This article investigates the construction of marginal railway cityscapes in the painting of the ... more This article investigates the construction of marginal railway cityscapes in the painting of the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux (1897-1994). Marginal sources like art and literary history may provide unexpected insights into architectural and urban history. Likewise, a marginal, urban-historical reading of Delvaux’s oeuvre might cross-fertilize art-historical interpretations. It might highlight how his artistic vision critically evaluated urban reality by distilling strong iconographic statements, painterly parti pris, which may, at their turn, influence individual or collective cultural perceptions of architecture and the city. We argue that Delvaux’s work both contributes towards and expresses the emergence of a taste for the industrial and the minor urban heritage, just like the eighteenth-century capricci painters, such as Pannini, Piranesi, Hubert or Guardi famously contributed to the dissemination of a taste for Antiquity. It is during the late 1950s and the 1960s that Delvaux creates a particular body of railway-inspired work, rendering the railway periphery poetically, as a place of revelation and enchantment. Delvaux’s paintings anticipate, inspire and profoundly resonate with the interest of the post-war literary avant-gardes in the poetry of banality. The contrast between the major railway works going on in central Brussels and Delvaux’s contemporary painting is read as an intentional reaction to the dialectics between (urban) history and historicity. By sublimating the railway landscape of the periphery into dream-like, poetic images, Delvaux foretells, and subtly resonates with, the emergence in the 1960s - 1970s of the post-war urban conservation movement, wherein Belgium and Brussels played a key role.
Radu Marza ed., Shaping Modernity. The Railway Journey Across Two Centuries, 2022
One of the emblematic spaces of a railway station, the restaurant can
be an index to railway hist... more One of the emblematic spaces of a railway station, the restaurant can be an index to railway history, evoking in nuce the railway journey from the nineteenth to the twenty‑first century. This paper is an investigation into the symbolic value of this peculiar aspect of the railway heritage. The station restaurant evolved from none, modest-, or subsequently‑improvised equipment, in the first‑generation stations, to purposely‑designed, spacious amenities, towards the end of the nineteenth century. These high‑end restaurants, often adjacent to the waiting rooms functioning as cafés, organised by ticket class, flourished in medium‑to‑large cities, largely remained the paradigm during the interbellum too. Looking at a condensed, yet representative selection of pre‑WWI stations, we interpret the restaurant’s integration within the architecture of the station. What does architecture let read about the symbolic function of the restaurant in a railway station? Conversely, what does a semiotics of the station restaurant reveal about architecture’s signifying modalities? Drawing on architectural representations (railway station projects), photography (especially picture postcards), cartography (city plans) and architectural historiography, the study is concerned with the immediate urban context, the planimetric, volumetric and functional articulations of the restaurant within the station. Lieux de prestige – Belle Époque symbols, a taste of- and for modernity is expressed by the diverse facets of these improbable lieux de memoire: from Munich’s core‑position, through St Pancras’ subtle contradiction of the hotel’s shield‑like opacity, Budapest West’s exteriority and material contrasting the train shed’s transparency, Frankfurt’s confronting scale‑contrast, Köln’s insular mise en abyme of the “solid” and the “evanescent,” Cluj’s representation of the typical provincial station’s marginal condition, finally to Paris’ Gare de Lyon’s purposeful architectural sublimation of the station’s Janus condition in the elevated Train bleu dream‑machine. The station restaurant positioned the traveller in a particular architectural situation, prone to inspire both a modern meditation on the human condition, as well as a meditation on modernity as human condition. The best station restaurants stage a metadiscoursive architectural situation in which a site- and sight‑specific representation of the journey is enacted. Sitting in the restaurant’s accommodating, refuge‑like environment, framing the city- about to be left behind or about to be discovered, and the maelstrom of flows along and around the tracks, promising the liberating progress(ion) of the voyage, yet exposing its disquieting estrangement and uncertainty, the railway journey subject both “tasted” modernity and developed one’s taste for it.
Aesthetic experience is irreducible. Words cannot 'explain' painting. Neither words, nor ... more Aesthetic experience is irreducible. Words cannot 'explain' painting. Neither words, nor images can 'render' the experience of a place. But both writing and painting have the power of creating their own virtual places. Between the places of the city, the imag(in)ed places of painting and the written places of literature, historiography or theory, there is both direct communication and subtle, subconscious exchange. In this paper, the painting of Belgian artist Paul Delvaux (1897-1994), assigning prominent roles to architecture and the city, is read through these disciplines' lenses. It is argued that apparently marginal sources like art and literary history can provide fresh insights into architectural and urban history. Likewise, a marginal, architectural and urban-historical reading of Delvaux's oeuvre can cross-fertilize the art-historical interpretations so far triggered by his work. e fact that throughout his carrier, spanning almost three quarters of a ...
While states undertook railway construction targeting economic and military objectives, this arti... more While states undertook railway construction targeting economic and military objectives, this article questions whether and to which extent their symbolic territorial cohesion was also at stake. The hypothesis we aim to verify is that railway buildings acted as recurrent visual signifiers of territorial coherence and had, therefore, the potential of being instrumental as state-building tools. This research explores how an architectural reading of railway networks can inform our understanding of state-building projects and processes. We expect that geographically scoped railway architectural history is capable of cross-fertilizing political and planning history, through a better understanding of empire, state, and regional building discourses. The investigation focuses on the stylistic architectural choices of edifices on two trunk lines in Transylvania, North-West Romania, before World War I, while this territory belonged to the Habsburg then, as of 1867, Austro-Hungarian Empire. The...
