Digitization of the UAUIM Archive - Diploma Projects (60s-70s) is a project carried out by UAUIM from the University Scientific Research Funding Funds (FFCSU no. 2024-007), with the intention of transferring parts of the traditional archive of the School into the digital environment. Therefore, the targeted research areas include strategic studies (H) and digitization (F), with the project focusing on a small segment of documents held in the archive: the diploma projects designed between 1960s-1970s. The idea of creating a digital archive arose from the desire to preserve these fragments of the School on a medium and long term and to showcase them as closely as possible to their current form, by scanning existing photographic film and transferring the resulting images, with minimal processing, to an online archive. The whole process of scanning - inventory - data and image processing – analysis – selection - digitization/re-archiving had as its main aim to make the documents accessible to the academic community and to protect them against temporal or accidental degradation (flood, fire, earthquake, breakage etc). By making the archive accessible to the scholarly and specialized public, further research is facilitated and encouraged in the niche of architectural didactics, recent local history, architectural theory and practice, all cut out from a period with a closed and centralized political climate.
The DigitArh_Diplomas project continues a line of research initiated by previous doctoral studies (2009-2013), the publication of the Diploma Box (2021) and the DigitArh_Sketches research grant (FFCSU 2023), all focusing on the study of the UAUIM archive (year projects, sketch of a sketch and diplomas produced during the communist regime (1944-1989). Of all these, the diploma projects are probably the most important and significant, due to their local historical and architectural relevance, and making them accessible to current students and teacher-architects could have a revealing cultural and educational impact. Preserving documents for future generations thus becomes yet another argument for online archiving, both for the School and the Guild, and the availability of projects or images in an innovative (digital) format can stimulate the development of the university research infrastructure.
Finally, the intended digitization of the School's archive is part of a larger process, in which many of the diploma projects designed during the communist period (1944-1989) have already been scanned. A suggestive part of them frame the core of the Diploma Box book: 86 diploma projects elaborated between 1940-1989, out of a total of 5,680 works identified, illustrated an architectural (and not only) history of the School. The current digitization project (2024) focused on the 1960s-1970s segment, attempting to scan, inventory and include in the DigitArh online archive a further 352 diplomas (5,451 images).
The oldest graduating class from which we were able to discover drawn diplomas is from the 1957-1958 academic year, and the last graduating class available in the archive is from 1988-1989. The diplomas from the 60s-70s of the last century were archived on photographic film at the end of each academic year, after a qualitative selection (only the best ones were kept). After scanning, we obtained more than 5,400 images, drawings of diploma projects designed between the academic years 1959-1960 and 1969-1970, and 32 projects from the 70s. This is a total of archived files after three months of intense and busy work, aiming to complete the present digitized fonds with at least as many diplomas from 1970-1979, in a subsequent FFCSU project.
The process of scanning the documents was associated with a cataloging of the images obtained and, after a first selection of the plates, additional data were collected for each project: author, supervising professor (or collective), academic year of the diploma's design and submission, thematic category of the subject, number of plates. This inventory efficiently organized the entire volume of digital images, making it possible to further filter them, according to need and desired selection category, on the implemented online platform.
The current research also includes two interviews of the authors of the digitized diplomas, with the intention of revealing as faithfully and in as much detail as possible the projects presented: the story described by each case illustrates a broader landscape than the design of their own graduation project, referring to the atmosphere of the School of that period, to official regulations and unwritten rules, affinities, ideals, constraints.
The UAUIM archive digitization project resulted, therefore, from a real need to transform and adapt the traditional archive into a contemporary format, which would be available and easily accessible to the entire academic community and the profession. Research has benefited from a complete set of IT services, essential to any digitization process, and which have reconstituted and preserved an important architectural and didactic heritage. We hope that the relevance of the documents now transferred into the digital environment will become an argument in itself for the research project undertaken, providing new generations of students and teachers of architecture with a new rendering upon the School of those years.
