of a generally negative perception of utopia.
Over time, constantly related to their context and accumulating new meanings as
well, they may indeed become negative due the will to control involved in them
and through their incapacity of rising to the promised/imagined expectations, since
the implementation of the utopian scheme and functioning is impossible in actual
practice due to the simplifications it uses and also because of its idealized projection.
Utopias that are perfectly functional on the theoretical level disclose their ‘calculation
errors’ when materialized. Other utopias, however, are reevaluated over time, and
their defective functioning or impossibility is attributed to the (backward) historical
context in which they were conceived. This reevaluation or reconsideration of utopian
models and the (social, architectural, economic, ecologic, etc.) variations in which
the ideal reappears actually reflects society’s idea of itself.
Nevertheless, according to the context to which they are related, the enclaves of
‘alternative’ orderings may alternate between the fulfilment of the positive and the
negative potential. Regardless of their interpretations and, partially, precisely due
to the plurality of these interpretations, they remain heterotopias, easily identifiable
even because of their unique model character and on the account of the context in
which they are read. I will further discuss the heterotopia as the realization of the
utopias and the main resulting types of spaces in the chapter on Heterotopia and the
utopian project.
4.18 The Heterotopic Potential of the Model
As prominent inflection points, the heterotopic spaces of the type proposed by Het-
herington—his “obligatory points of passage” or “laboratories”—are most often
addressed and analysed from the perspective of their unique and alternative char-
acter that is the easiest to identify. These spaces also become heritage due to their
hub-like, primary, or unique character and are cherished just because of these values
as the first manifestations of a new order. (A classic example for this are the first
spaces of industrialization, marking the transition to a new type of society and to a new
perception of time, space, and the individual, as well as a reordering of value system-
s—especially where the built object reflects this new ordering in a materialized form).
The tendency, and sometimes explicitly assumed objective, of alternative spaces is
normalization and the model status. As the above analysis of utopias has shown,
the material form or the built expression is readopted, storing the initial utopian
codification in a condensed form. The source object is most often treated as the gen-
erator of a phenomenon. The specific spaces generated by these models are discussed
less frequently, primarily due to their large number, but also due to their diversity.
These spaces preserve the initial heterotopic coordinates, but also undergo muta-
tions, transformations, adaptations, and dissolutions of the initial utopian encoding,
finally becoming singular enclaves and accumulating meanings that may strengthen
or diminish them, until the disappearance of the utopian encoding and, implicitly, of
the heterotopic character. I believe that these heterotopic spaces, found at the con-
fluence of the many impacting factors of a model, become increasingly interesting
as they accumulate a plurality of very broad meanings in their material form. The
plurality of these spaces is a result of the process through which the proposed alter-
native orderings and models are “localized” and appropriated. Although distancing
themselves from the original model and heterotopic in the sense of materializing a
utopian encoding, the more heterogenous, layered and cumulative, the closer these
spaces are to the complexity of the Foucaultian concept of heterotopia. Hence, the
(theoretical or material) hybridization of models can produce heterogeneous forms
accumulating over time a meaning layer of heritage as well. The heritage status,
as praxis, selects and consecrates the value of the built object, conceived of as the
accumulation of meanings it was invested with by a group or a human community.
4.19 The Heterotopic Character and the Marginal.

Heritage Potential
Following Lefebvre and Shields, Hetherington discusses two further types of spaces:
the space of resistance (opposition) and the liminal or marginal space. The author
argues that both are subjected to the same binary principle of manifestation and func-
tioning: the principle of alternative ordering as an answer to the context dominated
by (or defined as) the central power, where each (central/marginal) space takes shape
through relating to the other’s existence—as far as marginal spaces are concerned,
“their existence is either defined by the centres as all that is excluded from the centre,
or as a site of opposition to all that the centre stands for”.347 Nevertheless, Hether-
ington argues that an oppositional binary separation cannot work in the case of the
heterotopic space that is not defined as the opposite of the official ordering, but as an
alternative reordering of the official hierarchy. Thus, the heterotopic space unites
the marginal and the central, the hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic, order and
freedom, dominant power and resistance. The heterotopic space is essentially defined
through relating to its context and to what is considered the dominant normality and
centrality. This type of space defines itself using the same language as its context,
but in an alternative ordering of the elements of that context. In the case of the Palais
Royal, Hetherington sees the material form as a representation of a new and alter-
native social ordering, manifested through the practices conducted in that space. In
other words, the alternative social praxis, although still anchored in the official order-
ing, creates these alternative orderings that, on their turn, create alternative physical
spaces, or change the perception upon existent physical spaces. The practices transfer
347 Hetherington apud Shields, The Badlands of Modernity…, 25.

4.19 The Heterotopic Character and the Marginal. Heritage Potential 343
their characteristics upon the physical space, defining and modelling it as alternative,
i.e. the space of alternative practices, which becomes, over time, associated with, and
identified as different, as a space that implies or requests specific practices. Follow-
ing this reflexive relationship, the physical spaces, or architecture, shaped by social
praxis, may generate, on their turn, alternative social practices.
Returning to the marginal spaces as interpreted by Hetherington, conceived of
as heterotopic in the sense of orderings that are alternative to the context of their
analysis, one can observe the same potential to gain and accumulate heritage value
over time precisely through their marginality and their capacity of resistance to its
opposite, the dominant force.
The liminal space is generally perceived as the space occupied by marginal groups,
either intentionally or as a space imposed from outside and attributed to them by the
dominant group. The marginalization process of the space is based on a one-to-one
relationship: the spaces perceived as marginal are attributed to specific groups pre-
cisely in order to transfer the characteristic of the space upon the group—or condemn-
ing that group to marginality—, but marginal groups can also attribute to themselves
and assume a space, transferring their own marginality upon it through the reflexive
relationship between space and praxis. In the general sense, the marginal space is
associated with the interstitial, the residual, and the remnant, after its normalizing and
structuring, or with the space that escapes the control and the appropriation processes
of the dominant group. The examples discussed in the scholarly literature usually
vary in their scale, function, and temporality (buildings, streets, neighbourhoods,
squares, parks, airport terminals, railway stations, urban and extra-urban lands). In
other words, the examples are chosen according to alternative criteria, different from
the ones usually used in urbanism. The panoramic analysis of these examples allows
us to identify the basic characteristic of the marginal space: that it is not necessar-
ily fixed in a certain location, but “subject to reinterpretation by groups, both from
‘within’ and ‘outside’ the margin and is likely to shift temporally and spatially”.348
Similarly, the product of any culture considered to be marginal—in a given socio-
economic context and in relationship to the dominant culture—is a priori defined
as different. If it is considered to be undesirable, non-compliant, and primitive, then
it will be deprived of visibility, deliberately ignored and camouflaged, in order to
deny its existence, or even openly attacked. However, the (material or immaterial)
‘marginal product’ can also become a focus of interest and an object of study that
is appreciated, delimited, and carefully extracted with scientific attention from its
invisible state. In such cases, it is reevaluated and receives a new status. Its marginal-
ity is also involved in stirring up this interest that is explained by the curiosity for that
which is ‘different’ and unknown. Nevertheless, the recognition and the establish-
ment of the marginal object through its officially projected status can be interpreted
as a compensatory process, as the official status comes to somehow ‘redeem’ the
348 Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity, ed. Thomas Alan Acton, p. 70, chapter 5: Sites of Resis-
tance: places on the margin—the Traveller “homeplace”, Sally Kendall, Great Britain, University
of Hertfordshire Press, 1997—republished in 1999, p. 70, Google Books, accessed in December
2013.
enforced marginality of the object. In the case of assumed marginality, the protected
status can be interpreted as an attempt at normalization and introduction into the
official ordering.
In the case of the constructed object that is viewed as a sociocultural product of
a certain group, the coordinates that may define it as a marginal space are acquired
contextually—according to the value scale active at that moment—and are temporary
(variable).
4.19.1 The Temporal Development of Status. From

Marginality to Protection. The Case of the Gothic
These relationships are also exemplified by the development of the attitude to inher-
ited buildings and especially of their investment with value over time. This example,
however, is not so much related to the actual, physical, and objectual space, although it
also includes this, but to the conceptual space of the material manifestations included
in the designated class, i.e. to the fluctuating attitude to the product of Antiquity vs.
the product of the Middle Ages, broadly, and a partially incorrectly, defined as the
Gothic.349
In the Attalid and the Roman period, the interest is concentrated exclusively
on the art object and on the monument of Greek origins, seen as fulfilments of a
superior civilization, and not on the aesthetic, identity, or age criterion. In the Quat-
trocento (fifteenth century), this leads to the exclusion of any other historical age,
best illustrated trough the “bracketing”350 of the mediaeval stage (cf. Petrarca’s three-
fold periodization of antique beauty, the Dark Ages, and modern Renaissance).351
This differentiation clearly established the relationship between the central and the
marginal through relating it to the antique ideal, as the architectural language of the
Renaissance readopted the aesthetic rules of ancient Rome and Greece, perfecting
their proportions and clearly delimiting the object invested with cultural value from
the marginal one. Thus, as Françoise Choay put it, the historical monument had to
be ancient, and there was no other art but ancient and contemporary.352 From the
sixteenth and seventeenth century onwards, the concept of ‘national antiquity’—and
the criterion of the national cultural identity—is added to that of Antiquity, initially
limited to the Roman and Greek classical period. The mediaeval built object—and,
349 The term “Gothic product”, is employed incorrectly (in the sixteenth century), sense in which
“Gothic” described everything outside the classical canons, considered to be perfect; it was the
barbarous, the brutish, and implicitly, the worthless. The paradoxical character of this definition
stems from the actual correspondence and continuity between the two styles supposedly/perceived
as mutually opposed: the only trait of the Gothic admired in the sixteenth century—as it was demon-
strated already in the nineteenth century—, its technical virtuosity, stems from the mathematical
principles and the proportions of antique architecture.
350 Jukka Jokilehto, A History of Architectural Conservation, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999, 15.
351 Choay, F., Alegoria Patrimoniului, 35.
more generally, any product of mediaeval culture—is no longer completely rejected,

but is kept in a marginal position: it is described, praised, and admired, but not entirely
accepted. It does not become ‘central’ and is never put on the same value level as the
Antiquity, seen as the fundamental source of knowledge and artistic value. The medi-
aeval product remains the obscure and barbarous ‘other’, lacking aesthetic value and
backward, but at the same time also arousing curiosity, amazement, and admiration
for its technical performance. In a later stage, on French territory, these creations
—considered, until then, ‘strange’ and barbaric—were grouped in two categories.
Again in Choay’s terminology, there was the “old, bad Gothic”, encompassing all the
nameless styles from late Antiquity and up to the Roman period, and the “new, good
Gothic” that corresponded to the current concept of style.353 Thus, a partial detach-
ment occurs from the previous all-encompassing marginal status. The transition to
an accepted status of the crude Gothic creation, lacking balance and rules, which was
seen as the result of “the corruption of taste, […] a monster begotten of the chaos of
all ideas, during the night of barbarism […]”,354 will have to wait for several more
centuries, and the Gothic creation will remain marginal and antithetical to the clas-
sic products of the Greek canons. On British territory, however, the Gothic product
will achieve this transition with the birth of the interest for ‘national antiquity’ in
the sixteenth century. The Gothic ceases to be perceived as marginal and becomes
accepted and perpetuated as a national and an identity value. Thus, for the entire
European space, the transition process of the Gothic product from marginal to cen-
tral status had culminated in the nineteenth century, as it started to represent, for its
own context, that which the classical Antiquity represented for the Renaissance, i.e.
a source of inspiration as well as a model and canon of beauty, as it began to be seen
from the perspective of the neo-Gothic style. The meaning attributed to the Gothic
style continues to fluctuate—to a lower degree—even thereafter, when modernism’s
‘fear of ornaments’ and the exclusive association of beauty with the complete lack
of the decorative will again place the Gothic creation in a marginal area, although
with reduced repercussions.
With the sedimentation of the concept of heritage and the development of its
characteristic ordering structures, the sociocultural product—as is the case with the
Gothic style—is invested with the protective aura that removes it from the scope of
the general ordering process. The heritage status subjects and reorders the typical
hierarchy of values according to which the built object is ‘read’. It is extracted from
the flow of the everyday, and the criteria that constitute its (subjective) aesthetic,
functional, economic, etc. value are integrated in, and subjected to, the heritage
value. The built object with heritage status no longer has to justify its existence like
other objects, and functions according to a set of different standards. Its use, the
allowed interventions, and everything pertaining to the actual life of the site/building
is subjected to alternative rules rather than those applied to the common built fabric
(lacking heritage status). Although the heritage status is conceived as final—i.e. the

354 Choay, F. apud Quatremere, Dictionnaire de l’architecture, vol. 2, Enciclopedie, ed. Panckoucke,
1803, in Alegoria Patrimoniului, 52.

object can no longer be altered and is exempted from the passage of time—and
as an ultimate and absolute signified (layer of meaning), it is, in fact, part of an
ordering structure that can be interpreted as a signification process similar to those
of everyday life. That is to say, the assignment of heritage status represents the
practice of attaching a specific meaning to a given object, similar to the process
known from linguistics.355 The meanings assigned to the object vary over time, are
modified, cumulated, or exclude each other, depending on the conditionings of the
context and on the user as well as on the interpreter. It is precisely this characteristic
of the heritage concept that confers upon it the heterotopic character. Similarly to
the examples discussed by Foucault in his essay Of Other Spaces, the site and the
material object is heterotopic due to the sociocultural praxis that builds and occupies
it, or due to the meaning it is invested with by its users and ‘readers’.
4.19.1.1 Assigning Meaning to the Built Object—The Accumulation

of Statuses
Some objects with heritage value enjoy an unofficial protected status—due to their
special function or to a meaning acquired over time (e.g. places of worship, heirlooms
passed on from one generation to the next, etc.)—at least partially and temporarily,
and their subsequently gained official status legitimates the unofficial situation, ‘sig-
nals’ the built object (i.e. heightens its visibility), and strengthens their symbolic
meaning, while other objects, perceived as normal and everyday, are, at a specific
time, “extracted” from their context through their inclusion in heritage inventories.
In the first case, the objects already have a special status, and their alterity is already
perceived by, and fixed in the consciousness of, the viewer or the user. In the second
case, their official recognition serves to confirm an already existing situation. Hence,
theoretically, the manifestation of power through an externally imposed ordering
would not have to be considered as conflictual, since it would correspond to the
existing situation or to the status actually attributed to the object by the user. The
acquired (official) status confirms the existent (unofficial and user-attributed) one and
implicitly affects the user community as well. Through the confirmation of its values,
the community is validated by the dominant power. Nevertheless, at least two other
aspects also have to be taken into account: the one-to-one character of the validation
process and the plurality of the object, both covered by the term ‘multilocality’.356
355 Garth Kemerling, Philosophy Pages, http://www.philosophypages.com/faq.htm, accessed in Jan-
uary 2014.
356 Thisterm was introduced by anthropologist Margaret Rodman in order to redefine the concept
of “place” as a sociocultural construct shaping and shaped by various agents; Rodman establishes
the capacity of the place/site of being local and multiple, not only an “inert container”. She delimits
four dimensions of this plurality (multilocality): it may involve an understanding of the places as
constructs realized from multiple, and not merely Eurocentric and Western, perspectives; in its
second sense, the term may also refer to comparative and contingent analyses of the place; its third
sense refers to the reflexive relationships with places; and finally, according to its fourth meaning,
“a single physical landscape can be multilocal in the sense that it shapes and expresses polysemic
Thus, in both cases, the gesture that ensures the protection of the object is meant to
justify and legitimize the very authority that confers this status, so that—through this
selection, value assignment, and protection—the meaning carried by the built object
becomes associated with, and is reflected upon, the official authority. In other words,
the official authority seeks its own validation through overtaking and associating itself
with the values carried by the object, establishing a reflexive relationship between
the user and the place/built object.
Due to the implicit plurality of the built object, carrying different meanings for dif-
ferent communities, groups, and even individuals, the assignment of the official pro-
tected status—irrespective of the underlying reason, of validation or self-validation,
as well as of the positive character of the protectionist intervention—will take place
at the cost of the meaning assigned by specific users, or at the expense of a culture
or a (secondary) identity inscribed into the built object (or into the site).
Hence, the (external) attribution of a special official status creates a conflictual
situation, both for built objects benefiting from an initial special status—usually
carrying several meanings for several users—and for everyday objects with any
previous special encoding.
The process through which the built object/architectural environment is endowed
with meaning was also discussed by Rapoport, who distinguishes between the mean-
ing attributed by the meaning assigned by the creator (i.e. the designer or the archi-
tect), through the “perceptual” aspects, and the meaning assigned by the user, through
the “associative” aspects of the built object/environment.357 Although his exam-
ples and analysis are primarily aimed at modern and contemporary architecture,
Rapoport’s observations may be extrapolated to the topic of the built heritage object,
whose acquired status—interpreted as a process of meaning-endowment of the object
—represents the establishment or the introduction of the value deposited in the object
into the official order of the dominant power. Through this ordering, the alterity of the
heritage object is recognized. Just as various user groups (successively and cumula-
tively) endow the object with meaning, the assignment of the heritage status is also a
process of this kind, but originating in the dominant group, with the most illustrative
example provided by the UNESCO World Heritage Lists, to be discussed later.
From the perspective of the heritage object, the structure proposed by
Rapoport—the perceptual reading of the creator and the associative reading of
the user—maintains the polarity. Thus, by analogy, the perceptual reading is asso-
ciated with the official order, the scientific perspective, and the “professionals” who
substitute and superimpose themselves on the creative actor (missing in the case of
meanings of place for different users”, as “a single place may be experienced quite differently”.
American Anthropology, 1971–1995: Papers from the American Anthropologist, ed. Regna Darnell,
University of Nebraska Press, 2002, Empowering Place—Multilocality and Multivocality, Margaret
Rodman, vol. 94, 1992, 640–656, and Bruce McCoy Owens, Monumentality, Identity, and the
State: Local Practice, World Heritage, and Heterotopia at Swayambhu, Nepal, in Anthropological
Quarterly, ed. The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research, Vol. 75, No.
2 (Spring, 2002), 269–316.
357 Rapoport, Amos, The meaning of the built environment—A nonverbal communication approach,
The University Of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1982, 19.

the heritage object) through the supreme quality of the assigned status (the intro-
duction of a new and, at least in its intent, undeniable ordering). In other words,
the all-encompassing and absolute nature of the heritage status is displayed as the
object’s unique signified. This process is best exemplified through the built objects
whose usual practices are interrupted or cancelled through their official recognition.
At the same time, the associative reading is assigned to the everyday user and to the
informal groups which endow the object with subjective, variable, and alternative
meanings, as opposed to the official ones. Associative interpretations may also be
multiple, originating from different user groups. Nevertheless, the ordering institu-
tion substitutes itself to the creative actor through recoding space and imposing its
own meaning as absolute (since, irrespective of the object’s function, it will be read
as heritage). The conflict identified by Rapoport between the two types of mean-
ings attributed to objects is also maintained in the case of built heritage, but shows
a paradoxical nature: the official meaning (the officially recognized status) often
contradicts the unofficial (the functional, everyday one), although the first admits
and is based on the very succession of the historically accumulated and attributed
meanings. And yet, even the selection and the hierarchy introduced by the official
authority reveals its informal nature, as both the official and the multiple informal
actors are essentially groups reading the object and assigning meaning to it, the sole
difference consisting in the subordinating intention of the ‘official group’.
Similarly to the process of double signification discussed by Rapoport, modelling
and altering the material form of the architectural object, by the creator-architect
through the selection of specific design elements and by the user groups through the
personalization of space, the meaning-assigning process has repercussions on the
material form in the case of the heritage object as well. Both the official as well as
the unofficial agent introduces some orderings that delimit the use of the object, nor-
malize its rhythms of functioning, and condition its state of preservation. For exam-
ple, the restoration of a monument can involve structural, compositional, aesthetic,
or formal changes, which can be both positive and negative (the loss/degradation
of the original substance and the elimination of various layers of cultural identity).
Similarly, the perpetuation of unofficial orderings or daily use may both degrade and
keep the built object alive.
4.20 The Heterotopic Character and the Protected

Status—The Official Ordering and the Establishment
Process of Alterity
At least theoretically, if not practically, the heritage status limits the repositioning
of the object in any other ordering process, and superimposes itself upon any other
existing informal and official ordering schema. In daily practice, the official protec-
tionist orderings are often juxtaposed with the unofficial ones. Although the official
ordering may interfere with, and modify, the daily and informal praxis, the two
4.20 The Heterotopic Character and the Protected Status—The Official Ordering … 349
ordering systems coexist to some extent. For example, in the case of the UNESCO
recognition, the protected status reflects the introduction and assuming of a supreme
global ordering, as the value assigned to the object is universal (“exceptional uni-
versal value”). The object has an even greater importance as it reflects the identity
of the entire human group; the built object officially recognized by the UNESCO
is clearly delimited from the rest of the objects carrying (national or local) heritage
value and is endowed with a new rhythm of functioning. The attractiveness due to
the (iconic) status is mainly translated into economic development, along with “more
funding and access to UNESCO’s ’knowledge and experience’”, while, nevertheless,
“most countries are expected to implement and fund their own protection plans”,358
a measure reflecting the superimposition of orderings into which the cultural object
is included. The UNESCO world heritage category is juxtaposed not only with the
official local orderings—the national system of classification—, but also with the
unofficial ones, associated with daily and traditional practices associated with the
built object.
In the case of the heritage objects, the two ordering categories—the official and the
unofficial—tend to be contradictory due to the ordering principles, the conservation
of the original substance, and the cancellation of usage processes vs. the everyday use
of the objects, inscribed in their current or original and traditional function (insofar as
it is still extant). The everyday praxis may correspond, cohabit, or be in contradiction,
generating new modes of ordering, with the praxis introduced through protectionist
ordering. All these ways of relating will be exemplified below in succinct analyses
of the transformation of some sites and heritage objects. In some situations, the
heritage status tends to be contradictory in itself; although being equal components
of the scope of conservation, the educational coordinate (knowledge) may clash with
the protectionist (conservation). Another reflection of the juxtaposition of orderings
consists in the tension derived from the overlapping of property claims with the built
heritage object or site: the private (specific and legal) property claim is subordinated to
the state authority’s ‘protectionist’ right (expressed through the heritage legislation)
and even to an international (moral) right over the property, if the built object is put
under UNESCO protection. Thus, the official recognition by the UNESCO introduces
additional attractiveness that, beyond the positive main aspect (protection, visibility,
valorisation), often manifests itself negatively, at the flipside of economic growth
and higher visibility. Furthermore, the universal value recognized through this status,
positive in its (utopic) intention, is translated and understood in terms of economic
consumption: the place (as landscape) and the architecture, as expressions of human
creativity, are reduced to the iconic object (e.g. as “ten/fifty/one hundred… places
worth seeing”); the heritage object becomes a commodity and an accumulation of
signs.
Due to their newly acquired popularity, visibility, and accessibility, the offi-
cially recognized built objects—especially, but not exclusively, those included on the
358 Camille Agon, Protecting the Wonders of the World, Time Magazine, 11 July 2008, con-
tent.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1821948,00.html#ixzz2pta4DnZb, accessed in January
2014; official UNESCO site, http://whc.unesco.org/en, accessed in January 2014.
UNESCO’s World Heritage List—are subjected to degradation from two sources:

(a) massive overcrowding, which contributes to the actual physical degradation of
these already fragilized monuments, architectural ensembles, and sites, and (b) the
impact of development projects (road and tourist infrastructure, etc.), both as direct
interventions at the protected sites or at its adjacent areas and as a permanent source
of pollution.
Another negative aspect of the concentration of the attention on these sites consists
in the inadequate ‘response’ of the responsible authorities, e.g. in the case of Saint
Petersburg’s historic centre, nominated in 1989 and inscribed in 1990 on the World
Heritage List, conceived of as a ‘postcard’ and as a ‘museum city’—also one of St.
Peterburg’s unofficial titles—, “seen as a space to be observed, but never touched or
lived”.359 This separation, characteristic for the Soviet period, noted by Zhelnina and
conceptualized in F. S. Nielsen’s duality between the prospect, as a well-arranged and
sanitized space representing the image of civilization, and the dvor, the ‘backyard’
that is actually frequented and lived, but hidden away from the outside persists in
spite of, or even through, the city’s Europeanization that is promoted as its distinc-
tive and iconic characteristic and conceived of in two different ways: the one “that
includes active communication and self-expression in public places, prioritizes the
interests and comfort of the city-dwellers”, or of the European (urban) lifestyle, and
the other that stops at the superficial level of the outwardly projected Europeanized
image (as its raising to the level of the same aesthetic standards), “the space which
has to be kept in order to be shown to the guests, but it is not the space of everyday
routine use”.360 Of these two hypostases, the latter is the one adopted by the official
ordering—i.e. the perspective of the local authorities—and, not surprisingly, it also
has a significant impact on the conservation state of the built heritage fund. Since
the priority consists in creating a Europeanized image of the city, the restoration
interventions are restricted to the main façades, to ‘tourist’ street fronts, and to the
most important tourist attractions, i.e. the favourite postcard subjects, leaving inner
courtyards as well as secondary streets and façades to a rapid deterioration process.
The primarily post-Soviet economical and political changes and the Western Euro-
pean focusing on St. Petersburg, also enhanced by the UNESCO recognition, has
triggered a superficially understood Europeanization process. In spite of the positive
intention inherent to the protected status as well as of the numerous interventions by
responsible heritage forums, the added value recognized and validated through this
protected status is hijacked and interpreted as an exploitable economic resource, not
in a sustainable, but in an almost abusive manner, endangering the very integrity of
the ‘exploited asset’. The reports on the conservation status of the 90s identify a host
of problems, emphasizing the “critical situation” and the “steady deterioration of the
physical environment of the city”,361 while also mentioning problems of integrity and
359 Zhelnina, Anna, Learning to Use ‘Public Space’: Urban Space in Post-Soviet St. Petersburg, The
Open Urban Studies Journal, vol. 6, (Suppl 1: M2), 2013, 30–37, 31.
360 Zhelnina,A., Learning to Use…, 33.
361 Monitoring of the state of conservation of World Heritage cultural and natural properties, 17th
Session of the Committee, Cartagen, Colombia, 1993, 34–35.

4.20 The Heterotopic Character and the Protected Status—The Official Ordering … 351
authenticity, the lack of respect and understanding for protected areas, and the issue
of inadequate insertions, calling attention to the need to prepare “the future upgrading
of the housing stock to higher standards of accommodation”.362 Subsequent reports
(2006–14) remain concerned with the problems of the housing stock and of the pro-
posed contemporary insertions’ quality, considered as a major degradation factor
for the area’s historical heritage character (the modern extensions of the Mariinsky
theatre in 2006, the Gazprom Tower in 2007, and the Ohkta Centre/Gazprom Tower
in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011363 ), a potential cause for subsequent inclusion on the
list of endangered sites and even for the downgrading of its status. The 2010 report
mentions “the lack of a management system [including a Plan for Environmental
Design and Urbanism for the entire territory as well as a Safeguarding Plan which
would define appropriate degrees of intervention for each element of the property]
and necessary mechanisms for management coordination of the property”,364 and,
in spite of the implementation of some urban planning regulations (regarding zoning
and the demarcation of protection areas), the later (2011, 2012, and 2014) reports
mention the same essential problems.
Due to the uniqueness of each heritage object, the recognition of its alterity from
its context and its establishment through the introduction of the protected status (as a
new official ordering) will generate specific responses for each individual situation.
These responses will also manifest themselves, almost without exception, in the
material form of the built object, and the alternative orderings, both the official and
unofficial ones, will be juxtaposed within in its physical space.
4.21 The Lascaux Cave—Vézère, France
One of the earliest and best-known examples that can be included in the category of
human dwelling is represented by the Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the
Vézère Valley in France.365,366 Even before their induction into the UNESCO World
362 Examination of the State of Conservation of World Heritage properties, World Heritage Com-
mittee, 13th Session, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2006, 202.
363 That year the project was moved outside the historical centre, without any changes in the archi-
tectural solution. It was renamed as the ‘Lakhta Center’ and an impact study on the historical urban
landscape was also completed, using the arguments from a paper of the Russian State Hydrom-
eteorological University, “which concluded that the cloudy weather prevailing in St. Petersburg
(237–256 days a year) makes it difficult to observe the tall building up to its top and retains only the
lower 100–200 metres visible”. State of conservation of World Heritage properties inscribed on the
World Heritage List, 36th Session of the Committee, Saint-Petersburg, Russian Federation, 2012,
151.
364 State of conservation of World Heritage properties inscribed on the World Heritage List, World
Heritage Committee, 34th session, Brasilia, Brazil, 2010, 166–7.

365 The ensemble stretches across an area of 30 km by 40 km, containing 147 prehistoric sites and 25
decorated caves, along with human, animal, and vegetal remains and other mobile archaeological
objects from the prehistoric and quaternary period.
366 http://www.lascaux.culture.fr, virtual tour of the caves, accessed in January 2014.
Heritage Sites list in 1979, changes were reported in the microclimate of the caves,
especially in the Lascaux Cave: “as early as 1960, […] the impact of visitors and
the services that accompanied them were beginning to have a detrimental effect
on the paintings. A few years later, algae started to proliferate and carbonate pre-
cipitations appeared on the surface of the paintings.” In 1963, drastic rules were
introduced for visiting the cave, and access was restricted “to the general public
apart from 5 people per day for visits of up to 35 min and the air-regulation system
was removed”.367 Measures for the treatment and reassessment of the interior cli-
mate were also taken, directed at the implementation of a new air control system that
could compensate for the presence of visitors. “The cave came into State ownership
in 1972 and in 1983, the Ministry of Culture opened for public access [in the imme-
diate vicinity] a facsimile of 50% of the original cave. The same limit of visitors
was maintained.368 However, lichens appeared in the cave in 1998 in addition to
the algae and microbe (Bracteacoccus minor) colonies.369,370 In 2000–2001, a third,
inappropriate, air-regulation system was installed, without the necessary precautions
(sterilization), leading to a new biological attack on the painted surface, this time
by fungi (Fusarium solani).371 New treatment interventions followed, without any
other result than the change of the cave’s microclimate,372 leading to new and even
more extended fungal attack of the “black spots” type (Ulocladium sp.). Finally, the
facsimile cave, along with its associated tourist infrastructure, was moved to another
location, sparing the protection area of the site and taking over the flow of visitors.
According to the 2013 report, the inner microclimate was stabilized, leaving as fur-
ther tasks the mapping of the affected areas and the establishing of the restoration
measures to be taken. The main source of all this degradation was the human factor
367 UNESCO report on the state of conservation of the Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the
Vézère Valley, France, http://whc.unesco.org/en, accessed in January 2014.

368 The situation is the same with the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Altamira Caves from
Santillana del Mar in Spain; the Palaeolithic polychrome murals suffer degradation caused by the
microclimate change that is due to the human factor; the increase in moisture and carbon dioxide
was caused by the large number of visitors, and facilitated the development of microorganisms. The
cave was closed from 2002 to January 2014 when, in order to reevaluate the impact of the human
factor, the site opened again for controlled visits (groups of five individuals wearing protective
equipment, 37 min per week) of an 8-month period. Published on 25 February 2014, accessed on
26 February 2014, http://artdaily.com/news/68441/Closed-in-2002--Spain-s-paleolithic-Altamira-
Cave-to-reopen--albeit-to-very-small-groups-#.Uw21g7T46Sp/ [url].
369 F. Bastian, V. Jurado, A. Nováková, C. Alabouvette, C. Saiz-Jimenez, The microbiology of
Lascaux Cave, Microbiolog, (March 2010) vol. 156, no. 3, 644–652; published online on 7 January
2010, accessed in January 2014.
370 UNESCO report on the state of conservation of the Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the
Vézère, France, http://whc.unesco.org/en/soc/930, accessed in January 2014.

371 Joëlle Dupont, Claire Jacquet, Bruno Dennetière, Sandrine Lacoste, Invasion of the French
Palaeolithic painted cave of Lascaux by members of the Fusarium solani species complex, Mycologia
July/August vol. 99 no. 4, 526–533 (2007).
372 The treatment consisted in the application of antibiotics and fungicides along with the cleaning
of the surfaces during which large quantities of quicklime were scattered on the cave floor and
subsequently turned into a layer of calcium hydroxide (slacked lime), increasing the temperature
in the cave.
4.21 The Lascaux Cave—Vézère, France 353
in the form of the massive influx of visitors (public interest and touristic pressure),
both through triggering successive degradation processes and through the inadequate
interventions (air-regulation systems and biocide treatments) for adapting the site to
its new heritage status. The double-coded, national and worldwide, protected sta-
tus had an initial negative impact on the site’s conservation status, in spite of the
positive motivation of the interventions to safeguard and valorise it. The external
imposition of the protected status and, implicitly, of the new ordering, has led to the
disturbance of the already existing ones, threatening and partially even irrevocably
destroying the very attributes on the basis of which the protected status was assigned.
Nevertheless, the same status also generated the creation of a new ordering. Under
the pressure of being inscribed on the UNESCO List of World Heritage in Danger,
of the responsibility to manage a cultural good of worldwide significance, and also
of the touristic interest, the French state implemented the project of a ‘new Las-
caux’. Adding to the two already existing partial replicas—Lascaux II-1983 and the
Lascaux III-2012/2013 mobile exhibition373 —the French state initiated the Lascaux
IV—International Centre of Parietal Art competition, won by the Norwegian archi-
tecture firm Snøhetta, alongside scenographer Casson Mann, and by Duncan Lewis
from SCAPE Architecture for landscape design. The new centre will accommodate
museal and related public functions, organized around the complete reproduction of
the Lascaux cave complex. Thus, the consequences of the externally imposed order-
ing (i.e. the UNESCO-protected status) generate a new alternative ordering. The
initially introduced official ordering having led to a major imbalance and, implicitly,
to the deterioration of the site, the reaction consisted in progressive alteration, culmi-
nating in the generation of an alternative ordering, manifested in material form. The
utopian character of the creative intention is clear, consisting in the recreation of the
hyper-fragilized cave as a completely controllable and accessible environment, freed
from the constraints of age and matter. Therefore, the introduction of a new order
(induction into the list of heritage sites or, in the most general sense, the investment
with special value) produces an imbalance, as the site begins to relate differently to
itself and to its context. In the case of Lascaux, the recognition of its alterity gener-
ated a new, alternative ordering, or a heterotopias, whose main coordinate consists
in illusion as a hyper-contemporary and simultaneously prehistoric space. The entire
succession of actions seems to have reached its ultimate goal, in this case, the bal-
ancing of conflicting coordinates of the concept of conservation: the educational and
the protectionist.
373 Laurence Geannopulos, Q & A with Muriel Mauriac—Curator of the Cave of Lascaux,
Frenchculture.org, 18 March 2013, http://frenchculture.org/visual-and-performing-arts/interviews/
q-muriel-mauriac-curator-cave-lascaux, accessed in January 2014.
4.22 Wieliczka and Bochnia Mines—Poland
Another example is that of the Wieliczka and Bochnia salt mines of Poland, dated
from the 13th to the 20th centuries. Classified as UNESCO world heritage in 1978,
the Wieliczka mines were kept for nine years (between 1989 and 1998) on the List
of World Heritage in Danger, with the increase in relative humidity as one of the
main causes of degradation.374 Its partial source375 was the added humidity from the
breath of the visitors, leading to the degradation and loss of sculptural details on the
statues, altars, and friezes that decorate the 300 km of galleries and the numerous
chapels. More than 60% of the series of safeguarding investments made during
three consecutive years, with the introduction of ventilation and dehumidification
equipment in 1994, was financed by the UNESCO,376 leading to the stabilization
of the inner microclimate and finally to the removal of the mines from the List
of Endangered Sites in 1998, when the World Heritage Committee ascertained the
positive impact and the efficiency of the humidity control system.
Following the statuses attributed to the site, one can observe an aggregation of
meanings. In 1774, the mines were opened to the public for the first time, and the flow
of visitors increased continually with the diversification of the (cultural, health spa,
etc.) offer. In 1976, the mines were entered in the national register of historic monu-
ments of the Polish Popular Republic, followed by their inclusion on the UNESCO
World Heritage List in 1978 and by their classification as historical monuments of the
Polish Democratic Republic in 1994. In this case, the successive official protectionist
statuses were superimposed on the traditional practices: the excavation on industrial
scale went on until 1964 and was shut down completely in 1996, meanwhile maintain-
ing a less invasive exploitation. In other words, more than two centuries were needed
for the official recognition of the cultural value of the mines, already recognized in
1700, and for the introduction of safeguard measures. The conservation of the mines
involved the shutdown of the main utility practices associated with its initial function-
ing, primarily due to the danger of degradation (collapsing galleries, flooding of the
historic galleries, etc.). However, at the same time, the protected status also presup-
poses the conservation of the site’s identity through maintaining the daily practices of
the involved groups (i.e. the religious and secular cultural practices associated with
life in the mines). From a social, economic, and cultural-pedagogical perspective,
these practices represent a significant immaterial heritage. Similarly, the practices
involving material manifestations or affecting the protected object (the kissing of the
icons by Eastern Orthodox Christians or the repainting/ritualized reconstruction of
374 World Heritage List—Wieliczka and Bochnia Royal Salt Mines, whc.unesco.org/pg.cfm?cid=
31&id_site=32, accessed in January 2014.
375 The moisture addition stems from two major sources: the one mentioned in the main text and
the underground seepage points, characteristic of all underground mines.

376 Co-financed by the Polish-American Fund of Maria Sklodowska-Curie and the Polish Govern-
ment. The total amount of intervention costs was 157,350 USD, of which 100,000 USD (in 1994)
went to providing dehumidifiers. World Heritage List—Wieliczka and Bochnia Royal Salt Mines,
conservation status reports, whc.unesco.org/pg.cfm?cid=31&id_site=32, accessed in January 2014.
4.22 Wieliczka and Bochnia Mines—Poland 355
statues and buildings in Oriental cultures, etc.) are also sensitive. The case of the
Polish mines is an example of good practice precisely due to the balanced selec-
tion of the maintained and newly introduced practices. As opposed to the situation
in which the classification presupposes the abrupt and total shutdown of the prac-
tices associated with the functions generating the very qualities for which the site
is classified, at Wieliczka, the decoration of the mines with the salt sculptures and
the curative functions, initially introduced in the nineteenth century, have both been
preserved. Furthermore, elements of the original mining practices—e.g. related to
accessing and working in the mine and to work breaks—have also been kept and even
introduced in the touristic offer. The division of the site’s management between two
companies with different duties377 enabled the involvement of the miner community
in the mine’s “new life”.
The Polish example represents a version of adaptation to the protected status as the
new official ordering. Its process is similar to the previous case, that of Lascaux, as
far as the “extraction” from the context, through the assignment of protected status,
and the response to this new ordering are concerned. At the Polish mines, the imbal-
ance, manifested in the conservation state of the material form, was accompanied
by the gradual adaptation to the new ordering (i.e. rebalancing), through the super-
imposition of the new practices onto the traditional ones, as the traditional practices
were partially substituted and partially kept. Thus, the site can “survive” the touristic
pressure—exercised under the doubling of its protected status (both national and
UNESCO)—precisely due to this overlap.
4.23 The Seto Community
Due mainly to its official character or to its belonging to the dominant ordering,
cultural heritage has generally been able to avoid the association with a heterotopic
profile, functioning, or character. This applies especially for the interpretation pro-
posed in this investigation, in which the conceptual space of heritage is read as a
first heterotopic ‘layer’, as the assignment of the protected status establishes (and/or
legitimizes) the heterotopic character of the site, at which point it begins to function
in a heterotopic manner.
Nevertheless, it must also be pointed out that there are a number of approaches
that identify heterotopic ways of functioning in the case of some sites with heritage
value. These were taken into account during this research, supporting the demarcation
between the heterotopic profile and the heterotopic functioning, as well as the various
ways in which a heritage object may lend itself to a heterotopic reading.
377 The “Wieliczka” Salt Mine Corporation, made up of “Wieliczka” Salt Mine Ltd., with the
Polish state as its main shareholder, has two other limited liability companies as subsidiaries: the
“Wieliczka” Salt Mine Tourist Route and the “Wieliczka” Salt Mine Mechanical Unit; the former
is in charge of the development of tourist activity and the latter is responsible for maintaining the
mine galleries through technical interventions.
One such case is discussed by Aet Annist.378 Her analysis focuses on an ethno-
graphic region whose demarcations, located on territories of present-day Estonia
and Russia, are defined by cultural heritage. The area is considered “a sociocul-
tural ‘system’ where the inheritance from past generations is considered to have
survived in some sort of complete form, even in a symbiotic relation with the pre-
sent”.379 Using the method of participant observation, Annist presents the assembly,
usage, and consumption patterns of this heritage, as well as of the many forms of
authenticity—the authenticity of the heritage experience, symbolic authenticity, the
social construct of the ‘external’ perspective, and local authenticity, assembled and
practiced by the cultural group that is considered to be part of the heritage—in the
Estonian and Western projection. This ‘heritage system’, although attached to the
everyday—and assumed as its alternative—, coexists with it. The marginal Setomaa
cultural region and Kihnu island are interpreted from the perspective of the concept
of heterotopia—as the ‘place of alterity’ and a temporal and/or spatial enclave of
otherness that presents an alternative to the dominant ‘everydayness’, in a double
relationship of reflection and challenge. Defined by the ethnic identity of the Seto
communities, the analysed region has been380 —according to the author’s argumen-
t—historically perceived as different: “The Setos have been considered a deviation
from Estonianness since the late 19th or early 20th centuries, people who need to be
normalized and civilized, yet left as they are, contesting and reflecting the essence
of what is Estonian as well as non-Estonian.”381 These groups appear as irregular,
exotic, and even backward, which also gives them their value through their ‘authen-
tic’, more direct, connection with the past. According to the author, the division
of the region between two states nourishes and contributes to the strengthening of
the identity character that is assumed and affirmed as being other; the context and
the sociopolitical development of the region also motivates the concentration on the
folkloric praxis as the main instrument of self-definition. In this interpretation, alter-
ity is understood as difference, hybridity—between the two poles of influence, the
Russian and the Estonian—, uniqueness, ambivalent relationship with the context,
and as a mirror/reflection—the Setomaa region as the mirror of Estonia, essential-
izing the traditional Estonian ethnic character that is otherwise diluted or has even
disappeared within the modern Estonian state—, but also as an objector—against the
official, segregationist ordering—and, to a certain degree, even as the expression of
an orientation toward the past—with its material and immaterial attributes, such as
folkloric costumes and practices—, seen as a ‘tool’ for self-definition.
378 Annist, Aet, Heterotopia and Hegemony: Power and Culture in Setomaa, Journal of Baltic Stud-
ies, Special Issue: Temporality, Identity and Change: Ethnographic Insights into Estonian Field
Sites Volume 44, Issue 2, 249–269, 2013.
379 Annist, A., Heterotopia and Hegemony…, 250.
380 The demarcation of the ethnic region was officially established only in 1920, under the name
Setomaa, or as Petseri County. As pointed out by Annist, the region was divided during World War II,
into a Russian and an Estonian part, affecting the daily life of the community through limiting access
“to previously owned land, as well as relatives, acquaintances, and graves of deceased relatives”.
Annist, A., Heterotopia and Hegemony…, 254.
381 Annist, A., op.cit., 253.
4.23 The Seto Community 357
The author analyses separately, as a heterotopia, one of the main identity practices
of the Seto community, known as the “Seto Kingdom Days”, an imaginary unified
state stretching across the borderline. The festival and the celebration are mentioned
in Foucault’s text as heterotopic spaces: one-off events that delimit and temporarily
acquire a physical location, a territory which, for a limited—given, predetermined,
or just undetermined and ephemeral—time interval becomes different both from the
context in which it is manifested and from its previous hypostasis. In it, the dominant
ordering is reflected, overturned, or substituted by an alternative ordering. The deter-
mined temporal character—or the fixed, and mostly predetermined, duration—rep-
resents a guarantee—or an instrument of control—enabling the manifestation and
existence of alterity within normality and the everyday, yet also with the assurance of
the return to normality. The celebration thus takes the form of a ‘pressure valve’: the
alternative ordering is visible and accepted for a given time interval, even occupying
the official position of normality and enabling not only the opening of the gaze from
the outside to the alternative ordering, but even the participation in it. Similarly, the
individuals who exist subsequently to, and practice, this alternative ordering, are also
temporarily becoming visible, accepted, and even ‘dominant’.
For a single day each year, the dominant order is overturned—the Russian–E-
stonian border is temporarily suspended, and the region is invested with several
attributes of an actual state (its own a leader, an army, etc.). At the same time, the
celebration reunites and manifests the main characteristics of Seto culture, offering
an essentialized representation of it in an even more restricted territory, at the place
of the celebration—in a temporal heterotopia, or, in the author’s own words, in “a
musealised environment that forms or at least represents the daily experiences of oth-
erness by looking backwards, into the mirror of the past”,382 while also remaining
deeply anchored in the present as a major tourist event.
Furthermore, the assuming of alternative roles is also associated with this deter-
mined temporal character. In the case of the Seto community, the author mentions
the participation of the officials (“Estonian politicians, including the President, and
the Metropolitan of the Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church”).383 Although they
apparently support, through their participation, the Seto community, they are in fact
backing the status quo (‘normality’). As Annist observes, the temporary delimitation
and the inclusion of entire ethnic region merely within the celebration (as an isolated
event) accentuate the museum enclave character of Seto culture and, implicitly, its
alterity. By extension, Seto culture may exist only within these temporary spatio-
temporal ‘brackets’ and with the ‘guarantee’ of returning to everyday normality. The
connection with the past and the traditional, even with their authenticity, seem to be
thus consolidated through the emphasis of the difference to the everyday context, as
the region is imagined as a cultural reservation where isolation and enclavization
vouch for authenticity.
Hence, Seto culture embodies this double hypostasis that announces the pres-
ence of the heterotopic character of heritage. Starting from an alterity organically
382 Annist, A., Heterotopia and Hegemony…, 255–6.