ABSTRACT:This article addresses the morphological and functional implications of the railway as a... more ABSTRACT:This article addresses the morphological and functional implications of the railway as an urban boundary, by studying seven towns in Romania, connected by the First Transylvanian Railway (1868–70). The research highlights similarities and differences as to the initial railway insertion, the subsequent growth patterns and the differentiation appearing between areas adjoining the railway tracks. The article argues that although a ‘wrong side of the track’ did not emerge everywhere, the segregation and lack of urban amenities affecting the areas which could be thus labelled is rooted in the failure to render the railway barrier permeable and to generate complementarity rather than subordination between the two sides of the track.
The relationship railway space – domestic space is both an old and a topical issue at the same ti... more The relationship railway space – domestic space is both an old and a topical issue at the same time, one that cannot be thoroughly understood in the absence of complex research. The focus of this paper is on art’s power of expressing and criticizing urban realities, assuming the premise that it is possible to understand art history as a mirror of urban history and to read certain works of art as expressions of collective perceptions of urban reality. Evoking and interpreting images by (early) modern artists as Gustave Doré, Claude Monet, Eduard Manet, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and others, we study the ways in which aspects of domesticity are if at all embedded representations of the railway space. Thereby, implicit positive and negative assessments about the sustainability of housing in the proximity of railway space, as recorded by nineteenth and early twentieth century artists, are highlighted and nuanced. Railway mobility evolves from an age when space was conquered under the sign of...
While states undertook railway construction targeting economic and military objectives, this arti... more While states undertook railway construction targeting economic and military objectives, this article questions whether and to which extent their symbolic territorial cohesion was also at stake. The hypothesis we aim to verify is that railway buildings acted as recurrent visual signifiers of territorial coherence and had, therefore, the potential of being instrumental as state-building tools. This research explores how an architectural reading of railway networks can inform our understanding of state-building projects and processes. We expect that geographically scoped railway architectural history is capable of cross-fertilizing political and planning history, through a better understanding of empire, state, and regional building discourses. The investigation focuses on the stylistic architectural choices of edifices on two trunk lines in Transylvania, North-West Romania, before World War I, while this territory belonged to the Habsburg then, as of 1867, Austro-Hungarian Empire. The large-scale analysis of railway architecture is discussed in relation to railway-line ownership, political (central, regional, and local) agency, economic development, and architectural Zeitgeist, highlighting state-building and territorial integration patterns. The mapping carried out reveals two successive architectural layers. These denote a shift in the role of railway architecture from an initial liberal phase, before the 1880s, to a bloom phase, prior to World War I. While during the former there was little state control over architectural aspects, during the latter architecture became a foremost representation instrument for the state railway administration. At the same time, the extant railway architecture appears as a palimpsest, a genuinely cross-border, European heritage, documenting the dynamics between imperial, state, regional, and local agencies.
As Dacia 1100 – the first car produced in Romania – was released
in 1968, a fine collection of ne... more As Dacia 1100 – the first car produced in Romania – was released in 1968, a fine collection of new medium-to-large railway stations were just being inaugurated too, including the one in Baia Mare. The two historic events are tightly connected. While the car can be read as the epitome of a much larger phenomenon, i.e. Romania’s intensive industrialisation under the communist regime, the new stations were both consequences thereof and means to support industrialisation, which in turn triggered the accelerated urbanisation of industrial centres and also stimulated commuting. The article studies the passenger building of Baia Mare Railway Station, a remarkable industrial artefact, now severely decaying. We first provide an overview of the railway network development around Baia Mare, followed by a brief review of the station’s urban planning stakes. Through Bauforschung we survey the original architecture of the building, as well as its subsequent alterations; through virtual restoration we (re)present perspectives of an ideal state of the station, as awareness-raising and value (re)cognition gestures.
During the interwar period, the North-Western Romanian territory, unified with the
Old Kingdom at... more During the interwar period, the North-Western Romanian territory, unified with the Old Kingdom at the end of World War I, remained a battlefield: besides the political and administrative appropriation of the united regions, a symbolic “taking into possession”1 was very much at stake too. Thereby, public buildings played a prominent role as national-cohesion signifiers. In architecture, nationalism and modernity, while apparently complementary cultural goals, brought forth stylistic dilemmas and debates. Furthermore, the Hungarian annexation of Northern Transylvania between 1940 and 1944 occasioned competing territorial-appropriation discourses, made visible through architectural signifiers as well. While the Paris Peace Treaties returned Northern Transylvania to Romania, public architecture produced immediately before and during World War II reflected re-appropriation discourses through hybrid stylistic choices, idiosyncratically mediating between vernacular sources, Classicism and Modernism. Meanwhile, railways held an exceptionally privileged status among the public institutions of the interwar period. In Romania, as well as in the states of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, railway systems became powerful centralized institutions after 1900, through the nationalization of the initial, privately owned and operated lines. The states’ “second armies,” symbols of progressive agency during the interwar decades, state railway companies, whether in Romania or in Hungary, ran architectural design services and represented foremost mission providers for industrial, public, and residential architecture. Investigating the 1930s - 1940s architecture of Transylvanian rail lines, the paper outlines symbolic appropriation battle lines, addressing a few key questions. How did railway architects deal with the national-versusmodern stylistic dilemmas of the interbellum? Were there clear-cut differences between the architectural options of the Romanian and the Hungarian railway production of the period? Conversely, beyond these differences, was there a similar Zeitgeist at work? How did railway architects stylistically respond to the increased political radicalization around World War II?