The process of digitizing graduation projects has revealed an impressive series of images, both surprising and predictable. On the one hand, we have discovered the 1960s as a period of liberalization, exuberance and relative detachment from the ideology of "socialist realism", now legible in modernist projects, with the pure or organic geometries of "lyrical functionalism", specific to the period. Conjugated formulas are often assimilated to both Cartesian volumes or lines, rough and sober, with the materiality of facing concrete, as well as to curved, elongated surfaces - all revealing a single-object architecture, different from that of the typified series promoted in previous years. On the other hand, the diplomas described a climate of industrialization and massive urbanization (large areas systematized in micro-regions adjacent to newly implemented industries, apartment blocks, public facilities at the macro-scale of the area: stadiums and sports complexes, cultural centers with theater and philharmonic), designed to provide the necessary infrastructure. Surprising are also the less usual projects of Restoration or adaptive reuse of heritage fragments, which are finally becoming visible during 1960s. The first Restoration diploma we have information about belonged to Gheorghe Curinschi ("Reconstitution of the Suceava Palace for the sets of a film") which was submitted in 1952, without being a listed topic among the programs imposed at that time. Ten years later, Curinschi began the first series of lectures on the Restoration of Monuments, which would become an independent subject taught in the School after 1961-1962. Restoration diplomas initially appear in a small segment, about 1% per year (1-3 projects) and reach a peak of 3-4% between 1967 and 1969 (5-6 projects per year). Also in 1962, the Restoration diploma of Ana Sanda Voiculescu ("Systematisation of Iași Historic Centre") was designed, and not to be found in the archives, but which is presented in volume I of Studies and Projects (1964, p.168) as a singular and appreciated project.
Under the rectorate of Ascanio Damian, the whole 1960s decade of the School evolved in an innovative and transfigured climate, visible now also by reading the diplomas of this period. The projects have a dominant theme of Tourism, Culture, Education, Housing dislocated only in the early years by Industrialization and Systematisation, as an inertia of the 1950s, and now rather bending to the theme-interests of real practice, contemporary to them. A reading of the 1960s diplomas reveals hypostases and mentalities detached from the serialist monotony of earlier projects, from the classicizing elements and insertions of "cult vernacular" or "indigenous language". Although still monumental in scale and form, the architecture legible in these projects is a replica of the images found by the students in the modernist library set up by Ascanio Damian, a mature and somewhat intellectualized architecture, probably also due to the change in the profile of the student architect after 1962 (when the policy of admitting "healthy" files to the School was abolished). What is quite evident in all the plans drawn in this interval is that the designed objects or architectural assemblages are not conceived/presented as belonging to a real context. The sites are real and are pertinently described, in pieces such as site plans or masterplans, with descriptions of the landscape and other defining and relevant elements, but most of the objects are placed outside a built context. With the exception of the natural context, which is impeccably rendered, and evaluated as attractive and polarizing, both in perspectives and in other drawn pieces, the built environment seems to be a non-participant character in the scenario. And even more so, as many projects depict the existence of a built context, in frontage deployments or masterplans, yet the newly designed implants seem not to be included or suggested as belonging to such a context.
Another breakthrough of this research was the formula of the prediploma, which was presented (as it is today) before the diploma in order to evaluate the theme and location as a coherent whole. A study of precedents was also presented on this occasion, which - unlike the current formula and for obvious technical reasons - was redrawn in its entirety, in constituent parts and text-concept. This small detail suggested to us a difference in the assimilation of this first phase of the degree, in which today the study of references seems to be more superficially integrated or calibrated in other terms, compared to the time. A classic paradox, moreover, since the abundance of information today seems to have the opposite effect on the study of the diploma and the understanding of previous similar approaches.
Representation techniques revolve around the beaux-art drawing, with the annotated presentation of absolutely all the parts of the project, starting with the masterplan in which all the components are rendered expressively: the natural landscape, with the relief and contour lines, sunlight and shade, then the built landscape, which is illustrated mainly in dense and/or historic urban fabrics. The projects were extensive and sometimes reached an impressive number of plates, impossible to manage individually and outside the School studio. The "hammered" cardboard specific to this period made it possible to render in watercolor, ink, wash, airbrush or a mixture of techniques, in which the best students became true master draughtsmen. The perspectives of the graduates of the sixties are exuberant and wonderfully illustrative of this.
