“And love is nothing more than a name for our passionate desire to be whole again. Whole as I said we were from the beginning and not divided in our own being, split, for our presumptuousness, by Zeus […]. It is, therefore, to be feared that if we sin against the gods, we will be split once again, like firebrands, so that we walk, like people who are seen in profile, in bas-relief, on tombstones, cut from top to bottom along the line of the nose.” (Plato, The Banquet, translation by Petru Creția, Humanitas, 2011, 192e-193a, pg. 116)

This is not a fortuitous photograph.

This is a conspiracy. Since I have known it, my city has been gradually re-calculating its heels, in a concert of the contingencies of post-communist convalescence. It is a citadel in which together it seems to have calibrated its ideal via Brâncuși’s “The Kiss”, in a calm desperation, in a measured eroticism; it is completed by a grip synonymous with a trap, only that its “signalectic” seems stingy and hungry, begging for an anachronistic lighting. It is hard to find architectural arms that unite landmarks and points of view!

This is not a photograph of my city.

In my city, the architectural details are aortic. Metropolitan peristalsis is a barcode scarred in decayed concrete. Living spaces only have sweat glands. Office buildings only have deltoids. Somehow, the two typologies only touch their pelvises.

This is, however, a functional architectural detail photo in which together means a sought-after, non-delicate, yet anti-gravitational touch, which allows for a synchronized vertigo: two resistance structures that seem to tense each other at a 15-degree angle, with an extended epidermis that parametrically sinks towards a Scandinavian sun with canines, and which allows for an inclusive transfer of penumbra, but does not approve of confusing crowding with intimacy.

This is an architectural detail photo: Bella Sky Hotel, built by 3XN in Ørestad, Copenhagen.

PS: – schesis s [At: VĂCĂRESCUL. IST. 289 / Pl: ? / E: ngr σχέσις] (Grî) Relationship established between things, facts, events, etc. (cf. dexonline.ro)

– conspiracy (etymology): con = together, spirare = to breathe

Accept my slang for the attempted pun in the title, because “together” is a nourishing embrace of our everyday cosmopolitan! I am talking about the “cosmopolitan” in architecture, speaking, in fact, about the emancipation of this term, haunted by a pejorative accent, stamped with populist generosity by proletcultist propaganda on any creation it has laid hands on. And I am also talking in this photograph about an eminently inclusive architectural act, conceived by a Romanian engineer of Franco-Polish origins (Anghel Saligny), originally named in honor of a Romanian born in Sigmaringen (Carol I), ennobled by a French sculptor (Léon Pilet) with the monumentality of Romanian soldiers known under a name of Slavonic etymology (dorobanți). Such a natural diversity for our “middle” of the world, and therefore so functional & (sic!) durable (despite some Soviet bombings…)! After all, I took this photo with a work by Paul Gauguin in mind.

Of course, being an architect, the result doesn’t really resemble the source of inspiration… But “D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?” are the questions to which the CERNAVODĂ BRIDGE offered, I believe, a unified answer, which encloses within it the quintessence of architectural praxeology: we build to get together where we want to, to stay together, to measure time together. Of course, being an architect, I know well that a bridge is more than a metaphor: it unites two languages ​​of land, nothing more, nothing less; related metonymies belong to poets. But it also unites two complementary professions: that of architect and that of engineer. Today, when they are no longer confused with each other, when overspecialization is crippling them, only the passage of time impartially measures their almost incestuous performances. At the end of the 19th century, work was individual. At the end of the 20th century, work was team work. The end of the 21st century will probably cement the dominance of the algorithm born of a sterile database handled by “A.I.” with compiler dexterity. So, in this photograph (art that is already a sedated vat of algorithms) I am talking about Anghel Saligny, because I am afraid that the students of my students will plagiarize him without their will. Because, after all, “it is only” a bridge, right?

It’s just that our gaze runs, like in Gauguin’s painting, from one angle to another, and we see that we are, in fact, unfolding time. And thus we give it meaning: because we show that we have arrived where we wanted to be, and we are together. Could an architect ask for more? Just a bridge… whose justification was the joy of a reunited Romania. And the confirmation of its soul was not political or conjunctural-industrial, but its being, simply, in guaranteeing the reliability, including the resistance of this bridge over the Danube. How could we not remember here the team of engineers who stood with Anghel Saligny under the bridge, at its inauguration, to show, perhaps, that together means trust? The cantilever beams and the soft steel for the decks thus become banal plagiarizable details of a “simple bridge” that was to unite – via accessibility and speed – the Romanian Country of Dobrogea, barely recovered after the Treaty of Berlin. And to unshakably join them, like a silver rivet.

PS: “The Carol I Bridge with the “Dorobanții” statues is listed in the list of historical monuments under the code CT-II-m-A-02872”.

In memoriam Anghel Saligny (1854-1925)