Mapping Landscapes in Transformation Multidisciplinary Methods for Historical Analysis, 2019
‘An idea, not a thing,’ landscape is the cultural perception of the physical environment, ‘create... more ‘An idea, not a thing,’ landscape is the cultural perception of the physical environment, ‘created by our minds and emotions’ (Clark et al. 2003: 3). The environment as physical place and the landscape as culturally determined perception and representation of the physical place, therefore, form a complex unity. Among the different representations of the environment (or landscape-construction means), cartography and statistics are allegedly more objective, while photography, painting, and literature provide rather subjective readings. Through mapping, contemporary geo-positioned data-management tools allow for a multi-layered relatedness between these two components of landscape. Through mapping, this paper investigates the triple relationship between photography, railway, and landscape. Hereby, mapping is understood as the associative operation that topologically connects sets of iconographic data to cartographical sets, more specifically in this study, historic railway photography to contemporary and historic cartography.
Railways and photography appeared at the same time, around 1830. Both are mechanical technologies and industrial media: a medium for transportation and a medium for the creation of images respectively. Both railways and photography ushered in a modern understanding of space and time, a new awareness of, and relationship with, landscape. Railways reshaped places, indeed entire territories, while landscape photography created a visual discourse about these transformations, often apologetic, sometimes evasive, and sometimes critical.
How should one read, analyse, and interpret this peculiar object, railway, and the landscapes it formed and transformed? In this study we argue that historic photography, investigated as a coherent body of images, corpus photographicum, rather than as individual images, can prove an effective means to this end. Focusing on railway cases from Transylvania, Romania, we propose a mapping system wherein mapping is understood more as in mathematical linguistics — as associative operation between different data sets — rather than as in cartography proper, as the creation of graphic representations of parts of the Earth’s surface. A system is proposed of interconnected geo-located data, using the photographic image as an entrance gate to a multi-layered investigation of change in the railway landscape, or as a nexus around which diverse types of historic documents may revolve and confront each other.
sITA Studies in History and Theory of Architecture, 2016
This article investigates the construction of marginal railway cityscapes in the painting of the ... more This article investigates the construction of marginal railway cityscapes in the painting of the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux (1897-1994). Marginal sources like art and literary history may provide unexpected insights into architectural and urban history. Likewise, a marginal, urban-historical reading of Delvaux’s oeuvre might cross-fertilize art-historical interpretations. It might highlight how his artistic vision critically evaluated urban reality by distilling strong iconographic statements, painterly parti pris, which may, at their turn, influence individual or collective cultural perceptions of architecture and the city. We argue that Delvaux’s work both contributes towards and expresses the emergence of a taste for the industrial and the minor urban heritage, just like the eighteenth-century capricci painters, such as Pannini, Piranesi, Hubert or Guardi famously contributed to the dissemination of a taste for Antiquity.
It is during the late 1950s and the 1960s that Delvaux creates a particular body of railway-inspired work, rendering the railway periphery poetically, as a place of revelation and enchantment. Delvaux’s paintings anticipate, inspire and profoundly resonate with the interest of the post-war literary avant-gardes in the poetry of banality. The contrast between the major railway works going on in central Brussels and Delvaux’s contemporary painting is read as an intentional reaction to the dialectics between (urban) history and historicity. By sublimating the railway landscape of the periphery into dream-like, poetic images, Delvaux foretells, and subtly resonates with, the emergence in the 1960s - 1970s of the post-war urban conservation movement, wherein Belgium and Brussels played a key role.
The relationship railway space – domestic space is both an old and a topical issue at the same ti... more The relationship railway space – domestic space is both an old and a topical issue at the same time, one that cannot be thoroughly understood in the absence of complex research. The focus of this paper is on art's power of expressing and criticizing urban realities, assuming the premise that it is possible to understand art history as a mirror of urban history and to read certain works of art as expressions of collective perceptions of urban reality. Evoking and interpreting images by (early) modern artists as Gustave Doré, Claude Monet, Eduard Manet, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and others, we study the ways in which aspects of domesticity are-if at all-embedded representations of the railway space. Thereby, implicit positive and negative assessments about the sustainability of housing in the proximity of railway space, as recorded by nineteenth and early twentieth century artists, are highlighted and nuanced. Railway mobility evolves from an age when space was conquered under the sign of the extraordinary, through an age of eclipse and oblivion under the sign of the common or the everyday and towards a recent phase when the place of mobility in space is critically reassessed. Although this paper only addresses the first phase, it shows that art history does not merely register this evolution in a linear way. Rather, a diversity of relations between railway space and domestic space are identified, including aggressive intrusion, mutual exclusion, ambiguous complementarity, overt confrontation but also peaceful coexistence. Rezumat Relația cale ferată – spațiu domestic e o problemă deopotrivă veche și actuală, o temă care nu poate fi pe deplin înțeleasă în absența unor cercetări complexe. Această lucrare pune accentul pe puterea artei de a exprima și de a critica realitățile urbane, asumând premisa că istoria artei poate fi înțeleasă ca o oglindă a istoriei urbane și