383 Annist, A., Heterotopia and Hegemony…, 255.
developed (through historical development) and assumed by the Seto communities,

as well as relying on an exterior perception of the entire cultural landscape (terri-
tory, material and immaterial heritage) as an enclave of alterity, the celebration has
led to the coagulation of connected practices consolidating this otherness (heritage
practices). In this regard, Annist also emphasizes the overlapping of the layers of
meaning: “Seto heritage culture is being developed by a multitude of external bod-
ies, state institutions and agencies”,384 the Seto character being simultaneously “both
identity and business”.385 The process observed by the author, characteristic for cul-
tural heritage, takes place between two reference points: the gaining of visibility and
the recognition of the Seto identity—as the declared objective of the community,
oriented to the reunification of the Setomaa territory—and the powerful subsequent
economic development (tourism and associated investments) exploit and are based
on the authenticity of this cultural heritage. At the same time, the official recogni-
tion also means integration into the dominant ordering and, as such, a normalization
process that transfers decision-making powers regarding authenticity from the com-
munity to the authorities.386 Especially through the selective financing of the projects
regarding Seto culture and, generally, of the project from this region, the dominant
ordering controls and models the development of this culture. The author remarks
a similar tendency in the public presentation of the Seto character and culture (e.g.
simplification, inauthentic variations of the folk costume), a situation in which the
community not only expressed its “outrage over (…) the lack of control over the
representation of their own culture”,387 but also claimed its right over it, establish-
ing several intermediate agents as guardians of the Seto heritage: non-governmental
organizations and especially self-generated forms of association integrated into the
official structure, whose members are militants of Seto culture or belong to the com-
munity, experts both “from within” and from the outside, controlling who and what
can be considered as authentic and thus also conditioning the financing opportunities.
Nevertheless, the definition of authenticity raises problems, as it is generally the case
for most forms of cultural heritage. The orientation observed by the author is toward
a static notion of the traditional and even toward the ‘musealization’ of Seto culture:
Such an environment becomes restrictive to the inhabitants who do not actively promote
a particular, heritage-related form of Seto culture. As Seto culture is defined in relation to
cultural heritage, many cultural activities there become defined as non-Seto, even if prac-
ticed by Setos or others living in Setomaa. These activities are treated as unimportant or
insignificant, or even as damaging to the authentic setting.388
The funding processes—as the author remarks—are the main expression of

the inclusion/exclusion mechanism mention, attributed by Foucault to heterotopic
384 Annist, A., 257.

385 Annist, 256.
386 Annist, 259.
387 Annist, 258.
388 Idem.
spaces.389 Due to the visibility and the official support gained by Seto culture, it
becomes, on its turn, a dominant ordering, even if only within its own limited terri-
tory (or cultural enclave), now operating exclusions of that which is not considered
to be representative for the traditional and authentic Seto character. As in many other
cases of living heritage, defined primarily through traditional practices (in this case,
Seto folk choirs), the definition of their authenticity is based on the unchanged per-
petuation of inherited forms, the occurrence of any changes (of form, substance, or
expression) always leading to its re-evaluation. As change and adaptation are integral
to the coagulation of any heritage—and to the process of meaning accumulation—,
the acquired protective status arrests its development. Both the praxis and the object
become ‘frozen’ in a state considered as ‘authentic’, and the additions, losses, and
alterations become a taboo subject, conditioning their very existence as heritage.
Nevertheless, in the case of the heritage material, the physical form has the capacity
to express, in a differentiated manner, the subsequent development of the protection-
ist status—restorations, additions, and any other alterations, as well as losses, or even
the complete disappearance of the site. In the case of immaterial heritage, authen-
ticity becomes difficult to grasp. Hence, the ‘freezing’ of the form and the complete
exclusion of any change becomes the safest and most efficient conservation method.
In this example, discussed by Aet Annist, of the ‘musealization’ of Seto culture, inter-
preted as the ‘freezing’ of its development, the motivation—also recognized by the
author—is partially economic, since it is a heritage that can be successfully exploited,
and partially due to the fragility of this culture. From a perspective focused mainly
on the folk choirs—as the most visible cultural element and an extremely fragile
form of heritage—, the material expressions of Seto culture (architecture, landscape,
traditional costumes) seem even more vulnerable and in need of similar conservation.
Although this attitude seems extreme, since it turns conservation into an exclusion
process, as the rejection of any development, and its product, the heritage that is
conserved in this fashion, appears as an artificial construct, it is born precisely from
the ‘awareness process’ so often invoked in the doctrinal texts of heritage protection.
A different algorithm that further explains this ‘musealization’ of Seto culture
may be found in my home country, Romania, in its Saxon cultural heritage. In its
case, a built heritage perceived as durable and highly visible (in the form of the
fortified churches and the Saxon villages) suggested a similar profile for the asso-
ciated traditional practices and immaterial heritage. However, the weakening and
eventual disappearance of the Saxon communities has also led to the disintegration
of their traditional practices and finally to the inevitable degradation of their material
heritage. The loss of the traditional crafts, indispensable not only for the restora-
tion and general maintenance of the buildings, but also for the very occupation of
many utility constructions (e.g. workshops, mills, brick kilns, etc.), had the greatest
impact. According to the rural mentality, the private functional spaces are abandoned
or reused, rendering the Saxon built heritage of Romania extremely vulnerable to the
changes coming from the community itself. The awareness of the values associated
389 “Funding
schemes inevitably create or affirm exclusions”. Annist, A., Heterotopia and Hege-
mony…, 260.
with this heritage comes late, already after the dissipation of the traditional practices.
Afterwards, these practices can be, and are often, recovered or‘recreated’, with their
inevitable partial alteration. Similarly, to the Seto celebration, events such as the
Saxon culture days recreate an ordering that belongs to the past. The celebration
deliberately emphasizes the present/past demarcation—the representation is clearly
and unequivocally of the past—, but simultaneously also perpetuates and restores,
even if in a condensed form, that ordering in the present. Nevertheless, as illustrated
by both celebrations discussed here, the present restoration of the ordering can only
happen within the celebration as a special and isolated event, and the ordering is
‘alive’, active, and real again only within the temporal and spatial enclave. In both
cases, that which takes shape within the celebration is, in fact, the “imagined commu-
nity”,390 whose symbolically condensed image is activated, locally and temporarily,
in the celebration ritual. Some of these symbols can maintain their charge after the
return to the everyday and non-ritual context, but can also rebecome mere everyday
images and objects. During the Seto as well as the Saxon celebration, the elements
considered to be defining and authentic are brought to the fore as constituent symbols
of identity. As noted by Annist, the essence of Estonian identity is condensed and
attributed to the Seto region and culture, while Saxon culture has become synony-
mous with the fortified churches and their villages, being claimed by the community
only at the annual event.
In the case of the Seto enclave, the heritage status activates and strengthens the
heterotopic functioning of the site. The heritage status is directed at the preservation
and perpetuation of the practices mediating Setomaa identity. However, due to the
organic development of the involved community, the general tendency is directed at
‘musealization’ as the last-resort method of conservation. The traditional practices
gradually turn into the performance of a standardized structure, and the material
object is transformed into an iconic image. The temporality of this enclave, as it
becomes officially active only occasionally and temporarily, contrasts with the idea
of heritage preservation, associated with undetermined perpetuation, but also coex-
ists with it. In other words, through the recognition as heritage, the two hypostases of
the Foucaultian heterochronia coexist in a single space, without contradicting their
essence: the temporality of the event and the permanence of the status. The ‘museal-
ization’ process of Seto culture gradually tilts the balance toward that heterotopia of
eternal and frozen temporality. The heterotopic temporal coordinate is the main and
defining factor in the case of the Setomaa community, but the material elements that
are added to it (as architecture, landscape, and folk costume) also introduce, through
their alterity from the context, the heterotopic character and functioning.
At the same time, the elements that do not fit the Seto heritage profile, recognized
as valuable, are excluded, remain devoid of visibility, and are considered worthless.
All this affects the segment of the population which, although part of the community,
390 The expression is used here as defined by Anderson, for whom ‘imagined’ is not synonymous
with ‘invention’, fabrication’, and ‘falsity’, but rather with ‘imagining’ and ‘creation’. Anderson,
Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised
edition, Verso, London and New York, 1991, 5–7.
does not identify itself with, or does not participate in, the construction of this imag-
ined community, viz. in the reconstruction of its identity from iconic and heritage
practices and sites. If the Setomaa cultural space is considered to be the context,
this excluded segment, the non-Seto everydayness becomes the marginal one, whose
practices and spaces exist and develop in an alternative way, being pushed outside
the dominant ordering.
This example illustrates an instance of the overlap between the concepts of ‘her-
itage’ and ‘heterotopia’, analysed in this study. As shown by Annist’s paper, the
Seto enclave’s functioning as a heterotopic space is accentuated by its functioning
as heritage, without the latter being, it itself, the triggering cause. Through their
relationship with the historical context, the community and both the mobile and the
immobile heritage of Seto culture come to be delimited as an enclave. Although
the author’s interpretation is focused on a single perspective, that of the celebratory
event/temporary and temporal enclave, heterotopic coordinates are easily identifi-
able; e.g. the mirror function, represented trough the heritage status; the isolation or
the ‘enclavization’, activated and deactivated depending on the moment and on the
current reader of that space; duplication, as the same space is simultaneously acces-
sible and restricted, everyday and extraordinary, through its two ‘lives’, the ‘her-
itagised’, that is performed or staged, and the everyday and normal; the internal hier-
archization, with different grades of accessibility and prescribed roles. Other major
coordinates include: the celebration as a temporary and tolerated interruption of nor-
mality, through which a subordinated alternative ordering becomes possible, as well
as the journey and the route, necessary to access the cultural meanings—although
these are predominantly conserved as immaterial heritage (oral culture, tradition),
it is necessary to access the ‘Seto space’, thus demonstrating the overlap and even
the assimilation of the space with the symbolic encoding. Paradoxically, strengthen-
ing the heterotopic functioning through a compensatory character, this localization
becomes all the more important since the expression of this culture is predominantly
immaterial. The heritage status ensures another heterotopic coordinate, the illusory
role: the Seto identity has a preformed and staged character, and the receiving audi-
ence is perfectly aware of this convention. Even the experience of the author, urged to
unveil the truth behind the representation (the Seto choir), reveals the alterity attached
to this culture, the fracture between the internal (associated with the culture) and the
external (non-Seto everydayness), as well as, most importantly, the hypostasis of
heritage as representation. The Seto heritage is received by the viewing audience
rather as a historical reconstruction—a theatrical representation, marked by the con-
ventional actor/audience dichotomy, reiterating specific events or reanimating, for
the sake of a clearer reading, some heritage object—, although being, in fact, an
interpretation of folklore and inherited traditions. This paradox, in which the most
authentic hypostasis of this heritage is perceived as a representation, generates an
illusory role and contributes to the heterotopic functioning of this ‘Seto space’.
Compared with the previously discussed examples of heritage as heterotopia,
the case of Seto culture highlights the immaterial aspect of heritage, even as the
main expression of that culture. The material expression plays a secondary role,
although, as noted above, localization—referring to the cultural landscape with its
natural and anthropic/built element—is integral to the definition of Seto culture.

Nevertheless, the separation of this case in its constituent elements reveals the three
factors constituting—as I have argued—the heterotopic space: the profile, the event,
and heterotopic functioning. The latter, although not directly discussed in Annist’s
analysis, is suggested by the vernacular character of this heritage. This profile encom-
passes both the material aspect—encompassing traditional architectural typologies,
construction technologies and materials, etc.—and the immaterial aspect, as well
as a certain lifestyle. These coordinates begin to be perceived as obsolete and as
different from their (transformed) context, taking on a heterotopic profile, although
initially they represented the norm and the everyday. The event that activates this
profile, lending it an additional heterotopic reading, is the fragmenting of its initial
delimitation between the two states, the Russian and the Estonian. The heterotopic
functioning is consecrated through the heritage status: the enclave only becomes a
homogeneous organism under this status and by virtue of its cultural meanings, as
the patrimonial status guarantees its existence as an enclave of alterity within the
dominant ordering, in spite of its incompatibility with it. Although the intention
motivating the heritage status is—as we have seen—to conserve, to transmit, and
implicitly to stop the destructive flow of time (heterotopic coordinate: the utopian
character and the temporal fragment/“slice of time”), Seto culture is transformed
under its impact, due partially to its relationship to the exterior (from which it has
become irrevocably different) and partially to the interior of the community. In this
case, the heritage status and the functioning as a heritage space seem to guarantee the
existence and the heterotopic character of this enclave. In spite of the metamorphosis
into a performative act and its ‘musealization’, the transmission of cultural meanings
continues to depend on the existence of the material expression and, especially, of
the senders of this communication process and the practices perpetuated by them.
4.24 The Swayambhunath (Swayambhu) Religious

Complex—Kathmandu, Nepal
My fourth example demonstrates another type of reflexive relationship between the

status and the official practice, on the on hand, and the unofficial practice, on the
other. The Kathmandu Valley was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in
1979. In includes an ensemble of seven groups of monuments and buildings: “the
Durbar squares or urban centres with their palaces, temples and public spaces of the
three cities of Kathmandu (Hanuman Dhoka), Patan and Bhaktapur, and the religious
ensembles of Swayambhu, Bauddhanath, Pashupati and Changu Narayan”.391 The
Swayambhu religious complex has 12 architectural objects, including the oldest
Buddhist monument (stupa) that has undergone multiple additions and renovations,
supported by various sponsors, during the 14th, 17th, and 20th centuries.
391 Kathmandu Valley, UNESCO World Heritage List, WHS number 121, http://whc.unesco.org/
en/list/121, accessed in January 2014.
4.24 The Swayambhunath (Swayambhu) Religious Complex—Kathmandu, Nepal 363
Bruce McCoy Owens has analysed the development of this Nepalese site,392 iden-
tifying as the sources of its heterotopic nature the confessional, ethnic, and cultural
pluralism, each of which generates not only material expressions, but also different
and even contradictory practices that coexist and juxtapose their materializations
in a single physical space, or at the same site. The heritage status is another such
hypostasis in which the site is imagined, as well as another layer of meaning, gen-
erating a set of mainly protectionist practices juxtaposed to the existing (religious,
economic and social) ones, in a competitive and contradictory coexistence, or even
remaining incompatible with them. This unlikely coexistence of multiple layers of
meaning, statuses, and practices puts the site into a state of perpetual transforma-
tion and negotiation. In Owens’ approach, the site is heterotopic primarily due to
the—contemporary, but also historical—practices that have built it and are gradu-
ally changing its physical shape, illustrating the plurality of meanings invested in it.
As previously discussed, the destruction and reconstruction of the Swayambhunath
complex presupposes a reconsideration of its heterotopic character.
The site represents the unique artistic and architectural manifestation of the fusion
process between different historical periods, as well as between the languages of the
two dominant religions of the area, Buddhism and Hinduism, overlaid upon animistic
rituals and tantrism.393 It continues to be Nepal’s political and religious centre, joining
natural elements (associated with rituals, legends, and celebrations), “pilgrimage
centres, temples, shrines, bathing sites and gardens—all sites of veneration for both
religious groups”.394
The site has been declared a monument of national importance in 1956. Its
UNESCO recognition (1979) also triggered a conservation and monitoring campaign,
leading to the implementation of a General Management and Conservation Plan for
the monuments in the entire Kathmandu valley in 1981. In spite of this, the site had to
be inscribed on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2003, on which it remained
until 2007, due mainly to the uncontrolled and accelerated urbanization process,
manifested in the degradation and loss of the traditional fabric. Along with this main
source of degradation, the area’s seismicity, the illegal activities (more specifically,
the theft of art objects and architectural elements), various local development initia-
tives, and the mismanagement of the site (as the lack of coordination between local,
national, and international initiatives) are also problematic. In spite of its inclusion on
the list of endangered monuments, of the recommendations made by the UNESCO
commissions, as well of the fact that “the property has been managed by the coordi-
native action of tiers of central government, local government and non-governmental
organizations” and, implicitly, of the existence of the Integrated Management Plan
for the Kathmandu World Heritage Property (2007), one of the main and recurring
392 McCoy Owens, Bruce, Monumentality, identity, and the state: Local practice, world heritage
and Heterotopia at Swayambhu, Anthropological Quarterly, 2002, 75, 2, 269–316.
393 Kathmandu Valley, UNESCO World Heritage List, WHS number 121, http://whc.unesco.org/
en/list/121, accessed in January 2014.

394 Evaluation of the UNESCO committee, Kathmandu Valley, UNESCO World Heritage List, http://
whc.unesco.org/en/list/121, accessed in January 2014.

threats to the conservation of the site consists in the management system, mentioned
as a direct risk in the UNESCO conservation reports issued in 1990, between 1993
and 2008, as well as between 2011 and 2013. In spite of the repeated interventions
and recommendations,395 this mismanagement has led to the transformation of the
built fabric. One such intervention, also discussed by Owens in his paper on the iden-
tity definition process of the Nepalese site, consisted in the arrangement of the access
road to Swayambhu’s central stupa. He discusses the confluence of the involved fac-
tors, i.e. the political, religious, and ethnic context, along with the influence of the
UNESCO recognition. In his opinion, the architectural ensemble is a “heterotopia
of contestation” due to the plurality of the involved agents—ethnicities, religious
groups, governmental and non-governmental organizations—, each investing vari-
ous meanings in this site and juxtaposing different meanings, manifested in both
material and immaterial forms (related to protection, landscaping, architecture, and
ritual). Furthermore, Owens also notes the main issues around which these various
agents are concentrated: the traditional and historical multi-confessional identity, the
multi-ethnic identity, subjected to negotiations in the context of democratization, and
the cultural identity, modelled under the pressure of the international status. These
introduce and juxtapose numerous statuses and practices, both official and unofficial,
leading to an accumulation of various meaning by the site.
In spite of its UNESCO and national protection—both statuses being official, nor-
mative, and meant to preserve the original material form of the site—, Swayambhu is
in an ongoing change. On the one hand, there are the ongoing traditional processes
of ritual transformation—including rebuilding, improvement, repainting, redeco-
rating, and remodelling—as consequences and manifestations of the sacred prac-
tices. On the other hand, there are new forms of devotional transformation as well,
the introduction of new structures, with local and international financial support,
also reflected in material expressions (representations, architectural and aesthetic
language). The cultural and religious values acquired over time have transformed
Swayambhu into a legitimation object, and, with the process of democratization,
the devotional interventions have taken a deeply ethnic character. This phenomenon
is especially reflected by the arrangement of the pilgrimage route and its adjacent
wall leading to the Swayambhu stupa. The road arrangement project has required
construction work on separate sections and this initiative for multi-layered (“local,
international, and interethnic”) cooperation396 has attracted the patronage of various
donors who have individualized each section of the wall through architectural means
395 The UNESCO recommendations were directed at improving the management of the area through
control measures, e.g. “appropriate and realistic building regulations to control change of the built
stock around the main monuments within the World Heritage property” (2005), demarcation and
redemarcation (2003, 2004, 2005) of protected areas and the establishment of buffer areas (non-
existent at its inclusion among the world Heritage sites). Both protection areas, the main one as
well as the buffer zone, include traditional buildings, a green area, and several haphazard (and
inadequate) constructions; evaluation of the UNESCO committee, Kathmandu Valley, UNESCO
World Heritage List, http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/121, accessed in January 2014.
396 The collaboration reunites parties which vary considerably (as do their respective expectations),
such as individual funding, families, groups, and communities on the local, territorial, regional,
national, and international level. Bruce McCoy Owens, Monumentality, identity, and the state:
and various features.397 The site is thus simultaneously an object of cooperation and
an ostentatious demonstration of interethnic and interconfessional distinctions398 : a
multilocal space.399 However, the history of the Swayambhu religious site and its
complex (multicultural) artistic expression clearly reveals the similarity between the
phenomena: the cultural identity practices that have built it over time are the same
as the ones that generated the modern (contemporary) heterogeneous construction
of the ‘prayer wall’ and are gradually transforming Swayambhu. Overlaid on these,
there are also the modern processes associated with the protected status, including the
interventions directed at the adaption to the touristic impact, manifested in the mul-
tilingual explanatory signs, the protective fencing, and various secondary features,
such as commercial establishments, food services, and accommodation.
However, all these transformation processes contradict the protected status that
primarily implies the conservation of the original material form. The paradoxical
situation, common to many monuments—and especially to religious sites—, is trig-
gered by the multiple encoding of the space by different agents. The protected status
positions the conservation of the original substance and the conservation of tradi-
tional practices in a relationship of opposition, in spite of their interdependence.
At Swayambhu, the official orderings (protected statuses and governmental initia-
tives—at least in intent) overlap and coexist with the unofficial forms ordering (the
informal application of the protective legislation).
A further point to be mentioned is the addition of meaning through the UNESCO
status, simultaneously the effect and the cause of the transformation of the selected
sites into cultural products (cultural commodification/mercantilization of culture)
under the pressure of globalization. Through the consecration of value, the status
unintentionally exposes the site that now acquires added importance for more groups,
currently gaining—as in the case of Swayambhu—the (economic) opportunity, the
intention, and the sociopolitical conditions (through the right to affirm their ethnic,
religious, and cultural identity) to intervene upon the material form.
However, after the publication of Owens’ study, the development of the site has
taken a radical turn. The earthquake of 25 April 2015 has deeply affected the entire
Kathmandu Valley. All seven architectural groups—the ‘honorary’ Durbar squares
from Hanuman Dhoka, Patan and Bhaktapur, the Hindu temples from Pashupati
and Changu Narayan as well as the Buddhist stupas from Swayambhu and Baud-
Local practice, world heritage and Heterotopia at Swayambhu, Anthropological Quarterly, 2002,
75, 2, 269–316; 294.
397 The wall was completed with altars, stupas, and statues, in violation of the UNESCO principles
and of the protective legislation regarding the site. Owens mentions that some of these interventions
have obtained the approval of the Archeology Department managing the site, through exerting
pressure and other extra-legal means. Bruce McCoy Owens, Monumentality, identity, and the state:
Local practice, world heritage and Heterotopia at Swayambhu, Anthropological Quarterly, 2002,
75, 2, 269–316.
398 Bruce McCoy Owens, Monumentality, identity, and the state: Local practice, world heritage
and Heterotopia at Swayambhu, Anthropological Quarterly, 2002, 75, 2, 269–316; 297.

399 Bruce McCoy Owens, Monumentality, identity, and the state: Local practice, world heritage
and Heterotopia at Swayambhu, Anthropological Quarterly, 2002, 75, 2, 269–316; 286.

dhanath—have suffered massive destruction.400 The site is currently on the List of

World Heritage in Danger. The first among the problems affecting the UNESCO site
is the natural disaster, but the previously mentioned problems continue to be present,
with the loss of the traditional urban fabric due to uncontrolled urban development,
especially in the private residential area; the lack of a coordinated management mech-
anism; the construction of a logging road and the project for building a tunnel in the
protected monument zone of Pashupati; the project for the extension of the Tribhu-
van International Airport in the Kathmandu Valley; and various other development
projects, e.g. of building a crematorium in the protected area and of the reconstruc-
tion of the Bhaidegah temple. Due to these issues, the vulnerability of the site is
increased beyond the immediate (e.g. artefact theft and additional degradation due
to inappropriate interventions). Around 70% of the Swayambhu site currently needs
to be rebuilt,401 in spite of the protected status, under the pressure of the new devel-
opment projects. Nevertheless, the site was reopened just a few months after the
earthquake. This decision, although controversial from the perspective of the pro-
tectionist doctrine, may have a positive impact, as it will keep the site present in the
media. Under the monitoring of the UNESCO and other international organizations,
the reopening may act as a control mechanism of the potential inadequate interven-
tions, especially those at an urban scale. The impact on the meaning layers of the site
still remains unclear, as the site continues to function as an active religious centre. The
massive destruction and the reconstruction envisioned by the UNESCO remind us of
the classic case of Warsaw’s reconstruction in 1944, when the destruction amounted
to 85% of the site, and to other similar instances,402 putting into perspective the
400 According to the UNESCO report on the state of preservation of the site, “a 7.9 magnitude earth-
quake struck middle Nepal, 80 kilometre northwest of Kathmandu. The earthquake and the aftermath
resulted in disastrous loss of human life [dead: 7.885; injured: 17.803; displaced: 2.8 million] and
extensive and irreversible damage to the historic monuments and buildings of the Kathmandu Val-
ley World Heritage property [according to the Government of Nepal, there were 288.793 damaged
and 254.112 partially damaged public buildings]. […] In particular, major damages have been
reported in the Durbar Squares of Patan, Hanuman Dhoka (Kathmandu) and Bhaktapur. All his-
torical structures within the seven monuments zones of the property were affected” and numerous
temples “have collapsed completely”. The three squares mentioned above were almost completely
destroyed. 39th Session of World Heritage Committee held in Bonn, Germany, 28 June—8 July
2015, report on the state of conservation of World Heritage properties, WHC-15/39.COM/7B,
114, and WHC-15/39.COM/7B.Add, 90–91, consulted online at http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/121,
401 Cf. David Andolfatto, UNESCO consultant, apud Stéphane Huët, Saving Swayambhu, Nepal-
iTimes, 5–11 June 2015 #761, http://nepalitimes.com/article/nation/saving-swayambhu-destroyed-

by-the-earthquake.2310, accessed in June 2015.
402 Some “textbook” examples: the main hall of the Hōryū-ji Temple at Nara in Japan (destroyed in
a fire in 1949); the Campanile in the Piazza di San Marco, Venice (collapse of the whole structure
in 1902); the Frauenkirche in Dresden, Germany (destroyed during World War II in 1945); the Old
Town of Warsaw, Poland (bombed during World War II)—later partially reconstructed, without tak-
ing into account the original lots and the internal partitions of the buildings, the facades facing the
street were recreated and new community functions were inserted within the islands (schools, shops,
planted areas); the Old Bridge at Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina (destroyed during the Balkan war
in the 1990s), the Teatro La Fenice of Venice (burned down in 1996), etc. Dushkina adds in her mono-
current situation of the Middle East with its deliberate destruction and massive loss
of heritage.
If reconstruction seems to be the natural response—to the shock and the propor-
tions of the destruction, in order to recover the layering of cultural meanings—, at
least from the perspective of the protectionist organizations (UNESCO, ICOMOS),
it remains to be established what the impact of repeating an essentially specific situ-
ation, such as that of the Polish site, might be. Whereas, in the case of the Nepalese
site, the arguments for reconstruction include its status as living heritage, its spiritual,
identity, and cultural, as well as economic functions—also supported by its inclusion
on the World Heritage List—, the Polish case was supported by arguments invoking
the post-conflict trauma (in the context of a sensitized, post-World War Europe) and
the affirmation of national identity. Although reconstruction is considered a ‘taboo
subject’ of restoration and conservation—generally not recommended, or reluctantly
allowed, in theoretical discussions—, it is frequently, and increasingly often, the
preferred solution. If the organicity of the practices is to be considered as the main
argument for the Nepalese site as a currently active spiritual centre, the same organic
practices may also act negatively, diverting, altering, and substituting that which is
considered to be valuable and worthy of protection. Such an organic reconstruction,
although it might find its antecedents in historical reconstructions—even includ-
ing the actual Nepalese site (1934)403 —after natural/anthropic disasters, could also
graph a varied series of examples, both Russian—with the extreme case of façadism, i.e. the wooden
seventeenth century Palace of the Tsar Alexei Michailovitch in Kolomenskoe, Moscow, dismantled
in the eighteenth century and currently reerected with a concrete skeleton and wooden facades—and
European—the (re)construction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London, and (re)constructions
based only on sketches—buildings that never got beyond the project phase, e.g. Le Corbusier’s
Church of Saint-Pierre in Firminy-Vert, France, nominated for the World Heritage List. Dushk-
ina, Natalia, Historic Reconstruction: Prospects for Heritage Preservation or Metamorphoses of
Theory? in Conserving the authentic: essays in honour of Jukka Jokilehto, 83–94, Ed. Nicholas
Stanley-Price, Joseph King, ICCROM Conservation Studies 10, ICCROM International Centre
for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, ISBN 978-92-9077-220-
0, Roma, 2009, 84–5, 87–9, and Dushkina, N., Reconstruction and reinterpretation in Russia—2,
paper presented at the conference on Monuments and Sites in Their Setting—Conserving Cultural
Heritage in Changing Townscapes and Landscapes, ICOMOS 15th General Assembly and Scien-
tific Symposium, Xi’an, China, October 17–21, 2005, section II: Vulnerabilities within the setting
of monuments and sites: understanding the threats and defining appropriate responses; Stanley-
Price, Nicholas, The Reconstruction of Ruins. Principles and Practice, in Conservation: Principles,
Dilemmas and Uncomfortable Truths, 32–46, ed. Alison Richmond, Alison Bracker, Routledge,
2009, 32; for reconstructions of recent monuments and the principles of reconstruction see also
Dushkina, N., Historic Reconstruction: from Theory to Practice along a Way of Temptation, in
Conservation Turn—Return to Conservation. Tolerance for Change. Limits for Change, Proceed-
ings of the International Conference of the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee for the
Theory and Philosophy of Conservation and Restoration, 5–9 May 2010, Prague, Cesky Krumlov,
Czechia, 3–6 March 2011, Florence, 264–277, eds. Wilfred Lipp, Josef Stulc, Boguslaw Szmygin,
Simone Giometti, Editzioni Polistampa, Florence, 2012, 275–6.
403 The report initiated by ICCROM and ICCORP for the emergency situation in Nepal, Overview
Report of the Nepal Cultural Emergency Crowdmap Initiative, 19 May 2015, ed. Jonathan Eaton,
CHwB–Albania, 15, http://www.iccrom.org/nepal-cultural-emergency-report, accessed in June
2015.
involve alterations of the initial form, following the traditional principle of adaptation
and improvement in cases when materials and techniques considered to be superior
have become available. Still protected, although as an endangered site, Swayamb-
hunath requires a reconstruction based on the established principles of restoration,
respecting its original coordinates (dimensions, materials, volume, structure, orna-
mentation, etc.) and the preservation of its original substance through the recovery
of its original material, even if these raise major problems.
4.25 The Issue of Reconstruction
The issue of reconstruction is continuously debated in the field of conservation, with

antecedents reaching back to the nineteenth century.404 As part of the heritage prac-
tices, it is intimately associated with the older issue of authenticity, “found at the
foundations of Western culture, where it is organically connected to the authority
of normative and foundational texts both from the field of law and religion”405 —as
Françoise Choay puts it in her succinct analysis of the concept. At a casual glance
at the doctrinal texts, one finds a development of the attitudes toward reconstruc-
tion intimately connected to the issue of authenticity, in spite of the dilution and
blurring of the latter’s definition. Leaving aside the Athens Charter (1931) that does
not deal directly with the issue of reconstructions, the Venice Charter (International
Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites, 1964) is
the first to establish an official attitude toward reconstruction, although associating
it with the category of archaeological heritage, according to the section where it is
placed (Excavations), which establishes that the sites considered ruins have to be pre-
served as such, and “all reconstruction work should […] be ruled out ‘a priori’. Only
anastylosis, that is to say, the reassembling of existing but dismembered parts can be
permitted”,406 since “the material used for integration should always be recognizable
and its use should be the least that will ensure the conservation of a monument and the
reinstatement of its form”.407 The charter introduces a series of hybrid interventions
404 See the disputes around the reconstruction of the Palais des Tuileries (destroyed by fire in
1871), which started in the late nineteenth century (1870–80) and went on until the twenty-first
century (2000!). The proposals made in the historical discussion ranged from reconstruction in the
original form (based on the original project and eliminating three centuries of additions, considered
qualitatively inferior in spite of their age) and “reproductive selective cloning” to recreating the
last known form (from before the fire). Bastoen, Julien, Le clonage architectural, remède à la
dénaturation de l’esprit du lieu? Enjeux et présupposés des projets de reconstruction du Palais des
Tuileries à Paris, à la fin du XIXe et au début du XXIe siècle, in 16th ICOMOS General Assembly
and International Symposium: Finding the spirit of place between the tangible and the intangible,
Quebec, Canada, 2008, 2.2.
405 Choay, F., Alegoria Patrimoniului, ed. Simetria, 1998, 196.
406 ICOMOS, International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites
(The Venice Charter 1964, 2nd International Congress of Architects and Technicians of Historic
Monuments, Venice, 1964), Art. 15.
407 Idem.
4.25 The Issue of Reconstruction 369
as well, conditional upon and reserved for exceptional cases, including conjectural
reconstructions, of underlying layers, additions, uncovering underlying layers that are
totally or partially hidden, and the moving of all or part of a monument.408 The next
doctrinal text on the issue is the UNESCO World Heritage Convention (1972) and its
Operational Guidelines (1977). It discusses reconstruction in terms of authenticity,
limiting it to anastylosis as the tolerated maximum of the destructive impact on the
structure.409 Along with their discussion of authenticity, the Operational Guidelines
published in 1980 also added a commentary on reconstruction that granted generous
opportunities to replicated structures, specifically those from the historical centre of
Warsaw, inscribed on the List of World Heritage in the same year—as also noted by
Natalia Dushkina.410 This inclusion on the list not only represents a new coagulation
of tolerance for the reconstruction technique that creates something new, but even
more than that: its validation as a solution of preservation, paradoxically cancelling
the contradiction with the idea of authenticity.411
A change in attitude toward reconstruction can already be felt in the Burra Charter
(1981), which states that that is “appropriate where a place is incomplete through
damage [the term mainly refers to fires, natural disasters and armed conflicts] or
alteration and where it is necessary for its survival, or where it recovers the cultural
significance of the place as a whole”.412 “Reconstruction means returning a place as
nearly as possible to a known earlier state and is distinguished by the introduction
of materials (new or old) into the fabric”, and is also included in the categories of
repair and maintenance work.413
The Declaration of Dresden, published in 1982, is concerned exclusively with
the reconstruction of monuments destroyed by armed conflicts. It tilts the balance
again toward a more conservative attitude towards reconstruction, allowing it only
in exceptional circumstances, if the monument has “great significance” and the nec-
essary “reliable documentation” exists. In spite of its rather reserved attitude toward
reconstruction, treated as an exception, the declaration also puts forward several
positive arguments for it, including examples of best practices and its many good
results. As noted by Dushkina, the text is characterized by a duality, and promotes
408 ICOMOS, International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites
(The Venice Charter 1964, 2nd International Congress of Architects and Technicians of Historic
Monuments, Venice, 1964).
409 Dushkina, Natalia, Historic Reconstruction: Prospects for Heritage Preservation or Metamor-
phoses of Theory? in Conserving the authentic: essays in honour of Jukka Jokilehto, 83–94, Ed.
Nicholas Stanley-Price, Joseph King, ICCROM Conservation Studies 10, ICCROM International
Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, ISBN 978-92-9077-
220-0, Rome, 2009, 90.
410 Dushkina, N., Historic Reconstruction…, 90.
411 According to Dushkina, and also supported by the definition of authenticity proposed by Jokile-
hto, “‘authentic reconstruction’ is a philological, philosophical and cultural nonsense”. Dushkina,

N., Historic Reconstruction…, 91.
412 The Australia ICOMOS Charter for the Conservation of Places of Cultural Significance (The
Burra Charter, 1981), Art. 17.

413 The Australia ICOMOS Charter for the Conservation of Places of Cultural Significance (The
Burra Charter, 1981), Definitions, 1.8., 1.5., 1.7.

“reconstruction for the first time within the international doctrines and adjusted its
consequences for heritage conservation”.414 The pro-reconstruction arguments raised
by the document include symbolic national value, the urban fabric’s function of pro-
viding the framework for daily life (mnemonic and emotional role), the continuity
of the function (viz., the continuity of the practices), or the reuse in a new function,
educational or research functions—the monument thus reconstructed becomes a “di-
dactic tool”,415 especially for visitors—, tourism promotion, economic benefits, and
even the conservation of the site that now rebecomes functional.416
The 1987 edition of the Burra Charter includes reconstruction in the category
of conservation. The 1999 version establishes it as a separate category, while keep-
ing its definition approximately the same: “reconstruction means returning a place
to a known earlier state and is distinguished from restoration by the introduction
of new material into the fabric.”417 “Reconstruction is appropriate only where a
place is incomplete through damage or alteration, and only where there is sufficient
evidence to reproduce an earlier state of the fabric”, and “should be identifiable on
close inspection or through additional interpretation.”418 Additionally, “in rare cases,
reconstruction may also be appropriate as part of a [traditional] use or practice that
retains the cultural significance of the place”.419
While the Nara Document on Authenticity (1994) brings in its wake a new renego-
tiation, in an international context, of the concept of authenticity, from the perspective
of the traditional practice of periodical reconstruction as a conservation method of
Japanese wooden temples, another text, although of a national scope and concen-
trated on a specific site, proposes a seldom mentioned clarification of the concept,
reflecting an even greater openness, or even looseness, in the interpretation of the
concept of authenticity. As a response and a reaction to the Nara Document, the
Declaration of San Antonio (1996, USA) differentiates between dynamic sites “that
continue to be actively used by society”420 and static sites that are no longer active
and used, whose meanings are dissipated with time and/or lie exclusively in the phys-
ical form, which thus becomes even more valuable and vulnerable. Surprisingly, a
similar structure has already been proposed in the nineteenth century by the Bel-
gian architect Louis Cloquet, with striking similarities. “The old ‘historic’ category
became instead ‘dead’ monuments (with no use but documentary value), that should
be preserved, and the rest […] became ‘living’ monuments (those with contempo-

415 Stanley-Price, Nicholas, The Reconstruction of Ruins. Principles and Practice, in Conservation:
Principles, Dilemmas and Uncomfortable Truths, 32–46, ed. Alison Richmond, Alison Bracker,
416 Stanley-Price, N., The Reconstruction of Ruins…, 37.
417 The Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance (The Burra Charter, 1999),
Art. 1.8., 2.
418 Idem., Art. 20.2., 7.
419 Idem., Art. 20.1., 7.
420 ICOMOS National Committees of the Americas, Declaration of San Antonio, San Antonio,
Texas, USA, 1996, Art. 5.

rary use), where preservation was too restrictive and therefore unacceptable.”421 The
first category allows adaptation to the needs of contemporary society as an argu-
ment for authenticity and for the transmission and perpetuation of traditions, stating
that “some physical changes associated with maintaining the traditional patterns of
communal use of the heritage site do not necessarily diminish its significance and
may actually enhance it. Therefore, such material changes may be acceptable as
part of ongoing evolution.”422 The second category includes “the concluded work
of a single author or group of authors and whose original or early message has not
been transformed. […] In these sites, the physical fabric requires the highest level
of conservation in order to limit alterations to their character.”423 Although such an
interpretation apparently attempts to resolve the defining conflict in approaching built
heritage (conservation and development vs. evolution), the looseness of the definition
of authenticity renders the heritage object even more vulnerable to change. Although
the document initially supports the principles of the Venice Charter, emphasizing the
importance of preserving the original material, the polarity between ‘static’ and
‘dynamic’ proposed by it contradicts this approach. After defining these two cate-
gories, the document allows the alteration of the physical form and renovation for any
active site (urban centre, landscape, historical ensemble, etc.) used accordingly to its
traditional function (housing, religious practice, etc.) under the pretext of continuity.
Such an approach not only legitimizes reconstruction, but even pushes further the
intervention, opening the way for radical transformation. In such an interpretation,
reconstruction appears as a possibility even in the case of unaffected sites, becoming
substitution motivated by evolution. A “classic” example, already mentioned and
detailed in a case study, may be the wooden churches of Transylvania (Romania),
for which the traditional practice requires the replacement and improvement of the
construction whenever necessary, or when the necessary material means become
available, which is a type of evolution common to vernacular architecture. Applying
the static/dynamic dichotomy from above, most Transylvanian wooden churches are
to be included in the dynamic category, as they are transmitted in the Saxon commu-
nities into the care and given into the use of each new generation. Their substitution
with more spacious and durable constructions—otherwise an organic and character-
istic form of evolution for vernacular architecture, characteristic for the traditional
attitude toward the church as representative object—could be regarded, from the
perspective of the Declaration of San Antonio, an authentic evolution, although it
would have led to the loss of monuments with multiple cultural meanings. Accord-
ing to this document, the preservation of the original material is mandatory only
in the case of inactive sites—and associated, as suggested by the text itself, with
421 Louis Cloquet, Restauration des monuments anciens, Bulletin du cercle historique et arche-
ologique de Gand I (1894), apud Bell, D., The naming of parts, in Conserving the authentic: essays
in honour of Jukka Jokilehto, 55–62, Ed. Nicholas Stanley-Price, Joseph King, ICCROM Conser-
vation Studies 10, ICCROM International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration
of Cultural Property, ISBN 978-92-9077-220-0, Roma, 2009, 56.
422 ICOMOS National Committees of the Americas, Declaration of San Antonio, San Antonio,
Texas, USA, 1996, art.5.

