7/25/2019 In the Context of Profound Standardization

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Historical Constructions of the User in the Romanian Socialist Apartment

In the context of profound standardization, the golden age of state housing constructionin Romania of the 60s and 70s, generated a built environment that became the research

terrain for the outstanding interdisciplinary research collaboration between architectureand sociology in mid 70s and early 80s. This partnership, which was rooted into an

ongoing intellectual partnership between sociology and architecture and sanctioned bythe communist system from its beginnings, was finally embedded in what was at the time

the motherboard of standardized housing design and architecture, the Romanian DesignInstitute of Standardized Constructions in 1976. The housing design production and

architecture within this institute was partly the outcome of post-occupancy empiricalsociological inquiry. Architects and historians alike often neglect this intellectual

partnership through which professionals involved in housing production understoodresidents way of dwelling, housing aspirations, interior housing unit adaptations and

space appropriations and at a bigger scale, their demographic structure of families,

migration, and others factors of urbanization.The historical investigation I propose here would unravel the ways in which throughoutthe socialist period in Romania the development of the architecture profession must be

comprehended also through the ways in which the idea of the user was constructed andthe way the user as resident, inhabitant and citizen participated directly or indirectly in

the formation of the built environment. In this paper I argue that the user was not just afixed, institutionally created entity whose actions were determined by the built

environment and controlled by a rigid political system. The users interventions, spaceadaptations, space negotiations were recovered by the sociological and architectural

intellectual partnership and re-inscribed in the practice of architecture and its housingproduction of the early 80s through the interdisciplinary nature of the state architectural

institutions.