că unele opere pot fi interpretate ca expresii ale unor percepții colective despre realitatea urbană. Evocând și analizând imagini ale artei moderne (timpurii) de Gustave Doré, Claude Monet, Eduard Manet, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner și alții, sunt studiate modurile în care aspecte ale domesticului sunt – sau nu – încorporate în reprezentări ale căii ferate. Astfel, sunt evidențiate și nuanțate evaluări implicite, pozitive sau negative, privind sustenabilitatea locuirii în proximitatea spațiului feroviar, așa cum au fost înregistrate de artiști în secolul al XIX-lea și la începutul secolului XX. Mobilitatea feroviară a evoluat dinspre o vârstă când spațiul era cucerit sub semnul extraordinarului, trecând printr-o vârstă a eclipsei și uitării sub semnul obișnuitului și al cotidianului, spre o fază recentă în care locul mobilității în spațiu e reconfigurat critic. Deși prezenta lucrare tratează doar prima fază, se arată că istoria artei nu reprezintă această evoluție în mod liniar, ci mai degrabă printr-o diversitate de relații între spațiul feroviar și cel domestic, incluzând intruziunea agresivă, excluderea reciprocă, complementaritatea ambiguă, confruntarea deschisă dar și coexistența pașnică. Keywords: railways and domesticity; railway space in art; art history as mirror of urban history;
When architecture and the city become its research objects, art may be in the position of uniquel... more When architecture and the city become its research objects, art may be in the position of uniquely articulating a relevant, convincing and enduring critique of urban realities. This paper addresses contemporary public-art works that focus on contested urban sites, sites specifically marked by discontinuity. The case studies are projects of Artangel, British art organization active over the last two decades in commissioning and producing remarkable, often controversy-generating, site-specific art. The studied works are Rachel Whiteread's House (1993), Catherine Yass's High Wire (2008), Mike Kelley's Mobile Homestead (2013)-all addressing the issue of urban dwelling. A close reading of these projects, merging art-historical and urban-(planning)-history notions is proposed. It is argued that these art projects have the power of pertinently questioning unresolved tensions inscribed within their urban sites, tensions between memory and amnesia, between 'organic' growth and tabula rasa, between utopian projects and concrete achievements, between private and public spaces… If angels may be conceived of as masters of the interval, agents of the in-between-indeed of continuity, this paper argues-inspired by the organization's name-that the studied art works posses precisely such angelic virtues. They have the power of operating-often only ephemerally – in the very gaps between physical or conceptual dichotomous pairs, generating new possibilities for urban continuity. Rezumat Când arhitectura și orașul devin obiecte ale cercetării artistice, arta e capabilă să articuleze o critică relevantă, convingătoare și durabilă a realităților urbane. Acest articol abordează lucrări ale artei contemporane instalate în situri urbane problematice, în locuri marcate de discontinuitate. Studiile de caz sunt proiecte susținute și finanțate de organizația britanică Artangel, activă de-a lungul ultimelor două decenii în producția unor lucrări remarcabile, uneori controversate, de artă situată. Lucrările studiate sunt House-Rachel Whiteread (1993), High Wire-Catherine Yass (2008) și Mobile Homestead-Mike Kelley (2013), cele trei având în comun problematizarea conceptului de locuire urbană. Se propune analiza celor trei proiecte, îmbinând noțiunile de istoria artei cu cele de istorie urbană (și urbanistică). Se susține că lucrările interoghează în mod pertinent conflicte prezente în situri urbane, conflicte între memorie și uitare, între creștere organică și tabula rasa, între utopie și realizări concrete, între spații private și publice… Dacă îngerii sunt maeștri ai intervalului, agenți ai intermedierii deci, ai continuității, articolul susține – inspirat de numele organizației-că tocmai aceste 'virtuți angelice' caracterizează și proiectele artistice studiate. Se arată cum acestea operează – deși adesea doar efemer – în chiar intervalele dintre perechi dihotomice fizice sau conceptuale, generând astfel noi posibilități pentru continuitate în spațiul urban.
... CRISTINA PURCAR ∗ Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, ... more ... CRISTINA PURCAR ∗ Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, 726 Observatorului Str., Cluj-Napoca, Romania ... intre Revolutia de la 1848 si Unirea din 1918: contributii demografice (Cluj-Napoca, 2000); T. Rotariu (ed.), Recensamantul din ...
This article investigates the construction of marginal railway cityscapes in the painting of the ... more This article investigates the construction of marginal railway cityscapes in the painting of the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux (1897-1994). Marginal sources like art and literary history may provide unexpected insights into architectural and urban history. Likewise, a marginal, urban-historical reading of Delvaux’s oeuvre might cross-fertilize art-historical interpretations. It might highlight how his artistic vision critically evaluated urban reality by distilling strong iconographic statements, painterly parti pris, which may, at their turn, influence individual or collective cultural perceptions of architecture and the city. We argue that Delvaux’s work both contributes towards and expresses the emergence of a taste for the industrial and the minor urban heritage, just like the eighteenth-century capricci painters, such as Pannini, Piranesi, Hubert or Guardi famously contributed to the dissemination of a taste for Antiquity. It is during the late 1950s and the 1960s that Delvaux creates a particular body of railway-inspired work, rendering the railway periphery poetically, as a place of revelation and enchantment. Delvaux’s paintings anticipate, inspire and profoundly resonate with the interest of the post-war literary avant-gardes in the poetry of banality. The contrast between the major railway works going on in central Brussels and Delvaux’s contemporary painting is read as an intentional reaction to the dialectics between (urban) history and historicity. By sublimating the railway landscape of the periphery into dream-like, poetic images, Delvaux foretells, and subtly resonates with, the emergence in the 1960s - 1970s of the post-war urban conservation movement, wherein Belgium and Brussels played a key role.