423 Idem.
archaeologic sites—, that is motivated as the last form of preservation of the cultural
meanings in lack of the associated practices. The Declaration of San Antonio over-
states the objectivity of interpretation424 and does not consider the potential negative
impact, the subjectivity of contemporary adaptation, even if within the same practice
there remains the possibility for it to be diverted and the issue of identifying the
stakeholders with the right to decide is not resolved.
Where the document directly addresses the issue of reconstruction—especially
while dealing with archaeology—, it is considered to be a reduction of the site’s
authenticity, while the same paragraph also recognizes its educational value. This
attitude is paradoxical: if the reconstruction intervention cannot be authentic, as it
is dependent on subjective interpretations and expresses “fluctuating interests and
values”, then how is this reflected in the educational endeavour, in the perception of
the monument, and finally in creating an ethics on intervention?
While the Nara Document called for a reconsideration of authenticity in more per-
missive terms, adapted to specific cultural practices, the Declaration of San Antonio
leaves the concept open to free interpretation. The transition to the loose interpreta-
tion of authenticity and its official acceptance may be clearly identified in the Riga
Charter on Authenticity and Historical Reconstruction in Relationship to Cultural
Heritage (2000).425 Although it stands declaratively against reconstruction, the docu-
ment accepts it if it is “necessary for the survival of the place”, adding the ‘traditional’
conditions of restoration: the intervention has to be stopped where conjecture begins,
it may not compromise the original substance, and must be legible, reversible, and
minimal.426 As noted by Dushkina, the text represents an official legitimation of
reconstruction as a method of conservation and of “revealing the significance of cul-
tural heritage”, while simultaneously removing the conservation professional from
the decision process (“the need for reconstruction should be established ‘through
full and open consultations [exclusively] among national and local authorities and
the community concerned’”).427 According to the author, this gives carte blanche
to reconstruction, offering indulgence to already completed replicas and a free pass
to all similar approaches from the future.428 However, the Charter of Krakow of
the same year (2000) prohibits the reconstruction of large integral elements, only
allowing it for small parts “as an exception on condition that it is based on precise
and indisputable documentation”. Furthermore, for the current use of the building,
the completion of parts is allowed, but it has to reflect contemporary architecture
and must be legible in the historical context of the architectural object. This charter
424 According to the document, “the interpretation of the sites can authentically reflect only fluctu-
ating interests and values, and in itself, interpretation is not inherently authentic, only honest and
objective”—however, this objectivity is questionable as well. ICOMOS National Committees of
the Americas, Declaration of San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas, USA, 1996, Art. 5.
425 The Riga Charter on Authenticity and Historical Reconstruction in Relationship to Cultural
Heritage, Riga Charter 2000, adopted at the identically entitled conference in Riga, Latvia, October
2000.
426 The Riga Charter for Authenticity and Reconstruction of Cultural Heritage, 2000, Riga, Latvia.
428 Idem.
allows for complete reconstructions, similar to the historical cases mentioned above
(Warsaw, Dresden) and the ones called for by recent massive destructions (Nepal,
Aleppo, Palmyra) only “if there are exceptional social or cultural motives that are
related to the identity of the entire community”. Although defining reconstruction as
an exceptional solution, its wording is quite loose and open to interpretation.
The dual discourse identified by Dushkina in the doctrinal texts of the UNESCO
reflects, according to her, the fact that “reconstruction remains attractive not only
for governments, clients and the public at large (which is understandable), but also
for professionals”.429 First, it affects authentic heritage—both directly, as physical
degradation via the actual interventions, as well as indirectly, through devaluing the
idea of authenticity and deliberately creating ambiguity. Second, the conceptual net-
work drawn in the doctrinal text gradually becomes (has become?) malleable, as the
protectionist institutions/organizations renounce their protector position in favour of
the role of the intermediary and the negotiator of heritage as an economic and politi-
cal resource. Furthermore, in a long-term projection, this official attitude also has the
capacity—that is actually even claimed by it—to shape the general public’s attitude
toward the heritage object and its authenticity. That is to say, it can erase the distinc-
tion between fake and genuine in the consciousness of the general public. However,
if this border no longer exists, then anything can be conceived as carrying heritage
value and exploited accordingly, and vice versa, the heritage value of the authentic
object becomes ambiguous, diffuse, and as exploitable as any other resource. Some
further counterarguments to be made430 refer the loss of the construction’s evocative
value in its ruin state (e.g. the Genbaku Dome, part of the Hiroshima Peace Memo-
rial, which has been a UNESCO site since 1996), the disturbance of the already
settled landscape’s values, the lack of authenticity associated with the approach, the
deformation of interpretation, and the ethical problem of the transmission of false
information—especially under the aegis of such a prestigious organization as the
UNESCO—, the destruction of the original substance, affecting the perpetuation of
meanings carried by the material form and its documentary potential—the recon-
struction destroys, masks or renders the original witnesses inaccessible, as in the
case of the Potlogi Palace in Romania, reconstructed between 1954 and 1956431 —,
and, not least, the high costs involved.
In an attempt at clarifying the issue of authenticity, Choay has observed that
the UNESCO’s interpretation of the term and the criteria of the World Heritage
Convention “leave open the possibility of inscribing proven fakes on the list”,432
although considering authenticity to be the necessary condition of value.
Dushkina also brings into the discussion the philosophical argument, associ-
ated here—similarly to other arguments against reconstruction—with the name of
429 Idem.
430 These arguments against reconstruction can be found in Stanley-Price, N., The Reconstruction
of Ruins…, 37–41.
431 Curinschi Vorona, Gheorghe, Arhitectură. Urbanism. Restaurare, ed. Tehnică, 1995, reprinted
in 1996, 182.
432 Choay, F., Alegoria Patrimoniului, ed. Simetria, 1998, 202.
Viollet-le-Duc and especially with this approach, i.e. stylistic restoration. This pro-
reconstruction attitude, increasingly widespread and accepted (as the “mass recon-
struction of historic structures”433 ), although currently put at the service of develop-
ment, reflects a cyclical—and paradoxically, excessively nostalgic—perspective on
time, or “the idea of eternal return”434 :
the past forms the real content of the present and the future is modelled on the basis of
existing experience. Values are encompassed in repetitions, periodicity, regularly renewed
actions, forms and traditions. In fact, this is an expression of identity. A cyclical system
excludes direction and does not know the final goal of history. […] Within a cyclical model,
time itself is unhistorical and human consciousness lies beyond the notion of time.435
The opposite model supports:

the irreversibility of time and life processes. A monument becomes an embodiment of the
linear time concept. […] time has a beginning and an end; it possesses extension and irre-
versible historical succession. It has a vector direction and a linear development. In spite of
inevitable cyclical elements in this model, its place belongs to the philosophy of history and
authenticity, which is fundamental in this context.436
Ultimately, these two contradictory philosophical models resume the concep-

tual conflict at the basis of conservation and restoration theory (the debate between
Le-Duc and Ruskin/Reigl) and, as Dushkina remarks, although the entire twentieth
century was dominated by the support for linear temporality, this second, cyclical
system regains ground, “taking the heritage community back more than a hundred
years”.437 Dushkina also outlines this new reality of heritage, essentially modelled
by the acceleration and radicalization of transformation processes, as well as by
the transformation of the temporal and physical context and of human perception,
reflected on heritage in the phenomena of globalization, unification, and simplifica-
tion. The external, operational aspect of heritage prevails against the content and the
practices as well as the visual aspects, the rapid flows of information and images
against concepts, finally leading—according to Dushkina—to a fragmentation of
conscience438 and to a dilution and hybridization of the concept of conservation.
Also, when writing her analysis,439 she has noticed an intrusion of commercial val-

434 Hadžimuhamedović, Amra, The reconstruction of destroyed built heritage in view of our under-
standing of its permanence and mutability, in Conservation Turn—Return to Conservation. Toler-

ance for Change. Limits for Change, Proceedings of the International Conference of the ICOMOS
International Scientific Committee for the Theory and Philosophy of Conservation and Restoration,
5–9 May 2010, Praga, Cesky Krumlov, Cehia, 3–6 March 2011, Florence, 202–215, eds. Wilfred
Lipp, Josef Stulc, Boguslaw Szmygin, Simone Giometti, Editzioni Polistampa, Florence, 2012, 202.
436 Idem.
437 Idem.
438 Idem.
439 She has been drawing attention to this phenomenon since 1994, periodically returning to the
issue in her talks held at official events organized by major bodies such as ICOMOS and UNESCO,
before publishing the paper cited above in the 2009 honorary volume.
ues and image worship in the sphere of heritage, “producing a menace to the very
philosophy and theory of classical conservation”.440
During the time of this present research, the algorithm observed by Dushkina
seems not only still active, but to have advanced. As noted by Jokilehto, the princi-
ples of the Venice Charter are questioned and the establishment of a new standard,
adopted to new contemporary possibilities was proposed at the ICOMOS Annual
Advisory Committee Meeting of 2013 in Costa Rica (ICOMOS Scientific Commit-
tee on Interpretation and Presentation of Heritage Sites). Addressing this ongoing
debate, Jokilehto views reconstruction as a cultural act and thus acceptable when
“when a building or structure has been strongly part of the cultural identity of the
place”.441 Finally, the attitude taken by the author toward reconstruction reflects one
of the major issues of the theory and philosophy as well as of the practice of con-
servation and restoration: the establishment of general standards and norms for a
domain that is extremely heterogeneous in its relationships both with its context and
with itself. As Jokilehto notes, the option of reconstruction has to be considered sep-
arately for each case, necessarily weighing the role and the interests of the involved
actors and the impact of such an intervention.
The official attitude toward the Nepalese site and the proposal for the recon-
struction, already announced under the protectionist aegis of the UNESCO and its
associated organizations as well as the reopening of the site for the public after such
a short period of time signals the sedimentation of the trend noticed by Dushkina
and its transformation from a temporary phenomenon into a program. Especially the
reopening of the site may appear as guided by an intention to capitalize on the tragic
event that hit both the community and the built heritage. In combination with the
announcement regarding the reconstruction, the devastated site becomes a unique
attraction that can be exploited for tourism due to its exceptional and temporary
nature.
Although the intention is essentially humanitarian, with the objective of recon-
structing the previous functioning of the community and recovering, as far as possi-
ble, an exceptionally rich—both built and immaterial—heritage, the chosen attitude
toward reconstruction will decide how much of the juxtaposition of cultural mean-
ings will be kept and in what manner. If in the past the actions of the religious, ethnic,
and political actors were the ones that led to the formation of the Swayambhu site
and to the juxtaposition of its cultural-historical, as well as contemporary, meanings
and to the formation of its multiple values—even leading to their recognition and
establishment through the inclusion on the UNESCO’s list—, this time, after such
heavy losses, the input will be reversed. Regardless of the attitude it will take toward
the issue of reconstruction—influenced by cyclical or linear temporality—, the evo-
lution of the site will be strongly influenced or even dominated by its UNESCO
heritage status. The adjacent issue, already brought into discussion in the media,

441 Jokilehto, J., Reconstruction in the World Heritage Context, European Association for Architec-
tural Education, Rome 2831 October 2013, 12, https://engagingconservationyork.wordpress.com/,

accessed in June 2015.
is whether the sites, even if reconstructed, will be able to draw the same touris-
tic interest again.442 This preoccupation touches upon the phenomenon noticed by
Dushkina: reconstruction is conceived of (and feared) as a falsification of the site and
its value. Such a reconstruction may reestablish the architectural ensembles down to
their smallest details; the image of the site may be returned to the public, and—even
though over some time, as the reconstruction project is estimated to take about five
years—the site may be reentered into the touristic circuit in its original form, erasing
the memory of the natural disaster and the distinction between the reproduction and
the authentic. Due to the high financial costs involved in such a reconstruction, there
is also the possibility that only some of the monuments will be rebuilt, leading to
an ambiguity and to the deformation of interpretation. Being already under the pres-
sure of the housing market, the vernacular fabric, previously protected through its
proximity to the UNESCO site, becomes much more vulnerable and its chances of
being reconstructed with equal thoroughness are reduced (along with the necessary
documentary and financial sources). The same category also includes the more iso-
lated monuments that are part of the area listed by the UNESCO in the Kathmandu
Valley, but less visible for the general public.
However, the reconstruction might also have a positive impact. The increased
visibility of the site for the general public and its vulnerability may act as a control
and compensation mechanism, cancelling out the pressure of the urban development
and spurring authorities to solve the administration problems (through adopting a
coordinated management mechanism). Furthermore, the special vulnerability of the
site may also represent a counterargument against uncontrolled urban development
and the development projects that might negatively affect the UNESCO site (e.g.
logging road and tunnel building in the protected area, airport extension).
However, to what extent is the heterotopic functioning of the Nepalese site main-
tained after the damages? The ICOMOS/ICORP report proposed a preliminary evalu-
ation of the material damage suffered by the site, while also emphasizing the negative
impact on the immaterial-human heritage, harder to quantify at that moment. Evi-
dently, the characteristic practices of the site were dislocated, and the heterotopic
functioning coagulated through them was interrupted, at least temporarily. Will their
continuation—which can be regarded as certain—bring a new symbolic encoding or
rather influence the previous one? The material form that has registered the expres-
sions of these multiple practices is now massively degraded or has disappeared, thus
cancelling, even if not necessarily the juxtaposition of these multiple practices, but
at least its physical expression. The apparently stable ordering, additionally estab-
lished through the protected status, is instantly substituted by a radically opposed
crisis ordering. Immediately after the earthquake, camps were set up for the dislo-
cated population and for the volunteers at the centre of the site. Following the rescue
operations, the land-release actions have ‘occupied’ and reshaped this space through
442 For example, Steve Clark (Channel NewsAsia) wondered if tourists interested in heritage sites
will eventually stay away from a ‘made-over’ heritage site in years to come. Nepal quake: Iconic
Swayambhunath temple complex badly hit—Channel NewsAsia, published online on 30 April 2015,
23: 36, updated on 30 April 2015, 23:42, http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/nepal-
quake-iconic/1817476.html, accessed in May 2015.
the alternative crisis practices. This alternative functioning was superimposed on

the original functions: the release operations orient themselves, at least partially,
according to the norms of the sacred spaces (e.g. the restriction of access to some
sacred areas). The characteristic (spiritual, heritage, touristic, etc.) practices are sud-
denly, but not fully, suspended, and the actors take on various hybridized functions
(voluntary work/tourism, spirituality/security, etc.).
Paradoxically, this tragic development of the site confirms one of the heterotopic
principles proposed by Foucault: although each heterotopia has a well-established
role in its spatio-temporal context, “a society can make a heterotopia that exists,
and has not ceased to exist, function in a very different way”.443 Initially, the spir-
itual core becomes a protected site, accumulating layers of meaning and adapting
its functioning and even its physical form to its new ordering. In this hypostasis, as
also noted by Owens, the functioning of the site is heterotopic.444 In a few hours,
the site adapts a new ordering and becomes a heterotopia of crisis—expressed both
in practices and its material form. This process represents an accumulation of mean-
ing, even if (symbolically and physically) negative, at the expense of heritage. The
heterotopia does not disappear, but takes on a different expression. Even with the
perspective of its identical reconstruction, the heterotopic functioning could persist.
However, the meaning thus gained would tell more about the official attitude toward
the site and the officially recognized values, than about the surviving community
and the trauma of the event. In the case of a reconstruction through anastylosis, the
heterotopic coding would be enhanced, accumulating new meaning layers, expressed
both in practices and especially in the material form, a mnemonic device with an
additional role. The meaning transmitted through such an attitude would be focused
on the endured trauma and on the fragility of human creation, or even of human soci-
ety. These arguments support a reconstruction through anastylosis, in spite of the
reduction of the aesthetic value, since, paradoxically, the documentary value would
even be enriched.
The issue of the organicity of the site’s development is also raised here. The tra-
ditional, organic, response to such an event is the—mostly enhanced and always
altered—reconstruction. The specific culture to which the site belongs is that of
the cyclical and not of the linear time, Christian in its essence. However, to what
extent is this conceptualization of time—regarding the built object and especially
the monument invested with spiritual, heritage, representative, economic, etc. val-
ue—part of the answer given by the local community, the authorities, and the directly
involved parties? The involvement of the local community in the decision process,
as a procedure which enjoyed considerable attention in recent years, is one of the
possible solutions for identifying the organic answer. Yet, even with the help of this
instrument, can that organic direction still be identified, without the interference of
external factors? Globalization and the (thus far successful) competing of the site
on the international market, the adjustment of the supply to the demand—under the
443 Foucault,
M., Of Other Spaces…, in Dehaene, De Cauter, Heterotopia and the City…, 18.
444 BruceMcCoy Owens, Monumentality, identity, and the state: Local Practice, World Heritage
and Heterotopia at Swayambhu, Anthropological Quarterly, 2002.
domination of the consumption of images and ‘heritage’ experiences—, motivated

by the economic factor, the Western model and the constant developmental impulse:
these are but a few of the influences generally considered as external, which can
all be contained in an organic answer. This is also demonstrated by the case of the
Swayambhu site which, over time, has accumulated many layers of meaning, influ-
ences, and expressions stemming from various actors and from the temporal stages
through which it went through. Moreover, the interventions of the local as well as of
the more extended, cross-border, religious communities, mapped by Owens before
the natural disaster, that have shaped the site in spite of the UNESCO status, suggest
that an authentic organic evolution would automatically entail alterations, seen as
improvements from the perspective of everyday religious practice. Organic evolution,
or the impulse toward it, is characteristic for a site that is active and alive. In this inter-
pretation, both before and after the natural disaster, the protectionist norms partially
contradict the traditional practice in the name of the conservation of the material form
that carries meaning. Its safeguarding, however, is of vital significance. The response
of the local community—to the extent that it will be involved—and especially of the
local authorities, along with the involvement and the attitude of the UNESCO and
of other protectionist organizations toward the reconstruction will dictate how the
site will evolve and whether and how it will keep its juxtaposition of meanings. The
manner in which the negotiation will be mediated between the various actors will
have a direct impact on the site and an indirect, lasting impact on the shaping of the
official protectionist attitude toward reconstruction and toward the dynamic of the
sites of international value.
The three discussed examples—Lascaux, Wieliczka, and Swayambhu—reflect
both the versatility of the built heritage object (i.e. its ability to accumulate various
and contradictory meanings) and the subjectivity of each reaction in similar contexts.
The common element is represented by the UNESCO recognition as the establish-
ment of both the universal value and the alterity that all three of these sites have
in common. Each monument is perceived as “different” on several levels and read
in different contexts by the different agents who bring particular—overlapping and
often even contradictory—practices in the respective spaces. Although the UNESCO
categorization unifies them under the same single status, it also recognizes, estab-
lishes, and strengthens the individual otherness of each object—especially alterity
manifested in material forms (e.g. the aggregation of architectural styles, material
traces of some practices and even the practices themselves, etc.). Although, due to its
unifying character, delimitations, and hierarchies, the heritage categorization may be
interpreted as a normalizing reading, this actually attributes a heterotopic character
to the heritage object. On the one hand, categorization normalizes the site and its
rhythms, and on the other hand, attributes its new, alternative ordering to it, contribut-
ing to the consolidation of its alterity and plurality: the protected site is definitively
different from its context. Its status grants homogeneity to the protected object, but
simultaneously also conserves its heterogeneity.
The heterotopic character was best reflected—as also noted by Owens—in the case
of the Nepalese site, where the two ordering systems, the official and the unofficial,
are simultaneous and juxtaposed, instigating and (unintentionally) perpetuating the
very (cultural and social) practices that have created the site, while the added value
and attraction acted as a driving force for these practices directed at the material
object. Recent developments substitute this heterotopic functioning with a tempo-
rary operational mode of the crisis. (And yet, are these not all temporary modes
of operation, as attested by the actual built form?) For the Nepalese site, the rene-
gotiation between the official and the unofficial ordering will be the determining
factor for its development. In the Polish case, these two orderings, the official and
the unofficial, overlap with each other and are hybridized until reaching a state of
equilibrium, while the original practices that generated the site are perpetuated in a
partially artificial manner, that is, nevertheless, the only manner of conserving with-
out ‘musealization’. In the case of the Lascaux ensemble, the heterotopic character
stems from the actual heritage practice, i.e. from the official ordering that comes
to ‘fill the void’ after the disappearance of the original practices of the object. The
status generates a new ordering and a new material form (the new museum complex)
through which the site with heritage value is reconstructed in its original form, as a
heterotopia of illusion that apparently freezes the passage of time as well as space
(along with its uncontrollable phenomena), while also having a compensatory role
as a heterotopia, where the contradictory coordinates of the heritage concept (knowl-
edge/conservation) may manifest themselves simultaneously and in an artificial and
noncontradictory manner. Once materialized, these two heterotopic qualities reveal
the utopian nature of the concept of conservation.
The reaction to the introduction of the protected status depends on a series of
coordinates that are specific for each individual site, including its history, (economic,
political, etc.) context, fragility, character (morphology, materials, location, etc.),
(initial or newly introduced) function, or its social coordinates (traditional/newly
introduced practices, the perception and value invested in the site by various groups,
etc.), while the assessment of the reaction to the introduction of a newly protected
status (on the national, local, or universal level) and of its associated practices remains
problematic.
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Chapter 5
Heritage as a Heterotopic Space. The
Tertiary Character and the Hybrid
Characteristic as Arguments of Its
Heterotopic Character
Abstract The chapter presents in a condensed fashion the main argument of the
present research, outlined along the lines of the initial theoretical segment of the
work. The heritage’s tertiary and intermediate character—or otherness—is argued
within the preamble, understood as a conceptual entity (the conceptual heritage space,
of theoretical space defined through concepts, theories and attitudes that shape the
perspectives onto the heritage built object. Related to the thin intermediate character
it is also discussed the dichotomist structure of heritage. Underlying this concept is
the ideas of selection, of inclusion and exclusion, of valuable and non-valuable, that
have (historically) fashioned the heterogeneous nature of heritage itself. Imagined as
n-conceptual entity, heritage expresses simultaneously two contradictory desiderata:
the utopic one, of unity and universal and democratic representation of all identities,
and that of the selection of value, of division between valuable and non-valuable.
The heritage requires and establishes numerous internal hierarchies, ramifies series
of criteria, values, intensities and nuances, different degrees of protection, etc. The
source of this imperative of creating hierarchies and divisions can be encountered
in the very desire for unity and inclusion. The entire heritage normative apparatus
functions as a mediating dispositif, necessary for managing its heterogeneous nature.
The dichotomic, the tertiary or intermediate character are further discussed through
an example, the decolonization process, pre-eminently unfolded within the heritage
sphere. Thus, the us/them separation in never a fixed one: in relation to the context
in which it is discussed, the categories change their “content”. Heritage appears as
an assembled reflection, continuously re-adjusted through the negotiation process
between the two focal points. Finally, this chapter proposes a condensed analysis
tool based on the heterotopic profile. This set of coordinates can allow, in the pro-
posed interpretation, the identification of the heterotopic character and functioning
of a specific place. This heterotopic functioning, in its turn, is able to signal an insuf-
ficiently visible heritage potential, it can explain a specific evolution of a space and it
can also signal the dilution of a heritage value. Traced back to the basic reading of the
Foucauldian text, these heterotopic spaces (both conceptual and material) ultimately
reflect the image of the society in a specific moment in time and in a specific context;
the reading of the heritage space through this heterotopic lenses can delineate such
an image not only retrospectively but also in the present—an image that is usually
more difficult to grasp due to its very proximity. The ensuing case study focuses on a

388 5 Heritage as a Heterotopic Space. The Tertiary Character …
particular manifestation of balneal spaces—the development of the leisure profile of

the Romanian Black-Sea coast during the communist regime. The large scale, state-
patroned project is analysed via its material form (architecture, and urban planning),
its practices, and its contextual relations—in order to identify its basic heterotopic
profile and functioning. Via its leisure profile, the project illustrates a strong multi-
layered utopian encoding, enhanced through its contemporary evolution. Analysed
through the proposed grid of heterotopic coordinates, the coastal network of resorts
reveals its heritage potential, threatened by its ongoing processes of disintegration.
Keywords Heterotopia · Heritage as heterotopia · Narrative of destruction ·

Patrimonialization · Heritageification · Heritage ideal · Heritage heterotopia
5.1 Tertiary Character Coordinates for Heritage
The conceptual structure of the heritage status appears to be a dichotomic one. “Uni-
fication and separation are intertwined in signification processes produced in the
realm of culture and politics” observes During.1 The unifying character can be read
on a general level—heritage as the representation of common, absolute values, or
that which unites us as individuals along a temporal and a horizontal (or territo-
rial) axis. The same unifying character of heritage has been and still is used in the
construction of national identities,2 (where the heritage is defined as a “homoge-
nous and collective identity assumed to be representative of the wider nation”),3 of
regional or local, ethnic, professional identities, etc. Yet, within its very core lies the
idea of selection, of inclusion/exclusion, which has ultimately led to the shaping of
the heterogeneous nature of heritage. Thus, simultaneously with the assertion of its
unitary nature, the heritage object demands and establishes numerous internal hier-
archies, ramifies series of criteria, values, intensities and nuances, as well as different
degrees of protection, etc.—ultimately revealing its heterogeneity and, although often
challenged, its hierarchical nature. Its entire normative apparatus operates as a het-
erogeneity mediation device. A testimony in this respect can be found within the
ongoing debates regarding the values of heritage—what are the values that dictate
the objects’ inclusion or exclusion?—as well as in the conceptual expansion of the
1 During, Roel, European heritage discourses, a matter of identity construction in Cultural Heritage
and Identity Politics, ed. Roel During, Wageningen Academic Publishers, e-ISBN: 978-94-6173-
076-3, 2011, 17.
2 One of the first readings of heritage belongs to Dehio: “Nous ne conservons pas un monument parce
que nous le trouvons beau mais parce qu’il représente une part de notre existence nationale” Dehio,
Georg, Denkmalschutz und Denkmalpflege, 1905, Kunsthistorische Aufsatze, Munich, Berlin, Ros-
denbourg, 1914, apud. Recht, Roland, Penser le Patrimoniue. Mise en scène et mise en ordre de
Tart, ed. Hazan, Paris, 1999 republished in 2008, 102. See also Jokilehto, Jukka, A History of
Architectural Conservation, Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 2002, 217.
3 Waterton, Emma, Politics, Policy and the Discourses of Heritage in Britain, Palgrave, London,
2010, 93.
5.1 Tertiary Character Coordinates for Heritage 389
term “heritage”; while this plurality flourishes, each culture producing group/identity
claims its recognition and inclusion within the heritage sphere.
The process is commonly explained, just as Waterton does, as a response to the
one-sided, profoundly Western-European and socially segregated nature attached to
the initial concept of heritage—“based on selective understandings of a good, grand
and monumental past ‘owned’ and monopolized by the white upper- and middle-
classes”—4 a point of view considered by Waterton as still valid, despite and even
powered by the official heritage discourse. Choay sees this ethnocentrist nature of
heritage in a less provocative and accusatory manner—and rather as a spatial and tem-
poral given, an inheritance shaped by the historical circumstances of the European
space, that must be critically assessed. Waterton targets an opportunity to disassemble
and contest, to dismantle in order to assemble a new and innovative construct, rather
than assuming the existing one as an inheritance and built upon it. She proposes the
analysis of the official discourses, of their semantics and linguistic characteristics
through charters, recommendations, governmental measures and laws, and official
declarations. Ultimately, she argues that the contemporary notion of heritage is based
upon the idea of segregation, between a collective us and the other/others; a repre-
sentation of heritage that projects a self-proclaimed unitary image (historic truth,
beauty, exceptionality, etc.) can only conceal a biased, segregated inner structure.
I counter argue that the relation proposed by Waterton cannot be a simple bipolar
one; as a cultural construct, the heritage functions as a tertiary space—on a physical
object level as well as on a discursive or conceptual level—similarly to the read-
ing of the term (tertiary) proposed by Dehaene and De Cauter previously discussed.
This intermediary character resides within its very construct quality: heritage can be
interpreted as a space of representation (Lefebvre), simultaneously containing three
‘spatialities’—the conceived, the perceived and the lived—none of which privileged
a priori within this scheme; it can be interpreted as a thirdspace, according to Soja and
supported by Harvey.5 Thus heritage allows an interpretation as hybrid and interme-
diary, from multiple perspectives: as a dynamic process, according to Harvey, that is
not so much opposed to, as he argues, but simultaneously “an aspiration to fix; to pre-
serve; to stabilize […]”—6 a disruption of the evolution and a stagnation commonly
associated with the conservation dogma. Heritage can also be interpreted as a pub-
lic–private hybrid,7 a past–present hybrid, a global public asset and simultaneously
4 Waterton, E., Politics, Policy and the Discourses of Heritage in Britain, Palgrave, London, 2010,
72.
5 Harvey, D., Emerging landscapes of heritage, in The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies,
152–165, ed. Howard, Peter, Thompson, Ian, and Emma Waterton, Routledge, Oxon, 2013,154.
6 Harvey, D., Emerging landscapes…, 152.
7 Setten, Gunhild, Farming the heritage: on the production and construction of a personal and prac-
ticed landscape Heritage, in eds. Olwig, K. R. and Lowenthal, D., The Nature of Cultural Heritage
and the Culture of Natural Heritage: Northern Perspectives on a Contested Patrimony, London:
Routledge, pp. 65–77, apud. Harvey, D., Emerging landscapes of heritage, in The Routledge Com-
panion to Landscape Studies, 152–165, ed. Howard, Peter, Thompson, Ian, and Emma Waterton,
Routledge, Oxon, 2013, 153.
a local ‘identitary’ one,8 “a palimpsestic retrospective memory” and simultaneously

“prospective memory; an unfolding and on-going relationship between past, present
and future”.9 Analysing one of the more recent notions included in the patrimonial
sphere, the landscape, Harvey finds it is, much like the concept of heritage itself, part
of a process of “blurring of organizational dualities—of nature and culture; the past
and present; the global and local; expert and lay; tangible and intangible; stasis and
movement”10 ; inherent to this process, Harvey observes the refocusing of heritage
from the material towards the immaterial and the relational. Thus, in the same manner
the cultural landscape can be interpreted as a manufactured-natural hybrid, between
the two poles identified by Harvey as the constructed-heritage and the preexisting-
natural, heritage as well can be interpreted as hybrid, occupying an intermediate
position, simultaneously a discursive phenomenon and a tangible material entity, in
a constant self-reflexive or self-defining process. This hybridity can also be identified
in Waterton’s binomial pairing: between the cultural product of the dominant polarity
(the dominant discourse) and the cultural product of the secondary polarity (the other,
the excluded) lies in an intermediary space that partially and inaccurately contains
them both, without fully illustrating any of them. The image of the dominant polarity
as it is reflected by this hybrid heritage-construct is itself created through selection, as
Waterton acknowledges, and thus unable to represent it entirely: the selection filters
the dominant cultural product, compiling its revised tailor-made version. More so,
the idea of a heritage as a progressing process implies that the two polarities that
define it are constantly shifting, never stagnant and never having the same delin-
eations or contents; they are constantly defined through processes of negotiation,
transformation and transposition, displaying the functioning of a space much like
the one described in the Foucaultian text. In this interpretation the dominant polarity
constantly claims its visibility and acceptance, recruiting advocates in the very oppo-
site polarity. Citing Byrne, Harvey observes that “such hegemonic practice offers a
fantasy of containment: it might be powerful, but it is never complete, and may
provide critical opportunity”.11 As he further argues focusing on landscape, exactly
through this interpretation heritage as a set of “processes [that] provide the means
through which more nuanced, situated and fluid understandings of landscape can be
championed”.12 Similarly, by retrospectively acknowledging the orderings and the
hierarchies to which it is tributary, the heritage-as-process allows the coagulation of
nuanced and alternative understandings, ultimately leading towards the uncovering
and the recognition of new heritage categories. In fact, the ‘decolonization’ of the
past mainly unfolds within the heritage sphere, allowing easy reading of the scantily
hidden utopian intent. Yet beyond the indisputable benefits of reading the heritage
8 Comer, Douglas C., Archaeology as Global Public Good and Local Identity Good, in Identity and
Heritage. Contemporary Challenges in a Globalized World, 11–26, eds. Peter F. Biehl, Douglas C.
Comer, Christopher Prescott, Hilary A. Soderland, Springer, 2015, 11.
9 Harvey, D., Emerging landscapes…, 155–6.
12 idem.
as a process, and similarly the process of decolonization of the past, there is the
potential to “replace the realities of the spatial and political unities created by the
colonial state” with a return to “imagined traditions”,13 and even the loss of heritage.
The double polarity identified by Waterton would thus reveal a third or inter-
mediary item, and the division between us and the other would cease to be a defi-
nite and fixed one. Depending on the context discussed, the categories adjust their
content—and even within these, new, additional hierarchies and segregations
develop. Thus, the heritage seems to be an assembled reflection, continuously
adjusted through the negotiations of its polarities. This segregationist nature encoun-
tered in some of the historic instances of heritage is a reflection of the social order-
ings specific to those historic stages, these instances being in themselves historic
witnesses. In her analysis, Waterton seems to omit exactly this utopian core intrinsic
to the concept of heritage. Starting with the first endeavours in the field of heritage the
safeguarding and the conveying are mainly focused on the distinctive, the represen-
tative, the exceptional, the unique, etc., in short on the ideal, ultimately showcasing
an interpretation of the idea of value characteristic for specific time frames. The fact
that ideal is itself reassembled, variable, subjective and constantly being rewritten,
contested and undergoing metamorphoses, needs no further argument. By adding the
Foucaultian reading of utopia the heritage endeavour is depicted even clearer: the
attempt to materialize the ideal, specific to its historical time frame, will produce an
image and a discourse inherently imperfect. The result, as Hervey observes, becomes
itself an opportunity and a motif for the subsequent redefining of the ideal and the
restarting of the entire process.
Besides, the author’s discourse is framed within the paradigm of its own time,
and her intervention not only illustrates the contemporary perception of heritage,
but is also instrumental to the renegotiation of the ideal and of the hierarchies of
value that define it. Waterton considers that heritage is created through discourse
alone, as something that “emerges from the discursive labour that both manufactures,
and is manufactured by, [an] imaginative process.”14 and not the built object (the
monument, the site) onto which the doctrinal texts are restrictively focused. These
two—the material and the discourse—are not only interconnected but, as the history
of conservation indicates, also interdependent; because of its capacity to imprint and
record—both physically, within its material expression, and symbolically, imprinting
itself within the perception of the community—the built object is the very element
disputed, that focuses and sustains all the official and subordinate discourses.
By pushing the material expression in the background, and even discarding it
entirely, as inferior to the discourse and the network of interrelations—the essen-
tially human mnemonic impulse itself is denied, along with its mechanisms. Or this
very impulse, to set something in memory, is if not entirely the rationale of the built
object, the very rationale for the existence of the heritage built object. The monumen-
tal object displays it ostentatiously, while the minor, the everyday and subordinate
13 Dülffer, Jost, Frey, Marc, Introduction în Elites and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century, ed.
Jost Dülffer, Marc Frey, Palgrave Macmillan, Londra, 2011, 3–4.

14 Waterton, E., 98.
built object, whose mnemonic relations are minor and generally unofficial as well,
seeks to obtain it through the heritage protected status. The consequence of averting
the focus from the material expression is the embrittlement of that network of adher-
ence points that coagulate and define identities—whether dominant or dominated,
collective or individual, etc.—and ultimately the dilution of the feeling of belong-
ing and of the genius loci. The criticism directed towards heritage as an essentially
material category, invokes in fact a focusing on the living aspect of communities’
everyday relations, advocating for a more plural and democratic approach15 ; despite
this, the numerous cases of disintegration, degradation and deliberate destruction of
the built heritage bring forward again and again the interdependence of the discourse
and the material. Their interdependence becomes more obvious especially when in
moments of crisis or tension that bring forward identities, less visible, subordinate
or even excluded until then.16 Yet how strong are the identities and the sentiment
of belonging of some communities when the material network that anchors them
disappears? Dushkina raises this question in connection with the issue of authen-
ticity, exemplified through the reconstruction of the UNESCO heritage sites where,
she argues, “the possibilities of identity are [to a great extent] overestimated”.17
Moreover, as previously discussed in this paper, this approach that minimizes the
importance of the material over the one of the discourse, usually translates as a ten-
dency for laxity in regard to conservation, introducing a potential for alteration and
adjusting of the material object in the name of organic evolution (even with the risk
of losing the very witnesses of the involved identities); these are paired with the
commodification and the unsustainable exploitation of the heritage object, as it is
gradually made vulnerable to economic and political interests. Yet, the conservative
attitude remains a fixed mark, and although varying its approaches and expressions,
maintains its official purpose: “to preserve as much as possible the historic, cultural
and artistic authenticity of monuments and sites in their regional context and in inter-
action with their contemporary use and meaning and generally with the social values
of today”.18
15 for more see Nigel Walter and Denis Cosgrove.

16 One such excluded community, contested as well as contesting, is the graffiti artists’ community;
the reaction of the targeted community as well as that of a sympathizing public are triggered when
opposed to the (initial) official stance, intending to eliminate the physical identitary expression; by
means of this conflict, the material expression has managed to gain visibility, even if still partial
and contested; more recently it has even gained an official recognition.
17 Dushkina, Natalia, Historic Reconstruction: Prospects for Heritage Preservation or Metamor-
phoses of Theory?, in Conserving the Authentic: essays in honour of Jukka Jokilehto, 83–94, ed.
Nicholas Stanley-Price, Joseph King, ICCROM Conservation Studies 10, ICCROM International
Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, ISBN 978-92-9077-
220-0, Rome, 2009, 29.
18 Schadler-Saub, Ursula, Preserving tangible and intangible values. Some remarks on theory and
practice in conservation and restoration and the education of conservators in Europe, in Conservation
Turn—Return to Conservation. Tolerance for Change, Proceedings of the International Conference
of the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee for the Theory and Philosophy of Conservation
and Restoration, 5–9 May, 2010, Prague, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic, 3–6 March, 2011, Flo-
Thus, taking into account all of these approaches with different viewpoints, the
concept of heritage reveals itself to be of a hybrid nature, its material form inextricably
connected to the immaterial discourse that defines, coagulates and activates it. The
numerous actors involved, the multiple readings of the concept of heritage as well
as the different roles in which it is cast, all contribute to the juxtaposition of various
layers of meaning and the proliferation of the relations through which heritage is
connected to its contexts. Despite this, the significations remain inevitably attached
to the signifier, even in the reading of heritage as an immediate unstable.19 The
significations coexist or compete, or they are juxtaposed as the concept is constantly
redefined, yet they always remain attached to the material built object; the existence
of the material allows the construction of its significations. In this interpretation, the
conservation endeavour, accused of introducing normative measures and freezing of
the heritage object, reveals itself to be the mere guarantee for the continued existence
and further creation of different readings. The utopian nature of the heritage concept
also entails that it inevitably conveys the potential for hijacking, misinterpretation
and misusing, despite its overall positive endeavour.
Although initially ignored, the built context of the monument has gradually
earned its recognition through multiple official documents (charters, recommenda-
tions and other doctrinarian texts)—not only as an attribute and constituent part of
the monument but also in itself, as a complex heritage object and as a fertile source
of knowledge. The subsequent discovery of its numerous and varied manifestations
lead to the formulation of several definitions and the gradual extension of its area
of interest. This progression can be easily observed in the evolution of attitudes
towards the built context—from its understanding as a “parasitic” form from which
the monument must be set free, to the notion of cultural landscape which encom-
passes—along with the monument—its entire milieu: the built, the natural and even
the intangible coordinates.
These changes in the understanding of the built context, now endowed with her-
itage value, outline a new perspective. The context is no longer considered a static
attribute, but a set of connections (social, economic, spiritual, psychological, sym-
bolic, etc.) that involve different players/actors and which, in turn, assume diverse
roles—all of which, I argue, are reflected in the built expression. These connections
or relations are dynamic and influence not only the layers of significance carried by
the apparently “static” built form, but also the way in which these are connected to
it. Furthermore, due to this reevaluation of the context’s value, the monument no
longer belongs exclusively to the dominant order; numerous other players, initially
ignored and considered inferior or subordinate, are acknowledged as entities capable
rence, pp. 111–121, eds. Wilfred Lipp, Josef Stulc, Boguslaw Szmygin, Simone Giometti, Editzioni
Polistampa, Florence, 2012, 114.
19 One such example is proposed by Harvey: the Jurassic Coast Heritage Site, Great Britain, [defined]
“not as a ‘stable site’, but as an eroding cliff line, which must be allowed to continue eroding for any
heritage value to be recognized would seem to herald a fresh approach to notions of stability; we must
preserve the dynamic processes of destruction and wholesale change. In this case, ‘conservation’
means the celebration of the ephemeral—even the very bounds of the ‘site’ will change with each
tide and winter storm.”, Harvey, D., Emerging landscapes…, 159.
of generating value and implicitly a cultural heritage of the same caliber. The hierar-
chized and contrasted relation between different historical typologies of heritage—as
exemplified by the process of discernment and selection of value in the eighteenth
century, which positioned antiquity as opposing and excluding of other cultural prod-
ucts, inferior because of their appurtenance to other historical styles, époques, social
classes, ethnicities, religions or social groups, regional typologies, etc.—is gradu-
ally levelled, each earning its own recognition and visibility. Through the intrinsic
recognition of these categories as heritage, they are considered as equally valuable
and automatically become less contrasting, contradicting or incompatible, within
the framework of protective policies and even in the eyes of the beholder (the local,
the tourist or “heritage consumer” and in the eyes of the regular and direct user). This
levelling and unifying effect can be argued through the coordinate of time—the accu-
mulated (temporal) distance between the object(s) and the users; however, one must
also take into account the tangible coordinate: the deliberate, sometimes beautifying,
interventions that fall in the stylistic restoration category—an ambiguous technique
that levels contrasting expressions within the same object, not so much by tempering
with the value grid and the assignment of meaning, but with the annulment of the
hierarchy: elements that are considered inferior are eliminated and the overall image
of the object unified and reshaped.
The minor built heritage—generally defined as the common everyday built envi-
ronment, ordinary and generally unremarkable, and the more modest relative to the
major heritage—corresponds to the notion of ‘monument context’. This built fabric
serves as background, even décor, which completes and supports the significance
or message that the monument conveys. While this context acquires its recognition
and while the secondary narratives, players and their cultural products, become more
visible (and are perceived as valuable), the label and significance of the minor title
changes. One such textbook evolution belongs to the rural vernacular built context,
which often accompanies a monument with religious, mixt-religious or aristocratic
residential nature.
The vernacular represents one of the heritage typologies that have migrated from
the unrecognized, to the minor, finally to be accepted as an independent heritage
category. Nonetheless, the heritage status implies a selection process: the screening
of a very diverse collection of built objects, most of which defined by their ordi-
nary, everyday and extremely functional architectural expression, un-exceptional in
comparison to the “major monuments”, and profoundly anchored in their environ-
ment. This selection process has had a generally positive impact, safeguarding a great
number of vulnerable built objects—with unknown or multiple authors, of acquired
local historical interest, one of a kind objects, or bearing technical and aesthetical
value—yet many of which pertaining to the category of intentional monuments, as
identified by Reigl. From unacknowledged en masse, the vernacular acquires her-
itage value and along with it new internal hierarchies. As the case of any selection
process, there was a negative impact, especially obvious in the case of the common
built objects. These make up most of the vernacular built fabric, characterized by
homogeneity for larger territories, repetitiveness, an easily interchangeable utilitar-
ian profile (or adaptability) and by their informal character. The selection process
normally separates that which is considered peculiar, exceptional and unique, in one
word the distinct: the otherness of the object in relation to its category/family. The
representative character has thus remained the only criteria allowing access to pro-
tection for the everyday vernacular. Subsequently, one large part of this common built
fabric has been denied the protected status, this exclusion being partially motivated
by one of the vernacular’s dominant characteristics: its adaptability. Furthermore,
the charter for the acknowledgment and protection of vernacular architecture intro-
duced a non-interventionist approach, oriented against museification and in favour of
a natural, organic evolution of the traditional uses and practices that allow the gradual
alteration of the built object. This official approach also influenced the general attitude
towards the vernacular product, inevitably allowing its alteration even while under
heritage protection; the tolerance towards the alteration is still overwhelmingly the
prevalent attitude in the case of the unclassified/unprotected vernacular. According
to the charter’s text, the vernacular architecture must be considered as “a continuing
process including necessary changes and continuous adaptations as a response to
social and environmental constraints”.20 Unintentionally, this approach led to the
creation of a new category: the post-vernacular.21 This label has been proposed in
order to facilitate the perception of the dominant character of this category, consisting
of ordinary built fabric or objects, common or un-exceptional, that have not been
protected and that have been rejected in the initial selection process; this built fabric
has evolved and gradually adapted to its context without entirely losing its vernac-
ular characteristics, and thus becoming a hybrid. This category appears to be other
in relation to its original source (the vernacular) yet, through its inherited vernacular
features, it is more so in relation to its contemporary, already strongly contrasting
context, undergoing a continuous transformation process. The post-vernacular can
be rightly considered as an organic evolution phase of the vernacular; it has accu-
mulated historical value, in some cases even esthetical value, but most importantly
it has acquired documentary value.
Through this research the post-vernacular has been identified as a new category of
potentially valuable built fabric, exemplified in the Romanian space, so far undocu-
mented and not analysed. The identification of this hybrid has widened this research,
from the focus on the acknowledged heritage fabric (such as the particular case
of hybridization22 of a heritage object), to the inclusion of the non-heritage fabric
as a potential source of heritage value. It also contributed to the consolidation of
20 Charter on the Built Vernacular Heritage (1999) ratified by the ICOMOS 12th General Assembly,
in Mexico, October 1999, 1.

