Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about the mechanisms through which the architecture of daily life accrued political and cultural meaning in postwar Romania. It examines the extensive efforts that architects committed to the design of the architectural types of socialist housing: types for the single apartment, but especially types for clusters of apartments that could then be assembled into whole buildings. The book looks at the way socialist modernization accommodated a discourse about tradition, and more specifically folk craft. The architecture of socialist housing was, like the tractors that also regularly paraded in the city streets or the abundant wheat harvests touted in the media, the object of significant investment by the new socialist state. Architecture’s aspirations combined both a visionary and a pragmatic register, and wondrous visions of togetherness and objective technological improvements intersected in the construction of modern buildings and spaces.