Radu Marza ed., Shaping Modernity. The Railway Journey Across Two Centuries, 2022
One of the emblematic spaces of a railway station, the restaurant can
be an index to railway hist... more One of the emblematic spaces of a railway station, the restaurant can be an index to railway history, evoking in nuce the railway journey from the nineteenth to the twenty‑first century. This paper is an investigation into the symbolic value of this peculiar aspect of the railway heritage. The station restaurant evolved from none, modest-, or subsequently‑improvised equipment, in the first‑generation stations, to purposely‑designed, spacious amenities, towards the end of the nineteenth century. These high‑end restaurants, often adjacent to the waiting rooms functioning as cafés, organised by ticket class, flourished in medium‑to‑large cities, largely remained the paradigm during the interbellum too. Looking at a condensed, yet representative selection of pre‑WWI stations, we interpret the restaurant’s integration within the architecture of the station. What does architecture let read about the symbolic function of the restaurant in a railway station? Conversely, what does a semiotics of the station restaurant reveal about architecture’s signifying modalities? Drawing on architectural representations (railway station projects), photography (especially picture postcards), cartography (city plans) and architectural historiography, the study is concerned with the immediate urban context, the planimetric, volumetric and functional articulations of the restaurant within the station. Lieux de prestige – Belle Époque symbols, a taste of- and for modernity is expressed by the diverse facets of these improbable lieux de memoire: from Munich’s core‑position, through St Pancras’ subtle contradiction of the hotel’s shield‑like opacity, Budapest West’s exteriority and material contrasting the train shed’s transparency, Frankfurt’s confronting scale‑contrast, Köln’s insular mise en abyme of the “solid” and the “evanescent,” Cluj’s representation of the typical provincial station’s marginal condition, finally to Paris’ Gare de Lyon’s purposeful architectural sublimation of the station’s Janus condition in the elevated Train bleu dream‑machine. The station restaurant positioned the traveller in a particular architectural situation, prone to inspire both a modern meditation on the human condition, as well as a meditation on modernity as human condition. The best station restaurants stage a metadiscoursive architectural situation in which a site- and sight‑specific representation of the journey is enacted. Sitting in the restaurant’s accommodating, refuge‑like environment, framing the city- about to be left behind or about to be discovered, and the maelstrom of flows along and around the tracks, promising the liberating progress(ion) of the voyage, yet exposing its disquieting estrangement and uncertainty, the railway journey subject both “tasted” modernity and developed one’s taste for it.
Aesthetic experience is irreducible. Words cannot 'explain' painting. Neither words, nor ... more Aesthetic experience is irreducible. Words cannot 'explain' painting. Neither words, nor images can 'render' the experience of a place. But both writing and painting have the power of creating their own virtual places. Between the places of the city, the imag(in)ed places of painting and the written places of literature, historiography or theory, there is both direct communication and subtle, subconscious exchange. In this paper, the painting of Belgian artist Paul Delvaux (1897-1994), assigning prominent roles to architecture and the city, is read through these disciplines' lenses. It is argued that apparently marginal sources like art and literary history can provide fresh insights into architectural and urban history. Likewise, a marginal, architectural and urban-historical reading of Delvaux's oeuvre can cross-fertilize the art-historical interpretations so far triggered by his work. e fact that throughout his carrier, spanning almost three quarters of a ...
While states undertook railway construction targeting economic and military objectives, this arti... more While states undertook railway construction targeting economic and military objectives, this article questions whether and to which extent their symbolic territorial cohesion was also at stake. The hypothesis we aim to verify is that railway buildings acted as recurrent visual signifiers of territorial coherence and had, therefore, the potential of being instrumental as state-building tools. This research explores how an architectural reading of railway networks can inform our understanding of state-building projects and processes. We expect that geographically scoped railway architectural history is capable of cross-fertilizing political and planning history, through a better understanding of empire, state, and regional building discourses. The investigation focuses on the stylistic architectural choices of edifices on two trunk lines in Transylvania, North-West Romania, before World War I, while this territory belonged to the Habsburg then, as of 1867, Austro-Hungarian Empire. The...
ABSTRACT:This article addresses the morphological and functional implications of the railway as a... more ABSTRACT:This article addresses the morphological and functional implications of the railway as an urban boundary, by studying seven towns in Romania, connected by the First Transylvanian Railway (1868–70). The research highlights similarities and differences as to the initial railway insertion, the subsequent growth patterns and the differentiation appearing between areas adjoining the railway tracks. The article argues that although a ‘wrong side of the track’ did not emerge everywhere, the segregation and lack of urban amenities affecting the areas which could be thus labelled is rooted in the failure to render the railway barrier permeable and to generate complementarity rather than subordination between the two sides of the track.
The relationship railway space – domestic space is both an old and a topical issue at the same ti... more The relationship railway space – domestic space is both an old and a topical issue at the same time, one that cannot be thoroughly understood in the absence of complex research. The focus of this paper is on art’s power of expressing and criticizing urban realities, assuming the premise that it is possible to understand art history as a mirror of urban history and to read certain works of art as expressions of collective perceptions of urban reality. Evoking and interpreting images by (early) modern artists as Gustave Doré, Claude Monet, Eduard Manet, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and others, we study the ways in which aspects of domesticity are if at all embedded representations of the railway space. Thereby, implicit positive and negative assessments about the sustainability of housing in the proximity of railway space, as recorded by nineteenth and early twentieth century artists, are highlighted and nuanced. Railway mobility evolves from an age when space was conquered under the sign of...
While states undertook railway construction targeting economic and military objectives, this arti... more While states undertook railway construction targeting economic and military objectives, this article questions whether and to which extent their symbolic territorial cohesion was also at stake. The hypothesis we aim to verify is that railway buildings acted as recurrent visual signifiers of territorial coherence and had, therefore, the potential of being instrumental as state-building tools. This research explores how an architectural reading of railway networks can inform our understanding of state-building projects and processes. We expect that geographically scoped railway architectural history is capable of cross-fertilizing political and planning history, through a better understanding of empire, state, and regional building discourses. The investigation focuses on the stylistic architectural choices of edifices on two trunk lines in Transylvania, North-West Romania, before World War I, while this territory belonged to the Habsburg then, as of 1867, Austro-Hungarian Empire. The large-scale analysis of railway architecture is discussed in relation to railway-line ownership, political (central, regional, and local) agency, economic development, and architectural Zeitgeist, highlighting state-building and territorial integration patterns. The mapping carried out reveals two successive architectural layers. These denote a shift in the role of railway architecture from an initial liberal phase, before the 1880s, to a bloom phase, prior to World War I. While during the former there was little state control over architectural aspects, during the latter architecture became a foremost representation instrument for the state railway administration. At the same time, the extant railway architecture appears as a palimpsest, a genuinely cross-border, European heritage, documenting the dynamics between imperial, state, regional, and local agencies.
