I forgot to go on holiday, or that was somewhere around but I didn’t remember the word for it. It was a pretty hectic summer for our editorial staff: we represented Romania in the Venice Biennial, we designed the space for ¾ Gallery of the National Theater for the Bucharest Biennial, and now we are ready to bring in exhibitions and conferences from Japan to Bucharest, and last but not least, we are just about to hand in the issue on Venezuela of our journal. Maybe we can contaminate you into working hard, if you forgot about it, or into just thinking that it could be worse than that.
The current issue on Venezuela brings to the fore a quite dense and impoverished urban situation. That reminds me of the Venezuela Pavilion at the Venice Biennial, their tough protest signed by Juan Pedro Posani, this year’s curator and one of the architects featured in this issue. The “you understand that the cities of the third world are made of a different society, with other roots and fate. Your prescriptions are for a world of entertainment, which ours is not, so let us alone with our mistakes because you may have something to learn about from us. Don’t judge, just try to understand us.” Maybe too much politics and no architecture whatsoever in the pavilion, but we definitely find in our Venezuela dossier a lesson about architecture and social problems, about community life and finding answers to problems.
Picking up again the subject of Venice Biennial, presented in some brief accounts of the projects we liked best, I would like to tell you that the theme of this issue is “City, Architecture, and Society.” That is that most unlikely theme of Venice Biennial that stealthily avoided the highways with architecture stars and chose instead reflection and research. As many pavilions show it, the cities are author less creations, as sometimes anonymity is so creative that no famous signature could surpass it.
We haven’t forgotten about our holiday though, even if it was besieged by so many projects. We shall hand in the Venezuela issue, and then wait for the Japanese to come, organize the BAB 2006 and then, certainly, we’ll go on holiday.