21 This term is proposed by this research to identify the evolution phase(s) of the unprotected
vernacular, or its altered instances that still maintain recognizable vernacular features.
22 The research has observed the peculiar case of adjacent churches, manifested in a series of
Transylvanian wooden churches, where a “doubling” of the sacred space was noted, as a direct effect
of the introduction of the heritage status. Spânu, Smaranda, The Heterotopic Nature of the Built
Heritage. The Sacred Wooden Architecture of Transylvania and Its Practices, Part 3: Spirituality and
Decay in Architecture, in Time and Transformation in Architecture, Series: At the Interface/Probing
the Boundaries, Volume: 100, Editor: Tuuli Lähdesmäki, Brill Rodopi, Publication Date: 30 August
2018, ISBN: 978-90-04-37679-3.
notions such as heterotopic functioning and heterotopic profile. Based on this case,
an effort was made to clarify and set an analysis structure able to identify not only the
alterity, the hybrid character in heterotopic terms, but also an overlooked heritage
potential. With the aim of validating this theory, a series of Transylvanian villages
was analyzed23 in order to identify the post-vernacular, its nature and function as a
hybrid unprotected type of built fabric. In continuation, the heterotopic principles are
argued based on the parallel discussion of the post-vernacular fabric and the heritage
protected vernacular.
The main alterity source of the post-vernacular can be found in the rapid develop-
ment of its context and, consequently, in its response to it: a process of isolation. Its
adaptive nature inherited from the vernacular—otherwise, a positive trait that con-
tributed to its endurance well into contemporary stages—can be translated into both
openness and vulnerability in the face of change, or as a propensity for transforma-
tion and ultimately loss. The otherness of the built object is thus assembled based on
a narrative of destruction or danger.24 This previously ignored built fabric endures
a rapid process of deterioration and disintegration and, as it is radically modified or
even replaced, it remains as isolated fragments that cannot keep up with the transfor-
mation of their context, subsequently becoming contrasting enclaves. This fabric’s
obsolete materiality becomes a symbol of the break with the past. Thereby, the poten-
tial value of the object manifests under the threat of the object’s extinction—a not
at all unusual process both for material heritage and for immaterial heritage—as
observed by Arrhenius.25 Furthermore, the process of selection and distinction of
the built object based on its vulnerability in the face of destruction described by
Arrhenius is, in fact, contributes to the construction of the object’s alterity.
This analysis proposes the use of the heterotopic concept based on Foucault’s
definition, as a ‘tool’ for better understanding this particular type of places and the
establishment of the heritage significance investment process; in other words, this
concept can be used as a tool for recognizing heritage potential by analysing the alter-
ity coordinates of the built object. The otherness of the object (read within its context)
signals a heritage potential under the guise of heterotopic functioning. According to
Foucault’s definition, heterotopic spaces are “relation with all the other sites, but in
23 The case study proposes a comparative analysis for a series of villages from the peri-urban zones
of Cluj-Napoca, and additionally a similar, cross-county comparative analysis between the villages
Alba county and Cluj County. Spânu, S., The Landscape under Urban Pressure: the peri-urban area
of Cluj, in: Reflections on Cultural Heritage Theories and Practices, Garant Publishing, Antwerp,
Belgium, 2016.
24 The destruction narrative is discussed by Arrhenius, T., The Fragile Monument, Blackdog Pub-
lishing 2012; for Linck this destruction narrative surfaces as a main reason for identifying value
and for triggering the heritageization process: “Le patrimoine se révèle à nous dès lors qu’il est
menace, qu’il change et que notre rapport aux choses, au idées, à notre corps, à la nature et aux
autres hommes s’en trouve affecté.), Linck, Thierry, Économie et patrimonialisation, Développe-
ment durable et territoires online, Vol. 3, nr. 3/Décembre 2012, online since 11.12.2012, paragraph
6, http://developpementdurable.revues.org/9506, accessed on 06.06.2015, https://doi.org/10.4000/
developpementdurable.9506.
25 Arrhenius, Thordis, The Fragile Monument, on Conservation and Modernity, London, Blackdog
Publishing, 2012, 1–8.

such a way as to suspend, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to
designate, mirror, or reflect”.26 The heterotopic space is perceived as a paradoxical
site, one that opposes the dominant order of society (or norm, normality) but at the
same time contributes to its fabrication and proliferation; the heterotopic space is not
found outside society or of dominant order, completely severed from it, but exist as
an integral part of it, continuously connected through an active and varied network.
Heterotopia describes a relational system, opposed to a static, closed or complete one
in spite of the physical features or the materiality that can easily be identified in Fou-
cault’s heterotopic principles (each one being attached to an architectural programme
with its own set of physical coordinates—the cemetery, jail, school, etc.). These het-
erotopic spaces must be thus understood through the relation with their context and
amongst themselves: they mirror, reverse, distort, compensate or react critically and
thus they influence and inform their own (present) context. The examples given by
Foucault also describe a wide array of spatial typologies that are contradicting and
incompatible (cultural, institutional, discursive, etc.). Based on the definitions of
heterotopia proposed by Foucault and Hetherington,27 this research argues that the
built object can develop a heterotopic character through its functioning, its practices
and through its material coordinates; as previously argued, the heterotopic character
of a given space is conditioned by the juxtaposition of three features: the material
substance of the space, the practice (continuous, semi-continuous or reoccurring
processes) or the event (singular occurrence) and the context. The heterotopic char-
acter is simultaneously bound to the place, to the social and to the temporality: as
previously argued, if these relations are severed or missing then the heterotopic char-
acter ceases to exist or retracts to a state of potentiality. While Hetherington rejects
entirely the idea that this heterotopic character can derive from the built object (rather
focusing his analysis the social coordinates), Foucault’s illustrations of heterotopia
reveal exactly this connection, the dormant influence of specific physical character-
istics on the heterotopic functioning of a space—an argument that is also supported
and developed through this research.
As argued before, the built object can harbour heterotopic potential through its
physical and spatial features, because it inherently bears the coding of the specific
social ordering that had shaped it. The previous analysis of the utopian project and
its multiple expressions support this argument (see Chap. 4); imagined as embodi-
ments of perfect and ideal worlds (of equality, justice, science, happiness, etc.), the
fortresses, towns and architectures modelled after utopian ‘blueprints’ reveal them-
selves, at a retrospective glance, as devices that condense not only the social (real)
ordering within which they were imagined—addressing it critically—but also the
26 Dehaene, M. and De Cauter, L. (eds.) 2008 Heterotopia and the City, (London and New York:
Routledge 2008), 178.

27 Hetherington defines heterotopies as spaces whose very “presence either provides an unsettling
of spatial and social relations or alternative representation of spatial and social relation”; therefore
the heterotopic space can be something without, something which lacks one or more coordinates
(that differ in relation with the norm of a certain culture or between cultures), can be something
excessive or discrepant, a hybrid combination of the discrepant. Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands
of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering, Routledge, London/New York, 2002, 8.
ideal ordering (imagined and intangible)—whose source and limits are also defined
by the social ordering that ultimately acts as context for the utopian projection. These
material expressions appear to be even more interesting since they intend to compress,
within very specific and clear boundaries, an entire universe, overloading in the pro-
cess the capacity of the built object to record and convey meaning (and thus to mould).
These materialized utopias were generally treated and analysed as exceptional cas-
es—maybe precisely because of their all-encompassing and absolute ‘will to order’,
wholly and confidently imprinted in the built form, yet simultaneously bound by its
(de)limited language. As a chronological analysis of the utopian project reveals, the
faith in the capacities of the built form dilutes and the utopian projection gains addi-
tional prescriptions—or normative orderings involving the practices. Therefore, the
material form continues to be necessary but not sufficient to the utopian demarche,
for it must be practiced in a specific way. I argue that a space can have a heterotopic
functioning only when the previously indicated coordinates—the physical form (the
material), the practice or the event (the introduction of a catalyst or activation in
relation to the context)—become juxtaposed within a specific conformation of its
context.
Both the built object and the social order it represents, imprinted in a physical
form, are defined through the relationships with their context; the space can become
other in relation to its transforming context, regardless to its preexisting alterity, be
it deliberately or unintentionally created. For the built object deliberately created as
other one must consider its initial source, in relation to the dominant ordering: as
either stemming from it, from within, and tolerated despite its opposing character,
or in opposition and excluded.
The built object whose alterity is deliberate, appearing as an emergence of the
dominant ordering, is generally created as a privileged space, having an alternative
ordering which is different and contrasting in rapport with its context; this order-
ing implies a certain degree of (organic) protection within and from the community
where it is formed. These are generally illustrative embodiments (religious or power
spaces), deliberately designed to express through their alterity an ideal (the prestige
of the creator/owner/group, military of financial strength, epitome of beauty, etc.).
They almost always require a specific functioning, different from their context, as
well as distinct practices governed by rules, all mirrored in the object’s temporality
(the prescribed intervals of time for certain practices, specific progressions, intervals,
etc.). The alterity of these spaces can also concentrate “negative attention” that, in
most cases, leads to aggression towards and a degrading of the physical form, in
some extreme cases escalating to its complete destruction, precisely because of its
corporeality and its ability to convey meaning. However, based on the intuitive or
organically developed protection—an instinctive acknowledgment of the values and
the imprinted meaning—these spaces deliberately created as other are usually the
first ones to be officially recognized and labelled as heritage. These built objects
whose alterity is deliberate, which either possess ab initio or organically develop
heterotopic coordinates. The protected status that is subsequently acquired acts as
a secondary heterotopic layer: it legitimizes the space’s existent alterity and simul-
taneously introduces a protective alternative ordering—with a direct impact on the
physical state of the built object, its functioning and its accepted practices (access
limitations or conditioning, practice norming, certain use specifications, etc.).
However, the built object can also become other in time, chiefly in relation to its
context and implicitly through practices. This is the case of the common or everyday
built fabric—one case being that of the vernacular and post-vernacular discussed
in this research; generally, the common built fabric is defined by its functionality
and, unprivileged through its creation, becomes valuable in time, by accumulating
meaning and historical durée. For this category, the acknowledgement of its alterity
occurs as an event, one that introduces an alternative functioning (radically alter-
ing its initial one) as well as new practices. This is the case of minor heritage—or
the common built object whose value/values are accumulated in time, subsequently
to the process of creation/construction—and in particular in the case of the minor
heritage found in rural areas. The alterity of this minor heritage is built through
contextual relations: the object becomes other through the transformation of its con-
text, the alteration, dilution and loss of the attached traditional practices, through
degradation, abandonment, through obsolescence or through the impact of an event.
These spaces are imbued with meaning outside of their original context and in a
retrospective manner; most often they acquire value as consequence of their degra-
dation and disintegration—through a narrative of destruction. A series of heterotopic
coordinates, such as the spatial and temporal enclave, the alternative functioning, the
mirror function etc., can be identified in these built spaces, marking the object’s alter-
ity as well as announcing their potential value; this potential can either be legitimized
through the heritage status, either it can evolve into a normalizing process—through
which the alterity of the object disintegrates while the object is assimilated into, or
becomes analog to its context. Such an alterity legitimization process, similar to the
official heritage one and often preceding it, can also assume a semi-organic form:
the community or individual who owns the object shifts its perspective towards it,
deeming it worthy for conservation, a process that in some cases is followed by the
‘external’ acknowledgement through the heritage status. This process is read as “her-
itageification”; the term is initially derived from the French patrimonialization and
is generally understood as a mise en patrimoine, relating to performativity, staging
and the assumption of a role. Heritageification is also a “socio-spatial process, non-
exempt of ideological selections”.28 Skounti understands it as “the process by which
cultural or natural components become, at a moment of the history of human soci-
eties, heritage elements worth safeguarding and valorising for the benefit of present
and future generations alike”29 ; for Linck even the “commodification device”, as a
“collective appropriation” method, is an integral part of this heritageification pro-
28 Duchêne, François, Les anciennes cites ouvrières, entre patrimonialisation et normalisation

in Habiter le patrimoine: Enjeux, approches, vécu Presses universitaires de Rennes, Rennes,
2005, paragraph 3, accessed on 6 June 2014, http://books.openedition.org/pur/2288, ISBN:
9782753526754. Original quote: “la patrimonialisation est bien un processus sociospatial, non
exempt de choix idéologiques”.
29 Ahmed Skounti, ‘De la patrimonialisation. Comment et quand les choses deviennent-elles des
patrimoines?’, Hesperis-Tamuda, Vol. XLV, 2010, 19.

cess.30 By analysing the implications of the process, Faurie observes its positive
potential—heritageification read not only as a ‘guarantee of inviolability of her-
itage’31 but also as a means of acquiring power (visibility) by the involved under or
unrepresented local communities, as well as its negative impact—heritageification
used as a “pretext for [the creation of] a sometimes antidemocratic hierarchy of
development priorities and leading to an inequitable repartition of investments and
resources allocated to management”,32 or paradoxically to the very vulnerability of
heritage.33
With an explanatory role, it is worth mentioning a closely related term of mon-
umentification. Although often considered as an equivalent, it identifies a different
process; this term is derived from the actual object (monument) and has acquired
a derogatory nuance, implying a disguised narrative of destruction (Arrhenius);
Kázemér Kovács identifies this process as “the tendency to bestow memorial value
to almost any creation of the human civilization of the past” under the pressure of its
degradation, respectively, the tendency to “identify a historic monument in almost
any artefact whose fabrication technology has become obsolete”34 ; the long-term
effects engage both the object itself and heritage as an ‘all-encompassing archive’,
leading to its devaluation. The motivations behind this monumentification are often
historically diagnosed, as relating to the industrialization phenomenon and to major
conflicts, but also identified in the present, as part of the globalization or the dein-
dustrialization processes—in both cases associated to passéisme or nostalgia.
The built object has the ability to accumulate and juxtapose multiple layers of
meaning—it documents and showcases the continuous transformations of its con-
text, often strongly branded in its material form and therefore acting as a mnemonic
device. Its alterity—comprised as difference, distinction, contrast or incongruity—-
can, therefore, manifest itself both in relation to its context and in relation with the
30 Linck, Thierry, Economie et patrimonialisation, Développement durable et territoires online, Vol.
3, nr. 3/December 2012, online since 11.12.2012, paragraphe 29, http://developpementdurable.

revues.org/9506, accessed 06 June 2015, https://doi.org/10.4000/developpementdurable.9506.
31 “[…]une garantie d’inviolabilité des héritages […]”, Faurie, Mathias, Impacts et limites de la
patrimonialisation à Ouvéa (Nouvelle-Calédonie), Le Journal de la Société des Océanistes online,

132/1er semestre 2011, paragraphe 46, 47, online since 30 June 2014, accessed on 06 June 2015,
http://jso.revues.org/6293, 118.
32 Faurie, Mathias, Impacts et limites de la patrimonialisation à Ouvéa (Nouvelle-Calédonie), Le
Journal de la Société des Océanistes online, 132/1er semestre 2011, paragraphe 46, 47, online
since 30 June 2014, accessed on 06 June 2015, http://jso.revues.org/6293, 118, original quote:
“La patrimonialisation peut servir de prétexte à une hiérarchisation parfois antidémocratique des
priorités de développement et conduire à une répartition inégale des investissements et des moyens
accordés à la gestion.”
33 Heritageification, understood as mise en patrimoine, as positioning on a map or ‘integration in the
world’ and openness to the outside, with negative impact (tourism and development) on the material
and immaterial heritage. Grenier, Christophe, La patrimonialisation comme mode d’adaptation
géographique: Galápagos et île de Pâques. In: Patrimoines naturels au Sud: Territoires, identités et
stratégies locales, IRD Éditions, Montpellier, 2005 accessed July 2014, http://books.openedition.
org/irdeditions/4082, ISBN 9782709918206.
34 Kazemer Kovacs, The Time of the Historical Monument, Paideia, Bucharest, 2003, 128–129.
initial/original or previous “self” of the object—while the built object accumulates

multiple layers of meaning, incompatible and contradictory. The contemporary her-
itage perspective and the heritage consecration act—that mise en patrimoine as a way
to confer meaning, conducted in the present, oriented towards the past and projected
into the future, can be read as the addition of a new layer: that of the heritage signif-
icance. This layer of meaning is projected upon the object as final layer, albeit not a
static one, that intervenes and transforms the object through the norming of its use,
in an attempt to slow down its inevitable destructive evolution. The proposed phrase
requires clarification, its meaning being vulnerable to misinterpretation, and veering
the preservation effort towards museification; the consecration of heritage value and
the legitimization through the protective status represent a turning point in the life of
a (built) object—whether if it is read as a signification endowment act in the present,
as a revelation/acknowledgement of values, or as the assuming of an inheritance—-
more accurately a moment beyond which the object irreversibly becomes other, when
compared to its former (officially unprotected) self and when considered within its
context. The layer of heritage signification accompanies the object from now on, it
is intimately linked to its ‘becomings’, balancing, determining, norming and evalu-
ating them. The comprehensive conservation of the original substance remains the
main desiderata of preservation, despite the constant renegotiation and redefining
of the essential notions of the conservation and restoration theory and philosophy.
From this point of view, the heritage layer is ultimate or final because it deliber-
ately targets the interruption of the degradation processes, the end of the natural
decomposing of the object’s substance—essentially, a utopian endeavour. While this
finality is indeed pursued, it is also acknowledged and accepted as unattainable. Nev-
ertheless, one must constantly recall the inherent purpose of this endeavour: keeping
the safeguarded object in use, relevant and legible, active even when it is devoid
of its initial practice and, perhaps most important, alive in the consciousness of the
society. Conservation is therefore not a purpose in itself, not even for the technical
practice (the actual intervention); it can be likened to maintenance processes without
whom the correct functioning of the device is not possible. The heritage object-
device (be it mnemonic, ‘identitary’, educational—or other functions it can fulfil) is
acknowledged as such through its status. Its functioning, practices, perception are
(according to the conservationist perspective) reordered once the statute is given, the
object becoming (re)hierarchized and governed by norms. But to what extent can this
final layer of heritage meaning be projected? Up to the inevitable deterioration of
the object—to the erosion of its coordinates that convey meaning, eventually losing
its values and, in the end its very purpose (as heritage) or, in other words, when it
becomes normalized (the same), like any other everyday object; or until its complete
physical disappearance and the erasure of any traces of its existence. Either contested
or celebrated as successes some heritage reconstruction projects demonstrate that this
layer of meaning can sometimes extend even beyond the object’s annihilation. Once
the object’s alterity is acknowledged, it will accompany it and norm, shape, influ-
ence and dictate all of its other becomings—at least according to the conservationist
intent.
Therefore, the introduction of heritage status can be understood both as an event

and as a practice, both acknowledging the alterity in the built object and endowing
it with a secondary layer of alterity, as well as aiming to stop its natural progres-
sion. If an organically developed heterotopic functioning already exists (when the
object is deliberately built as other and perceived/practiced as such), or if the het-
erotopic functioning is temporarily acquired, then the protected status stabilizes and
legitimizes the heterotopic functioning. The built object, therefore, becomes other
yet also included (same as), as an equal part, a valuable fragment of a bigger her-
itage ‘body’; the object thus acquires a paradoxical functioning: it is simultaneously
other, different and worthy of safeguarding and transmitted, and same, assimilated
and normalized.
5.2 Heritage as a Heterotopic Space
In a contemporary reading, the heritage status emerges as a hallmark of an ideal,

revealing the utopian nature of the conservationist intention. Heritage appears as
a conceptual space that allows the coexistence of conflicting narratives—conveyed
through different layers of meaning, bestowed by various involved actors—within
a single seemingly neutral medium. This delicately ‘manufactured’ neutral medium
within which each narrative is (ideally) assigned visibility, importance, values, etc.
is constructed in the name of objectivity and truth, as it is partially revealed in
the concept of authenticity. The contradictory nature of the attached significations
is seemingly resolved, and their juxtaposition becomes possible, yet only under
the aegis of the heritage status. Within this idealized conceptual space all material
heritage spaces, all narratives and all involved actors become equally valuable and
visible. In this intentional neutral character lies the utopian encoding. As increasingly
more heritage categories are officially acknowledged, this egalitarian perspective
becomes even more obvious.
The same egalitarian aspiration also fuels the discussion regarding the UNESCO
listing, and the establishment of the notion of outstanding universal value (OUV),
previously discussed. This democratic instance of heritage is conceptualized and
moderated through a theoretical apparatus—charters, recommendations and other
doctrinaire texts—assembled and applied by a complex and hierarchized structure of
institutional bodies—governmental or non-governmental organizations, committees
and councils, research institutes, universities, etc. The utopian intention, although
positive, is susceptible and to some extent even predestined to being diverted, through
its very nature; its politicization, the influence of economic interests, the eurocen-
trism of the previous or historic heritage ordering (and not only), have all lead to
the questioning of the contemporary heritage ordering as a whole and inherently of
its preservationist ideal. As observed by Michael Petzet, ex-director of ICOMOS
(1999–08), the challenging of this preservationist ideal in the name of lack of tol-
erance towards change is, in fact, a direct attack on the “fundamental ideology” of
the international organization and, more alarming, on the concept of heritage; in Pet-
5.2 Heritage as a Heterotopic Space 403
zet’s opinion, this rebuttal violates one of the fundamental articles of the ICOMOS
statutes: “ ICOMOS shall be the international organization concerned with furthering
the conservation, protection, rehabilitation and enhancement of monuments, groups
of buildings and sites on the international level”,35 inherently bringing into questions
the very existence of the organization. Moreover, this contesting viewpoint incon-
siderately estimates the preservationist ideal as equal with ideological propaganda,
even if the initially assumed role of the organization (and ultimately the purpose of
the heritage concept) is to conserve—defined as “preserving, not altering or destroy-
ing”,36 and respectively, not as mediating or managing processes of change, a path
with immense negative potential for the heritage object. This challenging of the
initial structures, although necessary against stagnation, grants the discourse a rela-
tive and ambiguous character, observed by Petzet in the formulations of the newer
texts such as the Burra charter (although here the approach is explained to an extent
by the particular coordinates of the Australian heritage and its colonial past). The
proposed shift from ‘monuments, ensembles and sites’ to the more encompassing
notion of ‘place’ creates ambiguity: the boundaries of the object to be conserved
and its coordinates that carry its values become very difficult and even impossible
to identify. This ‘widening’ the protected physical space also creates the problem of
‘protection intensities’: while the monument has a buffer protection area, function-
ing as two defined and interdependent protection intensities, the concept of place
instantly reveals its potential of margin-dissolution, or the introduction of a gradient
of protection. Although the construction of the concept of heritage place, much like
the heritage landscape concept, showcases an openness towards the plurality of her-
itage, of diversity of identities and of their respective cultural expressions—therefore
an essentially positive route (egalitarian, democratic)—it paradoxically makes the
heritage object more vulnerable, especially when considered alongside the interpre-
tation of preservation as management of change. Furthermore, even, it introduces
a polarization—demonizing of conservation as freezing, institutionalizing, regress-
ing, hindrance of evolution versus management of change-mediation, streamlined
progress and evolution—which in itself contradicts the essence of conservation,
which echoes the neoliberal tendencies beyond the discourse. The relativity of val-
ues (these are defined as “in continuous flux”), demonization of the Eurocentric
perspective (although “the respect for the special traditions of all world regions also
applies to the great European tradition of conservation, which should not be dis-
35 Petzet, Michael, Conservation/Preservation: Limits of Change, in Conservation Turn—Return to

Conservation. Tolerance for Change. Limits for Change, Proceedings of the International Confer-
ence of the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee for the Theory and Philosophy of Conser-
vation and Restoration, 5–9 May 2010, Prague, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic, 3–6 March 2011,
Florence, 53–56, eds. Wilfred Lipp, Josef Stulc, Boguslaw Szmygin, Simone Giometti, Editzioni
36 Petzet, M., Conservation or managing change? In Conservation Turn—Return to Conservation.
Tolerance for Change. Limits for Change, Proceedings of the International Conference of the
ICOMOS International Scientific Committee for the Theory and Philosophy of Conservation and
Restoration, 5–9 May 2010, Prague, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic, 3–6 March 2011, Florence,
53–56, eds. Wilfred Lipp, Josef Stulc, Boguslaw Szmygin, Simone Giometti, Editzioni Polistampa,
Florence, 2012, 53.
criminated against on the basis of ‘old Europe’ attitudes”),37 the severe definition
of conservation as being freezing, elimination of the expert/specialist from the her-
itage equation in favour of a community and of multiple interested parties—weakly
defined and not necessarily motivated to safeguard the heritage, most especially vul-
nerable to the financial argument of greater economic interests—all of these actually
represent an unsafe transfer of responsibilities and of the “right” to identify values,
leaving the heritage without protection and at the judgement of non-preservationist
interests. This neoliberal and disputing measure appears even more so transparent
whilst the degradation, alteration and losses suffered by the heritage are immense and
in crescendo. The request to replace conservation with a management of change does
not so much reflect the desire of transparency of different orderings (that don’t define
in the same way time, preservation, significance, authenticity, etc.), but the proce-
dure to replace the protectionist ordering with a neoliberal one in name of those
other perspectives. But the conservation endeavour—nonetheless under immense
pressure—remains (and must continue to do so) focused on the preservation of her-
itage; the alteration of these major international organizations into subservients of
the economic interests would dilute and make relative the aim of conservation. If the
values are fluctuant and the heritage object must be aided to accommodate change,
then this whole neoliberal and disputing measure is nothing more than a normaliza-
tion, an annulment of the heritage object’s alterity and an assimilation of the object
in its non-heritage context.
The elusive and egalitarian utopian character of heritage perspective was demon-
strated by the very materiality of the built object that must be conserved. Values
are assigned hierarchically and the conflict between narratives cannot always be
resolved—as proven by the difficulties of restorative interventions encountered in
the case of a heritage object with multiple pictorial layers, or of a multilayered
ensemble or multicultural city.
Despite this, the heritage status does not annul and should not annul the conflictual
narratives as these constitute most of the heritage object’s nature. Instead, it follows
the conservation of the material form and of all involved identities along with their
narratives and relations, reflecting as accurate as possible their contrasting hierarchi-
cal values—authentic in physical shape just like in the conceptual paradigm (beliefs,
traditions, self-identification, etc.). When multiple narratives are attached to the same
object (as is often the case), each of whom competing for visibility and urging its own
reading of the “truth”, then the heritage status becomes an arena for negotiations, a
conflictual or crisis space, contradicting even the initially assumed neutral utopian
stance. This is built on absolute values like truth, authenticity, equality—assuming as
a duty not only protection and conservation, but also the true and correct depiction
and illustration of all these multiple narratives. Furthermore, when such a narrative
disappears (as consequence to the expansion and domination of another narrative) ,
the heritage status assumes its support and artificially keep it alive within the heritage
object. Thereby, the heritage status maintains and feeds—paradoxically—that very
conflicting relation through its ‘identitary’ character.
37 Petzet, M., Conservation of managing change?, 55.

5.2 Heritage as a Heterotopic Space 405
However, this conceptual instance that idealizes the heritage—guiding the heritage
endeavour after absolute values—must be transferred to reality. Using this outlook,
the process of embodiment in physical space of any utopian space is, as Foucault
proposes, heterotopic by definition—creating a materialized locus, an intermediate
space, faulty or imperfect, in constant conflict between the intangible potential of
the ideal and its actual possibilities. In other words, a materialized/embodied utopia
will always fail in its quest to attain its ideal specifically because of its materiality. If
this transfer is conducted it becomes obvious that the contradicting narratives cannot
be neutralized or equalized and each situation demands an individual negotiation of
the conservation’s ideal, a negotiation that invariably reflects the coordinates of its
present context and of the power ratio of the players. The complexity of such a the-
orization also derives from the troublesome acknowledgement of involved players:
who are the actual stakeholders and what is the impact, contribution and involvement
for each of them? Their fluctuating is another factor that complicates the equation;
approaches like Waterton’s oversimplifies this dynamic accumulation of relations in
an attempt to identify linear and bipolar processes, distinct teams and integral phe-
nomenon. Petzet’s argument, endorsing that reductively named Eurocentric focus
on a material form (or the so-called European rendering of conservation), proposes
the perspective of the heritage object, with its limited and vulnerable lifespan, that
was lost amidst the complex discussion regarding discourses, disguised or assumed
intentions, colonial blames and the relocation of previously subordinate identities.
Beyond their undeniable importance and their contribution to universal heritage, the
physical heritage object is a finite asset that, even if replicated, cannot be replaced.
Any intervention that involves it must take into account its very materiality. Thus, if
it doesn’t completely destroy the original substance of the object, any intervention,
no matter how subjective, allows itself to be regarded in retrospect and considered
together with the significations it managed to conserve—thus simultaneously ensur-
ing their transmittance and depicting the intervention’s own timeframe. When the
original material substance is considered as subordinate or less important, the origi-
nal significations as well as the historically accumulated ones, are distorted, erased or
replaced by any manufactured meaning that is introduced through the intervention;
in other words, a subjective intervention (politicized or with an agenda) can ‘rewrite’
the monument.
The contemporary heritage ideal (assembled after the process of objectifying the
heritage’s perspective, culminating in the awareness of subjectivity) has had a series
of predecessors while being redefined. The values recognized through the heritage
status transform, interchangeable within the value hierarchies that are redefined for
each spatial–temporal context. Even if this contemporary perspective assumes an
objective stance, it was always moderated through discourses and the action of vari-
ous players (on a local, national and contemporary-global scale); with each transfig-
uration into reality, this ideal is filtered, interpreted and adapted in order to legitimize
a certain ordering or narrative.
The heritage status functions as a paradoxical mechanism: an egalitarian and
democratic device that nevertheless operates after an internally hierarchized algo-
rithm; though it acts as a “normalizing” and equalizing device (heritage as one of
the exploitable resources), it allows and deliberately pursues the acknowledgement

of plurality and of multiple identities (conservation and depiction of multiple layers
of meaning)—an objective that itself conserves conflictual relations and hierarchies
(sometimes oppressive ones)—in the name of positive universal values. The annul-
ment or recognition avoidance of these conflicting narratives and of opposing sets of
values is to be avoided and is only possible to the disservice of invoked values, thus
sacrificing the conservation’s objective; such an attitude leads to both the consolida-
tion of a forged structure that aids the immediate non-preservationist interests and
also to the distancing from the initial and desired purpose of the heritage concept.
The research argues that the built object and then also the heritage built object
establishes itself as heterotopic in several phases:
a. Alterity assembled/developed organically (through deliberate creation as other
or through practice) or incidental alterity (destruction narrative);
b. Perception of alterity;
c. Acknowledgement and legitimization of alterity through official statute (legal);
d. Assimilation in normality without the dissolution of object alterity (it is acknowl-
edged and integrated but continues to function as other).
5.3 Heterotopic Coordinates
According to Foucault’s proposed structure, used to define the heterotopic con-

cept, each principle is defined by a definite example.38 This formula led to multiple
approaches, some presented in the first segment of this research, that deal with indi-
vidual heterotopic spaces corresponding to each of the principles. In other words,
the approaches argue that for each principle there is a corresponding and particu-
lar heterotopic space. This is supported by the philosopher’s proposed classification
that describes heterotopias of crisis, of deviation, of illusion, etc., each a heterotopic
space of its own. Despite this argument, these principles of heterotopia could be
interpreted differently: they can be considered as a set of base coordinates, which
altogether create the heterotopic profile of a space. Starting from this theory, a quick
glance reveals the existence of multiple heterotopic coordinates within a heterotopic
space that is considered as a single unit (after just one of the principles); therefore,
the simultaneous presence of these coordinates establish a heterotopic profile that
can be either intense or diffuse, partial or complete, active or passive for a space (be
it a theoretical or actual space). Subsequently, we propose the analysis of heterotopic
principles within the heritage context.
38 As argued previously in this research, the use of the term heterotopic principle was adopted
because of its affinity with the original Foucaultian text; the essay Other Spaces proposes a series of
“categories” of heterotopic spaces, each corresponding to a principle, as Foucault himself explains.
In virtue of the coherence with the structure proposed by the philosopher, the same term has been
adopted.
5.3 Heterotopic Coordinates 407
The first principle positions the heterotopic as “constant within all human
groups”; in terms of heritage, such constant spaces that are present in most civi-
lizations can be identified as those “spaces of memory”, protected and organically
passed on one generation to another. The built fabric, being perceived as an expres-
sion of permanence and having the ability to “record” information in its material
form (mnemonic device), was one of the preferred mediums. These spaces of mem-
ory have functioned as privileged spaces, other, different and separated from ordinary
spaces but connected to their common context through a dense network of relations.
The contemporary concept of heritage assumed this capacity by introducing a unitary
interpretation and acceptance—almost universal—of these spaces of memory; the
heritage concept (the way it is defined and applied contemporarily) recognizes (and
legitimizes through statute) a set of common and universal values within numerous
material manifestations of all civilizations, despite variability and even of contra-
dicting character.
It is worthy to mention Choay’s argument that differentiates between the monu-
ment and historical monument: “the monument demands and mobilizes through its
physical presence a living, corporeal, organic memory. It exists for all nations, it is
effectively a cultural universal. The living reference to an origin, to a fundament, the
monument pertains to the field of authenticity; it is part of the dispositifs that anchor
humans in their condition of beings endowed with speech, instituted and constituted.
It is an integral part of a fundamental anthropology”39 ; the historical monument “is
a spatially and temporally bounded creation of European culture that non-European
cultures have adopted late”, “is selected by the learned gaze, among old edifices,
either monuments or not, independently of any practical finality, for the sake of its
value to history and art”40 ; these appointed values for history or for art cannot be
universal but subjective, tied to a certain spatial–temporal context. Choay argues
that “the values carried by the historic heritage are not necessarily connected to our
condition of speech endowed beings”, and that “the very objective of the historic her-
itage conservation was dictated by a specific history, that of occidental Europe, and
its determinations”41 —markings of the European ethnocentrism and, again, cannot
be considered as universal. Nevertheless, as also noted by Choay, these guidelines
of the heritage concept still compose “a system and should be altogether accepted or
rejected”—the only possible direction for this universalizing concept being, in her
assessment, “the complete westernization of the planet”42 ; however, as proven by
the concept’s evolution and the constant redefining and readjustment of the rules, the
direction is different: not just of assimilation but also of adjustment and inclusion,
of pluralization and rethinking of these “given coordinates”. This aspiration is made
clear by the inclusion of various immaterial heritage or of the concept of living human
treasure in the concept of heritage. The adaptation of initial notions to non-European
39 Choay, Alegoria.., 203. [own translation from the Romanian edition of the book L’Allégorie du
Patrimoine].
40 Idem.
41 Choay, Alegoria.., 205.
interpretations and their official acknowledgment reflects, at the very least, the aim
of diluting the Eurocentric brand of the heritage.43
The european conceptualization of heritage that is currently active, as noted by
Choay, overlaps the notion of monument with the one of historical monument, an
action that is detrimental to the mnemonic function; if the overlap of the two terms
actually is obvious in the norming and special practices required by the heritage
space, then the mnemnoic argument can be discussed. The purpose of preservation is
increasingly assumed and declared as “the guarding against a collective amnesia”,44
a fact that leads to the broadening of typologies and categories and to the constant
rethinking of the interpretations attached to heritage terms. Especially, the focus on
immaterial heritage and its recognition seems to confirm Choay’s observation: the
fact that, additionally to the conservation of material form, the conservation of the
practice is also required, or what the author identifies as “the living memory of our
technocratic society”,45 its mobilizing and founding power. Yet Choay considers
these two directions as opposed, defining heritage specifically through their conflict-
ing nature: the organic memory and the historic memory, from which derive their two
equivalents—the organic or “natural” conservation through traditional practice,
more tolerant to change (albeit a slow one), respectively the normed conservation,
erroneously and derogatorily referred to as museification,46 or the suspension and
43 Schadler-Saub considers Nara Charter (1994) as the document through which “eurocentric
approach of the conservation of the cultural heritage” is made obsolete. Schadler-Saub, Ursula,
Preserving tangible and intangible values. Some remarks on theory and practice in conservation
and restoration and the education of conservators in Europe, in Conservation Turn—Return to Con-
servation. Tolerance for Change. Limits for Change, Proceedings of the International Conference
of the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee for the Theory and Philosophy of Conservation
and Restoration, 5–9 May 2010, Prague, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic, 3–6 March 2011, Flo-
rence, 111–121, eds. Wilfred Lipp, Josef Stulc, Boguslaw Szmygin, Simone Giometti, Editzioni
44 This is explicitly addressed through the programme that UNESCO initiates in 1992, the Memory
of the World Programme. This is motivated by “a growing awareness of the parlous state of preserva-
tion of, and access to, documentary heritage in various parts of the world. War and social upheaval,
as well as severe lack of resources, have worsened problems which have existed for centuries. Sig-
nificant collections worldwide have suffered a variety of fates. Looting and dispersal, illegal trading,
destruction, inadequate housing and funding have all played a part. Much has vanished forever; much
is endangered”; as deducted from the programme’s name, this list aims to represent “the documented,
collective memory of the peoples of the world”. 1.3 Background to Memory of the World: general
guidelines to safeguard documentary heritage, UNESCO, CII-95/WS-11, (revised February 2002),
Memory of the World: general guidelines to safeguard documentary heritage, ed. Ray Edmond-
son, Information Society Division United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Orga-
nization, UNESCO, Paris, 2002, 1.3.1. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001256/125637e.
pdf, respectively http://www.unesco.org/new/en/jakarta/communication-and-information/memory-
of-the-world/ (the source of in-text quote), accessed May 2015.
46 “Neither in the past nor in the present, are the efforts of conservator directed to freezing of his-
tory”. Schadler-Saub, Ursula, Preserving tangible and intangible values. Some remarks on theory
and practice in conservation and restoration and the education of conservators in Europe, in Con-
servation Turn—Return to Conservation. Tolerance for Change. Limits for Change, Proceedings
of the International Conference of the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee for the Theory
replacement of the organic practices solely with the heritage practice. Despite this,
the official heritage perspective and its demarche are in a constant process of trans-
formation, self-critical and aware of its own subjectivity47 ; observing its attempts
to adapt to new contemporary contexts, new issues arise, some of which attacking
the very fundamentals of the field and demanding the reconsideration of old themes
(such as the purpose of preservation, discerning the principles (now acknowledged
as subjective) of the heritage selection, or in other words “what do we conserve?”).
Alternative points of view, resulting from the contesting and the official reconsid-
eration of previous hegemonic relations, as well as from the affirmation of new
actors (that advance unprecedented heritage issues, as the case of the Australian her-
itage), have already caused the legitimization of ‘new heritages’ and the reshaping
of the classical principles of conservation and restoration. Even the relation with
the object’s temporality has been reconsidered and thus the ephemerality and insta-
bility were included in the heritage’s prerogative; these, from problems that need
to be addressed and solved subsequently become celebrated aspects and, paradoxi-
cally, organically preserved.48 Simultaneously, new problematics are being formed:
“which part of the past may be forgotten and which part of the cultural heritage may
be destroyed, both acts that furthermore potentially can have cultural significance
of their own, especially when we look at practices in the past”49 ; even the attitudes
towards the ultimate and taboo enemy—destruction—are reconsidered, as noted by
Holtorf and Kristensen: what exactly do we mean by different forms of destruction?
How is heritage being changed and transformed by different destructive processes?
Do preservation and destruction differ in how they may be socially contested? Which
values and benefits [emphasis added] may destruction have in relation to heritage?
How does destruction relate to preservation?”50 .
All this leads to the reassessment of classic definitions and establish a paradoxi-
cal state/hypostasis, contradictory to heritage and modelled by the necessity to norm
selection, intervention, administration and—simultaneously under the influence of
plurality—of fragmentation and of “the particular case”: a state in which every her-
itage object invariably finds itself. An interesting interpretation—and an argument to
support this approach—is forwarded by Ganiatsas: in his opinion, the monument must
be imagined as an expression of certain values of the society in which it materializes,
and Philosophy of Conservation and Restoration, 5–9 May 2010, Prague, Cesky Krumlov, Czech
Republic, 3–6 March 2011, Florence, 111–121, eds. Wilfred Lipp, Josef Stulc, Boguslaw Szmygin,
Simone Giometti, Editzioni Polistampa, Florence, 2012, 114.
47 Schadler-Saub, Ursul, Preserving tangible and intangible values, 111.
48 Harvey, D., Emerging landscapes, 159.
49 Driessen, J., (ed.) Destruction. Archaeological, Philological, and Historical Perspectives.
Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2013, apud., Cornelius Holtorf & Troels
Myrup Kristensen, Heritage erasure: thinking ‘protection’ and ‘preservation’, in International Jour-
nal of Heritage Studies, Routledge, 2015, 21:4, 313–317, https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2014.
982687, last accessed July 2015.
50 Cornelius Holtorf & Troels Myrup Kristensen, Heritage erasure: thinking ‘protection’ and ‘preser-
vation’, in International Journal of Heritage Studies, Routledge, 2015, 21:4, 313–317, https://doi.
org/10.1080/13527258.2014.982687, last accessed July 2015.
then these “values are documented, understood, interpreted and finally identified as
such by being inextricably connected to it. Values come after and because of it, net
as a priori and independently existent”.51 This perspective simultaneously encom-
passes the mnemonic and the moulding ability of the monument, as Ganiatsas argues,
also common to the architectural object. Consequently, each monument is “a living
ethical paradigm of itself” and the values it carries are not bestowed extrinsically
but are integral to it, “emanated from the monument”, existing “because of the mon-
ument’s way of embodying them […]”.52 I argue that these two great preservation
attitudes remain defined by opposing readings of time, as suggested by Dushkina;
generally regarded as antagonistic and exclusive, both must be simultaneously taken
into account, coexistent and interdependent and this accumulation seen as the “or-
ganic” and inevitable nature of heritage. The contemporary reading of the heritage as
a cultural construct is analogous to a ‘heterotopian’ reading of the term: heritage is
imagined as a superimposition of a set of relations (a focal point for cultural studies)
and its physical form, the actual object/artefact. The essentially utopic temptation
and its ever-present dystopian potential is essentially the deviation towards one of
the two foci. A heterotopic reading of the concept—in all of its multiple stances
and assumed attitudes as well as through the practices it supports and develops in
time—reveals a simple answer, paradoxical through its very visibility and straight-
forwardness: the maintenance of the equilibrium or, as Choay observes, ‘to conserve
without freezing, and to evolve without erasing’. The aim is to not lose an “ancestral
competence, nowadays exhausted, which belongs to humans as beings endowed with
memory: the dual competency of building and dwelling in both space and time, both
bodily and by memory”.53
Both in their historic and contemporary forms, many of these spaces of mem-
ory function as exclusive spaces, their accessing is conditioned and controlled, they
are hierarchized and partially forbidden, sometimes opaque and unreachable within
specific timeframes or for specific groups or individuals and reserved and accessible
to other. Following the Foucaultian description of this first principle, the alternative
functioning of the heterotopic space originates from its purpose: its role to shel-
ter a state of crisis. From a heritage standpoint, the safeguarding and transmittance
of these spaces (and their accumulated meanings) is stringent. The built heritage
object finds itself in a constant state of crisis, under the constant threat of its destruc-
tion/degrading, a state of fragility determined by its very materiality which endangers
its deposited memory. Through the heritage status the space harbouring identity and
memory can acquire an alternative functioning: it becomes governed by rules and rit-
uals with specific flows and intervals, and its access becomes restricted; such spaces
51 Ganiatsas, Vassilis, Heritage as ethical paradigms of identity and change: in need of new con-
ceptual tools, practices or attitude? In Conservation Turn—Return to Conservation. Tolerance for

Change. Limits for Change, Proceedings of the International Conference of the ICOMOS Interna-
tional Scientific Committee for the Theory and Philosophy of Conservation and Restoration, 5–9
May 2010, Prague, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic, 3–6 March 2011, Florence, 151–161, eds.
Lipp, W., Stulc, J., Szmygin, B., Giometti, S., Editzioni Polistampa, Florence, 2012, 157.
52 Ganiastas, V., Heritage as ethical paradigms…, 157.
53 Choay, F., Alegoria…, 214.
of memory can also organically develop the same functioning, without the input
of heritage—in which instance, they become appealing for the heritage selection
process. From the standpoint of the unprotected built object, the narrative of destruc-
tion is equally present, regardless the potential or value of its cultural significance;
an anachronistic obsolete built object can easily become vulnerable to destruction,
through abandonment, by becoming a marginal or a crisis space and accommodating
the deviant.
Despite its adaptability (or even because of it), the post-vernacular became a
fragmented fabric, anachronistic and threatened by destruction. The analysed post-
vernacular, similar to the vernacular fabric, displays multiple expressions but can
be regarded as an answer to the most basic human needs: shelter, therefore able to
be considered as a staple of all civilizations and societies. Within the changing and
transforming context, the post-vernacular represents a semi-anachronistic way of
life—according to different norms and times, despite it encompassing the same
basic residential function. In the previously analysed cases, the post-vernacular
gains a restricted access—first reflected on the one that occupies the respective
space, the condition being the acceptance of a more demanding lifestyle, one with a
reduced level of comfort and fewer facilities. In contemporary context, it has almost
entirely become a crisis space—threatened by destruction, forced to adapt or be
replaced—therefore adopting a temporary heterotopic functioning. The inclusion of
these post-vernacular fragments under heritage protection, while maintaining the
base residential functioning but eliminating the few-remaining production charac-
teristics, poses fewer problems or compromises—much less so than in the case of the
vernacular predecessor. Therefore, the juxtaposition of orderings can be a smoother
process, this characteristic leading to the identification of the second heterotopic
principle.
The second principle can be read as the resilience of heterotopic space, adaptive
power, suggesting its ability to perform different functions within different contexts
or societies. The heritage status often compels the protected space to assume a func-
tioning that is either partially or even radically different; in various degrees, the
status alters the “traditional” and established usages of space, its perception and its
cultural significance. The same space, therefore, becomes other, different from its
former self, while the newly introduced heritage ordering brings about a function-
ing based on norms. Furthermore, and in particular accentuated in contemporary
context, the base functioning of the heritage built object—as symbolic space—has
become insufficient: the protected space must assume new additional functions to
(re)become economically self-sustainable. These new functions are juxtaposed, the-
oretically, between the coordinates given by the heritage status—in accordance with
the preservationist norms, without annulling or affecting them; yet in many cases, the
highly normative ordering and the coding of the space are interpreted in an extreme
or even distorted manner—such as the conversions of west-European churches that
introduce radically different functions in a highly coded space. The existence of a
heterotopic character in such cases can be debated, as it is supported by the coex-
istence of the two competing functions. While many spaces acquire new functions
compatible to their initial ones, and inherently compatible with their material con-
figurations, the protective measures and the heritage status ensure the conservation
of their alterity without loss or radical transformation of their material form.
This second heterotopic principle allows an additional interpretation, connected
to the more extensive understanding of the concept of heritage: as conservation
history demonstrates, this concept had assumed various functions in different historic
timeframes and in different societies, maintaining as a constant its one defining
coordinate, the conservation of the material object endowed with signification.
This is the case of the post-vernacular fabric, explored in more detail elsewhere.54
This capacity of assuming multiple and various functions is anchored in its adapt-
able nature, in this case a characteristic of the common, everyday built object, and
a particularly most evident in the case of the residential function. Even if the initial
function—residential and agricultural production—differs only partially, as it is only
vaguely different from its present function or what could be considered as a contem-
porary conversion, the residential character itself has dramatically changed, imposing
new housing and living standards, as well as new esthetical, functional, represen-
tational expectations. The conserved post-vernacular enclaves are going through a
sweeping process of adaptation or normalization: ending this process would imply an
update of this fabric, which in most cases would mean the loss of documentary value
through alteration or complete disappearance through demolition and replacing. The
heterotopic tool, as explored here, has been employed as a means to identify the
heterotopic character of this built fabric. In addition to adaptability, when analysed
via the heterotopic grid proposed in this work, the post-vernacular fabric reveals
its potential heritage value. A protected status could maintain and advance their
hybrid nature, conserving their material form yet introducing an alternative function
(a heritage normed residential)—in other words it could accomplish their integration
without cancelling their alterity.
According to the third principle, heterotopia has the ability to encompass various
and incompatible spaces within the same physical place; by analysing Foucault’s
proposed examples, these incongruent spaces are juxtaposed in a symbolic man-
ner through the protocol of representation. The heritage conceptual space—under-
stood/perceived as non-material theoretical space—can be interpreted as heterotopic
because of the fact that is has gathered numerous and contradicting objects (con-
structions, aggregations, territories, places, landscapes, networks) of various nature,
mobile and immobile, extraordinary and infra-ordinary constructed spaces, etc. Fur-
thermore, this heritage conceptual space juxtaposes spaces that represent different
cultures, identities and narratives, and take on a neutral and encompassing stance.
As previously argued, the heritage status unites within a single conceptual space
multiple narratives that are both contradictory and competing, in an attempt to create
between themselves a network of relations both equitable and unbiased. Similarly,
the heritage object (in its material stance/form) embodies more than one culture both
physically (physical overlapping layers) and symbolic (multiple meanings); the pro-
tected status acknowledges and underlines this plural and contradictory nature on
54 Spânu, S., The Landscape under Urban Pressure: the periurban area of Cluj, in: Reflections on
Cultural Heritage Theories and Practices, Garant Publishing, Antwerp, Belgium, 2016.
behalf of the principle of cultural diversity. The existence of multiple and contradic-
tory meanings—most often expressed in the object’s material substance—can be the
main reason to acknowledge the cultural value of this object.
In respect to Foucault’s definition, symmetrically, the built object can—through
the medium of representation—juxtapose virtual and symbolic places (the ideal,
heavenly Jerusalem, etc.), these themselves being representations of values (lectured
as) universal. Through heritage status and connected protectionist practices, these
values are re-established even if they are interpreted differently, as long as their mate-
rial expression is safeguarded. In spite of this, the heritage status—understood as a
normalizing device—paves the way for a contradictory practice. The presence of her-
itage status—unquestionably and urgently required—can short-circuit the decoding
process that the viewer requires in order to decipher and understand the represented
values; the object is “announced” as valuable, thus becoming sufficient in itself and
leading to the consumption of heritage and to what has been identified as “the two-
hour tourist phenomenon”.
The fourth heterotopic principle addresses the temporal coordinate: these het-
erotopic spaces (or heterochronies) represents an “absolute break with their tradi-
tional time”,55 they function under a different time flux, detached from their time’s
context. For the heritage space, the normed protectionist system is imagined and
deliberately introduced in order to abolish the destructive evolution of time over
the object; with the aim of conserving the material expression of certain values, the
object is intentionally detached from the natural flow of time, becoming a temporal
fragment or a temporal enclave within the main temporal unfolding. Furthermore,
this temporal fragment becomes an illustration of the object’s historical time (rep-
resentation of an epoch or episode) and simultaneously represents a fragment of
universal human time span (expression of human presence). The conceptual heritage
space can be easily read using the second definition given to heterochronies: “sort of
general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all
tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time, and
inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual
and indefinite accumulation of time in a place that will not move”56 —the museum,
archive and library, but also the heritage registries. The definition also determines
the purpose of heritage: safeguarding all valuable and representative expressions of
human creations.
The actual practices introduced through heritage status bear two other tempo-
ral procedures: the stoppage of the object’s alterations in time (through conserva-
tion), respectively, the reversal of the object’s alterations (through restoration and
reconstruction, the latter with its questionable variants that have been previously
discussed). These temporal practices—the impossible effort to suspend time and its
effects on the material form—are linked to the utopian nature of heritage, as actions
part of the materialization (emplacement) of utopia, constituting the heterotopic
space.
55 Foucault, Of other spaces, in eds. Dehaene, De Cauter, Heterotopia and the City. Public Space in
a Postcivil society, 2008, Routledge, 2008, 20.