As Dacia 1100 – the first car produced in Romania – was released
in 1968, a fine collection of ne... more As Dacia 1100 – the first car produced in Romania – was released in 1968, a fine collection of new medium-to-large railway stations were just being inaugurated too, including the one in Baia Mare. The two historic events are tightly connected. While the car can be read as the epitome of a much larger phenomenon, i.e. Romania’s intensive industrialisation under the communist regime, the new stations were both consequences thereof and means to support industrialisation, which in turn triggered the accelerated urbanisation of industrial centres and also stimulated commuting. The article studies the passenger building of Baia Mare Railway Station, a remarkable industrial artefact, now severely decaying. We first provide an overview of the railway network development around Baia Mare, followed by a brief review of the station’s urban planning stakes. Through Bauforschung we survey the original architecture of the building, as well as its subsequent alterations; through virtual restoration we (re)present perspectives of an ideal state of the station, as awareness-raising and value (re)cognition gestures.
During the interwar period, the North-Western Romanian territory, unified with the
Old Kingdom at... more During the interwar period, the North-Western Romanian territory, unified with the Old Kingdom at the end of World War I, remained a battlefield: besides the political and administrative appropriation of the united regions, a symbolic “taking into possession”1 was very much at stake too. Thereby, public buildings played a prominent role as national-cohesion signifiers. In architecture, nationalism and modernity, while apparently complementary cultural goals, brought forth stylistic dilemmas and debates. Furthermore, the Hungarian annexation of Northern Transylvania between 1940 and 1944 occasioned competing territorial-appropriation discourses, made visible through architectural signifiers as well. While the Paris Peace Treaties returned Northern Transylvania to Romania, public architecture produced immediately before and during World War II reflected re-appropriation discourses through hybrid stylistic choices, idiosyncratically mediating between vernacular sources, Classicism and Modernism. Meanwhile, railways held an exceptionally privileged status among the public institutions of the interwar period. In Romania, as well as in the states of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, railway systems became powerful centralized institutions after 1900, through the nationalization of the initial, privately owned and operated lines. The states’ “second armies,” symbols of progressive agency during the interwar decades, state railway companies, whether in Romania or in Hungary, ran architectural design services and represented foremost mission providers for industrial, public, and residential architecture. Investigating the 1930s - 1940s architecture of Transylvanian rail lines, the paper outlines symbolic appropriation battle lines, addressing a few key questions. How did railway architects deal with the national-versusmodern stylistic dilemmas of the interbellum? Were there clear-cut differences between the architectural options of the Romanian and the Hungarian railway production of the period? Conversely, beyond these differences, was there a similar Zeitgeist at work? How did railway architects stylistically respond to the increased political radicalization around World War II?
Mapping Landscapes in Transformation Multidisciplinary Methods for Historical Analysis, 2019
‘An idea, not a thing,’ landscape is the cultural perception of the physical environment, ‘create... more ‘An idea, not a thing,’ landscape is the cultural perception of the physical environment, ‘created by our minds and emotions’ (Clark et al. 2003: 3). The environment as physical place and the landscape as culturally determined perception and representation of the physical place, therefore, form a complex unity. Among the different representations of the environment (or landscape-construction means), cartography and statistics are allegedly more objective, while photography, painting, and literature provide rather subjective readings. Through mapping, contemporary geo-positioned data-management tools allow for a multi-layered relatedness between these two components of landscape. Through mapping, this paper investigates the triple relationship between photography, railway, and landscape. Hereby, mapping is understood as the associative operation that topologically connects sets of iconographic data to cartographical sets, more specifically in this study, historic railway photography to contemporary and historic cartography.
Railways and photography appeared at the same time, around 1830. Both are mechanical technologies and industrial media: a medium for transportation and a medium for the creation of images respectively. Both railways and photography ushered in a modern understanding of space and time, a new awareness of, and relationship with, landscape. Railways reshaped places, indeed entire territories, while landscape photography created a visual discourse about these transformations, often apologetic, sometimes evasive, and sometimes critical.
How should one read, analyse, and interpret this peculiar object, railway, and the landscapes it formed and transformed? In this study we argue that historic photography, investigated as a coherent body of images, corpus photographicum, rather than as individual images, can prove an effective means to this end. Focusing on railway cases from Transylvania, Romania, we propose a mapping system wherein mapping is understood more as in mathematical linguistics — as associative operation between different data sets — rather than as in cartography proper, as the creation of graphic representations of parts of the Earth’s surface. A system is proposed of interconnected geo-located data, using the photographic image as an entrance gate to a multi-layered investigation of change in the railway landscape, or as a nexus around which diverse types of historic documents may revolve and confront each other.
sITA Studies in History and Theory of Architecture, 2016
This article investigates the construction of marginal railway cityscapes in the painting of the ... more This article investigates the construction of marginal railway cityscapes in the painting of the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux (1897-1994). Marginal sources like art and literary history may provide unexpected insights into architectural and urban history. Likewise, a marginal, urban-historical reading of Delvaux’s oeuvre might cross-fertilize art-historical interpretations. It might highlight how his artistic vision critically evaluated urban reality by distilling strong iconographic statements, painterly parti pris, which may, at their turn, influence individual or collective cultural perceptions of architecture and the city. We argue that Delvaux’s work both contributes towards and expresses the emergence of a taste for the industrial and the minor urban heritage, just like the eighteenth-century capricci painters, such as Pannini, Piranesi, Hubert or Guardi famously contributed to the dissemination of a taste for Antiquity.
