UAUIM-FFCSU-2025-007
Project acronym: DigitArh
Digitization of UAUIM Archive – Diploma Projects (1971-1975) is a project carried out by UAUIM with funding from the University Scientific Research Financing Fund (FFCSU no. 2025-007), with the aim of transferring parts of the School's traditional archive to a digital format. The targeted research area is F (Strategic Research and Research Development in the Field of Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Digitization and Digital Manufacturing, New Technologies).
This time, the project focused on a limited segment of documents kept in the archive: Diploma projects developed between 1971 and 1975. The first editions of this research project (2023 and 2024) aimed to create a digital archive, which the 2025 project expanded and enriched. The goal remains the same: to preserve fragments of the School's history in the medium and long term by transferring them from the physical archive to the digital one, by scanning existing photographic films and transferring the images thus obtained to the online environment. In the 1970s, the School continued the tradition established 15 years earlier of archiving the best projects (diplomas, year projects, sketches, etc.) - thus, today we have a significant collection of projects that eloquently describe the evolution of local architectural education. In this sense, the process of scanning, inventorying, processing data and images, analyzing, selecting, digitizing, and re-archiving has the main purpose of making the documents accessible to the academic community and the specialized public for possible future research, in the field of architectural pedagogy. On the other hand, the digitization of documents ensures the long-term preservation of these images and protects them from inevitable physical degradation.
The DigitArh project continues a line of research initiated by previous doctoral studies (2009-2013), the publication Cutia cu diplome (Diploma Box, 2021), and the grants DigitArh_Scketches (FFCSU 2023) and DigitArh_Diplomas (60-70) (FFCSU 2024), all focusing on the study of the UAUIM archive and projects developed during the communist regime (1944-1989). We believe that the diploma projects are probably the most relevant in this available study reserve, due to their local historical and architectural significance, while the online preservation of documents for future generations thus becomes an additional argument for innovation in terms of the available format of these images/projects.
The digitization of the School's archive is part of a broader process, in which many of the projects developed during the communist period (1944-1989) have already been scanned. Initially, the Diploma Box book described 86 projects developed between 1940 and 1989, out of a total of 5,680 identified works, then DigitArh 2024 focused on the 1960s and 1970s, attempting to scan, inventory, and include another 352 diplomas (5,451 images) in the online archive. The following 166 diploma projects (1,726 images) have now been added to this archive through DigitArh 2025, of which: 91 projects were scanned from 1971, 10 projects in 1972, 36 in 1973, in 1974 – 28, in 1975 – 1. We were unable to scan all the projects available from 1972, which will hopefully be digitized in a future edition of DigitArh. We were also surprised to discover a single project from 1975 preserved in the archive.
Similar to previous editions, the scanning of documents was accompanied by a cataloging of the images obtained and, after an initial selection of the plates, additional data was collected for each project: author, supervising/tutor professor, academic year of the diploma's development and submission, thematic category of the subject, number of drawings. In most cases, the supervisors could not be yet identified, because they were no longer mentioned on the plates, as in the previous decade, the only source of this information being the descriptions of the authors themselves. The current research also includes five interviews with the authors of the digitized diplomas, each story and recollection revealing a broader picture than that of the project itself: the climate and atmosphere of the School, affinities, ideals, constraints, nostalgia.
At the end of the DigitArh 2025 edition, after three months of intense work, a significant collection of diplomas produced in the first half of the 1970s became available and accessible in digital format to the entire academic community and the profession. Once again, the research benefited from a complete set of IT services, indispensable for the transfer of information to the online environment, which ensured the configuration, organisation and expansion of the digital archive, offering new perspectives on the teaching and architectural history specific to the School in the 1970s.
Looking back at these first five years of the 1970s and the diplomas designed within the School during this time, we see a constantly changing picture of the entire atmosphere of the faculty: of ripening – on the one hand, through the complexity of the projects and topics addressed, but also of paradigm shift from everything that had been considered “the model” and tradition in the School, on the other hand.
First of all, the diploma programs are focused on relatively the same areas that dominated the previous decade, the 1960s, with Tourism, Housing, Culture, and Education subjects, with the mention that many of these projects begin with extensive phases of urban studies (systematizations), whether they are revitalized or restored fragments of the city or urbanizations of new territories, especially those intended for seasonal and tourist recreation (mountain, seaside, rural). Due to the large scale of these systematizations, the projects are sometimes developed in teams of 2-4 students, and only the second part of the diploma deals with a subset of the systematization: a hotel in a resort designed in the first phase, spectacular objects that populate squares or restored urban areas (a philharmonic hall, a museum, a cultural center), a fragment of a residential neighborhood, an administrative center with all its components (city hall, ministries, embassies, etc.). Systematizations therefore appear as primary gestures indispensable to these studies, from which their significant or relevant parts are subsequently detailed, almost like a zoom in that illustrates, on a micro-scale, all the guiding principles of the urban concepts stated in the first stage. The large share of systematizations (20% in 1972 and 25% in 1973) overlaps, of course, with the new political ideology implemented in 1971 by Ceaușescu's Theses, but there is a coherence to these manifestations regardless of the political climate.