56 Foucault, Of Other…, in eds. Dehaene, De Cauter, Heterotopia and the city…, 20.
Regarding the object that is yet to be acknowledged as heritage, as is the case of

the post-vernacular fabric, the rift with the context’s time becomes apparent through
the obsolete character, like a representation of another temporal interval. Its original
practices, expressed in the ordering of material form, appear as being in conflict
with the contemporary ones. The alterity of these spaces stems from the contradic-
tory temporal relation, incongruent with their context: forced to take on a different
temporality, this leads to their additional hybridization and ultimately to their assim-
ilation. This conflictual relation can only be temporary, without the introduction of
protected status, which has the ability to interrupt the process and to condense or set
the limits of the temporal enclave.
The second state of heterochronic spaces is defined by Foucault as the hetero-
topia of transient time. Even though the materiality and purpose of heritage appear
to contradict such a fragile time-state, they are connected to it through the precarious
human existence. The appetite to accumulate numerous and fragile expressions of its
own existence, as a means to understand itself, derives precisely from the perception
of human precariousness. Similarly, the fragile existence of built/material heritage
is intertwined with the destruction narrative, which has shaped the conceptual pro-
tectionist approach and, implicitly, the pragmatic one. Especially in contemporary
context and despite the complex protection mechanisms, these expressions of human
existence appear as extremely vulnerable and transient/transitory. The heritage object
can be therefore interpreted as a complex and paradoxical heterochrony, on one hand,
reflecting the fragility of creation, and implicitly, of human existence and on the
other reflecting (and seeking to prove) their permanence. By accumulating multiple,
diverse and fragile material fragments the heritage conceptual space aims to com-
pile an image of permanence. The individual material fragments, the category or
the object itself, therefore, open up to a double interpretation: fragile time slices that
themselves express ephemerality and transience, but at the same time, under heritage
protection, they have the possibility to exceed their ephemeral state, contributing to
a broader notion of permanence and durability.
According to the fifth principle, the heterotopias imply “a system of opening and
closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable”57 ; both the heterotopic
and the heritage space exhibit such a mechanism that controls the access and that
is maintained and enforced additionally through privileges, interdictions, prescrip-
tions, through norms and regulations that define both the practices as well as the
material form of the specific space. The heterotopic space is defined as an enclave
that conditions its access with a series of demands (an admission ritual); similarly, a
heritage object appears as accessible, penetrable and generally open to the public but
its accessibility is, however, heavily conditioned: after certain times, regions, even
composing materials, allowed/restricted practices, groups and individuals, age, pro-
fessions, etc. These categories in themselves contain additional internal hierarchies,
with various degrees of accessibility and specific norms. Nevertheless, the heritage
status describes an ideal space that is totally accessible (the ideal of equality and

democracy), but one that conceals multiple exclusions, most of them deriving from
the destruction narrative and from the fragility that define it.
In the case of the unprotected post-vernacular fabric, this mechanism of access
control emerges in a very simple and unequivocal shape. The post-vernacular fabric
fits within the category of eminently private spaces, which require an agreed access
and a common admission access (generally specific to rural areas) that no longer
needs to be explained. Particular to the analysed areal, the post-vernacular fabric
displays certain formal characteristics, given by the regional typology: mechanisms
that control, mediate access, generally inherited from the vernacular predecessor
(the distribution of spaces within the household, spaces that are designated for spe-
cific functions or individuals, each with its own admission ritual and with different
transparencies and shifts between semi-public and semi-private). The whole unit
itself displays a specific spatial hierarchy that defines different grades of accessibil-
ity: the zones designed for daily flows and those that are special (“the clean room”).
Nevertheless, the perception of these post-vernacular fragments as obsolete and inef-
ficient leads to the dilution and loss of practices, to the alteration and replacement
of the remaining traditional characteristics (vernacular), or to abandonment. In this
last case, the abandonment strengthens their enclave character, subsequently trans-
forming them into marginal spaces—and potentially liminal—and accessing them
becomes a transgressive act. If the direct permission no longer seems necessary (or
possible), in most cases from the analysed areas, the access continues to be con-
trolled through a panoptic mechanism—‘the unseen eye of the community’—this
itself being a reminiscence of the rural vernacular space. In the other cases, these
post-vernacular spaces are further altered and transformed, updated and ultimately
replaced, being forced to gradually embrace their context’s general characteristics;
the enclave character is diluted, the restricted access is no longer ambiguous or multi-
layered (semi-private/semi-public), but becomes solely private (and flagged as such)
and of urban variety.
The sixth and final principle described by Foucault identifies two extreme and
opposing instances of heterotopia, based on the relations and their roles in their deter-
mining context. In the first instance, the heterotopia of illusion is defined as a mecha-
nism intended to expose “all real space, all the emplacements in the interior of which
human life is enclosed and partitioned, as even more illusory”.58 From a heritage
point of view, the safeguarding of multiple material expressions of human creation
is taken on as responsibility, a moral obligation to convey to future generations that
which is considered to be valuable for human society (assuming the responsibility of
the selection). From the entire human production, a series of fragments are selected
(artefacts, buildings, structures, sites, practices etc.) to be conserved; their alterity
is confirmed and bestowed, as they are extracted from the common time flow: in
relation to their context that is in constant process of transformation, these fragments
express the illusion of permanence. Interpreted this way, the ultimate aim of heritage
protection proves to be impossible to attain: the effort to halt the degradation process
of the object’s physical form, implicitly threatening the transmission process of its
58 Foucault, Of other spaces, Dehaene s, i De Cauter, 21.

values. The heterotopic and illusory nature of heritage space also stems from the
inevitable narrative of destruction rooted in its material form.
In the second instance identified by Foucault, the role of these heterotopias is to
create “another space, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged
as ours is disorderly, ill construed and sketchy”,59 or a compensatory space, opposed
and mirroring an inverted image of the real world. The heritage space accomplishes
that role in a very exact manner: it aims to “reconstruct its own origins/roots as
a compensatory fictional space in the past, a pseudo-utopia, therefore attempting
to artificially recreate the differences which the present no longer recognizes. The
past becomes […] a refuge value”.60 The heritage space can be interpreted in both
instances, either as compensatory space—a golden age, a vanished idealized world,
an accumulation of valuable and extraordinary fragments, etc.—or either as an illu-
sionary space, as previously argued. This compensatory instance becomes obvious
when the conceptual heritage space adopts that objective and neutral character: recog-
nizing and juxtaposing narratives and multiple identities (conflicting and exclusive)
but without cancelling the defining coordinates. Within the heritage space they are
equally valuable and acknowledged accordingly, they coexist and build an other com-
pensatory and idealized reality. The safeguarded fragments receive an added value
through the heritage status, in many cases even a nostalgic perspective—inevitably
subjective since they represent a reality that no longer exists, devoid of its original
context, practices, value hierarchies and mentalities. Even when these are known
and recreated they are accomplished by other individuals that are shaped by another
context, and from another temporal perspective. Beyond the horizons, objectivity
and encompassing character that the heritage perspective adopts and after which it
orders its endeavours, the contemporary lens is subjective and reductive (and aware
of both characteristics): it complements and substitutes that which no longer exists
(practices, meanings, beliefs, etc.) and it reads the built object through its own value
hierarchies. Therefore, the past is re-established as a privileged space, to a certain
extent idealized from an aesthetic, societal, moral, etc. point of view. This compen-
satory functioning of heritage space has many expressions, from the fabricated and
aestheticized version of the nineteenth century heritage object, to the contemporary
reconstructions (compensating that previous “mise en scène” and its lack of “real
character”). Similarly, the compensatory role of heritage can also be explained by
means of the mnemonic function.
One last heterotopic coordinate, closely bound to the compensatory role, is the
mirror role of heritage. Both as conceptual space and as physical space, heritage
functions as a reflection of society: a collection of its cultural products deemed to
be valuable, assembled in an attempt to define and better understand its own self.
59 Foucault, Of other spaces, Dehaene s, i De Cauter, 21.

60 Marc Guillaume, La Politique du Patrimoine, Éditions Galilée, Paris, 1980, 15. Original quote:
“A ceux qui n’ont plus ni territoire ni identité sociale propre, la seule possibilité qui reste ouverte
est de se reconstruire des “racines”, un espace compensatoire fictif dans le passé, une pseudo-
topie, pour tenter d’y recréer artificiellement les différences que le présent ne tolère plus. Le passé,
comme l’écologie, devient valeur-refuge. Pour briser l’uniformité et le fonctionnalisme du paysage
industriel et des logements, pour les rendre habitables, les débris anciens restent le dernier recours.”
Regarding the individual fragment, mobile artefact or built object, the mirror role
persists, since the object’s very alterity derives from it; the individual or the com-
munity is capable of recognizing its own alternative image, whether inverted, differ-
ent or extracted from another timeframe and detached from its present self. Yet the
reflected image is a deliberately constructed one and thus inevitably subjective, some-
times emphasized, idealized, embellished or even biased. While the (architectural)
built object has maintained this role in a more explicit and unapologetic manner, the
heritage built object has evolved differently. In the contemporary general understand-
ing, the concept of heritage has increasingly come to fulfil the mirror role; despite
acknowledging its subjectivity, it still aspires to illustrate the most ‘truthful’ or wilful
‘objective’ reflection (inclusive, democratic or equalitarian, etc.). The contemporary
understanding of heritage corresponds to Foucault’s definition: “In the mirror [her-
itage], I see myself there where I am not [anymore—in another timeframe], in an
unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface [of the built object]; I am over
there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself,
that enables me to see myself there where I am absent”61 —this mirror mechanism
that is simultaneously utopia and heterotopia, for “the mirror does exist in reality”.62
The built heritage can thus be read as the deliberate construct of our own image and
its projection in the future, with the purpose of affixing it.
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Chapter 6
Case Study
Abstract In the final chapter, heterotopia is explored via a case study. This analysis
identifies the set of heterotopic features common to the wider category of leisure
spaces, identifying the basic heterotopic ‘components’ common to spas, balneal or
coastal resorts, and observing how these navigate from foreground to background
in different temporal and spatial instances of leisure spaces. This concept of a basic
heterotopic profile, previously argued in the book, implies that the built object can
harbour a heterotopic potential within its spatial and physical features—features that
are in themselves carriers of encodings of specific social orderings, imprinted on and
shaping the object. The case study is designed as a comparative analysis of several
concrete examples, followed by the focusing on the modernist time frame and the
evolution of one Romanian embodiment of leisure space, (re)embodied under the
communist regime. The heritage point of view is closely explored, in support of the
book’s main argument: the heritage-as-heterotopia premise. The focus onto a specific
spatio-temporal evolution of a leisure space—one of the categories of ‘other spaces’
approached by Foucault—showcases the heterotopic potential of the heritage object.
Keywords Heritage as heterotopia · Romanian seaside · Balneal spaces ·

Heterotopic enclave · Built heritage · Leisure spaces

422 6 Case Study
Hotel Amfiteatru/Amphitheatre Hotel—Olimp Resort (1960–70) (source ONT Carpati, commer-

cial booklet, private collection)
6.1 Introduction 423
6.1 Introduction
The typology of built objects explored in this case study—the spa, balneal or coastal
resort space—lies at the intersection of several textbook Foucaultian examples dis-
cussed in the Of Other Spaces… essay. Both semantically (retreat, resort) and
functionally these complex spaces share recognizable characteristics with the het-
erotopian spaces of crisis/deviation, as transient hybrids resembling the retirement
homes and, depending on their specific profile, even ‘softer’ hybrids of hospitals and
treatment centres. The paradoxical juxtaposition of “the notions of leisure and plea-
sure with those of disease, suffering and treatment”,1 accompanies these spaces, with
variable intensities. Yet, their main ‘foucaultian’ reading places them in the realm
of heterochronias, due to their capacity to offer a temporary yet “absolute break
with traditional [everyday] time”2 ; taking into consideration their leisure-oriented
function, these spaces showcase features of the heterotopias of festivity, imagined
as recurring yet transitory events, as much as features of the heterotopias of an eter-
nal, unchanging or stagnant time. An expedite reading of these spaces through the
heterotopic lens immediately reveals these features, suggesting promising results
for a more in-depth analysis. However, not every single one of these spaces can be
considered a heterotopia.
Foucault’s dealings with leisure and leisure studies have been the subject of numer-
ous debates, mostly focusing on the dynamics of discipline, both self and social dis-
ciplining through leisure activities, gender, bio-power and so on. Miller reviews the
interpretations given to Foucault’s work, observing that “leisure has been central to
social control”,3 that “distinctions between work and leisure have always been prob-
lematic and [that] leisure is as much a form of governance as its supposed other.”4 .
As previously stated, this analysis will be focused on the concept of heterotopia and
its essential text (Of other spaces) in relation with the built medium, architecture
and built heritage and the construction of built heritage as other; although briefly
touched upon here, the problematization of leisure, self-control, bio-power, surveil-
lance, health and/as productivity, etc. have been discussed in more depth elsewhere.5
1 Audrey Bochaton, Bertrand Lefebvre. The rebirth of the hospital: Heterotopia and medical tourism
in Asia. Asia on Tour: Exploring the rise of Asian tourism, 2008, 98, hal-01802299.
2 F20
3 Foucault, M. (2003) ‘Society Must be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976,
trans. D. Macey, eds. M. Bertani and A. Fontana. New York: Picador, apud. Miller, Toby, Michel
Foucault and leisure, chapter 12, 133–140, in Routledge Handbook of Leisure Studies, April 2013
(print), July 2013 (online), 135.
4 Miller, Toby, Michel Foucault and leisure, chapter 12, 133–140, in Routledge Handbook of Leisure
Studies, April 2013 (print), July 2013 (online), 138.

5 See Cole, C. L. ‘Addiction, Exercise, and Cyborgs: Technologies of Deviant Bodies’, 261–276, in
G. Rail (eds.), Sport and Postmodern Times. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998;
Harvey, J. and Sparks, R., ‘The Politics of the Body in the Context of Modernity’, Quest 43 (2)
164–89, 1991; Rail, G. and Harvey, J., Body at Work: Michel Foucault and the Sociology of Sport,
164–179, in Sociology of Sport Journal, 12, Human Kinetics Publishers, Inc., 1995.
424 6 Case Study
The domain of leisure studies has come to be an extensive and very rich field of
research, whose evolution and specific features will be only lightly touched upon.
However, in order to identify the heterotopian workings, this case study will first
focus on identifying the set of heterotopic features common to the wider category
of leisure spaces, by breaking down the basic heterotopic ‘components’ common to
spas, balneal or coastal resorts, and observing how these navigate from foreground
to background in different instances of leisure spaces.6 The intent is to outline that
proposed basic heterotopic profile which, as argued before, allows some of these
spaces to become—at some point and in particular contexts—genuine heterotopias.
As argued in the theoretical segment of this book, this concept of a basic hetero-
topic profile is based on the argument that the built object can harbour a heterotopic
potential within its spatial and physical features, they themselves being carriers of
encodings of specific social orderings, thus imprinted on and shaping the object. The
second section will introduce a comparative analysis of several concrete examples,
focusing on the modernist time frame and the evolution of one Romanian embodi-
ment of leisure space, (re)embodied under the communist regime. Finally, the third
section discusses the heritage point of view, arguing the heritage-as-heterotopia
premise—the heterotopic potential of the heritage object for this particular typology
of spaces.
6.2 Identifying the Heterotopic Features—The Basic

Heterotopic Profile. The Foucaultian Example and Its
Coordinates
6.2.1 The Temporal Coordinate
First, what is the connection of these balneal leisure spaces with Foucault explo-
ration of heterotopias? Where does this functional group sharing similar features
intersect with the concept of heterotopia? At a first glance, seaside and thermal
resorts seem to fall clearly within the group of leisure spaces, which in turn find
themselves represented and directly addressed by Foucault as heterotopic, via their
modern proxy—the vacation village. This example is discussed as an illustration of
the principle of heterochronia, and also as a particular case for its ability to com-
bine two instances of heterochronia: that of the festive or transitory time and that of
the cumulative or ‘eternal’ time. The vacation village, or as proposed by Foucault
the Polynesian village, simultaneously illustrates the festive, transitory time and the
cumulative time; it appears to be at once one of the “marvellous empty emplace-
ments” that periodically come to life and a portal to a “time regained”, a primal
unaltered and archaic time, through which one briefly accesses a lost better alter-
6 This is not intended to be an exhaustive outline nor a historic evolution of leisure, resort or balneal
spaces.
6.2 Identifying the Heterotopic Features—The Basic Heterotopic Profile … 425
nate dimension. These sketched features appear to be shared by the balneal leisure
spaces: the alternating bouts of activity and downtime characteristic to all seasonal
resorts; the temporary retreat-function and its transformative capacities—through a
mechanism similar to the Roman saturnalia for Foucault’s example, or through the
physical and psychological therapeutic qualities; the detachment from the everyday
time coupled with the compliance with a different (and externally imposed) structur-
ing of time, can be easily identified in the case of the all-inclusive resorts; and finally,
through a symbolic proxy (the natural resource exploited, and its built spaces and
specialized practices), one is granted the access to that carefree, idealized time, most
often associated with one’s childhood or even with a mythical childhood, reaching
even deeper, as Foucault as well as Eliade and Bachelard suggest. In support of Fou-
cault’s argument, Eliade’s reading can be recalled: the ‘illo tempore’ or the mythical
time, is linked with the eternal return ‘ab origine’, to a sacred time (illud tempus), a
means of continuous repetition and regeneration.
In Foucault’s example, the space and its functioning are mainly read through
their temporal coordinates. It acts as a mechanism readily available for one’s willing
temporal dissociation from the everyday and for one’s (re)discovery of, or connection
with, an eternal, even paradisiacal and otherwise inaccessible time. Such a retreat
from the everyday time is however temporary, strictly delineated, having a clearly
marked beginning and ending. Yet, the utopian encoding reveals itself immediately
beneath this idealized image, enforced by the attempts to eternalize a temporary
experience.
The play between the eternal and the transitory time is defining for retreat spaces.
Although sometimes acting as heterotopias of accumulating time in the sense of the
Foucaultian example (the Djerba huts as museum-like repositories of knowledge),
they more often function as portals to a perceived-as-stagnant or “eternal time”,
a temporal instance that otherwise appears lost to the contemporary city dweller.7
The historic spas, resorts and balneal spaces, whose continuous and even on and
off functioning has been sequentially imprinted in the built form, reveal more easily
their functioning as repositories of knowledge, as I have explored in more depth
elsewhere.8 Yet, this link with the ‘eternal time’ can be considered as a common
feature to the wider category of leisure spaces. On a very basic level, these are
associated with an idealized ‘carefree’ (although productive)9 or even archetypal
time. Nonetheless, their temporal encoding is a more utilitarian one: they function
7 Foucault, M., 20
8 SPÂNU, S. (2012). The Balneary resource, a generator of built heritage. The stratigraphic features
of Herculane Bath. în: Pândi Gavril, Moldovan Florin (ed.) Air and Water components of the
environement, Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeana 2012, România, ISSN: 2067-743X.
9 In the 70s, Dumazedier defined “leisure as activity, apart from the obligations of work, family and
society, to indulge one’s own ‘free will’ for relaxation, diversion, amusing oneself, broadening one’s
knowledge or improving one’s skills, such as the free exercise of one’s creative capacity, and one’s
spontaneous social or volunteer participation in the life of the community.” Dumazedier, Joffre,
1974, Leisure and the Social System. In J. F. Murphy (Ed.), Concepts of Leisure. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall, apud. Iwasaki, Y., Leisure and Meaning-Making: The Pursuit of a Meaningful Life
Through Leisure, 287–302, in Global Leisure and the Struggle for a Better World, Beniwal, Anju,
426 6 Case Study
as portals opening onto a fundamental instance of ‘eternal time’, the natural time.
In this sense, nature itself can be defined as simultaneously transitory (constantly
decaying) and eternal (the perpetual cycle),10 an opportunity to glimpse outside our
localized, everyday trajectory. The fact that nature and/or the natural element has
been and still is intimately connected with the concept of retreat and leisure needs no
further argumentation—not to name the increasingly rift developed in the modern
hyper-urbanized context, where nature has become increasingly foreign, distant and
elusive. These spaces grant access to, create the opportunity for and mediate the
encounter of the individual with nature, in order to resynchronize or reconnect oneself
to the ‘natural rhythms’, to regain interior balance and to rediscover oneself. These
historically sanctioned benefits emerge in traditional secular or religious practices,
later to be redrafted as scientific practices and have since become undisputed lieux
communs. In order to follow up this reasoning and to explore the duality of leisure
spaces, I argue that through this reconnection with nature and natural time, leisure
spaces can transcend their more frivolous encoding. This will be briefly argued by
means of another Foucaultian text.
The focus on physicality and sensuous pleasure, or voluptas (“a pleasure whose
origin is to be placed outside of us and in objects whose presence we cannot be
sure of: a pleasure, therefore, that is precarious in itself, undermined by the fear of
loss, and to which we are drawn by the force of a desire that may or may not find
satisfaction”)11 still remains the more prominent feature of leisure spaces. The uncer-
tainty and ephemerality of the pleasures promised by the leisure spaces are mainly
expressed in temporal coordinates (the brief séjour) as well as through the numer-
ous contextual factors that lie outside one’s direct control. The object of pleasure is
enclosed (and attainable only) within these spatio-temporal enclaves. However, these
spaces of retreat can and do favour the re-encounter with oneself. Foucault points out
in his Care of the Self that, according to classical principles of self-cultivation, “[t]he
individual who has finally succeeded in gaining access to himself is, for himself, an
object of pleasure”,12 one that is, however, arising “out of ourselves and within our-
selves”.13 I argue that one highly disregarded function of leisure spaces is exactly
this process of (re-)discovering oneself—which is chiefly enabled and mediated by
the contact with the natural element and implicitly the built architectural devices.
The retreat from the everyday is a means of normalization, designed to return a
cured or balanced individual within society, thus enforcing the official ordering. This
reading is very much in line with the functioning and purpose of heterotopias and
Jain, Rashmi, Spracklen, Karl (eds.), Leisure Studies in a Global Era Series, Palgrave Macmillan,
2018, 288.
10 White, Jonathan, Introduction, 1–21, in Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination,
ed. Simon C. Estok, I-Chun Wang, and Jonathan White, First published 2016, Routledge, ISBN:
978-1-315-65731-8 (ebk), 3.
11 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self, 1st (first) Vintage Books
Edition, [Paperback (1988)], ISBN: 0-394-74155-2 (v.3), 66.

12 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self, 1st (first) Vintage Books
Edition, [Paperback(1988)], ISBN: 0-394-74155-2 (v.3), 66.

13 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self, 66.
more specifically of heterochronia. Within the boundaries of these slices of time,

one finds himself either in an absolute break with traditional time, either with all of
the time unfolded in front of oneself, suggesting a deceleration of traditional time
propitious to contemplation; here one can pursue the (re)discovery of the self.
This time-focused reading can be further explored by means of the leisure studies.
Commonly, leisure can be
“[…] understood, both by ordinary people and also by the various sorts of social
scientists and leisure researchers who study them (sic), in terms of a concept of time
which provides both for a division of ‘its’ duration into measurable periods, blocks
or zones, and also for an understanding of these zones as either ‘free’ or ‘unfree’
depending on whether paid employment is undertaken in them or not. Leisure, then,
is whatever is done in ‘free time’.”14
This view on leisure (or the ‘natural attitude’, according to Roche) quantifies it
in opposition to work, in terms of non-work time, thus strictly inside the binomial
pairing of employment-leisure, and innately defined by temporal segmentation; a
similar reading is offered by Sayers,15 and more recently by Deschenes.16 Although
not exclusive,17 such readings suggest that leisure time can be in fact externally
‘normed’, controlled and strictly partitioned—much like its counterpart.18 Roche
14 Roche, Maurice, Lived Time, Leisure and Retirement, 54–79, in The Philosophy of Leisure,
Edited by Tom Winnifrith and Cyril Barrett, Palgrave Macmillan, 1989, ISBN: 978-1-349-19731-6
(eBook), 56.
15 “[…] work is, in various ways, a necessary activity”, “[…] its very necessity is at the basis of its
potentially liberating character.”, “[…] leisure has value only in the context of work, as a complement
to work. Whereas when it is divorced from work, and made an exclusive activity, it loses its value.”
Sayers, Sean, Work, Leisure and Human Needs, 34–53, in The Philosophy of Leisure, Edited by
Tom Winnifrith and Cyril Barrett, Palgrave Macmillan, 1989, ISBN: 978-1-349-19731-6 (eBook),
41, 42, 49.
16 To the everyday production (attached to the homo faber), the counterpart is leisure (attached
to the homo ludens). Deschenes, G. (2011). The Spiritual Anthropology of Leisure: The Homo
Faber-religiosus-ludens. Counselling and Spirituality/Counseling et spiritualite, 30(2), 57–85, apud.
Iwasaki, Y., Leisure and Meaning-Making: The Pursuit of a Meaningful Life Through Leisure,
287–302, in Global Leisure and the Struggle for a Better World, Beniwal, Anju, Jain, Rashmi,
Spracklen, Karl (eds.), Leisure Studies in a Global Era Series, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 288.
17 For Godbey, leisure “implies a low degree of time-consciousness, among other things.” Roche,
Lived Time, Leisure…, 58. Kelly proposes three relational readings of leisure: as an extension (of
work, and thus leisure is its similar counterpart), “in ‘opposition’ (polarized and demarcated) and
[in a state of] ‘neutrality’ (they are distinct but not polarized).” Kelly, John, R. (1987). Freedom to
Be: A New Sociology of Leisure. New York: Macmillan, apud. Iwasaki, Y., Leisure and Meaning-
Making: The Pursuit of a Meaningful Life Through Leisure, 287–302, in Global Leisure and the
Struggle for a Better World, Beniwal, Anju, Jain, Rashmi, Spracklen, Karl (eds.), Leisure Studies
in a Global Era Series, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 288.
18 The structure proposed by John Kelly (1987), endows the leisure experience with decidedly
‘work’ related attributes: leisure is decision-making, creation, (as a by-product of decision and
action), development as a process and constructed in relation to a context (situated); leisure is a
complex act and it is an act of production (in the sense of a creation of meaning). Kelly, John, R.
(1987). Freedom to Be: A New Sociology of Leisure. New York: Macmillan, apud. Iwasaki, Y.,
Leisure and Meaning-Making: The Pursuit of a Meaningful Life…, 287–302, in Global Leisure
428 6 Case Study
also introduces an interesting set of two concepts, the primary time structure19 and
time stress—20 that can be further explored. First, the refuge enclave-like image of the
resort does suggest a process of alteration, a deformation of the primary time struc-
ture, either as a slowing-down (more commonly) or as an acceleration in comparison
to the norm, the everyday temporal flow; however, this distortion is not perceived as
a time stress, but on the contrary, a leisure or comfort generating experience. In het-
erotopian terms, the resort functions as a haven, a ‘reset space’ or an enclave outside
of customary time; here all the basic temporal dimensions become non-competitive,
coexistent (as the Polynesian village example shows) merged in an everlasting themed
present. This enclave ‘outside of time’ is very strongly anchored in it, and I argue,
even dependant on the everyday time flow; the work–leisure dichotomy resurfaces.
Two connected processes can be discussed—the dissolution of this dichotomy and
its reversal. In Foucault’s example, the vacation village functions as a heterochro-
nia, an enclave of alterity within the normal and a retreat from the everyday, in a
one-way exchange—from the outside (dominant ordering) toward the enclave; yet,
those involved in the functioning of the mechanism experience a reversal of the
leisure–work dichotomy, a diluted perception of the enclave’s alterity, or even a
dystopian instance of its features. The potential of dissolution of the work–leisure
dichotomy is discussed by Roche, Godbey, and Sayers; yet, one contemporary (het-
erotopian) example is offered by Bartling—the themed holiday living or themed
master-planned communities21 ; here the boundary between the everyday time flow
(work) and the alternative retreat-time (leisure) becomes blurred. One could opt to
live (and work, paradoxically) in a never-ending holiday. Those servicing the mech-
anism remain unseen, physically removed outside These utopian-flavoured hybrids
initially emerged as the industrial-planned communities of the late 19th century, and
gradually evolved into the themed age-restricted planned communities analysed by
Bartling; one vector of the heterotopic shift of these spaces, he notes, is the alteration
of the temporality characteristic of leisure spaces:
“Unlike the mall or the restaurant, where visitors are implicitly asked to ‘exit
reality’ to take part in a collective fantasy, the themed planned community is a
heterotopia with a ‘permanent’ quality.”22
In the Foucaultian example of a resort, it appears as a temporal enclave, where
lived and experienced present becomes the sole repository for both past (which is
and the Struggle for a Better World, Beniwal, A., Jain, R., Spracklen, K. (eds.), Leisure Studies…,
288.
19 Roche defines it as “The temporal order both framing and emergent within lived experience
[…]”, a universally common “primary structure of lived time [which] displays a unity of the three
commonsensical dimensions present, past and future”, onto which groups or individuals attach and
coordinate subjective, secondary structures of time, i.e. other “categories and measurements of time
present in any given group, culture or civilisation”. Roche, Lived Time, Leisure…, 61.
20 Time stresses are defined as “distortions, deformations and in a certain sense a loss of structure,
in the primary personal time-structure.” Roche, Lived Time, Leisure…, 61.

21 Bartling, Hugh, A master-planned community as heterotopia: The Villages, Florida, 165–178, in
Heterotopia and the City, Dehaene and De Cauter, eds., Routledge, 2008, 166.
22 Bartling, Hugh, A master-planned community…, 166.
re-enacted) and future, in an ad infinitum reiteration of the past–present hybrid. This

hybrid offering a levelled experience of time, can function exactly because of its
ephemerality and because it is defined within the dichotomy work/leisure, as Sayers
argues; this ephemerality argument is also supported by Rojek, who defines leisure
as: “[…] satisfaction and pleasure are strictly temporary. Leisure itself cannot be
regarded as a self-sustaining object in life, since the pleasure or escape achieved
through its practice will always end. Further, because leisure choice is situated in a
context of scarcity, the decision to practice leisure requires the work of others to sus-
tain the conditions that support effective leisure choice”.23 Davies identifies leisure’s
“savour is its disclosure of finitude”, as well as its enhancement through recurrence,
which altogether “mark[s] the passing of time”.24 Yet in Bartling’s example this
hybrid, much as leisure itself, seems to be ‘eternalized’—the embodiment of an
ideal permanent vacation or a materialized utopia; the annulment of its ephemerality
becomes one of the main sources of its heterotopian character. These communities
promise the everlasting possibility of “‘living in the past’, or ‘living exclusively in
the present’”—25 a deliberate and upfront use of a temporal distortion mechanism
that is, in fact, selling “the fantasy of perennial youth”26 and/or the return to an imag-
ined past (based more on the relatable than on authenticity or historical accuracy)27
to a specific social category, retirees, for whom the passing of time approaches its
inevitable ending. Observing Bartling’s detailed exploration of the planned com-
munity of The Villages, Florida, one more aspect can be added in support of its
heterotopian nature; this space abides by what can be explained as a ‘rule’ of het-
erotopic spaces: the function of resolving a specific social issue. While this is most
visible in the case of crisis spaces (asylums, cemeteries), in the case of the retreat-like,
age-restricted planned community, the issue is expressed in terms of a consumerist
society: the loss of a large segment of the population as consumers. The “elevation
of leisurely consumption” through theming, along with the organizational aspects
discussed by Bartling (the developer manipulated schemes, the hidden or increasing
costs, the mechanisms enforcing limited governability) reveal its ‘designed’ role—of
extending the consumerist capacity and the exploitability duration for an otherwise
withdrawing and vulnerable group. As previously argued, the alterity enclave acts
as a means of normalization, of enforcing the official ordering, that is, in this case,
a capitalist one.
23 Rojek, Chris, An outline of the action approach to leisure studies, 13–25 in Vol. 24, No. 1, Leisure
Studies, January, 2005, Routledge, 15. Quote—own emphasis added.

24 Davies, Martin, Another Way of Being: Leisure and the Possibility of Privacy, 104–129, in The
Philosophy of Leisure, Edited by Tom Winnifrith and Cyril Barrett, Palgrave Macmillan, 1989,
ISBN: 978-1-349-19731-6 (eBook), 110.
25 Roche, 65.
26 Bartling, Hugh, A master-planned community…, 171.
27 Bartling, Hugh, A master-planned community as heterotopia: The Villages, Florida, 165–178, in
Heterotopia and the City, Dehaene and De Cauter, eds., Routledge, 2008, 171–3.
430 6 Case Study
6.3 The Spatial Coordinate
The heterotopic principle (heterochronia) discussed by Foucault in relation to leisure

spaces focuses on the temporal coordinate. Although subordinated, the spatial coor-
dinate remains necessary. In the Foucaultian example, the temporal dynamic, the
return or escape to an idealized past, is expressed in built form: the Djerba huts
are an instance of habitation that—along with its implied practices—is no longer
customary, and thus becomes other; the built form is used as a means of conveying
temporal ‘information’, as a repository of knowledge or condensed versions of a
museum—essentially a mediator for the experience of a different instance of time.
The rendition of time is unavoidably conveyed through the material (the tangible
and the visible)—whether it is through presence—the built scenography onto which
temporality can adhere—or through absence, such as the (temporary) abandonment
of garments.
However, additional spatial characteristics are implied. One of the main non-
temporal features is the physical otherness, the encounter with the exotic other, the
experiencing of the different and unusual. Seeing that neither the notion nor the
practice are new,28 the encounter with the other through the leisure voyage, dif-
ferent definitions of leisure allow for contrasting readings. By the end of the 19th
century, Veblen defined leisure as “far from a life of idleness”, an activity requiring
“considerable time and effort” aimed at acquiring “[…] a wide range of skills and
knowledge that clearly demonstrated that one had the time and financial means to
avoid gainful employment.”29 In short, affording leisure time indicates status and was
displayed through non-lucrative knowledge and skill (among which Veblen recalls
the “knowledge of the dead languages and the occult sciences; of correct spelling;
of syntax and prosody; of the various forms of domestic music and other household
art; […]”).30 A life of leisure thus demanded an assiduous work-like construction of
a specialized education,31 and in these parameters, the leisure voyage would serve
as a twofold educational cum recreational device (see Le Grand Tour). This ‘tra-
ditional’ understanding of leisure has all but vanished, as the hierarchies of value
28 “Consider, then, for an instant, my increasing delight and astonishment as I discover myself a
thousand leagues from my homeland and let my senses slowly absorb the confused impressions of
a world which is the perfect antithesis of ours.” Gerard de Nerval, Voyage en orient (1844), quote
opening Chris Rojek’s Ways of Escape. Modern Transformations in Leisure and Travel, Palgrave
Macmillan, 1993.
29 Scott, David, Why Veblen Matters: The Role of Status Seeking in Contemporary Leisure,
385–400, in The Palgrave Handbook of Leisure Theory, editors: Karl Spracklen, Brett Lashua,
Erin Sharpe, Spencer Swain, Palgrave Handbooks, Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 2017, 388.
30 Scott, D., Why Velben Matters…, 388.
31 Scott, David, Why Veblen Matters: The Role of Status Seeking in Contemporary Leisure,
385–400, in The Palgrave Handbook of Leisure Theory, editors: Karl Spracklen, Brett Lashua,
Erin Sharpe, Spencer Swain, Palgrave Handbooks, Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 2017, 388.
6.3 The Spatial Coordinate 431
have shifted and the predicted “leisured society” failed to materialize;32 although
the leisure-status mechanism remains a similar one, it had for the most part lost
its educational encoding. Some vestiges of the ‘traditional’ approach remain in the
contemporary understanding of leisure and the practices of the leisure voyage—the
status value via conspicuous leisure and most of all via conspicuous consumption.
The modern encounter with the exotic other has become a common theme in the
leisure industry either as exotic destination travelling (the commodified exotic des-
tination as an epitome of leisure, linking leisure, consumption and the pursuit of
status) or as theming of spaces, and has even permeated further, as previously shown
in Bartling’s example. As Chard suggests, leisure travel is no other than the very
pursuit of otherness, that “travellers, then, impose on the foreign a demand that it
should in some way proclaim itself as different from the familiar” and that their
role appoints the task of “grasping that difference”.33 In the period travel literature
researched by Chard, otherness is usually identified as the marvellous, the wonder
or various “concepts of the strange, the singular and the astonishing”,34 and the
voyage an attempt to assemble an imagined and intangible cabinet de curiosités.
The contemporary exotic voyage retains comparable features—a restless search for
otherness seen as the new and marvellous, the awe-inducing experience, the dis-
tinctive or unusual, defined in coordinates such as spatial isolation and remoteness,
authenticity, exclusivity and financial value. Yet, that very alterity, that sought after
“evidence of difference expected and required”35 of the exotic other has morphed
into a paradoxical hybrid: it also has to be a “familiar other”. It has to be recogniz-
able and even explored or experienced a priori, through virtual reality, image and/or
film.36 Thus, the otherness experienced through the exotic voyage can be imagined
beforehand or experienced a priori via a proxy,37 as a well-researched construct or
at least made familiar by means of representation. One could argue that otherness
thus becomes less visible, less ‘different’ from, and even merging with the familiar,
as it is decanted in more subtle relations—yet, without losing its label. While this
may resemble a process of normalization (loss of difference), it reveals the leisure
spaces as absolute heterotopian devices—much like the other heterotopian spaces,
the hospital or the asylum—necessary enclaves of difference which support the func-
32 Schor, Juliet B., Overturning the Modernist Predictions: Recent Trends in Work and Leisure in
the OECD, 203–215 in A Handbook of Leisure Studies, editors: Chris Rojek, Susan M. Shaw, A.
J. Veal, Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 2006, 205.
33 Chard, Chloe, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography,
1600-1830, Manchester University Press, 1999, 3.

34 Chard, Chloe, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography,
1600-1830, Manchester University Press, 1999, 4.

35 Chard, Pleasure and Guilt, 4.
36 Rewtrakunphaiboon, Walaiporn, Film-induced Tourism: Inventing a Vacation to a Location, BU
Academic Review, vol.8, no. 1., January–June 2009.

37 The late 1990s and early 2000s saw a burgeoning expansion of the blog and the travel blog—a
modern metamorphosis of the eighteenth–nineteenth century travel journal—which later on lost

momentum in favour of the travel video-blog or vlog. These allow the prospective traveller to
experience via proxy a specific space, practices and services, etc.
432 6 Case Study
tioning of the official ordering. An interesting version of this dynamic is explored

by Cohen, in his study of the Exodus Program, an example of diaspora tourism of
the Jews to Israel. Here the dynamic altered; although essentially a tourist tour, the
journey is “a kind of spiritual pilgrimage with two primary, explicitly stated goals:
namely, to instil a sense of connection with Israel; and to help participants develop
and strengthen their ‘Jewish identity’”;38 this is not immediately recognizable as the
typical encounter with the (exotic) other because it redefines the self-other relation:
on one hand, the need for exploring Jewishness and the Jewish past (as a foreign
country)39 reveals the present as self versus the past as other dichotomies; simi-
larly, the idea of travelling anew to the promised land of Jerusalem, the epitome of
otherness par excellence, supports this reading. On the other hand, the aspect of per-
petuation, of connection with and of creating a common notion of the Jewish identity
(similar to most identitary practices) suggests the construction of the self-as-other,
thus revealing the journey to be an encounter with one’s own otherness. A similar
approach is offered by Steward in his chapter discussing the nineteenth and early
twentieth century conceptualisation of Italian sites by British tourist, focusing on
the “new social groups (the middle classes, women and entire families)” for whom
“travel was as much a process of self-discovery as it was of site discovery.”40
One of the other main markers of heterotopic spaces is the enclave character—the
relative isolation, the self-sufficiency, the clear demarcation, the presence of bound-
aries and point(s) of access which control and condition the entry—supported through
both physical features and practices. For most leisure spaces, all these markers are
immediately visible and used deliberately, as for the balneal spaces. In terms of the
architectural programme, the internal spatial hierarchies found in balneal spaces
are the first to signal and draw the interior/exterior demarcation; they define specific
functional flows, with fixed and controlled points of entry, as well as given trajectories
for the individual—with the purpose of resolving the individual’s state of crisis, thus
equating the route with a specialized ritual. The role and the functioning of a space in
its context can contribute to this enclave character. Paradoxically, the multifunctional
character of such spaces can sometimes contribute to the ‘enclavisation’ and the oth-
erness of a space, albeit unintentionally (the Greek Asclepion, the Roman baths, the
hamams, etc.). If for the classic balneal spaces the isolation and the retreat from the
everyday have a sacral motivation (the encounter with the sanative divinity requiring
isolation in specific junctures and loci), this temporary renunciation of one’s own
time gradually turns into a search and recovery of one’s one time and self through the
retreat from the everyday. Although contemporary resorts usually display most visi-
38 Cohen, Erik, H., Preparation, simulation and the creation of community. Exodus and the case
of diaspora education tourism, 124–138, in Coles, T., Dallen, J. Timothy, Tourism, diasporas and
space, Routledge, 2004, 124.
39 See Lowenthal, D. The Past is a Foreign Country, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985,
as well as Dimitri Ioannides, Mara Cohen Ioannides, Jewish past as a foreign country, in Coles, T.,
Dallen, J. Timothy, Tourism, diasporas and space, Routledge, 2004.
40 Medina Lansansky, D., Introduction (on Stewart, Jill, Performing Abroad: British Tourists in Italy
and their Practices, 1840–1914), in Architecture and Tourism. Perception, performance and place,
D. Medina Lasansky and Brian McLaren (eds.), Berg, 2004, 5.
bly such autonomous structuring and self-sufficiency, this tendency to reconstruct a

world in small scale is common to the entire typology of balneal leisure spaces. The
ideal—or the other par excellence—is also connected to this theme. One historic
example—a subspecies of balneal spaces—is the Roman bathhouse. These “elabo-
rate multi-functional complexes”41 mainly dedicated to “bathing and hygiene, [were
also a] place of gathering, facilitating social and business intercourse”,42 a place for
play, sport, worship and health (medical facilities),43 as well as intellectual ‘exer-
cise’ (endowed with “libraries, lecture-halls, lounges, sports grounds, gardens and
paths for walks”)44 ; these “pleasure palaces dedicated to the principle of enjoyment”
were designed as ‘leisure universes’ and it was not uncommon to spend the entire
day at the baths. The Roman thermae are instrumental to the ideal of Roman civi-
lization—sometimes a symbol of the Roman presence or mark of the pax romana
and a certain lifestyle made democratically accessible,45 more often the material
reminder of Roman identity and ideology, power and prestige, as instruments of
the official ordering46 ; furthermore, these complexly designed spaces introduced the
official ordering in the domain of leisure, acting as additional, softer, identitary
devices—connecting and aligning the individual with his community and with the
idea(l) of roman community. From a different perspective, the otherness of these
spaces sifts yet again: the Roman bath houses are also a conspicuous motif in the
narrative of the conquering civilizing power versus the barbarian other. Dvorjetski
argues the everyday, common character of the Roman baths (common urban equip-
ment), although admitting that these spaces were often a ‘gift’ to the city (much like
other roman leisure structures),47 to ensure its proper functioning. Although leisure
spaces are to be considered ‘opposites’ of everyday spaces (playing on the “feeling
of freedom and pleasure by formulating a sense of choice and desire”) they also
retain their ‘productive’ aspect (the temporal structuring, the leisure ‘activities’).48
This is, in fact, valid for all the Foucaultian heterotopic examples—spaces which
fulfil specific, central functions in their different time–space contexts,49 essential for
the existence of the sustenance of the official ordering (although always potentially
capable to contradict, challenge or even overrule it).
41 Dvorjetski, Estee, Leisure, Pleasure and Healing. Spa Culture and Medicine in Ancient Eastern
Mediterranean, Brill, 2007, 47.