It is during the late 1950s and the 1960s that Delvaux creates a particular body of railway-inspired work, rendering the railway periphery poetically, as a place of revelation and enchantment. Delvaux’s paintings anticipate, inspire and profoundly resonate with the interest of the post-war literary avant-gardes in the poetry of banality. The contrast between the major railway works going on in central Brussels and Delvaux’s contemporary painting is read as an intentional reaction to the dialectics between (urban) history and historicity. By sublimating the railway landscape of the periphery into dream-like, poetic images, Delvaux foretells, and subtly resonates with, the emergence in the 1960s - 1970s of the post-war urban conservation movement, wherein Belgium and Brussels played a key role.
The relationship railway space – domestic space is both an old and a topical issue at the same ti... more The relationship railway space – domestic space is both an old and a topical issue at the same time, one that cannot be thoroughly understood in the absence of complex research. The focus of this paper is on art's power of expressing and criticizing urban realities, assuming the premise that it is possible to understand art history as a mirror of urban history and to read certain works of art as expressions of collective perceptions of urban reality. Evoking and interpreting images by (early) modern artists as Gustave Doré, Claude Monet, Eduard Manet, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and others, we study the ways in which aspects of domesticity are-if at all-embedded representations of the railway space. Thereby, implicit positive and negative assessments about the sustainability of housing in the proximity of railway space, as recorded by nineteenth and early twentieth century artists, are highlighted and nuanced. Railway mobility evolves from an age when space was conquered under the sign of the extraordinary, through an age of eclipse and oblivion under the sign of the common or the everyday and towards a recent phase when the place of mobility in space is critically reassessed. Although this paper only addresses the first phase, it shows that art history does not merely register this evolution in a linear way. Rather, a diversity of relations between railway space and domestic space are identified, including aggressive intrusion, mutual exclusion, ambiguous complementarity, overt confrontation but also peaceful coexistence. Rezumat Relația cale ferată – spațiu domestic e o problemă deopotrivă veche și actuală, o temă care nu poate fi pe deplin înțeleasă în absența unor cercetări complexe. Această lucrare pune accentul pe puterea artei de a exprima și de a critica realitățile urbane, asumând premisa că istoria artei poate fi înțeleasă ca o oglindă a istoriei urbane și că unele opere pot fi interpretate ca expresii ale unor percepții colective despre realitatea urbană. Evocând și analizând imagini ale artei moderne (timpurii) de Gustave Doré, Claude Monet, Eduard Manet, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner și alții, sunt studiate modurile în care aspecte ale domesticului sunt – sau nu – încorporate în reprezentări ale căii ferate. Astfel, sunt evidențiate și nuanțate evaluări implicite, pozitive sau negative, privind sustenabilitatea locuirii în proximitatea spațiului feroviar, așa cum au fost înregistrate de artiști în secolul al XIX-lea și la începutul secolului XX. Mobilitatea feroviară a evoluat dinspre o vârstă când spațiul era cucerit sub semnul extraordinarului, trecând printr-o vârstă a eclipsei și uitării sub semnul obișnuitului și al cotidianului, spre o fază recentă în care locul mobilității în spațiu e reconfigurat critic. Deși prezenta lucrare tratează doar prima fază, se arată că istoria artei nu reprezintă această evoluție în mod liniar, ci mai degrabă printr-o diversitate de relații între spațiul feroviar și cel domestic, incluzând intruziunea agresivă, excluderea reciprocă, complementaritatea ambiguă, confruntarea deschisă dar și coexistența pașnică. Keywords: railways and domesticity; railway space in art; art history as mirror of urban history;
When architecture and the city become its research objects, art may be in the position of uniquel... more When architecture and the city become its research objects, art may be in the position of uniquely articulating a relevant, convincing and enduring critique of urban realities. This paper addresses contemporary public-art works that focus on contested urban sites, sites specifically marked by discontinuity. The case studies are projects of Artangel, British art organization active over the last two decades in commissioning and producing remarkable, often controversy-generating, site-specific art. The studied works are Rachel Whiteread's House (1993), Catherine Yass's High Wire (2008), Mike Kelley's Mobile Homestead (2013)-all addressing the issue of urban dwelling. A close reading of these projects, merging art-historical and urban-(planning)-history notions is proposed. It is argued that these art projects have the power of pertinently questioning unresolved tensions inscribed within their urban sites, tensions between memory and amnesia, between 'organic' growth and tabula rasa, between utopian projects and concrete achievements, between private and public spaces… If angels may be conceived of as masters of the interval, agents of the in-between-indeed of continuity, this paper argues-inspired by the organization's name-that the studied art works posses precisely such angelic virtues. They have the power of operating-often only ephemerally – in the very gaps between physical or conceptual dichotomous pairs, generating new possibilities for urban continuity. Rezumat Când arhitectura și orașul devin obiecte ale cercetării artistice, arta e capabilă să articuleze o critică relevantă, convingătoare și durabilă a realităților urbane. Acest articol abordează lucrări ale artei contemporane instalate în situri urbane problematice, în locuri marcate de discontinuitate. Studiile de caz sunt proiecte susținute și finanțate de organizația britanică Artangel, activă de-a lungul ultimelor două decenii în producția unor lucrări remarcabile, uneori controversate, de artă situată. Lucrările studiate sunt House-Rachel Whiteread (1993), High Wire-Catherine Yass (2008) și Mobile Homestead-Mike Kelley (2013), cele trei având în comun problematizarea conceptului de locuire urbană. Se propune analiza celor trei proiecte, îmbinând noțiunile de istoria artei cu cele de istorie urbană (și urbanistică). Se susține că lucrările interoghează în mod pertinent conflicte prezente în situri urbane, conflicte între memorie și uitare, între creștere organică și tabula rasa, între utopie și realizări concrete, între spații private și publice… Dacă îngerii sunt maeștri ai intervalului, agenți ai intermedierii deci, ai continuității, articolul susține – inspirat de numele organizației-că tocmai aceste 'virtuți angelice' caracterizează și proiectele artistice studiate. Se arată cum acestea operează – deși adesea doar efemer – în chiar intervalele dintre perechi dihotomice fizice sau conceptuale, generând astfel noi posibilități pentru continuitate în spațiul urban.