Also, the proportion of studies for collective housing is suggested or generated by the massive urbanization that took place during this period, and what is pleasantly surprising when reading the diplomas from the early 1970s is the concern for satisfying the densification indices imposed by political directives, but in experimental, lyrical, poetic formulas, of a different nature than what was designed in real practice. Another surprise is that sometimes these studies were not reported or developed from a specific context, a real physical location, but were combinations or exercises in architecture that could possibly have been implemented in various circumstances at a later date. Most of the testimonies of those who graduated from the School during this period convey the joy and pride of the architecture students during the preparation of their diplomas, an exuberance for conceptualizing and shaping ideas that were clearly detached from political propaganda. They did not really feel, at the School, the pressures that the guild had probably already begun to notice. The diploma was, in most cases, an individual artistic act, assumed, documented, and argued responsibly, but deeply personal and unanchored in the imperatives of the system (even if certain aspects coincide with recent ideological changes). Indeed, these seem to be the last years of detachment, of inertia from the liberalization of the 1960s, with all the necessary overlaps with the paradigm shifts taking place during these years.
The change of direction, beyond the extensive systematizations and programs addressed, begins to be legible in representation as well: traditional, beaux-artist drawing is replaced by technical drawing, made on tracing paper, generated on the one hand by the acute need to control the overwhelming manual representation of these complex and extensive projects, and on the other hand by the directive to technify the entire field of architecture. The accelerated production of buildings required a faster, clearer, and more precise method of design and representation, and the tracing paper and black ink allowed for the easy and reliable transfer of drawn pieces, with manual copying and monochrome photography also having obvious advantages. The use of Letraset and high-performance rapidographs with interchangeable tips had the same effect. Thus, by 1975, we have illustrations of the latest mixed representation techniques: free renderings, nuanced perspectives with overlays of flat, transparent, or matte shades (watercolor, tempera) and technical pieces in sober line drawings in ink, with interference between them: sectioned axonometric projections, but artistically framed, perspectives with technical insertions, details, ornamental hatching, project identification logos (repeated on each board, as an emblem specific to each diploma, in which the title is abstracted through acronyms or the subject). The graphics of the titles and logos still preserve the tradition of the 1960s, both in mentality and plasticity, in the fonts used or in the illustration of the concept or character of the diploma (industrial, leisure, restoration, etc.).
Only a few projects mention the names of the authors and their supervising professors on the drawings (since the late 1960s onwards, this was no longer specified), which leaves room for further research today. In this context, the relevance of the recently disclosed interviews with the authors of the diplomas is even more significant—the mentors who played an important role in the professional life of each architecture student are remembered today with gratitude and nostalgia—a sincere tribute that describes the broader context of the favorable atmosphere within the School, during those years.
The evaluation of the diplomas was carried out by committees made up of studio leaders and active specialists in the Departments of Urbanism and Technical Sciences, in formulas similar to those of today (the difference being the much larger number of current ones and their composition, with invited professors from universities outside Romania). The rigors of such a graduation exam are evident today in the quality and scope of the projects, in the maximum marks awarded (the archive of diplomas includes only the projects evaluated as the best, with marks of 9 and 10), but also in the atmosphere described in interviews, of a professional and collegial climate, with inevitable differences of opinion, but perceived as positive and invigorating. Only exceptions point to the presence of underlying ideological pressure, which could have a negative impact on the School, even if only occasionally.
After three editions of DigitArh, the scanning of diplomas and the transfer of the images obtained to the digital archive has outlined yet another fragment of the School of the 1970s, with the intention of deciphering a broader picture of the evolution of local architectural education. We hope that preserving this heritage in a digital format and making it available to the academic community in its entirety, will stimulate future research that is as varied and relevant as possible for the niche field of architectural pedagogy.
Additional references:
Vesa-Dobre, A-M (2021), Cutia cu diplome, Ed.univ. "Ion Mincu", Bucharest
Vesa-Dobre, A-M, (2023), Digitization of the UAUIM Archive – Year Projects and Sketch Sketches (1950s-1970s), Ed.univ. “Ion Mincu”, Bucharest
Vesa-Dobre, A-M, (2024), Digitisation of the UAUIM archive – Diploma projects (1960s-1970s), , Ed.univ. “Ion Mincu”, Bucharest