42 Dvorjetski, E., Leisure, Pleasure and Healing…, 47.
45 Lenoir, Eliane. Thermes et palestres à l’époque romaine, p. 62–76, în Bulletin de l’Association
Guillaume Budé, no. 1, martie 1995, 68.

46 Twigg, J., Bathing—the Body and Community Care, Psychology Press, 2000, 19.
47 Twigg, Julia, Bathing—the Body and Community Care, Psychology Press, 2000, 19.
48 Dvorjetski, Estee, Leisure, Pleasure and Healing. Spa Culture and Medicine in Ancient Eastern
Mediterranean, Brill, 2007, 36.

49 Heterotopia “has a precise and determined function within a society and the same heterotopia
can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs, have one function or another.”
Foucault, Michel, Of Other Spaces, apud. Dehaene, M., De Cauter, L., eds., Heterotopia and the
City. Public Space in a Post-civil society, Routledge, 2008, 18.
434 6 Case Study
The role of transitory retreat and the disengagement from the everyday suggest
an itinerary or a two-way ‘journey’ between known and unknown, the everyday and
the exceptional; for most leisure spaces this two-way transition is essential, even if it
assumes highly condensed forms, in that it signals the crossing of a threshold or the
conventional ending of the everyday and the onset of otherness. The journey trope
is usually defined through temporal coordinates (specific temporal fragmentations,
duration, times of departure), although it inherently remains spatially bound—the
immaterial connection of two spatially bound emplacements. However, the itinerary
usually associated with leisure spaces is both a ritual of access and an internal
‘obligatory route’. In some cases, the complexity of this ritual augments the otherness
of the destination: the more elaborate the journey, the more difficult to access the
space and the more exceptional the destination—sometimes even regardless of the
actual temporal or spatial coordinates; the more complex the internal itineraries, the
more exceptional the space. Generally speaking, for most balneal spaces the ritual
of access is expressed in both temporal and spatial coordinates—reinforced through
the built fabric as well as through preparatory practices. One of the most illustrative
cases is the Greek Asclepion. It juxtaposes the religious and the curative dimensions
in a privileged intermediate space, linking sacred and profane, the everyday and the
exceptional. Its structuring prompts for particular practices, from the ritual of access
(the pilgrimage, the physical accessing of the space) to the fixed functional rhythms
and determined transitioning of spaces. The stages of preparation and the isolation are
paramount for the encounter with divinity and the resolving of the individual’s state of
crisis—50 essentially restoring normality. These spatial and temporal coordinates are
expressed in built form and are enacted through practices, all suggesting the journey:
the successive enclosures, the points of passage, the functional specialization and
the hierarchy of spaces—essentially reflecting a set of relationships, among which
the ‘natural order’ (mortal/divinity), restored through the subjecting of the self to the
ritual; all these determine a strictly ordered space, decidedly other in both form and
function when considered within its context.
This reading reveals these leisure spaces’ multiple heterotopic features. Consid-
ering Foucault’s first principle, they can be crisis or deviation heterotopias, meant to
resolve an imbalance and restore ‘normality’ (the balanced individual), all in support
of the official ordering. For most leisure spaces, this encoding remains paramount.
According to Foucault’s second principle, without essentially changing their makeup,
these spaces can assume different functionings, at different moments and according
to their contexts—thus being able to “function in a very different way […]; for each
heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a society and the same
heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs, have
one function or another.”51 Considering this in a wider perspective, leisure has func-
tioned in different ways yet always as a cultural subsystem of society, reflecting and
50 Luce, J.V., Greek medicine from Asclepius to Hippocrates, 2001, Irish Journal of Medical Science,
Jul–Sep; 170(3):200–2.
51 Foucault, M., Of Other Spaces, in (eds.) Dehaene, M., De Cauter, L., Heterotopia and the City.
Public space in a Post-civil Society, Routledge, 2008, 18

enforcing existing cultural values or, according to Jarvie and Maguire, teaching the
individual to “accept dominant cultural values”.52 Balneal spaces, thermal or coastal
resorts, have all been such hybrid outlets, on the one hand enforcing the official
ordering and on the other enabling a sort of ‘bending of the rules’ and a laxity of
behaviours.53
The heterotopic capacity to juxtapose contrasts, differences or incompatibilities
can be exemplified by the incompatibility between the two functional profiles: the
more cerebral gaudia—requiring a space (and time) of contemplation—and the more
carnal Voluptas—implying a space centred on the stimulation of the senses—both
equally available to the one who seeks them. The capacity of balneal leisure spaces
“to juxtapose in a single real place several spaces, several emplacements that are
in themselves incompatible”54 (heterotopias’ third principle) can also be argued by
means of their symbolic encoding; these spaces inherit and juxtapose symbolic read-
ings of diverse spiritual origin—the fountain of youth, the gardens of Eden and/or
the earthly paradise, all linked with the lost paradise archetype—cyclically reintro-
duced and refashioned. This spiritual encoding coexists with the scientific dimension
in most historic instances of balneal spaces, the latter currently being challenged
by the “so-called alternative medical beliefs”.55 The contemporary balneal spaces,
much like coastal resorts, have maintained and developed this capacity mainly in
the form of a multifunctional profile and as a means of economic survival; for some
(exotic) retreats, this juxtaposition of opposites can (and often does) manifest as the
coexistence of two worlds, the tourist enclave of the retreat, paradisiacal in both
representation and encoding, and the dark, ‘underground’ world of illicit activity,
discrimination and economic disparity.56
The “system of opening and closing that both isolates them [heterotopias] and
makes them penetrable”, or the apparent isolation, is connected with the mechanism
of discovering oneself through nature and is fairly common in balneal leisure spaces.
Leisure spaces and more specifically retreats and balneal resorts all have a form
52 Jarvie, G., Maguire, J., Stratification, sport and leisure practices and social mobilities, 20–23 in
Jarvie, G., Maguire, J., Sport and leisure in social thought, Routledge, 1994, 21.
53 The case of the Roman bathhouse, the medieval bath houses.
Public space in a Post-civil Society, Routledge, 2008, 19.

55 York, William H., Health and Wellness in Antiquity through the Middle Ages, Joseph P. Byrne
(series editor), ABC-CLIO: Greenwood Press, 2012, 3.

56 Karnoouch suggests the existence of such an illicit underground of the seaside Romanian resorts
of the 70s and 80s, a parallel market, obscure or tolerated by the official ordering, and hidden behind
the economic touristic profile: “during their stay, they [international tourists] used to exchange hard
currency on the black market for ten or fifteen times the official rate, while others did a trade in
their summer clothes or ‘blue jeans’ […] bathing costumes, stockings, as well as contraceptives,
from which they made a handsome profit”. Karnoouch, C., From the Particular to the General. Or
how Communist Romania Confirmed its Integration in Global Capitalism through its Vast Social
and Subsequently Tourist Project to Urbanise the Black Sea Coast, 146–159, in Enchanting Views:
Romanian Black Sea Tourism Planning and Architecture of the 1960s and 70s, Serban, Alina,
Dimou, Kaliopi, Istudor, Sorin (eds.), Published by pepluspatru Association, ISBN: 978-973-0-
18345-0, Bucharest, 2015, 154.
436 6 Case Study
of conditional access, from the medical prescriptions for the nineteenth century or
mid-century balneal retreats to the modern economic constraints or the number of
leave days. In addition, most function as clearly delineated enclaves (the British eigh-
teenth–nineteenth century end-of-the-line coastal resorts), taking on the features of
gated communities. According to Foucault’s heterotopic principle, such spaces “look
like pure and simple openings, but that, generally, conceal curious exclusions [where]
everybody can enter […], but in fact it is only an illusion: one believes to have entered
and, by the very fact of entering, one is excluded.”57 This feature can be easily iden-
tified in the case of leisure spaces such as balneal or coastal resorts: the role assumed
when accessing the space defines the extent to which the space becomes accessible
to that individual. This definition can also be read through the link between leisure
and nature. The ‘mediation’ devices which are interposed between nature and the
individual accessing the space can be considered an expression of the need for and
a crystallized form of ritual and ritual practice; in this reading, the mediation device
would act as the key, or means of conveying symbolic meaning. Yet, these same
mediation devices can also be the operators of illusion and the witnesses of implicit
exclusion: nature is no longer ‘natural’ for the individual, it needs to be ‘translated’,
rendered safe and redefined within boundaries which are contextually defined. In a
more utilitarian reading, practices and their material embodiments become interposed
between the individual and the natural element instead of mediating and conveying
meaning; this process seems to unbalance the gaudia/Voluptas dichotomy, in favour
of the latter. Nature is glamorously enhanced, mise en scène: it is to be experienced
and perceived through a specific apparatus of built form (terraces, seashore walk-
ways and promenades, designed points of perspective etc.); aiming to render it more
accessible, these manipulate the perception of nature, and by interposing this lens,
the ‘object of desire’ becomes blurred, more and more exteriorly projected. Besides,
despite the apparent increasing accessibility of leisure spaces, hidden hierarchies and
exclusions of social and economic nature persist, to some extent implicit to any space
structuring operation. Most built forms that accompany any exploitation of a balneal
resource are designed for enhancing its accessibility and its use, yet they introduce
and enact in this very process the hierarchies of value specific to their historic time
frame; when considering the heritage perspective, these themselves (built form cum
imprinted layers of historic value hierarchies) become opaque to the present everyday
user—although the resort itself remains accessible, open.
One such example is the amply researched Victorian takeover of the seaside.
Several converging features created an auspicious context, mainly deriving from an
already established industrialization: the (re)discovery of health benefits of seashores,
sunbathing and bathing emerges in an increasingly industrialized and polluted envi-
ronment, in an age where tuberculosis had become the symbol of industrialization
57 Foucault,M., Of Other Spaces, in (eds.) Dehaene, M., De Cauter, L., Heterotopia and the City.
induced social problems.58 The demand for leisure and leisure activities emerged
from a background of economic growth, coupled with the development of railway
networks (and the implicit ‘temporal contraction’).59 Although nature and health
through nature were the initial point of interest—fuelling the creation of an ini-
tial built layer (holiday hotels, boarding-houses, tea-houses)—they quickly became
secondary to more frivolous attractions, these themselves prompting newly built lay-
ers (dancehalls, pleasure palaces, entertainment pavilions, terraces, hotels, museums
and galleries); the representational factor (to see and be seen, to partake in a fashion-
able pastime) also played a big role, reflected in the wide range of publicly shared
spaces, the beach, the promenades and piers, the ballrooms and theatres. Although
these spaces were designed with the purpose of creating a more democratic holiday-
making, they remain within the parameters of the strict and hierarchized Victorian
ordering, inheriting its segregations and rules; however, they did provide a refuge
from the everyday structures, even if a controlled one. These seaside resorts became
the hybrid other: an extension of and the reinforcement of the dominant ordering yet
simultaneously more lax ‘laboratory-spaces’ (akin to Hetherington’s “laboratories
for new social orderings”),60 where the new and different could be tested and eventu-
ally merged with the existing. In a more abstract perspective, the development of the
seaside resorts aimed to make widely available the benefits of industrialization ‘out-
side’ the industrialized environment, in an attempt to recover the healthier individual
(both physically and morally) of the past. Yet, this idealized return to nature would
be a hybrid, mediated and well-controlled one, made possible in a clearly defined,
somewhat isolated spatial enclave.
All these threads link the Victorian coastal resort to the process of Industrial
Revolution and the industrialization processes, still, the connection is more than
a simple causal one: the industrialization had permeated deep within the societal
ordering, altering not only work and habitation processes but also leisure and what
would later become the patterns of holidaymaking. The work–leisure dichotomy is
reinforced, the latter becoming an appendage, a necessary concession to working
activities. Observing the evolution of sport and leisure in society, Jarvie and Maguire
find that, among other functions of leisure activities, “participation in sport helps
to create suitably motivated workers necessary to maintain productivity in indus-
trialised societies.”61 Leisure had become increasingly regulated in order to ensure
better productivity—in brief, leisure itself had also been industrialized. This princi-
ple will resurface more pragmatically in the case of the modernist resorts developed
58 Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz, The White Plague. Cf. DUBOS, René e DUBOS, Jean—The
White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man and Society. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996,
p.xvi-xxxii.
59 Feltham’s 1806 A guide to all the watering and sea-bathing places; with a description of the
lakes; a sketch of a tour in Wales; and Itineraries, (Feltham, John, Publisher London: R. Phillips,
1806), opens with a comprehensive map of the road network connecting all the points of interest
for the potential bather in Britain.
60 Hetherington, K., The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering,
61 Jarvie, G., Maguire, J., Stratification, sport and leisure practices and social mobilities, 20–23 in
Jarvie, G., Maguire, J., Sport and leisure in social thought, Routledge, 1994, 21.
438 6 Case Study
under totalitarian rule: conceived to be democratically accessible (principle which

is unmistakably reflected in the architectural form), to make widely available what
was once reserved for the few, they are promoted as escape and freedom from the
everyday. However, they retain the strict orderings typical for work environments,
internal norming systems, controlled access, hierarchies and temporal fragmenta-
tions. In the case of the modernist coastal resort, this ‘industrialized’ view of leisure
is approached in a rather matter-of-fact way: leisure is a mere component of the lager
apparatus, which ultimately is reflected in the functional, machine-like architecture.
Efficiency and progress was to be the goal of both holidaymaking and work, in a
perpetual cycle. As with the Victorian seaside resorts, nature is mediated and mise
en scène by the anthropic; the apparatus of built form acts as a colonizer through
which nature, much like leisure, is used as a means of reinforcement of the dominant
ordering. Here, the other is deliberately constructed to support the everyday, just as
Foucault’s crisis spaces (asylums, hospitals) support to the good functioning of the
dominant ordering.
Similarly based on the link between leisure and nature, a less theoretical reading
of Foucault’s heterotopic principle of the ‘hidden exclusion’ can be discussed on the
basis of the Swedish right of public access (Allemansrätt or ‘everyman’s right’).62
While this “principle protected by law” refers to privately owned63 yet undeveloped
or ‘free space’—including water areas in the form of not yet developed coastal
spaces—it acts as a paradoxical, ‘invisible’ mediation device between the individual
and nature, creating an apparently open but highly normed hybrid public–private
space.64 The purpose is that very connection with nature and with oneself, defining
to the Swedish identity. In this case the mediation device and its exclusions are
concealed, existing strictly as written document, while being physically expressed
solely through absence—more specifically the absence of boundaries (“landowners
are […] not allowed to put up fences to keep people off land that is subject to the Right
of Public Access”).65 As Ankre observes, “the modern notion of the right of public
access was not clearly defined until recreation and outdoor recreation had gained
importance. At the same time, the obvious right of public access has been relevant in
62 Ankre, Rosemarie, Understanding the Visitor. A Prerequisite for Coastal Zone Planning, Blekinge
Institute of Technology, Licentiate Dissertation Series No. 2007:09, School of Technoculture,

Humanities and Planning, Sweden, 2007, ISBN: 978-91-7295-122-8, p. 28, footnote 10.
63 “The land owners have to accept other people’s occasional presence on their land, but there
should be no damages or disturbances. Certain products of the nature (for example, mushrooms,
berries and plants that are not under protection) are free to pick”, Blücher, G., Böhme, K.,
Gruppe, O. and Turowski, G. (2001). Tysk-svensk handbok för planeringsbegrepp. Stockholm:
ARL/Nordregio/Blekinge Institute of Technology, apud. Ankre, Rosemarie, Understanding the Vis-
itor. A Prerequisite for Coastal Zone Planning, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Licentiate Dis-
sertation Series No. 2007:09, School of Technoculture, Humanities and Planning, Sweden, 2007,
ISBN: 978-91-7295-122-8, p. 28.
64 What outdoor activities (camping, picking berries and mushrooms, horse riding etc.) and their
restrictions are strictly defined in the text of the Right to Public Access.
65 http://www.swedishepa.se/Enjoying-nature/The-Right-of-Public-Access/This-is-allowed1/
Fences-and-signs/, Last updated: 26 February 2018 Content editor: Sanja Kuruzovic, accessed
september 2018.
the development of outdoor recreation”66 ; this illustrates another type of mediation

device, emerging from a different context and based on a different understanding
of leisure, ultimately revealing a quite distinct hierarchy of values. Although the
invoked principle is the same—access to nature for leisure purposes—it assumes two
contrasting manifestations, even opposing, paradoxically harbouring and expressing
hierarchies of value specific to their dominant orderings and context.
The relationship with the natural element is a pivot point in understanding balneal
and leisure spaces. The discovery of oneself through nature is available to all within
these leisure spaces, yet only some resolve to go beyond the sensuous experience.
While this can be discussed in terms of the ethics of pleasure, I argue for a more sim-
ple reading: one can deliberately choose to seek oneself by absolute break with the
everyday time, by contemplation and (re)connection with nature—and this is made
available and marketed within these constructed enclaves (the Japanese onsen, the
isolated island retreat)—yet one can also do so unconsciously, through play, through
a playful immersion in a sensuous experience of nature. I argue that the ‘institutional-
isation’ of leisure uses these two modes of relating to the natural element as a device
to enforce the official ordering. The instance of the seaside resorts developed under
totalitarian rule supports this argument; they showcase a hybrid of the two instances.
The sensuous experience holds the foreground position, yet one experiences nature
through a highly regulated ‘play’, sports and activities, within the controlled envi-
ronment of the resort-as an extension of the everyday controlled environment. This
device reveals the real workings of the official ordering (the control is apparent in the
resorts’ every aspect, never concealed) and simultaneously creates an illusion of free-
dom and independent decision, as well as a larger scale illusion aimed at convincing
the individual of the official ordering’s functioning. As it will be discussed further
on, in the Romanian case the freedom to travel abroad was geographically limited as
well as reserved for the selected few, while internal tourism, although popularized
and having the states’ support, was dependent of several state-imposed limitations
(fuel rations, holiday tickets, waiting lists for automobiles, etc.). Considering this,
that “absolute break with everyday time” is twofold: apparent and more internalized
by those using the space, and less perceptible when considered as an integral part of
the ordering; however, this alterity will always be dependent on the context—as the
Romanian case will reveal.
The indispensable presence of the natural element offers a fertile terrain for the
interpretation of these resort spaces. This feature can be more or less pronounced,
producing a wide range of typologies between the festive, fair-like resort and the
secluded retreat. When present, a seasonal functioning of a resort can emphasize the
‘time-fragment’ character, their functioning as fragile, finite and exceptionally occur-
ring spatial-events that provide a temporary displacement of the official ordering;
off-season, the imprint of practices and of the event remain as empty and inaccessi-
ble reminders. The fragility evoked by a seasonal functioning contrasts with the large
66 Ankre, Rosemarie, Understanding the Visitor. A Prerequisite for Coastal Zone Planning, Blekinge

Humanities and Planning, Sweden, 2007, ISBN: 978-91-7295-122-8, p. 28.
440 6 Case Study
robust structures of resorts built under totalitarian regimes; considering this relation,
large-scale planned resorts appear as illusory devices, revealing in their less visible,
off-season moments the actual fragility of the dominant ordering they represent.
Dehaene and De Cauter interpret the Foucaultian example of the vacation village
as the paradoxical “permanent heterotopia of festivity”,67 a crystallization of sorts
of a transitory time; they discuss these type of spaces in the form of a much wider
functional group, that of leisure spaces, approaching it from the point of view of the
private–public hybrid. Upon a brief investigation, spaces such as holiday camps and
seasonal resorts immediately offer several features: they are inscribed within definite
physical enclosures or spatial delineations, active within the enclosure and sometimes
independent of it. While the physical enclosure may remain, and so even more ‘open’
than when active, the functioning needs to be activated (as an event)—supporting
another one of Foucault’s principles (“Everybody can enter into those heterotopian
emplacements, but in fact it is only an illusion: one believes to have entered and, by
the very fact of entering, one is excluded.”).68 As previously discussed, the access in
these spaces is usually conditioned by the completion of a ritual, a journey or route,
and/or the adoption of a predefined and fixed role. More so, the functioning of these
spaces is dependent of the existence and perpetuation of a specific and very strict
internal ordering, with most often concealed rigidly defined roles and hierarchies of
relations—paradoxically contrasting with the ‘total freedom’ these spaces promise.
On the other hand, a continuous non-seasonal functioning emphasizes the resort’s
function as a portal to a perceived-as-stagnant or “eternal time”. Also here the rigidly
defined roles and hierarchies are no longer concealed. The strict internal orderings,
the mandatory passage of certain steps become capital and highly visible; in order
to effect its purpose (regeneration, healing) one must partially give up freedom and
subject oneself to specific and normed procedures.
Water is most often the targeted natural resource, the common denominator of
the spaces within the functional category addressed—the spa, the balneal and the
coastal resort—in varied embodiments. While the reviewing of its extensive sym-
bolic interpretations and its connected themes (bathing, drinking, sailing, immersing
oneself, etc.) is not the main subject of this research, some symbolic aspects will be
discussed in the following paragraphs in support of both Foucault’s example and the
reading of heterotopia proposed herein; these can help decode the layers of meaning
embedded in by design or acquired by the built object accompanying this element.
While the sacred, religious or magical curating capacities historically associated with
this natural element are well known and need no further elaborating, its regenerative
quality also draws on grander motifs. The creation through water myth is “almost
67 Dehaene, Michiel, De Cauter, Lieven, footnote n.25 to Foucault’s Of Other Spaces essay, in
Heterotopia and the City. Public space in a Post-civil Society, Routledge, 2008, 27.

universal”,69 either in the form of the ‘primordial waters’, or as water as one of the
two essential elements that make up the primordial matter—70 all of these linking
the element to the original matrix, maternity (especially when associated with under-
ground sources) and fecundity, and by association, passing on paradisiac features of
plenitude and perpetuation to the spaces/places housing water sources.71 Chevalier
and Gheerbrant note its ambivalence. The destruction/rebirth myth, or the world’s
cleansing by flood, illustrates a violent return either to an initial and unspoiled (even
perfect) state,72 or to a brand new other; similarly, the themes of cleansing and
rebirth are reiterated in various sacral rituals (christening, ablution, the Christian
Epiphany festivity—a ritual re-enacting of Jesus’ baptism)—mediating the other or
renewed individual.73 Bachelard offers another valuable association: the mirror sym-
bolism and the psychology of reflection; for him, water is a “natural reflection”, more
organic and intimate than that of the manmade mirror, which interposes the hard,
impenetrable surface between the two images. Linking this to Foucault’s definition
of heterotopia as mirror—74 materialized utopia and play between the real and the
unreal—one can observe that the reflection and the ‘reflected’ are separate; these
remain disconnected at the very tangible surface of the mirror, while in its elemental
69 Chevalier, Jean, Gheerbrant, Dictionar de simboluri, volume 1 (A-D), Editura Artemis, Bucharest,
1994, ISBN: 973-566-026-1, page 108, initially published as Dictionnaire des symboles. Mythes,
reves, coutumes, gestes, forms, figures, couleurs, nombres, Editions Robert Laffont, S.A., Paris,
1969.
70 Bachelard, Gaston, Apa si visele. Eseu despre imaginatia materiei, editura Univers, translated by
Mavrodin, Irina, Bucharest, 1995, ISBN: 973-34-0303-2, page 19; initially published as L’Eau et
les Reves, Essai sur l’imagination de la matiere, Librarie Jose Corti, 1942.
71 The term oasis illustrates the permeation from a very culturally and geographically anchored locus,
the traveller’ physical space of peace and respite for the traveller (arising from water’s fecundity),
to a universally assumed idea of shelter and retreat.
72 Eliade, Mircea, Istoria credintelor si ideilor religioase (Histoire des croyances at des idees
religieuses), volume 1, publisher: Editura stiintifica, Bucharest, 1991, first published in French,
Payot, Paris, 1976, ISBN: 973-44-0027-4, p. 172.
73 “Only the water of the christening can cleanse the sins and it is bestowed only once, for it allows the
commencing of a new state: that of a man without sin. The discarding of the previous self, or rather
this momentary death of history can be compared with a flood, for it symbolizes a disappearance, an
annihilation: an epoch ends, another, new, is born.” Chevalier, Gheerbrant, Dictionar de simboluri…,
111.
74 “These heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, in-between experience, which would be the
mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a place without place. In the mirror, I see myself
there where I am not, in an unreal space that virtually opens up behind the surface; I am over there,
there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives me my own visibility, that enables me to see myself
there where I am absent. Utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does
really exist, and as it exerts on the place I occupy a sort of return effect; it is starting from the mirror
that I discover my absence in the place where I am, since I see myself over there. Starting from this
gaze that is, as it were, cast upon me, from the depth of this virtual space that is on the other side of
the looking glass, I come back towards myself and I begin again to direct my eyes towards myself
and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in the respect
that it renders this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the looking glass at
once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since, in
order to be perceived, it has to pass through this virtual point, which is over there.”
442 6 Case Study
version, the water-mirror allows the agglutination of the two, at the expense of both
‘worlds’ suggesting another kind of heterotopia: the other is no longer captive behind
the mirror surface, available only to the gaze, but the other becomes real, created anew
through the merging of the reflection and the reflected. Bachelard touches on this
while discussing Narcissus’ myth, observing that his contemplation is not static but
transformative and geared toward becoming: while facing the reflected ideal, Nar-
cissus “meditates on his own future”.75 What can this joining the real and the ideal
be, if not another variation of the translation of the ideal into the realm of the real
(or the embodiment of utopia), yet here the toll on both is more readily visible: the
ideal (reflection) is shattered and disappears, replaced by the transformed real, tem-
porarily suspended in an in-between crisis state, with either a positive or a negative
outcome, as in Narcissus’ case. Bachelard links this mirror-role of water to divina-
tion, a combination of “a natural [type of] catoptromancy” and ‘hydromancy’.76 In
another common reading, water is the quintessential representation of the ‘not yet
materialised’ or “everything that is virtual, everything that does not yet have shape
[…], all the signs of a future development, yet also all the dangers of its dissolu-
tion”77 ; this in-between ‘space’ accommodates the individual in crisis, he himself in
an in-between state. Another vast theme, the bathing or immersion in the water is
commonly associated with the regression to an original state, a symbolic death, while
the resurfacing—and breaking again the barrier between the two worlds—is rebirth
and repositioning of the self into the world. As Chevalier and Gheerbrant observe,
the duality and hybridity of this element resurfaces on multiple levels, whether when
considering its composition, pure/impure, nourishing or unwholesome, its origin, in
or on the ground or descending from above, its nature, shifting from feminine to
masculine, its state, stagnant or flowing, known and unknown, or its role, beneficial
or dangerous and malefic and so on. The thread connecting all of these symbolic
readings of water is, in fact, its very mobility and resilience: it is capable of simul-
taneously conveying opposing principles, thus situating itself in the realm of the
possible, a neutral and delicately balanced in-between, where both the positive and
the negative charge remain as potential.
75 Bachelard, Gaston, Apa si visele…, 31.

76 Bachelard, 31.
77 Chevalier, Jean, Gheerbrant, Dictionar de simboluri, volume 1 (A-D), Editura Artemis, Bucharest,
1994, ISBN: 973-566-026-1, page 107, initially published as Dictionnaire des symboles. Mythes,
1969.
Another feature of water—one which supports Foucault’s temporal approach of

his heterotopic principle (the Polynesian vacation village)—seems to be a recurring
theme in all of its mythical interpretations. The contact with the element is tem-
porary and limited. Bathing time implies a specific timing and ritualized actions
as well as a specific localization in space. Sailing or traversing water depends on
mainly temporal coordinates: while the designated place is more often a known one
(a crossing point, a port, a shore, etc.) the timing of the action needs to be revealed,
usually by a divinity (favour of the gods) or the spirits of the place. The contact
with the water is an event, a specific or given interval, a strictly determined moment
negotiated through and circumscribed within a ritual, for the individual’s interaction
with water and its unstable powers can only be a transient one: the human cannot
belong to the water except when permanently surrendering to it (Narcissus, Ofelia,
the perilous journey of the seafarer, and the last journey—Charon’s complex, the
ship of the dead, various funerary rituals, etc.); this is also in line with its transfor-
mative capacities, its beneficial potential turns deadly when unmediated contact is
prolonged. The navigation trope reveals the same features: it implies the journey, a
finite extent of time, through the unknown, the danger and the deceptive in order to
find peace.78 Despite its numerous positive features, and perhaps precisely to justify
them, this realm is assigned to the other, one which is not human (god or multiple
deities, spirits, monstrous creatures, Nereids and nymphs, death, etc.). For Chevalier
and Gheerbrant, as well as for Bachelard, water is “the symbol of unconscious ener-
gies, of the soul’s indistinct powers, of secretive and unknown motivations”,79 the
indefinite and the infinite, the unconscious and the oneiric. The link with the oneiric
(explored by Bachelard) reveals water as the privileged in-between place where one
can encounter it other self —the usually concealed unconscious—as well as explain
its healing capacity as the reestablishment of the equilibrium between the conscious
and the unconscious self. For Bachelard water is one of the quintessential archetypes
emerging from a primitive psyche, one that can be considered a reservoir of images,
reshaped and reiterated over again; a similar reading can be found in Jung’s work on
archetypes and collective unconscious.
The fact that water plays this axial role in the imagery and practices of virtu-
ally all cultures needs no further argumentation; however, these commonly shared
water-related mythologemes or motifs appear to be resilient, although reinvented
and reshaped, yet constantly resurfacing and acquiring new and sometimes oppos-
ing meanings; sometimes these resurface haphazardly, due to a juxtaposition of an
inherited motif with temporally and spatially disconnected formal languages—or,
in other words, unintended by design. While these meanings tend to intertwine and
morph in their oral and written variants, the built form allows the anchoring of at least
their associated images—as they are understood within a given social and cultural
ordering. Further on, I am interested in exploring the manner in which previously
78 Chevalier, Gheerbrant, Dictionar de simboluri, volume 2 (E-O), Artemis, Bucharest, 1994, 332.
79 Chevalier, Gheerbrant, Dictionar…, 116.
444 6 Case Study
highlighted features (the mirror-role, the double, the link with the ideal, the ambiva-
lence, etc.) are translated into the built form in order to observe their functioning in
terms of the heterotopian principles. This inquiry will not focus on the ornament,
which effortlessly expresses symbolic meaning and most readily offers itself to such
an analysis, but rather onto spatial structures, architectural form and function—the
dominant principles that are translated into the built form. The structuring of spaces,
the relationship with the context, the internal hierarchies, and the evolution of roles
and functions of the built form are analysed in conjuncture with the other two major
coordinates that assemble a heterotopic space, the context and the practices.
The presence of a water source is commonly80 accompanied by symbolic and/or
utilitarian practices which in time become fixed as religious, productive, habitation
and managing structures. These structures share at times multiple functions (repre-
sentative, sacred and divinatory, curative, commercial). In the case of specific local-
ized sources (thermal springs, rivers, ponds, etc.) this process is more intelligible and
causal, whereas in open coastal areas this relation tends to be more diffuse, rather
dependent on the terrain and its morphology, and not specifically on the water ele-
ment itself.81 The balneal resources showcase an initial symbolic dimension coupled
with a utilitarian one (healing), followed by cultural, leisure, economic and produc-
tion encodings,82 generating in time a bifold ‘stratification’—the built form layer
and multiple layers of meaning. Much like the balneal, discussed more in depth
elsewhere,83 the coastal resort showcases in a similar manner the features of the
proposed basic heterotopic profile.
80 Although this is not always the case: the water source of the Zambezi River, despite being deemed
as a sacred site, the birthplace of Zambia and having curative powers, has not generated ‘traditional’
religious or exploitation architectural structures, holding the official protection status of natural site.
81 This is the case of the Temple of Poseidon at (Cape) Sounion, Greece, and Temple of Poseidon
at Tainaron, Mani Province, Greece.

82 Such as the well-known spa towns of Bath (UK), Spa (BE), or those of Abano Terme and Mon-
tegrotto (IT), Vichy (FR), Baden-Baden (DE) Caldas de Rainha (PT), Caldes de Malavella (SP) or
the lesser known Hisarya (BG), Rogaška Slatina (SI) Trenčianske Teplice (SL), or Baile Herculane
(RO).
83 SPÂNU, S. (2012). The Balneary resource, a generator of built heritage. The stratigraphic features
environement, Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeana 2012, România, ISSN: 2067-743X.
Hotel Complex—Cap Aurora Resort (source Revista Arhitectura, no. 6, 1973)
6.4 The Romanian Case. The Black-Sea Coastal

Development as a Heterotopic Enclave
The post-war planned development of the Romanian seaside has recently re-entered
into focus. This can be partially explained as a reverberation of the surge in visibil-
ity of some less ‘traditional’ yet intersecting built heritage categories: the industrial
architecture, modernist architecture and social-communist architecture. The interest
in modern industrial architecture has been gradually increasing since the national-
446 6 Case Study
ization of large industrial ensembles in the 90s,84 and has been more recently fuelled
by large-scale losses of residential fabric (urban modernist villas and buildings) as
well as of industrial fabric (ensembles initially located in the outskirts, gradually
engulfed in the city’s fabric due to rapid development); high-profile rehabilitation
projects—Malaxa/23August/Faur Factories (1921) rehabilitated in 2014–15; the tex-
tile factory Crinul (1899–1963) rehabilitated in 2016 (all in Bucharest); The Brush
Factory (1926–1970) rehabilitated in 2009 (Cluj-Napoca) have brought and kept
in the public eye the industrial object as an economic, social and cultural credible
contender. The modern industrial architecture remains ‘conceptually’ subordinated
to the “traditional industrial”, a category including pre-industrial/vernacular her-
itage, respectively, the industrial heritage of the pre-1900s and the first decade of the
twentieth century. This ‘traditional’ industrial heritage shares a more recognizable
mark of ‘old age’ (mostly through its architectural style) as opposed to the modern
industrial and the socialist-industrial, which are conceptually and temporally more
immediate or familiar.85 Modernist architecture has followed a similar trajectory,
gradually gaining visibility beyond the academic sphere86 ; a more recent demarche
(2016) which brings the modern heritage into focus is the project “Sport Heritage.
Sport facilities of the 20th century”, aimed at “determining their potential to become
a part of the national cultural heritage”. Modernism (with brutalist and minimalist
features) will be the targeted architectural language for both the industrial project
and the seaside development project during the Ceausescu regime, although the lat-
ter had received a particular approach and image. I argue that this contemporary
process of recognition is, in fact, an acknowledgement of its ‘otherness’, as both a
space of alterity and a different and valuable built fabric worthy of conservation;
the heterotopic functioning and the heterotopic coordinates that will subsequently be
identified and discussed, capture and reveal exactly this process of alterization—the
process through which this built fabric becomes other, including context(s), events
and practices.
The development of the Romanian seaside has ties with the post-war rebuilding
programme, at least in chronological terms. Yet, it was part of a larger, national-scale
policy-led development programme of systematization, urbanization and an overall
raising of the living standard under the communist regime—and a display of power
and worth when considered within the social, economic and political context.
84 The first official developments took place in the early 2000s (with a gap of almost 30 years from
Great Britain or other European countries); the Romanian officials and academia (publications,
articles and workshops) align themselves with the European attitudes and legislative, culminating
in the 2008 Law for the Industrial Heritage; the recognition of industrial has been solidified and
expanding ever since (numerous attempts to record and classify—the first most important step of
heritage conservation; safeguard attempts driven by the public sector, etc.) all amounting to an
increasing visibility of the industrial fabric.
85 Some of the generations who have worked in these factories, now in their 50 and 60s, are still
in the contemporary active working class (due to shortages in a specialized workforce) or have
recently left the active sector, now in the early retiree class.
86 For the specialized academia (architecture universities and faculties) the modernist style remained
a major landmark and model, as a means of legitimation—mostly reclaiming a connection to the

interwar modernist heritage, and mostly focusing its attention on the residential and cultural sector.
6.4 The Romanian Case. The Black-Sea Coastal Development … 447
After the separation of the eastern bloc, the theme of the divide between us/them
became quintessential in defining eastern identities. Yet, this binary confrontation in
a manifold one. First, there is the past. The steps taken in the early 1950s to develop
the leisure facilities of the seaside are not new,87 nor did they start in on a pristine
tabula rasa.88 Wielding now-acknowledged big names of the period (G. M. Can-
tacuzino, Henriette Delavrancea-Gibory, Horia Creanga), this interwar architecture
of leisure has partially survived, despite sometimes lacking official recognition and
protection. Under the new regime, the existing built fabric represented a hierarchized
society, a privileged class and a monarchy, all of these branded as derogatory, and
quintessentially opposed to the equalitarian doctrine and the social and economic
levelling initially projected by the Stalinist model and later accomplished by the
communist doctrine. Despite this, the coastal modernist built fabric inherited from
this era—several villas hotels and restaurants—is to a great extent maintained, to
the same extent to which the architects and the architectural practices formed in pre-
war will be ‘recycled’, although anonymized and amassed in the design institutes.89
The relationship with the past, although dichotomic at first, reveals a blurring of its
boundaries; as Tulbure (2015, 2016) or Bancescu observe,90 the intended severing
of the ties with the past will not be complete and the interwar modernist direction
will resurface despite the delayed socialist realism intermezzo.91 This is visible also
87 Popescu, C. Observes that summer residencies and seaside holidays were rather rare until the
1918s. Popescu, Carmen, Le style National Roumain. Construire una Nation a travers l’architecture
1881–1945, Rennes, Bucharest: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Editura Simetria, 2004, apud.
Predescu, Magda, Architecture and Monumental Art on the Romanian Seaside in the period of
“Political Thaw”. The development of the Costinesti Youth Camp (1970–1972), in Enchanting
Views: Romanian Black Sea Tourism Planning and Architecture of the 1960s and 70s, Serban,
Alina, Dimou, Kaliopi, Istudor, Sorin (eds.), Published by pepluspatru Association, ISBN: 978-
973-0-18345-0, Bucharest, 2015, 111.
88 The first sanatorium is built in Techirgiol in 1899, and by the 1940s resorts such as Balcic, Eforie
(“one of South-Eastern Europe’s most prestigious spa-resorts”) and Mamaia already have “dis-
tricts of modern villas” along with other amenities built in the modernist style and its subcategory
streamline style/streamline moderne, in accord with the European architecture stage. Cicio-Pop,
Alexandru, Puscaru, Valeriu, Badautza, Alexandru, Guide de la Roumanie, ed. Ghidul Romaniei,
Bucharest, 1940, 356, 363–4, apud. Popescu, Carmen, An effective mechanics: the Romanian sea-
side in the socialist period, 12–39, in Enchanting Views: Romanian Black Sea Tourism Planning and
Architecture of the 1960s and 70s, Serban, Alina, Dimou, Kaliopi, Istudor, Sorin (eds.), Published
by pepluspatru Association, ISBN: 978-973-0-18345-0, Bucharest, 2015, 16.
89 Tulbure presents in a more detailed manner the dichotomy of this process—part an institution-
alized annihilation of the creative identity and part resilient metamorphosis followed by its timid
reaffirmation during the relaxation of the communist system in the 60s. Tulbure, Irina, Arhitectura
si urbanism in Romania anilor 1944–1960: constrangere si experiment [Architecture and Urbanism
in Romania, 1944–1960: Constraint and Experiment], ed. Simetria, Bucuresti, 2016.
90 Bancescu, Irina, Development of the Romanian Seaside under Communism. Architecture between
Political Constraints and Mass Tourism in Post-war European Context, 40–69, in Enchanting Views:
18345-0, Bucharest, 2015.
91 Tulbure argues that the short period after the war defined by socialist architecture or socialist
realism can only be considered as a transitional phase, despite “breaking the modernist direction of
448 6 Case Study
for the architecture and the urban planning of the first years of the ‘socialist realism’
projects: “some of the general principles of the socialist soviet town were in inter-
ference (although politically denied) with the principles of the western functionalist
urbanism: the industry-residential relationship, circulation as a major function of
the town, the hygienic housing in collective buildings, and the importance of green
space”.92 Popescu points out that in the interwar period modernism has already set
base in the Black-Sea coastal area, increasing the number of resorts and, drawing off
of the general trend in the reshaping of seaside activities, contributed to the creation
a “laboratory of modernity”, very much in line with the European and international
tendencies. This “allowed architects not only to try out formulas hard to imagine in
the urban setting, but also to adopt a radical approach more suited to the ‘alternative’
spatiality of the seaside”.93 The ‘alternative spatiality’ mirrored the rediscovery and
redefining of leisure, sport and tourism of the era. Despite the overall tendency of
a democratization of the seaside, this first influx of modernity remained a mainly
insular and relatively small scaled.
After the establishment of the new regime, the seaside is placed again under the
lenses—now as a vastly un-urbanized and rich reserve, and an opportunity to add a
high-profile component in the communist ‘machine’: a zone dedicated to leisure,
health and sport would also be dedicated to the wellbeing of ‘the people’. The
project’s scale, its specialization and functional profile, the timing as well as its
success have contributed to its reading as some distinct separate entity, other and
outside the communist imbued everyday world, despite the visible markers. Yet it
should be noted that the seaside project was essentially part of the larger, national-
scale systematization project, and a response to the new society’s need for leisure
spaces; this embeds the project in the overall communist demarche, emphasizing its
dependent and component quality. I argue that this illusive character—simultane-
ously part of and apart from the communist construct—is a marker of its heterotopic
nature, playing on the illusory nature of leisure spaces and the image of apparent
freedom constructed by the dominant ordering, versus the accidental freedom actu-
ally attained by (some of) the users.94 Its reading and practicing as the other space,
or a separate entity, suggest in fact its success and even a re-emerging of the basic
heterotopic profile, drawing on the work/leisure dichotomy.
The first phase of the project was predominantly a no-demolition intervention,
focused on maintaining, systematizing and exploiting the existing facilities.95 How-
ever, along with these interventions (infrastructure, shoreline stabilization, extensive
architectural development that had reached a certain maturity before the war”. Tulbure, I., Arhitec-
tura…, 8, 10–12.
92 Tulbure, I., Arhitectura…, 152.
93 Popescu, Carmen, An Effective Mechanics: the Romanian Seaside in the Socialist Period, 12–39,
in Enchanting Views…, Serban, A., Dimou, K., Istudor, S. (eds.), Published by pepluspatru Asso-
ciation, ISBN: 978-973-0-18345-0, Bucharest, 2015, 14.
94 See the chapters of Tublure, Maxim, and Bradeanu in Enchanting Views: Romanian Black Sea
Tourism Planning and Architecture…, Serban, A., Dimoou, K., Istudor, S., published by: peplus-
patru, 2015.
95 Popescu, C., An Effective Mechanics…, 18.
planting) some resorts (Mangalia, Mamaia—img. 4, Eforie I, Eforie II, Techirghiol)96

receive new small-capacity accommodation units, predominantly in the form of
small hotels, guesthouses, holiday homes, spa facilities—“originally allocated to
the employees of the various State companies and institutions”—97 as well as the
larger children’s summer camps. Although considerably opening up the coastal area
as a holiday destination, the profile of the coastal resorts won’t steer too far from
the interwar one nor from the established leisure practices. The functional profile
formulated in this phase remains multipurpose, including the residential function
along with the leisure/health ones. The architecture was “intended to be in step
with the times”,98 yet the resulting hybrid-regionalist style of this first phase (a mix
of high-vernacular, Mediterranean, Stalinist elements, modernist principles)99 was
paradoxically aligned with the international direction of the time while also con-
forming to the ‘socialist in content-national in form’ dictum of the official ordering.
The inherited functioning as a “laboratory of modernity” is maintained, although it
receives a different, ‘accepted’ encoding: the seaside project is now a testing site
for the innovations (technical, formal, functional, structural, and organizational)100
brought on by the communist ideology, through the work of and for the benefit of
the “new man”. Popescu goes as far as to suggest a model-like seminal capacity of
the seaside project: the experimental projects appear as “essential to reshaping the
physiognomy of the new residential districts [subsequently built within the country],
which were gradually to adopt the two criteria” of modernism—free composition
and the nature-built environment relationship.101 The latter would become “norma-
tive in the 1960s, eventually coming to define the ‘socialist town’”;102 the potential
model quality of the seaside projects was already intuited at that time, as Gheorghiu’s
96 The Eforie-Nord complex is opened in 1957. The Mangalia Rest Ensemble (Ansamblului de odi-
hna Mangalia) in Mangalia, with multiple hotels (Scala, Zenit, Astra, Orion, Zefir, Cazino Restaurant
and several protocol villas) is opened to the public in 1959.
97 Bancescu, I., Development of the Romanian Seaside under Communism…, 45.
98 Popescu, C., An Effective Mechanics…, 19, 21.
99 Bancescu, I., Development of the Romanian Seaside under Communism. Architecture between
Political Constraints and Mass Tourism in Post-war European Context, 40–69, in Enchanting Views:
18345-0, Bucharest, 2015, 43.
100 One such example is quoted by Bancescu: the “new feature” of the canteen-restaurant attached
to the Eforie I complex (1957) [Bancescu, I., Development of the Romanian Seaside…, 46]. This
would be a hybrid function inexistent until then at this scale; the appeal to several architectural
devices aimed at dissimulating the scale and the capacity of the unit reveals uncertainty in dealing
with such hybrids, different in form, function and representation from the industrial canteens as
well as from the urban, leisure and even high-end yet smaller scaled restaurants.
101 Popescu, An Effective…, 20.
102 Locar, Marcel, Pentru dezvoltarea urbanismului socialist, [“For the development of Socialist
Urbanism”], Arhitectura RPR, no. 4: 4–7, 1960, apud. Popescu, C., An Effective Mechanics…, 23.
450 6 Case Study
interview in the ’73 Arhitectura journal reveals in a parallel between the permanent
urban residential and the seasonal coastal accommodation ensembles.103
The onset of the second phase of the project is marked by the Eforie I and Eforie
II complexes: aligned with international standards, larger in scale (capacity of 1600,
2000 persons) and more decisively modern (functional zoning and flows, greater
focus intimacy and the public–private dichotomy, the un-filtered un-hybridized mod-
ern architectural language). This is also a shift of focus from the individual architec-
tural object (the interwar inheritance) to the large-scale ensembles or complexes. This
second phase also translates into an increase in density (low rise gives way to high rise,
tower-hotels, in an attempt to match the offer to the tourist demand) and a generaliza-
tion of standardized and prefab architecture: both architectural layouts and technical
solutions are readjusted and reused, in the name of building efficiency. Although the
seaside project was ab initio planned in its entirety, as a regional unit or enclave with
a specific character, fashioned as a string of individual stand-alone resort-nuclei,
the initial post-war economic constraints had dictated a rather moderate, uniform
and small-scale approach of the first phase; the “rationalisation, industrialization,
standardization, abstraction and [the] new technologies” were, as Bancescu argues,
the main inputs in the shift towards the large developments of the second phase.
The systematization devices initially mobilized for achieving a common develop-
ment standard is now harnessed for the expansion of the marketable shoreline—the
creation of artificial beaches and lakes, extensive green areas and new roads exclu-
sively dedicated to leisure. This phase will be defined by newly planned large-scale
resort complexes, implanted in the vacant terrain along the shoreline, although this
is not always the case.104 The iconic Mamaia complex (1960, img. 4) was planned as
a new, large-scale (70 ha/173 acres),105 stand-alone development with high capac-
ity (for 10,000 beds)—more alike to a spa-town than to a resort ensemble. The
opportunity to build from the ground up with little to none preexisting constraints
allows an unprecedented degree of freedom for the architects (somewhat tempered
through standardization and prefabrication), visible in both architectural form and
urban planning; the garden-city principles previously used become the calling card
of the seaside, and the entire project of the seaside will become the basis of the sea-
side school of architecture.106 Mamaia is followed by other resorts (Saturn, Venus,
Jupiter, Olimp, Neptun I, II, etc.) and in the next 20–25 years (60–80s) the coastal area
is gradually transformed. The principle of standardization in replayed at every scale.
Yet, despite the generalized appeal to prefab and standardization, deemed necessary
103 Statiunea Aurora. Convorbire cu arhitectul Dinu Gheorghiu/Aurora Resort. A conversation with
architect Dinu Gheorghiu, in Revista Arhitectura [Architecture Magazine], no. A6, 1973, 25.
104 Bancescu notes the case of the downtown of Mangalia: “the planning was to alter the town’s
seafront, under the pretext of cost efficiency and exploitation of natural attractions and architectural
discoveries” and ending up irremediably altering the local identity. Bancesu, I., Development of the
Romanian Seaside under Communism…, 49.
105 According to Bancescu—the largest complex in the country and one of the largest in Europe at
the time. Bancescu, Development…, 51.

