ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most remarkable legacy of the regime in Romania is the architecture of Bucharest. The complicated problem of what to do with this legacy is the subject of this paper.1 The problem is both architectural and philosophical. Repeating the destruction that created the present city by a further act of destruction is not an intervention. What must be done involves developing ways of understanding the regime’s own urbanism and thus ways of countering it. Fundamental to both is thinking a conception of the new or the other which demands the abeyance of destruction on the one hand and the refusal of a nostalgic sense of recovery on the other. (The latter would be the new as the rediscovery of a lost tradition.) Approaching this issues via Descartes may seem aberrant; but the real strength of the Cartesian formulation of the interplay between the philosophical and the architectural is that it is premised on the interconnection between destruction and the new. The limits of Descartes therefore are central to thinking the limits of this conception of modernity.
