We extract our sap, perhaps our inspiration or ultimately, our “creation”, from the near or distant past (essentially a shortcoming). We cannot remain indifferent, even after years, to the inventions or innovations of images that have become iconic, such as Henri Coandă or Anghel Saligny, whose creativity still defies the time they lived in.

Witnesses of technological progress, which manifests itself at a galloping pace in contemporary times, we adapt and store in the dungeons of memory bibliographic landmarks, seemingly meaningless and meaningless fragments, which perhaps one day will coagulate in the form of a “personalized creation”. We aspire to creation or fragmentary sequences of it, we invariably interpret them, in one form or another, so that ultimately, out of an immediate necessity, we can use it conjuncturally. And yes, we are plagiarists, beauty thieves without even realizing it, (maybe “The Beauty Thieves” by Pascal Bruckner)… we borrow things, fragments. We are self-sufficient and, most of the time, we experience an ecstatic intensity when our mind creates from some niche an architectural truth that seems eloquent… we have discovered something, we have “created” something new. And yes, apparently we do refer to creation, be it architectural or technological. Probability can make us believe that both Saligny and Coandă asked themselves at least once in their lives the question related to the creative act.

I found the two of them (HC and AS), in the Romanian Pavilion (Now-Here-There) at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. Alongside them, a panoply of contemporary inventions and innovations in the field of built/constructed architecture, some recognizable, others difficult to decipher or interpret. Face to face, representing the past and the present, the architectural exhibits with a touch of innovation look towards the future, Now-Here-There… A future, quantifiable, spotted and identified perhaps only by the Artificial Intelligence that humanity is just creating. A future in which images will be generated from words and fragments of other existing images possibly from the past, in which architecture will be self-regenerative and the undesirable result of the infinite permutations of a software anchored in an archive of predefined elements… an informational permutation.

Invention and innovation are the order of the day today, and can be quantified in the modification of a program line(s). It is strange that often, in the contemporary period, creation/innovation is affiliated with a team or a brand excluding the names of the authors, all things being done “together”, without personalization, without individualization. We are carriers and transmitters of data, each one of us, similar to an information device equipped with artificial intelligence connected to a vast network… In essence, we have “artificialized” ourselves as individuals, responding to requests determined by the environment in which we exist.

Maybe we will “partially” take over certain aspects relevant to us from the searches of others, exhibited in the Romanian Pavilion in Venice. Maybe we will absorb, like a vacuum cleaner, and recompose the notions taken over. Maybe we’ll simply pass by them indifferently, wanting a likeforshare or a selfie with a strange car… They remain there, silent, absorbing our thoughts, collecting memories in the dust…