106 Bancescu, I., Development…, 52.
for the timing and scale of the projects,107 the official desideratum was to create
diversity. The issue of the “given” or politically imposed standardized elements is
perceived by the project teams as a challenge, often invoked as a creative constraint.
Besides the typology selected for the urban planning,108 the principle of diversity is
achieved through the use of different combinations of standardized elements (various
typologies and reconfigurations), the adaptation of the solutions to the specific site
configurations and the constant reworking of the initial (successful) scheme, as well
as through architectural detailing, signage, naming and branding. If for the main,
larger and mass-produced modular elements achieving diversity is more difficult and
will remain an exception, smaller concrete prefab details are specifically created for
several hotels (façade decorations, pergolas, statuary groups, interior concrete parti-
tionings, etc.). The resorts are consistently named in order to be perceived as a whole,
an algorithm which is passed down to hotels,109 restaurants and other facilities, simi-
larly concentrated in clusters. This call for diversity and distinctiveness—seemingly
drawing on the exotic profile associated to coastal resorts, and on uniqueness as a
point of attraction—conveniently overlaps the necessity to create internal hierarchies
(or comfort categories), which in turn translate into an economic and class segrega-
tion—110 not so much in line with the ‘displayed’ egalitarian motif yet serving the
107 Asked on the relation between architecture and the imposed use of prefabrication in Auror
Resort project (a atypical, non-uniform example of the prefab architecture of the period), Gheo-
rghiu answered: “How else might have we finished, with any other means, in just a few months,
the 3000 beds equivalent to approximately 11 newly built hotels for cities within the territory,
whose construction lasted for each six months?”, Statiunea Aurora. Convorbire cu arhitectul Dinu
Gheorghiu in Revista Arhitectura, A6/1973, 25.
108 The development of the Romanian seaside differs from similar endeavours of the time in the
intent to create individual, distinct and stand-alone resorts, separated by lush green areas, and not a
continuous front along the shoreline; where the terrain constraints did not allow this and the merging
of these resorts was inevitable (Venus—Cap Aurora—Jupiter; Mangalia—Saturn; Neptun—Olimp),
the sole medium to express the individuality remained the urban planning and the architecture.
109 Venus (built: 1969–1971) showcases a set of low to medium rise hotels built in different phases,
all wielding feminine names (Dana, Raluca, Doina, Sanda, Ileana, etc.); a set of three tower-hotels
from the same resort all wielding avian names (Vulturul/The Eagle, Cocorul/The Crane, Pajura/The
Griffin). Olimp resort (1971) showcases several such “sets”: Traian Hotel, Decebal Hotel; Hotel
Transilvania, Hotel Banat, Hotel Crisana, Hotel Moldova, Hotel Oltenia, Hotel Muntenia—after the
Romanian historic provinces; Amfiteatru (amphitheatre), Panoramic, Belvedere, all names related
to their positioning and architecture.
110 These segregations are however debatable, at least for the first part of the Ceausescu regime;
the seaside was accessible through various state-governed intermediaries: youth and student
association (UTC/ Uniunea Tineretului Comunist din R.S. România/Communist Youth Union;
ASC/Communist Students’ Association) would offer tickets/coupons in summer camps structured
by age groups (Navodari ages 2–13; Costinesti 14–20/22). The trade unions (UGSR/Romanian
General Syndicate Union) would offer vacation tickets mainly focused on health and rest in balneal
sanatoriums and hotels (seaside: Eforie, Techirghiol; also Baile Herculane, Borsec, Felix; also in
specific hotels within these resorts, hotels that would become inaccessible to the wider population);
these all-inclusive coupons (boarding, treatment), covered longer rest periods than the customary
10 days, multiple seasons, and had lower prices, making them the most desirable, and thus requiring
an in advance registration. Outside of these specific homogenous groups, the ONT/OJT bureaus
(The National Tourism Office, The District Tourism Office) would offer holiday tickets/coupons
452 6 Case Study
dictum “seaside for everyone”. The entire demarche would reshape the image of the
Romanian seaside, retaining an overall coherent look.
In both period and contemporary discourses on the seaside projects, the alterity
or otherness of the coastal projects and the entire demarche is capital: it is imagined
and appointed as a temporary retreat from the everyday, a counterpart to and recom-
pense for the ‘hard-work and effort contributed in service of the country and party’,
in the ‘building of socialism’, by the mass of the ‘working people’. The project is
an ‘allowed’ exception in the everyday architectural landscape—an experimental
laboratory for the involved architects for testing both new/international design prin-
ciples and forms, as well as the limits of the political “acceptable”. In this sense,
the seaside project is a paradoxical hybrid; it was the result of a deliberate attempt
to showcase the image, identity and principles of a communist regime, or the tri-
umph of the “communist formula”,111 and at the same time an attempt to compete
internationally, by assimilating the very image associated to capitalism and the soci-
ety of leisure. Popescu observes that “[…] the Party did not hesitate to exploit the
seaside development plan in capitalist ways, turning it into a key instrument in the
competitive tourism free market” and that “the bold designs permitted to the Roma-
nian architects can be interpreted as a means of economic dumping”.112 The seaside
project offers a “new image”, a new “social and political product that changed the
form and the identity of the places, generating a new topography for the coast”.113
In addition to its role in the “experimental laboratory”, the architecture conveys yet
another dimension of the exceptionality of the space, as Bancesu notes: at the time,
the fast-pace, “the scale and place of construction work also contributed to turning
the Romanian seaside into one of communism’s myths”—114 an aspect which tends
to resurface again, when the entire demarche is placed in comparison to the con-
temporary lack or lethargy of other public interest state-governed projects. Another
dimension of the project’s exceptionality as an “experiment” becomes evident when
observed within its larger context: it was “remarkable in particular for the meanings
of its normal integration—more so than other Romanian projects—within the social,
political and cultural landscape of its time and within a broader mental geography.
[…] it may be regarded as an experiment in the midst of the distorted communist
for the wider population (including international tourists) almost anywhere on the seaside, by price
ranges; ONT/OJT would function based on a regional/zonal distribution system, meaning that local
tourist from certain regions would be preferentially offered certain hotels and resorts. The ONT also
handled the international tourist, covering all needs—organized transport or car rentals, lodgings,
entertainment or access to other local entertainment, local visits, currency exchange, etc. Finally,
what would be considered the most accessible means for a seaside tourist—the self-management
or camping—appears to be the most easy and unstructured form of tourism, yet rather challenging
due to restricted access to personal vehicles and later on in the regime to fuel; it remained, however,
a go-to solution for many, favoured by the extensive railroad network.
111 Bancesu, Development of the Romanian Seaside under Communism…, 66.
112 Popescu, An Effective Mechanics…, 39.
113 Bancescu, ibidem.
114 Bancescu, 67.
world, but one that tended towards normality”.115 In short, the seaside project was
an enclave of normality turned exceptional through the coordinates of its context; its
encoding—normal/exceptional—is enacted through the reading and practicing of the
space: it is exceptional for the local tourist, who briefly enters an anomalous space
of difference and gets a glimpse of a Western normality; for the Western tourist this
is an enclave of (lower cost) normality, whose exceptionality is exhibited only when
confronting the outside of this enclave. Yet, Western tourists are offered a highly
controlled scenography: dedicated hotels, restaurants and shops, services and prod-
ucts which will remain inaccessible to the local tourist. This creates a supplementary
segregation,116 an enclave within an enclave, which becomes apparent at times. Yet,
considered from the local perspective, this separation also contributed to the alter-
ity of the seaside: within this hybrid space the two conflicting sides are allowed to
coexist, here the otherwise inaccessible west becomes exposed to the gaze. Even if
in the first, more temperate half of the Ceausescu regime, the western world was still
rather accessible via media—as it is revealed by the Western-flavoured and up-to-
date architecture of the entire seaside project—it remained distant in terms of direct
experience. Yet, this was made accessible within these very enclaves, the seaside
project would act as softer, less controlled device of displaying the Western identi-
ties, bodies, fashion, languages and products, and even the promise of the interaction.
In the conducted open interviews discussing the western presence on the Romanian
seaside in the period, the segregation is always noted—mostly as access to specific,
better and inaccessible products (the shops dealing only in foreign currency, special
menus at restaurants, etc.) and as spatial segregation, in the form of the exclusive
hotels and the private beaches reserved for foreign tourists. The Western tourist is
always watched—interviewees often identify and compare national groups by looks,
habits and other small details (shoes, clothing, etc.). Yet, in comparison to the con-
trolled environment of the hotel or restaurant, at the beach the spatial segregation
would either be diluted (as the beaches were generally open to all tourists regard-
less of their nationality), or would hold the possibility of transgression (if only one
wanted and could swim far enough to pass the enclosure, as the particular case of
the private beach of Club Méditerranée, Mamaia). The seaside, much like the other
leisure spaces part of the international touristic offer, can be considered as excep-
tional spaces, where the two antagonized worlds would meet and intermingle. This
role of display device or portal towards the western world held by the seaside would
115 Bancesu, Development of the Romanian Seaside under Communism…, 67–69.

116 This is, however, not the only one of this kind of sub-segregation, two other noteworthy examples
being the ‘political enclave’—the spaces reserved by the party for international protocol meetings
or for the holidaying of high-profile individuals within the party (Neptun)—and the ‘camping
enclave’ or the more informal string of resorts (Costinesti, 2 Mai, Vama Veche, Navodari holiday
village; staying with local host was also an option); these were less developed and focused on a
less pretentious public—children and youth—and thus remained somewhat outside the controlled
leisure structuring found in on the rest of the coast. As a practice, camping was, however, not
restricted to these resorts but constituted a network of official and unofficial spaces. Among these
informal resorts, 2 Mai was especially preferred by artist communities—actors, painters and graphic
designers, musicians, etc.
454 6 Case Study
even be used by the official ordering, in commercial videos promoting the seaside;
the Western identities (role-played by Romanian actors) are at times even extrava-
gantly exaggerated, as a method to spark the tourist interest and to fuel the idea of
international competitiveness. As part of the wider communist scheme, drawing on
the capitalism versus communism dichotomy, this artificially enforced segregation
encountered in the case of the seaside resorts, has contributed to the amplification
and even perpetuation of the “us-versus-them” narrative in the national imaginary.
The intent and overall image behind the seaside projects is not particular to the
Romanian space but rather to the Soviet Bloc—117 a politically created network of
intercommunicating spaces; in this respect, striking similarities (architecture, urban
planning, interior design, etc.) can be found especially in the Bulgarian seaside
developed in the same period.118
The entire project was treated as a distinct entity, marking it as an enclave with a
highly defined delimitation; this cohesive enclave character is enforced through the
political intent behind the entire demarche, and is passed down through the architec-
tural approach, its functioning and the controlled patterns of practice. The enclave
character and the alternative ordering of the seaside space is enforced through the
typical coordinates of leisure spaces: the limited sojourn (temporal delineation), the
seasonal functioning of the resorts (temporal enclave), the self-sufficiency and func-
tional autonomy of the resorts (functional enclave), the alternative functional rhythms
and finally through the leisure-exclusive space structures, new and experimental for
the time and context, and otherwise incongruous with the ‘outside’ everyday spaces.
Although the concentration and juxtaposition of several built layers from different
timeframes can enhance the enclave character of the seaside, the ensembles built
under the communist regime are usually perceived as coherent and unitary enclaves,
yet again enclaves within the larger enclave of the seaside macrocosm, although
imposed over and disjointed from the previous existing strata.
When considering the two types of heterochronia discussed by Fou-
cault—heterotopia of the ephemeral and that of the eternal time—the communist
seaside project seems to be vacillating between the two. Imagined and created as
an alternative, other space of difference, the handling of its architectural and urban
expression reveals the intention: a ‘monument’ of sorts and a place of (a future)
memory; in the communist narrative, the co-dependency of leisure with everyday
life and the accessibility envisaged for the project would automatically place this
117 Beyer, Elke and Hagemann, Anke, Bulgaria Builds. Holiday Architecture and Urbanism on the
Black Sea Coast from 1950s to 1970s, 206–223, and Kazakova, Olga, Resort Architecture during
the Era of Soviet Modernism (as Exemplified by the Soviet Black Sea Coast), 224–235, both in
Enchanting Views: Romanian Black Sea Tourism Planning and Architecture of the 1960s and 70s,
Serban, Alina, Dimou, Kaliopi, Istudor, Sorin (eds.), Published by pepluspatru Association, ISBN:
978-973-0-18345-0, Bucharest, 2015.
118 The Archive of Romanian Architect’s Union [Uniunea Arhitectilor din România] holds several
,
sets of photographs resulting from various “documentary expeditions” in Bulgaria undertook in
the period; the preeminent subjects are architectural plastics, technical solutions and earth/terrain
works, architectural typologies or interior furnishings—a large part of which are focused on seaside
leisure spaces. https://arhiva.uniuneaarhitectilor.ro/, accessed October 2018.
leisure structure in the position of an ‘obligatory point of passage’—enhancing

its representative and repository character. Coupled with its uniqueness at the
time—woven in the communist narrative through phrases like ‘the largest’, ‘the
newest’, ‘the most rapidly built’, ‘the most up-to date’, etc.—they endow the entire
project with an almost ‘memorial’ quality, as if it were to support and showcase the
quintessential (ideal) image of the regime. Along these lines, the identification of an
ephemeral heterotopia within the project is a more delicate process, since the idea
of ‘transient’ is antagonistic to the narrative and built demarche of the regime. A
heterochronia of sorts reveals itself as a reversed reflection within this very image of
solidity and permanence projected by the regime; according to the communist narra-
tive, the ephemeral could only belong to the pre-intervention ‘amorphous’ seaside,
where the hotels and large ensembles would ‘hatch’ almost instantaneously, from
one year to the next. Subsequently, the fall of the regime was almost immediately
mirrored in the fate of these resorts—as they became a symbol of a transient pow-
er—their present state of abandon and collapse showcasing its ephemerality while
also serving as a reminder. The heterochronia of the ephemeral mediates the percep-
tion of the transient character of time and here it is expressed through the built object
designed as enduring yet turned provisional.
The mirror role of this space, beyond which can be identified in its inherited
coordinates as a leisure space, is also augmented by its development under the
communist regime. The project is conceived as a two-sided mirror: one oriented
towards the Western world, reflecting its fractional idealized image (through the
‘model’ contemporary architecture) as its own and as a make-believe reflection of
the entire country; the second face, offering an equally lopsided reflection, was ori-
ented ‘inland’, toward the local public offering a glimpse of a western scenography.
The contemporary gaze encounters the reflection of a consumed period, once able to
produce—architecturally wise—an impressive accomplishment. As the built context
evolves, the socialist development of the seaside become even more contrasting and
its delineation more clear.
The fall of the regime in 89 lead to the dissolution of the organizing system which
possessed and supervised the functioning of these resorts; as it was dissolved, some
resorts and their hotels (mostly with a curative-balneal profile) previously in the
property and administration of the Uniunea Generala a Sindicatelor din Romania
[General Union of the Romanian Syndicates, theoretically autonomous, in reality
state controlled under the communist regime] were divided between several sub-
organizations or syndicate confederations, going through a continuous process of
restructuring ever since. This placed their built patrimony in litigation, mostly out
of use, and also inhibiting their rehabilitation, conservation or upgrade. Successive
restructuring of syndicate confederations has passed the seaside resorts, along with
a large sector of the national leisure structure, from the care of one administrator
to another, almost none willing to invest. This transfer process from the public/state
sector to the private sector also used the formula of the business management con-
tract, or renting to the previous operators, for whom investing would thus be either
a hazardous move either outside of their financial capacity. Similarly, the resorts
previously owned directly by the state (through the National Tourism Organisation,
456 6 Case Study
structure subordinate of the Ministry of Tourism) remained in the custody of the

state, some to be divided and sold later to private developers or companies. The
considerable built patrimony of the UGSR and ONT attracted several actors includ-
ing local authorities, the private real-estate market or private property developers
and private individuals claiming previous pre-communist ownership of land. The
privatization process, deemed in the press of the 90s ‘the sole possible saviour’
of the seaside leisure structures, was faulty allowing the acquisition of hotels and
facilities without any obligation of investment or penalties; even the formula of the
‘foreign investor’, another highly circulated saviour-trope of the time, would con-
tinue the same cycle. In some instances (the large iconic hotels Amfiteatru: img. 1,
Panoramic—Neptun-Olimp) were transferred between state institutions and regis-
tered as protocol locations, still without being opened and without any investment,
and later to be privatized or resold at lower prices since they had further degraded. For
most of these communist-era hotels the lack of funding, the defective management
and exploiting, governed by the principle of minimum investment/maximum profit,
real-estate schemes, the so-called “conservation”,119 has led to their rapid degrada-
tion. Some of the hotels have remained opened despite their poor state, gradually
losing the rating; their mostly unaltered receptions and lobbies offer a glimpse into the
past. In some cases, the upgrade is declared unfeasible or unprofitable and the hotels
are paradoxically reappointed and sold as permanent residential accommodation.120
Finally, some of the hotels do showcase a different evolution—from purchase by
private foreign or local investors, to upgrade and addition of new features, followed
by the re-entering in tourist market (former Yalta Hotel, some hotels of the inland
balneal resorts). Yet, the unavoidable presence of large abandoned ensembles “put
in conservation”, such as the Amphitheatre Hotel at Neptun-Olimp, looms over the
beach and the resort. For some, they remain a symbol of the communist regime or an
image of an impressive urban and architectural feat; for some they are the image of
a carefree childhood; for most these simply reflect an incomprehensible and aimless
spoiling, a present marked by the impotence and the corruption of politic figures and
authorities who, caught up in real-estate business schemes, allow the deterioration
and ultimately loss of a public-use asset. The Romanian seaside continues to attract
modest numbers of tourists, despite competing with an open and diverse international
offer. The still existing tourist demand, the representative encoding still attached to
the image of the seaside and a perversion of the ‘free for all’ dictum has fuelled a
119 The now common phrase “to go in conservation” is far from what it might suggest, as it has little
to do with any heritage approach: the private/public owners have simply locked up and closed the
hotels, restaurants and other facilities. Vacated, without any maintenance or security the buildings
decay rapidly.
120 This is the case of Hotel Restaurant Vulturul, Hotel Restaurant Cocorul, Hotel Restaurant Pajura
(Venus Resort) and Hotel Alfa and Hotel Beta (Saturn Resort). Deemed unprofitable (expensive
rehabilitation) or unsuitable for tourist accommodation (space-wise), they are to be rehabilitated as
permanent housing—either for the use of the personnel of the owner company (as company housing)
or for sale on the real-estate market. Source: online official declaration of THS Marea Neagra (owner
company) for 2012, http://www.thrmareaneagra.ro/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/18-scoaterea-din-
circuitul-turistic.pdf, accessed September 2018.
different process—the uncontrolled densification of the built fabric. This can also
be explained by the expansion of the real-estate market felt at a national scale, and
part by the redundancy of the unusable/abandoned stock of tourist accommodation.
These processes have altered the overall image of the seaside, especially in cases
such as Mamaia Resort, where the present evolution stands in stark contrast with the
initial urban planning scheme.
The intent and the scale of the coastal projects dedicated to leisure reveal its social-
ist utopian flavouring. Although the first of its kind as an urban scheme,121 it can be
read as part of the larger communist project which, here as much as everywhere, was
essentially defined by the idea of a new man for a new and improved world (empha-
sizing, among others, an equalitarian access to health and leisure facilities),122 as well
as through a deliberate and complete break with the past.123 The utopian encoding
can be easily observed—as Karnoouh does, in identifying its references to the var-
ious metamorphosis of Fourier’s phalanstery all showcasing the utopian-flavoured
coordinates of the social programmes developed in the nineteenth century; another
utopian reading can be read into the ideal functioning as a mechanism (also com-
mon to the modernist approach), controlling (beyond design) every aspect of the
society’s life toward an ideal of efficiency and permanent progress; somewhat subor-
dinated to this ideal of efficiency is another already established utopian reading—the
hygienist lens and the green-city movement—involuntarily overlapping and draw-
ing onto prior symbols, and ultimately generating a new layer of meaning. The new
leisure facilities (coastal and other) were to complete a larger mechanism, necessary
for achieving an ideal seamless functioning of the socialist society. The ‘available
to all’ aura attached to these leisure spaces also contributes to their utopian image
and perception. Bancescu notes several other features which illustrate the seaside
121 For the Romanian space one such preceding example is the “ambitious project of marshal Ion
Antonescu for the systematization of all settlements in the Romanian territory”; this large-scale
project had already been primed starting with the interwar phase—through a set of connecting
projects such as the enhancing of the road network, the industrialization of agriculture or the
creation of a common standard of living; these approaches reveal similarities between the two
succeeding regimes, both sharing a differently branded yet all-encompassing utopian vision, the
relation with an ideal model and the subordination of all demarches to it. Even the architectural
standardization commonly associated with the communist regime is already in use in the pre-
war period as a tool in the systematization projects (the prolific model house projects). Although
redesigned and rebranded, the project for the systematization of settlements, town and cities remains
a leitmotif during Ceausescu’s regime. A more in-depth perspective on the subject see Tulbure, I.,
Arhitectura…, chapter Ideas for the Reconstruction, 57–69.
122 Karnoouh, Claude, From the Particular to the General or how communist Romania Confirmed
its Integration in Global Capitalism through its Vast Social and Subsequently Tourist Project to
Urbanise the Black Sea Coast, in Enchanting Views: Romanian Black Sea Tourism Planning and
Architecture…, Serban, A., Dimoou, K., Istudor, S., 147.
123 Tulbure, Irina, Arhitectura si urbanism in Romania anilor 1944–1960: constrangere si experiment
[Architecture and Urbanism in Romania, 1944–1960: Constraint and Experiment], ed. Simetria,
Bucuresti, 2016, 10. However, as Tulbure observes, the first post-war years (pre-50s) will see
an architectural production moulded after the Stalinist model and its traditionalist approach—a
continuation of the past, yet starting from a phase considered as “healthy”.Tulbure, I., Arhitectura…,
26.
458 6 Case Study
project’s ingrained communist ideology: the “domination of nature, social accessi-

bility (‘democratization’ of the beach, sea views for all), active holidays, socialist
mass production (architecture, tourism, culture), industrialization, oversizing and, in
particular, the politicisation of architecture”—124 all subordinated to an overarching
utopian idea: the ideal socialist image and functioning of society and its specific
definition leisure.
In the standardization-constrained context of the period, the utopian encoding
of the project also translates as the deliberate creation of alterity. In an interview
concerning one of the resorts—the 1971-‘73 Cap Aurora complex (located between
Venus and Jupiter resorts, img. 2, 3, 5)—Chief Architect Dinu Gheorghiu discusses
the potential for monotony and uniformity, and explains the specific methods identi-
fied and employed in the complex’s design, revealing the ingrained will for alterity.
He also pinpoints several key features directly required by the official design scheme:
“the correct insertion of the ensemble in the existing natural and built environment;
the creation of a systematizing consistent with the location and as much as pos-
sible less urban, in response to the individual’s natural desire for evasion from
the everyday; the organization, by design, of a complete life system, for the entire
length of the holiday […]”.125 These signal the coordinates of the space, the deliber-
ate alterity within its context and the enclave character. The initial intent behind the
seaside project is maintained, a reflection of a constant understanding of leisure, even
in what is considered to be its late stage (70–80s). Paradoxically, the intent behind
both the urban scheme and the architecture was to create alterity in the Romanian
context and sameness in a wider international context—connecting to the period’s
ideal of (seaside) leisure, and ultimately creating an enclave of modernity.
As previously argued, most specialized practices are gradually imprinted in and
shape the built form, and leisure spaces and their practices do not elude this for-
mula. The classic balneal leisure spaces, where the resource-centred function tends
to remain constant, acquire multiple period-specific embodiments of similar balneal
practices.126 However, in the case of the Romanian seaside the stratification tends
to be more diffuse, given the overall modern correlation between leisure and the
seaside as well as the specifics of the place. For example, the contemporary city
of Mangalia overlaps the ancient Greek colony town of Callatis, and a subsequent
(B.C. 55) settlement within the Dacian state ruled by Burebista (when the balneal
resource is first discovered and exploited as a spa); under the subsequent Roman
and ottoman occupations, it retains the function of a city-port. The balneal profile
remains in the background of its evolution, albeit locally exploited, until the pre-war
and interwar period, when it acquires its national and international resort title and
it is developed as such. Its restructuring (1956–58) under the communist regime
124 Bancescu, ibidem., 69.

125 Statiunea Aurora. Convorbire cu arhitectul Dinu Gheorghiu/Aurora Resort. A conversation with
architect Dinu Gheorghiu, in Revista Arhitectura [Architecture Magazine], no. A6, 1973, 25.
126 Thisis the case of the Baile Herculane balneal resort or spa-town, analysed in more detail in
SPÂNU, S. (2012). The Balneary resource, a generator of built heritage. The stratigraphic features
environment, Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeana 2012, România, ISSN: 2067-743X.
alters the built fabric aiming to enhance its balneal profile. Later, under Ceausescu’s
regime this ‘overlap-development’ technique is adjusted: although Mangalia’s bal-
neal profile is further developed, it is included in and connected to a string of new
resorts developed in the north of the city (Olimp 1971, Neptun 1965–68, Jupiter
1969–71, Cap Aurora 1971–73, Venus 1969–71–72, Saturn 1960–65–71, all operat-
ing under its administration); the resort-profile is in fact displaced, generating new
development—essentially mirroring the new perspective on seaside tourism and its
practices. If the practices which have historically imprinted in the built fabric of
Mangalia are diverse, matching its multifunctional profile, this is not the case with
the network of newly built resorts under the communist regime, most of which are
highly specialized resorts and have a relatively narrow functional mix (tourist facili-
ties, long-term residential, tourism-centred services, etc.), mostly focused on leisure.
Here, the practices corresponding to the new instance of the seaside leisure func-
tion are crystallized as a separate, independent layer or enclave. The ‘imprinting’
process is altered, the built form apparently preceding the practice127 ; the receptacle
is (politically) created a priori, in order to introduce, to generate and to support a
practice, which will later become ‘the norm’. The official structures governing these
resorts shape and dictate their functioning, including their characteristic practices.
In a sense, this experimental laboratory of leisure practices was testing what was
to become the ‘new normal’. The scale of the project and its intent seem to place
both built form and the specialized leisure practices in a particular position—since
they are both considered to be politically ‘prescribed’ they tend to be considered less
‘authentic’, and less worthy of recognition in the evolution of the resorts and their
built layers. Their political charge had erased all other potential readings especially
in the first two decades after the fall of the regime, placing the built fabric in a state of
vulnerability. Yet this ‘negative reading’ of the communist seaside development has
been increasingly challenged, albeit via indirect trajectories such as the synchronic
character of the entire demarche (the western character of its architecture, urban
planning, concept of seaside leisure, etc.) and for some a little behind time. The par-
ticular evolution of the resorts has created a different layering of both meanings and
built form. In most cases, the overlapping of strata prompts a main reading via the
heterotopic principle of temporal accumulation (as a ‘museal’ heterochronia allow-
ing a reversed-chronological, almost linear exploration of the historic instances of
the balneal leisure function); here, the clear segregation of its social-modernist built
stratum prompts its reading as a temporal enclave, while enhancing multiple hetero-
topic features—its temporal alterity, its detachment from the everyday, the controlled
access. I argue that due to its invalidating and deprecatory political charge, its post-
Decembrist contemporary context as well as the more recent nostalgic perspective
over given aspects of the era, the main heterotopian reading of this leisure enclave is
via its mirror-role. As the symbolic encoding of these spaces becomes more filtered
127 Aspreviously discussed, in an international context the formula is not essentially new—not in
terms of the concept of mass leisure and its attached practices nor in those of the chosen architectural
language—yet it can be considered new in the Romanian context, as well as in its particular features
generated by the locally imposed constraints and opportunities.
460 6 Case Study
and intellectualized, the built form begins to have a chance in being acknowledged
and even protected as heritage. Paradoxically, the non-specialized recognition of the
value of this built heritage—crucial to the official recognition—is done via proxy,
fuelled by a subjective, even nostalgic perspective: for a large segment of people
(40–70s) the seaside development is associated with a carefree period—the time
and space of leisure—within their childhood, youth or adulthood or with one’s per-
sonal ‘golden era’ or prime. The political encoding, the intent and mechanics, the
media propaganda attached to the seaside project (the main themes through which
it is analysed) become less preeminent and more diffuse when observed in the indi-
vidual narrative, one’s own memory of the time place. These tend to be replaced by
more emotive memories: the social interaction (“oamenii parca erau mai altfel/people
were somehow different”), the particular savour of certain practices (“atunci era alt-
fel/then it was different”, “faceam altfel atunci/things were done differently back
then”, “lumea se distra parca mai bine/people seemed to be having a better time back
then”)—by virtue of a ‘present-ness’ or what is now identified as ‘mindfulness’—,
the sentiment of personal freedom, the experiencing of a synchronicity with the ‘out-
side’ Western world (“eram si noi in rand cu lumea/we were keeping pace with the
world”) or the experiencing a new-at-the-time exceptional quality standard of leisure
services.128
The illusory character and the compensatory character of this leisure space can
be easily identified in two different instances. Both the illusory and the compen-
satory character are deliberately introduced coordinates, unmistakable in a contex-
tual analysis: the seaside resorts were to be the exceptional other to the standard-
ized/monotonous every day and the compensation for its shortcomings. This becomes
even more apparent in the second phase of the Ceausescu regime, when the impressive
scale of the seaside project and the Western-looking modern architecture contrasts
with the empty shops and the rationalized food, water and electricity supply. The
space of compensation becomes one of illusion. However, these leisure spaces were
also a portal to an illusory, imagined or ‘allowed’ freedom—even if normed and
temporary, and even if mostly drawing on the freedom-from-work construct, the
classic asset of leisure spaces and practices. This illusory character is later reversed,
epitomizing the volatile power of the regime; the compensatory character re-emerges
in the contemporary context of failed state-governed social projects (“it was possi-
ble back then”)129 and as a reverberation of the post-1989 process of programmatic
128 This ‘retrospective comparative analysis’ appears in narratives of interviewees increasingly often,
motivated by the opening towards the international tourist market and the subsequent diversification
of offers, paired with the consistent decline in the quality of services on the Romanian seaside. This
is a generalizing, biased attitude towards the matter in terms of both the present and the past. The
communist blueprint of the Romanian seaside had a hierarchized and segregationist scheme for both
resorts and hotels based on income and social position, despite the democratic motto ‘the seaside for
everybody’ (or, as one might argue, exactly by virtue of a programmatic accessibility)—implying
different quality standards for different income thresholds, and not a generalized exceptional stan-
dard. Similarly, this negative perception disregards the existence of high-standard resorts which still
place the Romanian seaside among the top holiday destinations in the country.
129 Although less mentioned, the seaside project falls within this category along with the more
prominent Palace of Parliament (former People’s House) in Bucharest; without the removal of the
quelling of the national pride. The compensatory character of the seaside project is
thus strongly connected to its illusory character.
At the junction of the official attitude (en masse rejection of the communist inher-
itance) and some of the individual/private attitudes (the personal, positive experienc-
ing of these leisure spaces) stems the conflicting nature of this space. The coexistence
of the strongly negative encoding of the communist regime and the positive, albeit
softer encoding seems to be possible particularly within these other spaces of leisure,
as in the case of the seaside resorts but also in other similar spaces such as the winter
resorts, the balneal inland resorts and even utilitarian-turned-leisure structures such
as the Transfagarasan road. In these places, a slight glimpse of a positive encoding
of a highly oppressive regime emerges.
All of these features reveal the alterity of this leisure space, be it physical, sym-
bolic or functional, intentional/by design or organically developed; in addition to
the heterotopic reading stemming from its leisure function (the basic heterotopic
profile), the specific by design coordinates (the historic context, the intent and the
coordinates of the demarche) and its evolution overlay another heterotopic reading.
A ‘final’ layer of meaning, an official recognition of its alterity, seems imminent due
to its contemporary evolution as well as its vulnerability (the rapid degrading of the
social-modernist resorts and hotels, their massive alteration as upgrading and their
demolition).
6.5 The Heritage Perspective
As the built object comes to be perceived as different, opposing or incompatible with

its own context—most often also entailing a state of vulnerability—its alterity calls
for a rephrasing and mediation through the heritage status. This creates an enclave
or ‘pocket’ within the official ordering where the alterity is accepted, acknowledged,
reendowed with meaning and most importantly, protected. The heritage status allows
the survival of the alterity of the built object along with its conflicting encodings.
Despite the previously discussed alterity of the communist seaside project, it is yet
to be acknowledged as heritage; the official recognition is (still) incompatible with
the negative encoding of the space. Beyond the immediate pragmatic impediments
(the real-estate wagers), little is done for the official re-evaluation of the symbolic
encoding of the space. All the mediation attempts come from unofficial and semi-
official sources—the soft media (blogs, private pages,), non-profit organizations,
academia, photographic expositions, etc. The attention amassed so far is focused
on the internationally synchronic character of the project’s architecture and urban
planning.
negative encoding (and even in spite of it), these places are sometimes evoked with a sense of
pride—mostly due to their scale and impressive constructive demarche.
462 6 Case Study
I argue that the string of interconnected socialist-modernist nuclei, which still

dominate the Romanian seaside has developed a multilayered alterity. In its most
condensed form, its alterity is structured as a triptych: the basic profile (leisure as
other), the ‘solution’ profile based on the project’s intended coordinates (deliberate
otherness through the design intent, the architecture, the urban planning, its controlled
functioning, etc.) and the incidental alterity developed after the fall of the regime;
its triptych anatomy is suggested through the network of relations between the three
profiles, which communicate among themselves and even blend. Yet, the last profile
alone reveals the vulnerability of the built fabric (and layers of meaning) and its state
of crisis—announcing its imminent demise through non-intervention. The heritage
status can act as a catalyst for change—both safeguarding the material markers and
rewriting the negative encoding of these spaces.
The listing of the seaside project could decelerate its rapid paced destruction
process; it could also contribute to the rehabilitation of the image of the impressive and
still functional communist built patrimony of leisure. A potential listing of the seaside
project could also introduce a ‘new’ heritage instance, as a network of ensembles.
The heritage status implies the recoding of the space’s coordinates. The compen-
satory character is refashioned on heritage terms: the safeguarded ensembles become
places of memory, supplying a ‘built’ narrative as support to the softer more vul-
nerable individual narratives. The symbolic encoding and the ‘memory’ associated
with this leisure construct, imprinted and transferred through the medium of its built
fabric, mostly gravitates in the periphery of the larger communist regime narrative;
if allowed to follow its current course, the ‘seaside holiday memory’ will remain
available only via its two-dimensional albeit rich representation: the postcard and
the promotional film, both part of the propaganda device of the regime. If preserved,
they can allow the transfer of a more intricate and fragile ‘network of memory’ asso-
ciated with these leisure spaces, that belonging to the secondary narratives. Their
preservation can ‘add detail’ to the official narrative, humanizing and populating
the modernist but otherwise ‘aseptic’ space of the seaside, carefully curated in the
propaganda materials. In a broader view, one of the material imprints of a dominant
oppressive ordering can become through heritage listing a space of mediation and
a space of celebration of micro-narratives in a context defined by the cancellation
of individuality. The current rediscovery of the seaside project has already brought
forward one such subordinate narrative by reconstructing the architect’s engagement
and discourse as an individual creative entity,130 or the inconspicuous narratives
behind the seaside propaganda media of the time.131 As a heritage space, it can also
assume a different role—that of a healing mechanism, providing acknowledgment,
130 Tulbure, Irina, Cezar Lazarescu. The Early Years of Seaside Development, 92–109, in Enchanting
Views: Romanian Black Sea Tourism Planning and Architecture of the 1960s and 70s, Serban,
Alina, Dimou, Kaliopi, Istudor, Sorin (eds.), Published by pepluspatru Association, ISBN: 978-
973-0-18345-0, Bucharest, 2015.
131 Bradeanu, Adina, Tourism, Car-boots, Cinema: Considering Sahia’s “Orphan” Films, 160–179,
in Enchanting Views: Romanian Black Sea Tourism Planning and Architecture of the 1960s and
70s, Serban, Alina, Dimou, Kaliopi, Istudor, Sorin (eds.), Published by pepluspatru Association,
ISBN: 978-973-0-18345-0, Bucharest, 2015.
6.5 The Heritage Perspective 463
acceptance and validation of both individual narratives and the positive memories
within the oppressive regime.
Considered in more traditional heritage terms, the network of socialist-modernist
resorts harbours a documentary value, not only as a testimony of the regime’s ide-
ologies, intent and workings, but also as a testimony of a specific time frame and the
period’s conventional understanding of leisure. The scope of heritage is to acknowl-
edge, conserve and transmit both signifier and signified—the built object and its
imprinted meanings; this intent is governed by the concept of authenticity, which
endows the space with an (ideal) neutral character allowing the coexistence of con-
tradicting encodings. As an officially acknowledged mnemonic object, it also allows
the juxtaposing of multiple layers of meaning. Unprotected, the seaside heritage
remains burdened under its negative encoding, as well as reduced to its most sim-
plistic meaning: a relic of the communist regime.
Linked to the documentary value, the heritage status of this leisure network can
also strengthen its mirror role, and mediate—especially for the coming epoch—the
‘ugly face’ of the communist regime. Through the heritage status, a space with a
controversial inheritance as the seaside project can be contemplated through a more
‘objective’ lens. At the core of the controversial character of this space lies a para-
doxical contradiction: the positive encoding of a leisure space and the overwhelming
negative encoding of the regime. The/any positive recollection attached to the regime
is silenced, even censored and judged as communist sympathy, in the face of the dom-
inant yet opposed narrative, defined by communist regime’s prosecution and crimes.
Both narratives are equally valid, and despite the common attitude, they do not cancel
each other; this juxtaposition can be resolved through a heritage status.
The heritage status endows its spaces with a mechanism of access control, imply-
ing a double adjustment, both mental and physical, of the object’s accessibility, as it
becomes simultaneously penetrable and isolated, and as it receives a supplementary
stratum of hierarchies and hidden exclusions—connected to conservation require-
ments. The heritage status establishes a new alternate ordering, and a new functioning
of the space. All of these features introduced by the heritage status are heterotopic
coordinates, enhancing the existing heterotopic profiles of a space. For the built fab-
ric of the communist seaside project the heritage status would introduce the issue of
the coexistence of the heritage and the utilitarian functioning, the latter being indis-
pensable to its sustenance given its sheer size. The hidden exclusions, the hierarchies
and the control mechanisms of both the tourist-utilitarian and the heritage would
be juxtaposed, revealing striking similarities such as the unseen ‘behind scenes’,
the panoptical eye, the supervised and controlled set of actions of specific actors, the
role-played by the built object and its stenographic display, the delineated and hierar-
chized enclosures, etc. Such a hybrid functioning would not be entirely new, finding
one of its early historical correspondent in the Swedish Skansen Museum. The basic
464 6 Case Study
practices (leisure/balneal) are not essentially hindered by a heritage functioning,

endowing it with the attributes of a ‘living heritage’; reciprocally, the heritage func-
tioning and practices are not necessarily inhibitive of usual balneal/leisure practice,
on the contrary, adding to the attractiveness factor by bringing into play a specificity
akin to ‘theming’.
As previously suggested, the seaside project could be listed as a network of her-
itage ensembles—thus enhancing several heterotopic features: the initial intent and its
utopian encoding; the enclave character—enhances delineations and marked thresh-
olds towards the exterior yet hidden within the network, hidden from the inside user’s
gaze; its microcosm functioning; the hybridization between the leisure and the her-
itage systems of access control, both requiring different levels of accessibility as well
as specific performances from the involved actors. The preservation of the resorts
as a network would also enhance their heterotopic illusory character, exposing the
real spaces of the regime and “all the emplacements in the interior of which human
life [was] enclosed and partitioned, as even more illusory”.132 The network’s scale
and structuring best communicate its compensatory character in the epoch’s context.
Finally, such a listing would also enhance the network’s heterochronic character or
the slice of time character, given the comprehensive protection of built architectural
object and urban fabric. However, in the present context, the minute diorama-like
preservation of the network of resorts as a means of completing its heterochronic
character is no longer possible due to aggressive transformation and densification
of the seaside’s built fabric, yet it remains possible for smaller enclaves—group of
hotels of individual hotels, their attached facilities and landscaping—which have
fortuitously and to some extent conserved their features.
Its initial encoding as a space of crisis—the utilitarian-touristic profile dedicated
to the health working man—has subsequently morphed (in the ‘golden’ era of the
resorts) into a celebratory encoding, describing a space of otherness, playfulness and
freedom associated to the leisure profile. In its current state, the socialist-modernist
built fabric of the seaside undergoes a rapid ‘process of normalization’, as it is
gradually fragmented and disintegrated through alteration, neglect and deliberate
abandon in order to be refashioned and replaced by new development; the unitary
character of the enclave is eroded. From this point of view, its current state enhances
its alterity. The conservation of the communist built inheritance showcases a different
type of crisis, unrelated to the curative-leisure profile of the resorts, but to a deeper
social, economic and even identitary crisis of the official ordering; this coexists
with the still vibrant leisure profile and its celebratory encoding. The seaside has
maintained its representative encoding, albeit distorted.
I argue that the heritage status can add a supplementary heterotopic encoding; if
the heritage norms and regulations are enforced, the built object acquires a heterotopic
functioning and its alterity is reinforced: it is endowed with a new layer of meaning,
and it becomes other compared to its former self, as well as compared to its context;
132 Foucault, M., Of Other Spaces, in Dehaene, De Cauter, Hetereotopia and the City…, 17.
its destructive becoming is hindered and its normalizing trajectory is interrupted. The
heritage perspective and that mise en patrimoine (an endowment with signification,
operated in the present onto the past and re-projected in the future) is intended as a
final, although not fixed, a layer which refashions the built object through status and
normed functioning and use. It attempts to hinder its inexorable destructive evolu-
tion. Considering the goal of preservation (the safekeeping of the material form and
its attached layers of significance), the ‘heritageisation’ is a utopian demarche—as
it deliberately aims to interrupt the natural processes, or the natural decomposition
of the object’s substance; another utopian undertone can be identified in the intent
behind the accessibility of the heritage object: its disconnection and removal from its
natural evolution (the interruption of its normalization) essential for its preservation
is coexistent with and even dependant of its stay and visibility within this every-
day flow. This highlights the hybrid, intermediate nature and functioning introduced
through the heritage status—the built object and its attached meanings can be safe-
guarded when it is simultaneously excluded from and (restrictedly) included in the
everyday flow. Through the heritage status it is included within the official ordering
(contributing to it), yet it is inscribed in it in its own terms, maintaining its alterity;
the hybrid, ‘in between character’ of heritage is yet again reaffirmed, as the process
of heritageisation reveals itself as an instrument of normalization.
Considering these heterotopic coordinates, I argue that through the endowment
with the heritage status (insofar as it would be actively and fully executed) would act
as the ‘freezing’ of the normalization processes and the subsequent disintegration,
which define the current state of the socialist-modernist fabric of the seaside. The
heritage status and its norming can reassemble the enclave character, and enhance
its trinomial-structured alterity; only under this protective status and as an estab-
lished heterotopia, its utopian encoding (as an imperfect materialized utopia) and its
attached layers of meaning can be preserved.
However, in the current context of heritage preservation in the Romanian sphere,
the listing of this network of resorts does not guarantee its safeguarding, ultimately
proving the unstable character and the utopian intent of heritage preservation—and
implicitly its heterotopian nature. Despite the official status of heritage, its institu-
tionalized authority and its recognition, it remains a secondary narrative, navigating
a larger network of power relations.
466 6 Case Study
Cap Aurora Resort (source Revista Arhitectura, no. 6, 1974)