The project titles are illustrated as acronyms and graphically essentialized, either in abstract logos or in text, in original type; sometimes Letraset (letters) or Letratone (hatches) were used, after 1965-66, when they appeared. The title was also intended to identify the plans as part of the same project, and was always designed and placed the same way, as a symbol of the diploma, in both text and graphics. Industrial projects, for example, employed an aesthetic of fonts used in this visual register, while Restoration projects used cylliric or archaic symbols. The title graphics were also taken to other minor texts in the plans, while the fonts were creatively conceived with the intention of also graphically suggesting the subject of the project, its atmosphere or architectural concept. From 1969 on, the plans were signed with the student's name only, without the tutor-teacher, (as in previous years) - which made it significantly difficult for us to identify them for the diplomas of the following years.
The evaluation of the diploma projects was done in committees of 3-4 members each, all professors, who could be joined by other guests, architects or engineers, teaching in the School as well. Grades of 9 and 10 were a selection criterion for archiving projects, and looking at the graph of archived diplomas, most of which are from 1968 (66 projects) and 1969 (100 projects), we might infer that the average promotion rate increased towards the end of the 60s. In any case, since quantity is not a quality in itself, we now appreciate that a considerably higher share of the best archived diplomas from the late 1960s could be a performance indicator of the School's evolution, probably due to its political and professional climate, but especially to the managerial and didactic one.
At first glance, these projects are significantly more consistent, profound and creative than those of the previous decade, dealing with wide-ranging topics and having a different impact on the sites in which they are set. Obviously, this incidence also includes the abrupt and radical systematisations, which swallow up important fragments of the inherited urban heritage: an attitude that was perhaps inevitable if "read" in the political picture in question and towards which we could eventually position ourselves critically in a completely different perspective.
Finally, the project of digitization of the UAUIM's diploma archive was conceived with the intention of preserving as faithfully as possible a didactic heritage: a ten-year sequence of the history and evolution of the School. The witness-diplomas of this journey turn out to be an important tool in deconstructing their own history, revealing an essential potential for reconfiguring a short episode of recent local architecture.
See also:
Damian, Ascanio (1964), Studii și Proiecte (I), IAIM Bucharest
Vesa-Dobre, A-M (2021), Cutia cu diplome, Ed.univ. “Ion Mincu”, Bucharest
Vesa-Dobre, A-M, (2023), Digitization of UAUIM Archive – Projects and Sketches (the1950s-197s0), Ed.univ. “Ion Mincu”, Bucharest
https://digitarh.uauim.ro/
While digitizing the School's diploma archive from the 1960s and 1970s, a precious routine emerged of discovering projects with functionalist and technical reasoning worthy of admiration, but also a hopelessness of discovering those urban-scale systematisation projects that abruptly modify and replace the inherited heritage (according to the political context).
Beyond these instances, more than fruitful plans and sequences suddenly appear.
Titles such as Bârnova Monastery, Neamț Fortress, Turda Historical Center, and Comana Monastery Restoration are adaptive reuse projects that, from urban scale to individual objects, connect with the place, reveal it, and save it through the project.
Professors Grigore Ionescu, Richard Bordenache, and Gheorghe Curinschi are instrumental in this approach for working according to the model, reading the existing and enhancing it. These projects can only be celebrated and followed as a permanent model.
The same concern is shared today by architecture diploma students, who often find inspiration and models in the existing tissue or objects of the built heritage. They substantiate their projects by seeking a historical permanence that must be preserved. In this dual and mirrored purpose—safeguarding heritage on the one hand and working alongside the model and place on the other—we can only strive to bring to light and enhance these fertile projects more often.
References:
Prof. Grigore Ionescu / Cristian Moisescu - Bârnova Monastery (1961), Alexandru Samoilă - Neamț Fortress (1962), Margareta Pop - Historical Centre of Turda (1963), Nicolae Enisteanu - Restoration of Comăna Monastery (1967)
Prof. Gustav Gusti / Ghilezan Delia - Restoration of Bistrița Historical Area (1961)
Prof. Richard Bordenache / Mihaela Nicolaescu - Adaptive Reuse of Historical Monuments in Mediaș (1962)
Prof. Gheorghe Curinschi / Roth Karlheinz - Sighișoara Restoration (1968)
Unidentified tutors / Anișoara Căpităniță - Restoration of Deva Fortress (1968), Gheorghe Ardelea - Restoration of Rupea Fortress (1969), Ioana Bellu - Restoration Heracleea (1969), Mihael Bartmus - Restoration of 23rd August Square, Brașov (1969), Rodica Ambruș - Restoration of Fortress “Pacuiul lui Soare” (1970)