Mamaia—aerial view of the resort (postcard, 1964, private collection)
Cap Aurora Resort—aerial view (source Revista Arhitectura, no. 6, 1974,

unknown author)
468 6 Case Study
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Chapter 7
Conclusions
Abstract The final chapter underlines several general conclusions of the research,
as well as the overall intention of the demarche. Here, the arguments in favour of the
applicability of the proposed heterotopic profile (and the analysis grid) are restated.
Its utility and its potential are underlined, especially when taking into account the
contemporary context, the coordinates and the evolution of a very diverse and increas-
ingly fragile built heritage. Finally, the overall approach of the text is reconsidered in
retraced in terms of its theoretical demarche, as a fragment in the continuous process
of (re)defining the concept of heritage.
Keywords Heterotopia · Heritage · The heterotopic profile · The heterotopic

tool · Heritage as heterotopia
As defined by Foucault, heterotopic spaces are “in relation with all the other” spaces
“in such a way as to suspend, neutralize or invert the set of relations designated, mir-
rored, or reflected by them”.1 The heterotopic space is understood as a paradoxical
site, one that can oppose the dominant order of society (or normalcy) yet simultane-
ously contributes to its fabrication and propagation; the heterotopic space is not out-
side of society, completely detached, but it exists as an integral part of it, continuously
linked through a network of active (and shifting) relationships. Heterotopia describes
a relational system as opposed to a static, closed or complete system—in spite of
the physical characteristics, or material profile, that can be identified within Fou-
cault’s heterotopic principles (each principle matching an architectural programme
with its key physical features). These heterotopic spaces are to be understood through
their relationships with their context and among themselves: they mirror, invert, dis-
tort, compensate, or critically react (influencing and contributing) in various ways
to their context. Foucault’s examples also describe an ample range of contradicting
and incompatible types of spaces (cultural, institutional, discursive, etc.).
1 Foucault, M., Of Other Spaces, in Dehaene, M., and De Cauter, L., eds., Heterotopia and the City:
public space in a postcivil society, Routledge, 2008.

472 7 Conclusions
Based on Foucault’s principles, as well as on the other interpretations such as

Hetherington’s of Dehaene and De Cauter’s, this volume argues that the built object
can develop a heterotopic functioning through both its practices and its material
characteristics. The heterotopic profile of a space is thus constructed through the
juxtaposition of three coordinates: 1. the particular materiality of a place, 2. the
social practice and 3. the (particular) event.
Thus, the heterotopic functioning is simultaneously place-bound, socially bound
and time-bound: if these relations are disrupted or missing, the heterotopic function-
ing either cannot exist or withdraws into a state of potentiality. While Hetherington
entirely dismisses the heterotopic as an appendage of the physical space, Foucault’s
examples reveal the strong input of specific material characteristics onto the hetero-
topic functioning of a space—such as the enclosure, its internal spatial structuring,
or the expression of the built form, which are in fact imprints of immaterial rela-
tions, social orderings and their practices. As explored here and elsewhere, I argue
that a built object can harbour a heterotopic potential within its material and spatial
features, since these are the direct outcome of specific social orderings; I argue that
this general, diffuse ‘heterotopic appearance’ showcased by multiple and heteroge-
neous built/immaterial spaces is responsible for the ‘stereotyping’ of the concept.
However, I argue, a heterotopic functioning of a space can be met solely through the
juxtaposition of practice, materiality and event.
The built object and the social ordering it represents, embedded in its physical
form, are defined through their relations with their contexts; both can be intentionally
created as other or can become other in relation to their changing contexts. The
latter situation usually engages the common everyday built objects or the common
fabric (such as the vernacular or the post-vernacular), entirely un-privileged by
initial design, but that become other (and valuable) in time. The recognition of
their otherness and value occurs as an event that introduces an alternate functioning
and alternate practices. This heterotopic functioning best suits the wider minor
heritage category—whose values are gained in time, after its creation. Its otherness
is constructed through contextual relationships: the object becomes other, through
alteration and evolution, or loss of traditional practices, through degradation,
abandonment, obsoleteness, etc. It is endowed with meaning outside of its original
contexts, in a retrospective manner. Most often it gains value as a consequence of
its disintegration (the narrative of destruction). The coordinates of the heterotopic
functioning, which signal the value potential, can either be identified and legitimized
through a protected status (and frozen or crystallized), either they evolve freely,
following a ‘normalization’ process—translated as a disintegration of the objects’
otherness, and its gradual assimilation within its context.
The introduction of the heritage status can be understood as an event as well as a
set of practices that colonize the built object, both recognising and consolidating the
otherness of the built object and operating onto its functioning. The heritage status
endows the object with an alternate spatial ordering and a new layer of meaning,
deliberately attempting to interrupt the object’s natural progression. Whether an
organic heterotopic functioning already exists (a deliberate otherness, via its creation)
7 Conclusions 473
or the heterotopic functioning is acquired (consecration of a relational otherness),

the awarding of the protected status establishes a legitimate heterotopic functioning.
As observed in the first chapter of this volume, the concept of heritage has a
strong utopian lineage. It is assembled and it operates as an essentially utopian con-
ceptual space, constructing an idealized functioning scenario and projecting it into
the future. The heritage conceptual space is simultaneously an intentional, combat-
ive and programmatic medium, enmeshed within and defined by its social, political
and economic context, and an ideal, equalitarian and neutral medium, allowing the
coexistence of contradicting narratives, granting them equal visibility, importance,
values etc.—in the name of objectivity and truth. Within this conceptual space, the
contradicting nature of these narratives is apparently resolved, as they are juxtaposed
and endowed with a ‘voice’. Within the theoretical and idealized heritage conceptual
space, all heritage places and all of their narratives, actors, contexts are considered
equally valuable, to be preserved and transmitted—as part of a larger collective
identity. As more categories of heritage gain recognition, this egalitarian perspec-
tive becomes more apparent. This democratic instance of heritage is conceptualized
through its theoretical apparatus—charters, recommendations and other doctrinal
texts—put forward by institutional bodies—international organizations, councils,
research institutes, and universities.
Despite this, the very subject of this protection, the built object to be preserved,
can and has already revealed, via its sheer materiality, the elusiveness of this utopian
egalitarian demarche; a hierarchical ordering remains one of its unavoidable, defining
characteristics, and the conflict between narratives cannot always be resolved—as
illustrated by the restoration of a heritage object carrying super-imposed historical
layers or by the issue of reconstruction.
Yet, the heritage status does not (and should not) cancel the particular and conflict-
ing narratives, the very defining nature of the heritage object. On the contrary, it aims
at preserving the material form and all the identities imprinted in it, and to reflect
their encoded meanings and contrasting values as accurately as possible—authentic
in their physical form as well as in their practices and conceptual paradigm (beliefs,
traditions, identification of the self). When multiple narratives are attached to a single
object, each competing for visibility and forwarding its own truth, the heritage status
becomes a conflicting space, or a crisis space, contradicting of that utopian stance
initially assumed. This neutral stance is constructed on absolute values, such as truth
(authenticity)—assuming as a duty not only the (inclusive) protection and conser-
vation, but also the true interpretation and depiction of these multiple narratives.
Moreover, when one narrative dissolves (as a consequence of another ‘dominating’
narrative), the heritage status assumes its advocacy—nurturing the conflicting yet
‘identitary’ relationship.
According to the structure proposed by Foucault, each principle has a concrete
exemplification, leading to analyses of specific functions. This is further on sup-
ported by Foucault’s categorization (heterotopias of crisis, of deviation, of illusion,
etc.), each a heterotopic space in its own right. Despite this, the heterotopic principles
defined by Foucault can also be read as the cumulative coordinates that make up a
heterotopic profile of a space, approach supported by the overlapping of Foucault’s
474 7 Conclusions
concrete examples. This volume argues that multiple such coordinates can be iden-
tified within a single space (concrete or theoretical), creating a stronger or a weaker
heterotopic profile, partial or complete, active or passive.
The heterotopic profile and the identification of the heterotopic coordinates.
Thus understood, the heterotopic principles can be condensed as a set of coordi-
nates, able to display the heterotopic character/functioning of a place.
I. First principle—a. a constant of every human group—the built object/space
is a particular place-bound and time-bound ‘response’ to a common issue.
This heterotopic principle comprises the heritage criteria that identify the
various material expressions of common human values. The presence of the
coordinate is determined through comparative analysis. b. a crisis space—the
object appears as obsolete, unsuitable or housing a crisis state/process (either
the marginal/undesired—poverty, squatting—either an active radical—yet par-
tial—adaptation or updating process): determined by state of conservation,
social survey (active practices and processes, involved social groups).
II. The second principle—the capacity to perform different functions within dif-
ferent contexts—can be understood in two ways: the capacity to assume mul-
tiple functions—the heterotopic coordinate is present if the space has gone
through several such function changes, maintaining its basic physical form,
(with/without alterations), gaining an added value in the process. The second
understanding targets the perception of the object: the object has multiple per-
ceptions attached to it by its various user-communities, either as new alternate
meanings (other than the original/previous), either as compensatory meanings,
in the absence the original ones. The presence of the heterotopic coordinate
can be determined through the interdisciplinary survey, focusing on both the
material substance of the built object and on the impalpable—practices and
relations, perceptions of its users and non-users, meaning encodings etc.
III. The third principle—the capacity to encompass multiple different spaces
(incongruous/incompatible) within a single material emplacement. The first
understanding is the extent to which a conceptual/symbolic space permeates
and can be read within the physical emplacement—when the conceptual space
(i.e. Heavenly Jerusalem) can be deciphered, the built object appears as an
emplacement encompassing several spaces (material, symbolic). In a second
understanding, the multiple spaces encompassed are the material imprints of
evolution stages, each representing a different reading of the building, and a
different space. The first instance encompasses the representativeness and the
uniqueness heritage values; the second instance encompasses the documentary
value, multiculturalism (the capacity to simultaneously represent multiple iden-
tities). The presence of this heterotopic coordinate can also be indicated by a
negotiated character of a space (assumed/disputed).
IV. The fourth principle—the temporal enclave character, the break with the tra-
ditional time—is expressed through the object’s material form and its context
relations. This coordinate is linked to the narrative of destruction. The hete-
rochronic character is signalled by: a process of alteration/degradation, percep-
7 Conclusions 475
tion of the frailty of the physical object and its associated meanings, otherness
as an appurtenance to a passed timeframe. This coordinate is revealed through
the state of conservation analysis, community/general perception analysis, and
comparative typological studies. This principle encompasses the historical, doc-
umentary, uniqueness and representativeness value.
V. The fifth principle—an access controlling mechanism (penetrable/isolated).
This coordinate is expressed through material and relational features: the
enclave like character, the presence of spatial demarcations, and the presence
of several degrees of accessibility (expressed in the material form); the state
of conservation—as a feature that conditions the access to the space; pres-
ence/absence of ritual(s) of entry. Requires quantification of each feature in
part—through quantitative and qualitative analysis: presence/absence of fea-
tures, active/inactive profile, typology analysis, state of conservation, identi-
fication of patterns of use (internal, external), as well as perception analysis
(social survey). It encompasses the historic, documentary, uniqueness values
and representative character.
VI. The sixth principle—an illusory and compensatory function. The place behaves
as an altered (or inverted) reflection of human existence; it reflects the domi-
nant order that created it, as a scaled down (controllable) and improved version
of it (as it “should be”). This principle reproduces several heterotopic coordi-
nates: the enclave character (perceived/symbolic and physical), the regulated
character of space (normed flows, uses, functioning, embedded within the spa-
tial ordering), self-sufficiency, a hierarchical internal ordering, presence of a
surveillance/panoptical mechanism that ensures the functioning of the space;
a controlled relation with its context (the controlled access). Following its
given definition (as a scaled-down version of ‘the world’), this principle can be
applied mainly to larger built objects, ensembles and sites, and some individual
objects. This principle encompasses several heritage values: authenticity, unity
and integrity, representative character, uniqueness value.
Considered as a group, these coordinates enable the identification of a hetero-
topic profile (physical coordinates) of a built space and its heterotopic functioning
(practices temporarily active in a place). The proposed profile, although exploring
the material form, should be considered as a dynamic relational process, as it is con-
stantly informed by practices; it aims to anticipate—to diagnose and single out—the
potential heritage value of a built space, through its current functioning, spatial and
social ordering, its perception and the way it is practiced.
A further application of the profile deals with the acknowledged built heritage and
its corresponding practices. The profile could also explore the limitations of contem-
porary conservation/restoration interventions and readjustments, when considering
their impact on the otherness of the object. The more complex application of this
heterotopic grid would involve the identification and superposition of multiple such
structures: the organic functioning and profile as well as the “newly” introduced het-
erotopic functioning—such as the heritage heterotopic practices, assessing whether
they conserve and enhance, or on the contrary level the otherness of the object.
476 7 Conclusions
The concept of heritage—as it is currently and ideally understood—can be inter-

preted as a heterotopic space. Based on this theoretical frame, a built object assumes
through its (externally) gained heritage status a heterotopic functioning and profile.
Yet, this status is called for and preceded by a specific functioning and physical char-
acteristics of that space within its context—coordinates which, as previously argued,
can be identified as heterotopic as well.
This perspective (the intellectual level, corresponding to the heritage space)
infuses significations within the heritage object (physical), and influences the inter-
vention on it, eventually shaping its materiality and its functioning; the capacity to
juxtapose several incompatible and contradicting spaces within a single real space
(both theoretical and physical) is one of the main characteristics of the heritage space,
attribute also shared with the heterotopic space. Heritage implies both continuity and
differentiation (Davallon)—through its existence as a definitive alterity within the
present, a physical past expressed in the present. Thus, the alterity of the heritage
space is acquired through discursive constructs, because of the past–present rift, and
it is ultimately consecrated through the protective status and specific regulations;
the same applies to the heritage object, however, this one registers within its fragile
material form this past–present rift. Whether referring to the object with a delib-
erately created alterity or to the one that acquired in time its alterity, the official
protective status legitimizes and secures this alterity. Despite this, the case of the
modern/contemporary object, whose alterity is deliberately created, as a purpose in
itself, raises the question of reading this otherness as a potential heritage value; after
the previous analyses that explained the coalescence of the alterity–heritage value
relation, the present research observes that this deliberately other modern object can
project itself in the future—and as a valuable heritage—only by reissuing the fusion
of signification and material form, and thus acceding to its perpetuation in time and
finally acquiring the protected status. Although this fusion process can be included in
the architectural creative endeavour, the concretizing of the alterity–heritage value
relation still depends on the dominant discourse and on the manifestation of the
subordinate discourses and their discursive constructs—in brief, on the evolution
of the context. Beyond the deliberate assembly of its own formal alterity, which
doesn’t guarantee the recognition as a heritage value, the contemporary architectural
product can only follow the creative process of the historical model—now acknowl-
edged as heritage—and leaving open the opportunities of exterior symbolic meaning
investment and coding.
All the heterotopic coordinates can be read within the heritage object, as a delib-
erately created alterity (extraordinary spaces, usually representative spaces, exces-
sively superlative ones, etc.) as well as a acquired over time alterity, perhaps even
more interesting for its capacity to simultaneously reflect both the author-society’s
values and the saviour-society’s values, through which the object becomes heritage.
The heterotopic principles as an analysis grid that can be used as a general, prelim-
inary and even emergency tool, preceding and complementing the existing official
heritage selection formula. This attempter tool aims to identify the enclaves of other-
ness—defined by both physical coordinates and attached processes (practices)—as
a potentially valuable built heritage, recommending it for preservation.
7 Conclusions 477
The tentative application of this grid onto the proposed case-study reveal that a
relatively ignored built fabric, in this case, an instance of socialist modern architec-
ture, has achieved the juxtaposition of a heterotopic functioning and of a heterotopic
profile—presenting itself as other within its context. While in this instance, the het-
erotopic space still resists its assimilation, the action suggested by the analysis is
the introduction of a preventive, intermediate protective status, similar to or even
the official heritage status, which would momentarily suspend the alteration process
and contribute to the acknowledgement of its values. Yet, as the analysed concept
indicates, such a heterotopic organism can only survive as heterotopic if its evo-
lution towards normalization is interrupted—a role fulfilled by the heritage status,
which would thus introduce a more stable heterotopic functioning, since it is itself
a heterotopic ordering. The heritage status acknowledges and perpetuates the orig-
inal heterotopic functioning, albeit in a different form: the material expression is
preserved, while only regulated, protection-oriented practices are (ideally) allowed.
Yet, true to its utopian encoding, the applied heritage ordering retains a potential to
be distorted inseparable from its idealized demarche.
Index
A 247–251, 253–273, 276–281, 284, 285,

Alterity, 30, 34, 39, 40, 46, 57, 66, 92, 93, 293, 295, 301, 302, 308, 313, 316, 330,
95–97, 102, 114, 136, 138, 141, 154, 332, 334, 337, 343–345, 347, 349, 353,
157, 159, 188–193, 196, 197, 202, 359, 360, 364, 371, 372, 395, 397, 423,
210–213, 225, 228, 239–242, 244–246, 432, 435, 438, 445–455, 457–462, 477
249–251, 253, 277, 278, 283, 284, 305, Authenticity, 2, 59, 60, 84, 125, 128, 129,
318–321, 323, 328–339, 346–348, 351, 168–170, 218, 220–222, 225, 239, 268,
353, 356–358, 360–362, 378, 396, 271, 277, 282–284, 294–297, 303,
398–402, 404, 406, 412, 414, 415, 417, 305–311, 314, 318, 320, 322, 323, 325,
428, 429, 431, 439, 446, 452, 453, 458, 329–331, 333, 335, 351, 356–359,
459, 461, 462, 464, 465, 476 368–374, 392, 402, 404, 407, 429, 431,
Alterity assembled, 406 463, 473, 475
Alternative functioning, 75, 377, 399, 410
Alternative ordering, 37, 59, 61, 67, 68, 75, 78, B
81, 82, 84, 86, 87, 133, 136, 137, 155, Balneal spaces, 424, 425, 432–435
190, 215, 248, 336, 339, 340–342, 351, Black-Sea coastal resorts, 445, 448
353, 357, 361, 378, 398, 454 Boullée, 58–63, 66
Archetype, 15, 16, 87, 214, 253, 254, 262, 272, Baroque utopia, 30
286, 435, 443 Built fabric, 10, 15, 18, 39, 40, 57, 65, 73, 78,
Architectural archetype, 253, 254, 443 88, 90, 92, 97, 99–103, 105, 106, 110,
Architectural heterotopias, 240, 241 123, 132, 142, 156, 239, 243–246, 248,
Architectural language, 64, 107, 109, 119, 157, 253, 254, 260, 285, 295, 300, 345, 364,
239, 246–248, 258, 259, 267, 333, 344, 394–396, 399, 407, 412, 434, 446, 447,
446, 450, 459 457, 459, 462–464, 477
Architectural typologies, 239, 362, 454 Built heritage
Architectural utopias, 5, 7, 10–14, 50, 133, 138 context, 1, 3, 156, 157, 225, 331, 339, 360,
Architecture, 2, 6–8, 10, 12–14, 17, 20, 21, 23, 378, 394, 424, 445, 476
25, 26, 29, 34, 49, 50, 52, 53, 56–66, 69, object, 153, 156, 165, 192, 217, 229, 249,
71–73, 79, 82, 83, 85, 86, 88, 97–100, 325, 331, 339, 347, 349, 378, 410
102, 103, 107, 110, 111, 115, 118–122,
125, 127, 128, 130, 133, 137, 139, 140, C
142, 153, 155–157, 166, 167, 173, 177, Cap aurora resort, 445
179, 182–184, 190, 194, 195, 199, 203, Cemetery spaces, 185, 189, 193
204, 208, 209, 223, 224, 239, 240, 242, Civitate dei, 6, 16, 23

The Urban Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18259-5
480 Index
Coastal resorts, 424, 435–438, 440, 444, 449, E

451 Eastern-Soviet Bloc, 454
Commodification, 128, 169, 218, 220, Economics of heritage, 287
280–284, 289, 290, 365, 392, 399 Effectively realized utopias, 138
Company town, 64, 71, 73, 74, 89–91, 107, Enclave spaces, 130, 154, 179, 187
109, 119, 124, 285 Evasionism, 458
Conflicting narratives, 402, 406, 473 Experimental spaces, 48, 80, 130, 133
Conservation, 1, 2, 11, 40, 48, 55, 56, 83, 84,
129, 131, 141, 142, 159, 168, 171, 174, F
179, 191–193, 203, 206, 208, 210, Filarete, 19, 21–27, 30, 37, 76, 88, 104, 131
217–220, 222–230, 232, 233, 239, Fortification, 24–26, 30–36, 38–40, 60, 201,
244–246, 257, 261, 262, 267, 270, 202, 205, 206, 210, 302, 320
279–281, 283–285, 287–289, 291–297, Foucault, 1–3, 12, 20, 30, 33, 36, 41, 42, 47,
299, 300, 302, 303, 306–313, 317, 318, 57, 66, 73, 80, 92–96, 101, 111, 113,
320–322, 324–327, 329, 330, 332, 339, 114, 119–121, 136–138, 141, 143, 151,
344, 349–355, 359, 360, 363–372, 374, 153, 155, 156, 159, 163, 175, 178, 180,
375, 378, 379, 388, 389, 392, 393, 396, 182, 183, 186–190, 193, 197, 198, 203,
399, 401, 403–406, 408–410, 412, 413, 210–214, 232, 233, 240, 241, 324, 335,
446, 455, 456, 463, 464, 473–475 337, 339, 346, 357, 358, 377, 396, 397,
Conservation ideal, 40, 41, 55, 83, 141, 142, 405, 406, 412–417, 423–426, 428, 430,
222, 267, 405 433–436, 438, 440, 441, 443, 454, 464,
Constructed utopias, 166, 167, 178, 212, 214, 471–473
268, 273, 277, 303, 327, 340, 402, 412, Fourier, 67–71, 73–76, 78, 79, 81, 83, 104,
438, 448, 472, 473 340, 457
Control, 7, 22, 30–33, 38–42, 45, 49, 53, 63, Fractal configurations of space, 11
68, 70, 71, 73, 81, 94, 95, 98, 101, Function of heterotopia, 212
104–106, 108, 110–114, 117, 119, 124, Futurist, 107, 124, 125
125, 128, 130, 133, 136, 152, 154, 157,
179, 183, 206, 229, 233, 247, 256, 270, G
275, 282, 340, 341, 343, 352, 354, 357, Garden-city, 72, 87–96, 106, 108, 130, 131,
358, 364, 366, 376, 414, 415, 423, 426, 133, 135
432, 439, 463, 464
Crisis spaces, 57, 151, 404, 411, 429, 438, 473, H
474 Heritage
Cultural economy, 218, 219 as heterotopia, 1, 2, 233, 361
Cultural heritage, 139, 141, 142, 208, 220, conservation, 222–224, 226, 227, 307, 324,
224–226, 298, 301, 309, 310, 322, 329, 325, 327, 370, 407, 446
331, 355, 356, 358, 359, 367, 372, 388, fabric, 395
389, 394, 396, 408, 409, 412, 446 heterotopia, 2, 3, 155, 159, 215, 216, 233,
Culturalist model, 76, 81, 83, 88, 96 239, 241, 342
ideal, 56, 240, 405
D listing, 118, 462
Device of social control, 423 narratives, 165, 167, 169, 171, 172,
Dispositif, 113, 182, 239, 277 319, 396, 404, 406, 414, 462,
Dominant ordering, 30, 37, 62, 80, 82, 88, 95, 463, 473
99, 102, 117, 126, 132, 133, 136, 137, perception, 291
156, 160, 161, 173, 214, 228, 229, 355, performativity, 174, 399
357–359, 361, 362, 398, 428, 437–440, potential, 3, 161, 302, 324, 342, 396
448 practices, 159, 180, 305, 328, 358, 361,
Dystopia, 122, 132, 133 368, 379, 409
preservation, 360, 367, 369, 392, 465
Index 481
protection, 46, 93, 170, 176, 180, 296, 332, Hierarchies of value, 246, 391, 430, 436, 439
359, 395, 411, 414, 415 Historical city, 249, 258, 260, 262, 265, 267,
selection mechanism, 230 278
spaces, 151, 158–160, 164, 168, 169, 171, Historical object, 272, 280, 284, 297, 313, 333,
174–180, 190, 209, 217, 218, 227, 229, 334, 338
232, 233, 239, 240, 319, 321, 362, 387, Historicist language, 248–252, 255, 280, 303
413, 414, 416, 462, 476 Historic quote, 248
status, 93, 102, 118, 140–143, 158, 159, History of conservation, 339, 391
174, 175, 177, 178, 192–194, 206, Hybridisation, 33, 47, 52, 58, 91, 95, 102, 118,
209–213, 244–246, 291, 305, 307, 319, 228, 234, 241, 242, 249, 250, 331, 342,
321, 323, 329, 332, 338, 339, 342, 374, 395, 414, 464
345–349, 353, 360–363, 375, 388, 394, Hybrid spaces, 453
395, 399, 402, 404, 405, 410–414, 416,
461–465, 472, 473, 476, 477 I
values, 40, 141, 176, 212, 227, 281–283, Ideal cities, 2, 14, 17–21, 24–30, 33, 36–38,
287, 290, 296, 302, 307, 308, 315, 327, 41, 43, 48, 54, 55, 61–66, 68, 71, 73, 82,
343, 346, 373, 379, 387, 393, 395, 401, 83, 87, 92, 95, 96, 98–101, 103–105,
412, 474–476 107, 119, 122, 126, 128, 129, 131, 132,
Heritageification, 142, 399, 400 140, 166, 173, 196, 262
Heritageisation, 203, 218, 219, 221, 325, 327, Ideal spaces, 129, 414
465 Illo tempore, 425
Heterochronia, 94, 95, 136, 172, 186, 210, 360, Imprinted practices, 14, 25, 37, 38, 46, 56, 93,
423, 424, 428, 430, 454, 455, 459 161, 200, 203, 211, 215, 289, 294, 324,
Heterotopia, 1–3, 5, 6, 12, 20, 21, 30, 41–43, 398, 424, 425, 458, 459, 462, 463, 473
46–48, 53, 54, 57, 66, 80, 81, 92, 94, 96, Inaccessible spaces, 179
101, 111, 117, 130, 136, 138, 142, 143, Industrial heritage, 140, 191, 284, 285,
151–163, 178–181, 184, 186–189, 193, 287–291, 332, 446
194, 197–199, 201, 202, 210, 212, Intentional alterity, 246, 332
214–216, 227, 228, 232, 233, 239–242, Internal orderings, 69, 113, 117, 440, 475
334–342, 347, 353, 356, 357, 359–361,
363–365, 377, 379, 397, 406, 412–417, L
421, 423–426, 428, 429, 433–437, Laboratories of knowledge, 305
440–442, 454, 455, 465, 471, 473 Laboratories of new social orderings, 80, 215,
Heterotopian, 3, 65, 66, 73, 75, 76, 93–96, 102, 437
104, 105, 111, 113, 115, 117, 118, 120, Lascaux, 351–353, 355, 378, 379
130, 131, 135, 136, 141–143, 153, 155, Layers of significance, 23, 93, 168, 393, 465
246, 319, 410, 423, 424, 428, 429, 431, Ledoux, 5, 58, 59, 61–66
440, 444, 459, 465 Leisure and nature, 436, 438
Heterotopia of festivity, 440 Leisure architecture, 179
Heterotopic coordinates, 2, 104, 105, 153, 155, Leisure spaces, 162, 421, 424–426, 428,
156, 162, 175, 178, 188, 190, 193, 194, 430–436, 439, 440, 448, 453–455, 457,
201, 212, 213, 217, 230, 240, 305, 342, 458, 460–463
361, 362, 398, 399, 406, 416, 446, 463,
465, 474–476 M
Heterotopic enclave, 180, 336, 445 Mamaia resort, 449, 450, 457, 467
Heterotopic space, 5, 36, 40, 47, 53, 110, 117, Management of change, 403, 404
118, 135, 136, 138, 143, 151–154, 159, Material heritage, 289, 309, 359, 396, 402, 414
162–164, 181, 183, 186, 188, 190, 194, Materializations, 2, 5, 6, 13, 19, 24, 25, 27, 30,
195, 197–199, 210, 215, 216, 227–229, 32, 36, 38, 42, 46, 47, 50, 55, 56, 59, 61,
233, 239, 305, 334, 335, 340–342, 357, 63, 68, 75, 77, 81, 84, 85, 87, 90, 92–95,
361, 362, 387, 388, 396, 397, 402, 406, 101, 106, 113, 114, 119, 120, 122, 132,
410, 411, 413, 414, 432, 444, 471, 473, 133, 139, 140, 142, 143, 153, 194, 198,
476, 477 201, 203, 210, 212, 215, 258, 291, 294,
Hierarchies of space, 171, 440 324, 334, 338, 363, 413
482 Index
Materialized heterotopia, 10, 24, 33, 38, 58, 60, Phalanstery, 38, 65, 67–71, 73–75, 119, 130,
65, 76, 92, 110, 115, 305 133, 135, 137, 140, 143, 340, 457
Materialized utopia, 2, 5, 30, 33, 41, 46, 47, 56, Philosophy of conservation, 310, 320, 367,
66, 85, 92, 93, 110, 118, 131, 132, 134, 374, 392, 403, 408–410
135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 198, 398, 429, Piranesi, 51–59, 61, 107, 155
429, 441, 465 Politics of heritage, 221, 229, 233, 388
Mediated space, 215 Postmodern architecture, 125, 239, 246, 252,
Military spaces, 42 255, 266
Minor heritage, 288, 322, 394, 399, 472 Postmodernity, 141, 248
Mirrored spaces, 186, 398, 455, 471 Potential heritage, 412, 475, 476
Mirror spaces, 455, 463, 471 Practices of space, 136
Mise en patrimoine, 328, 399–401, 465 Preservation, 83, 101, 121, 159, 175, 177, 192,
Mnemonic device, 2, 182, 183, 199, 213, 377, 210, 221–224, 226, 229, 230, 233, 234,
400, 401, 407 255, 281, 293, 298, 308, 310, 321–323,
Model spaces, 111, 112, 122, 124, 126, 329, 348, 360, 366–369, 371, 372, 392,
129–133, 135, 153 401, 403, 404, 408–410, 462, 464, 465,
Monumentification, 118, 400 476
Museum spaces, 167, 168, 178, 327 Progressive model, 67, 77, 82, 83, 88, 90, 96,
103
N Protected status, 174, 207, 230, 291, 293, 332,
Narrative of destruction, 396, 399, 400, 411, 334, 339, 344, 346–351, 353–355, 365,
416, 472, 474 366, 376, 379, 392, 395, 398, 402, 412,
New social orderings, 80, 215, 437 414, 472, 473, 476
Normalization, 30, 135, 137, 159, 189, 191, Public versus private space, 154, 216, 218,
193, 200, 217, 233, 245, 323, 335, 336, 264, 273, 415, 438
341, 344, 358, 404, 412, 426, 429, 431,
464, 465, 472, 477 R
Normalizing intention, 190–193, 245 Radial cites, 19, 26, 64
Radial layout, 24, 30, 62, 64, 124, 125
O Reconstruction, 38, 40, 41, 55, 57, 69, 83, 89,
Objective versus subjective, 168, 171, 308, 324 97, 111, 114, 118, 131, 140, 141, 143,
Objectivity, 168, 229, 322–324, 331, 372, 402, 159, 193, 209, 222, 239, 247, 252,
416, 473 255–260, 262–264, 267, 272, 279, 280,
Official heritage status, 177, 477 281, 286, 293, 294, 297–309, 311, 312,
Official order, 154, 347 314–319, 321, 326, 329, 354, 361, 363,
The other, 179, 189, 190, 202, 243, 389, 391, 366–378, 392, 401, 413, 416, 457, 473
430, 438, 441, 443 Refuge spaces, 180
Otherness, 33, 66, 152, 158, 173, 178, 247, Religious spaces, 191
305, 309, 325, 395, 396, 431, 432, 472 Repository of knowledge, 430
Other spaces, 1, 12, 41, 42, 45, 47, 66, 93, 110, Resorts, 6, 26, 32, 85, 116, 118, 156, 162, 185,
111, 118, 136, 138, 141, 151, 152, 156, 269, 320, 360, 388, 421–425, 428, 432,
162, 175, 178, 180, 183, 190, 193, 203, 435–440, 444, 445, 447–461, 463–467
210, 232, 233, 241, 243, 319, 339, 341, Restauro scientifico, 296
346, 377, 406, 413, 415–417, 421, 423, Restoration, 1, 2, 20, 55, 56, 82–84, 129, 159,
433–436, 440, 461, 464, 471 167, 179, 189, 207–211, 218, 222–224,
229, 230, 240, 244, 259, 268, 279, 286,
P 289, 291–297, 299–302, 304, 306,
Passéisme, 400 308–321, 323, 324, 331, 348, 350, 352,
Passeist, 52, 67, 96, 112 359, 360, 367–372, 374, 375, 392, 401,
Patrimonialisation, 142, 203, 396, 399, 400 403, 408–410, 413, 473, 475
Patrimonial spaces, 168, 172, 176, 178 Restoration intervention, 159, 208, 223, 229,
Patrimony, 54, 389, 455, 456, 462 230, 240, 293, 306, 311, 312, 315, 316,
Performative space, 168, 173, 174, 176, 180 318–321, 331, 475
Performed architecture, 166, 167
Index 483
Ritual, 34–36, 70, 136, 158, 163, 164, 166, Temporal enclave, 46, 94, 115, 136, 156, 163,
169, 170, 173, 175, 178, 179, 182–184, 170, 171, 179, 189, 191, 193, 210, 212,
190, 195, 197–201, 203, 211, 213, 217, 319, 361, 399, 413, 414, 428, 454, 459,
360, 363, 364, 414, 415, 432, 434, 436, 474
440, 441, 443, 475 Tertiary space, 151, 162, 164, 171, 180, 196,
Romanian seaside, 445, 447–453, 456, 458, 232, 389
460, 462 Transgression, 179, 180, 189, 190, 192, 340,
453
S Transgressive spaces, 340
Sacred spaces, 10, 24, 35, 93, 162, 178, 192,
194–199, 201, 203, 207, 208, 210–214, U
377 Uchronia, 54, 55, 59, 83
Seto, 355–362 Unbuilt, 42, 62, 98, 102, 124
Social practices, 158, 169, 334, 340, 343, 379, Urban centres, 89, 91, 97, 103, 106, 287, 295,
472 296, 299, 362, 371
Social-modernist architecture, 459, 461 Urban heterotopia, 154, 155
Social–communist architecture, 445 Urban planning, 2, 8, 10, 12, 57, 72, 87, 90, 91,
Socialist utopia, 457 97, 104, 112, 122, 124, 125, 142, 154,
Space 156, 239, 276, 279, 351, 448, 450, 451,
of compensation, 96, 151, 305, 460 454, 457, 459, 461, 462
of crisis, 156, 157, 202, 305, 423, 464 Utopia, 6–15, 17, 18, 25, 28–30, 39, 41–43,
of illusion, 57, 73, 81, 156, 173, 175, 212 46–50, 52–56, 59, 66, 67, 76, 77, 79,
of mediation, 151, 162, 194, 462 81–83, 85–87, 89, 92, 110, 114, 118,
of difference, 157, 159, 454 121, 122, 127, 129, 131–143, 153, 156,
Spatial 194–196, 198, 199, 213, 262, 336, 341,
context, 271 391, 405, 413, 416, 417, 441, 442
enclave, 137, 164, 217, 356, 360, 437 Utopian model, 30, 38, 50, 129, 194, 195
hierarchies, 33, 183, 415, 432 Utopian thinking, 6, 7, 12, 14, 29, 50, 83, 84,
orderings, 36, 38, 41, 45, 61, 73, 142, 173, 105
183, 196, 201, 340, 472
Stylistic restoration, 296, 300–302, 312, 314, V
316, 374, 394 Vernacular heritage, 395, 446
Subordinate order, 37, 160, 175, 266, 294, 306,
391, 392, 405, 462, 476 W
Subordinate ordering, 37, 160 Water symbolism, 316, 441
Swayambhunath, 194, 362, 363, 368, 376 Wieliczka, 354, 355, 378
Work–leisure, 428, 437
T
Temporal distancing, 21, 82, 121, 296

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The Urban Book Series

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14773

Heterotopia and Heritage

ISSN 2365-757X ISSN 2365-7588 (electronic)

2.5.9 The Total Institution and the Dystopian

3.7 Mediated Space: Between Public and the Private . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

4.13 Objectivation—The Multiplication of Values

Keywords Heterotopia · Heritage as heterotopia · Built heritage object ·

Forum. pp. 1–13. ISSN 2616-6968, http://openarchive.icomos.org/1857/1/6_Holtorf.pdf, accessed

accumulate, alternate and juxtapose multiple layers of meaning. The time-fragment

Keywords Heterotopic spaces · Function of heterotopia · Enclave spaces ·

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 5

2.1 The History of Utopian Thinking: Theories,

Lyman Tower Sargent. NYU Press, 1999, 6.

remaining, however, conditioned by time and/or completion of a rite of passage.

Tower Sargent. NYU Press, 1999, 2.

nova Insula Vtopia”, published in Louvain.

22 Miles, Urban Utopias…, 16.

Utopian projection turns towards prescription or method, the description of a

Pompilius, Pythagoras, Zamolxis, Solon, Charondas, Phoroneus, inventors, scientists, philosophers,

15, 1982), 149.

as compositional principles such as the fractal-like disposition of spaces or as the

31 In The Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652); Gerrard Winstanley—English Protestant religious

2.2 Utopia and the Heterotopic Reading of the Ideal

2.2.1 Architecture as “Effectively Realized Utopias”34

viziunea Renas, terii, Meridiane Publishing House, Bucharest, 1978, 62.

augur a transformed future envisioned as superior to the present.”44 Moreover, Cole-

44 Coleman, Nathaniel, Utopias and Architecture, Routledge, 2007, 48.

2.2.2 The Archetype City: Between Divine and Laic

appeared in a condensed space”,66 to the three dominants—the Campanile, the Dome

66 Assunto, Oras, ul…, 39.

2.3 The Ideal City of the Renaissance According to Alberti,

of its own approach through an established reference.76 In contrast, Manuel sees in

76 Arbore, Cetatea…, 38.

83 Coleman, Utopias…, 31.

neither a projection of the ideal citadel.88 Another perspective, also supported in

City, Penn State University Press, 2011, http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-04855-0.

15, 1982) 156.

of Sforzinda the mediaeval radial diagrams of St. Augustine.98,99 The assumed,

When comparing Sforzinda’s schema with another one of Filarete’s projects,

through architectural layouts and perspectives, and grouped by dimensional criteria.

des traités de fortifications”, Idem.

sanitary necessities. Although the utopian nature of these proposals is incontestable,

115 Kruft,Hanno-Walter, History of Architectural Theory, 96.

119 Christianopolis (Reipublicae christianopolitanae descriptio) or Christian reformist utopia by

2.3.1 The Baroque Utopia: Transition to the Functional City

129 http://www.ghetto-theresienstadt.info/terezingeschichte.htm si http://www.pamatnik-terezin.cz,

2.3.2 The Ideal City’s Expression in the Romanian Space

140 Foucault, Of Other…, op.cit., 21.

144 Pavel,Teodor, (contributor, Babes-Bolyai University) Transylvanian Saxons, published online

be an insufficient manoeuvre, unless the reconstruction of the enceinte (or at least

(September 15, 1982) 426–7.

cally with concrete elements—territory, materials, individuals/communities, negoti-

155 http://www.sarlota.de/index_e.htm, Accessed in June 2014.

Charlottenburg, 1821, National Archives of Hungary: Map Collection—Direction Königliche kam-

is legitimate, it continues to be mediated and controlled and subjected to the commu-

ideal, by resuming such a ‘second-degree’ material expression, a passive heterotopic

2.4 The Metamorphoses of the Ideal City. The Utopian

jective—driving any potential documentary role in the background. Compared with

177 Choay, Alegoria…, 66.

Princeton Architectural Press, 2005, 48.

Barbara Luigia, MIT Press, 1976, 16–18.

184 Tafuri, Architecture…, 18.

187 Kirk, Terry, The Architecture…, 52.