... CRISTINA PURCAR ∗ Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, ... more ... CRISTINA PURCAR ∗ Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, 726 Observatorului Str., Cluj-Napoca, Romania ... intre Revolutia de la 1848 si Unirea din 1918: contributii demografice (Cluj-Napoca, 2000); T. Rotariu (ed.), Recensamantul din ...
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Papers by Cristina Purcar
be an index to railway history, evoking in nuce the railway journey
from the nineteenth to the twenty‑first century. This paper is an
investigation into the symbolic value of this peculiar aspect of the
railway heritage. The station restaurant evolved from none, modest-,
or subsequently‑improvised equipment, in the first‑generation
stations, to purposely‑designed, spacious amenities, towards the
end of the nineteenth century. These high‑end restaurants, often
adjacent to the waiting rooms functioning as cafés, organised by
ticket class, flourished in medium‑to‑large cities, largely remained
the paradigm during the interbellum too. Looking at a condensed,
yet representative selection of pre‑WWI stations, we interpret
the restaurant’s integration within the architecture of the station.
What does architecture let read about the symbolic function of the
restaurant in a railway station? Conversely, what does a semiotics
of the station restaurant reveal about architecture’s signifying
modalities?
Drawing on architectural representations (railway station projects),
photography (especially picture postcards), cartography (city plans)
and architectural historiography, the study is concerned with the
immediate urban context, the planimetric, volumetric and functional
articulations of the restaurant within the station. Lieux de prestige –
Belle Époque symbols, a taste of- and for modernity is expressed by the
diverse facets of these improbable lieux de memoire: from Munich’s
core‑position, through St Pancras’ subtle contradiction of the
hotel’s shield‑like opacity, Budapest West’s exteriority and material contrasting the train shed’s transparency, Frankfurt’s confronting scale‑contrast, Köln’s insular mise en abyme of the “solid” and the “evanescent,” Cluj’s representation of the typical provincial station’s marginal condition, finally to Paris’ Gare de Lyon’s purposeful architectural sublimation of the station’s Janus condition in the elevated Train bleu dream‑machine. The station restaurant positioned the traveller in a particular architectural situation, prone to inspire both a modern meditation on the human condition, as well as a meditation on modernity as human condition. The best station restaurants stage a metadiscoursive architectural situation in which a site- and sight‑specific representation of the journey is enacted. Sitting in the restaurant’s accommodating,
refuge‑like environment, framing the city- about to be left behind or about to be discovered, and the maelstrom of flows along and around the tracks, promising the liberating progress(ion) of the voyage, yet exposing its disquieting estrangement and uncertainty, the railway journey subject both “tasted” modernity and developed one’s taste for it.
in 1968, a fine collection of new medium-to-large railway stations
were just being inaugurated too, including the one in Baia Mare. The two
historic events are tightly connected. While the car can be read as the epitome of a much larger phenomenon, i.e. Romania’s intensive industrialisation under the communist regime, the new stations were both consequences thereof and means to support industrialisation, which in turn triggered the accelerated urbanisation of industrial centres and also stimulated commuting. The article studies the passenger building of Baia Mare Railway Station, a remarkable industrial artefact, now severely decaying. We first provide an overview of the railway network development around Baia Mare, followed by a brief review of the station’s urban planning stakes. Through Bauforschung we survey the original architecture of the building, as well as its subsequent alterations; through virtual restoration we (re)present perspectives of an ideal state of the station, as awareness-raising and value (re)cognition gestures.
Old Kingdom at the end of World War I, remained a battlefield: besides the political and
administrative appropriation of the united regions, a symbolic “taking into possession”1 was very much at stake too. Thereby, public buildings played a prominent role as national-cohesion signifiers. In architecture, nationalism and modernity, while apparently complementary cultural goals, brought forth stylistic dilemmas and debates. Furthermore, the Hungarian annexation of Northern Transylvania between 1940 and 1944 occasioned competing territorial-appropriation
discourses, made visible through architectural signifiers as well. While the Paris Peace Treaties returned Northern Transylvania to Romania, public architecture produced immediately before and during World War II reflected re-appropriation discourses through hybrid stylistic choices, idiosyncratically mediating between vernacular sources, Classicism and Modernism. Meanwhile, railways held an exceptionally privileged status among the public institutions of the interwar period. In Romania, as well as in the states of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, railway systems became powerful centralized institutions after 1900, through the nationalization of the initial, privately owned and operated lines. The states’ “second armies,” symbols of progressive agency during the interwar decades, state railway companies, whether
in Romania or in Hungary, ran architectural design services and represented foremost mission providers for industrial, public, and residential architecture. Investigating the 1930s - 1940s architecture of Transylvanian rail lines, the paper outlines symbolic appropriation battle lines, addressing a few key questions. How did railway architects deal with the national-versusmodern stylistic dilemmas of the interbellum? Were there clear-cut differences between the architectural options of the Romanian and the Hungarian railway production of the period? Conversely, beyond these differences, was there a similar Zeitgeist at work? How did railway architects stylistically respond to the increased political radicalization around World War II?
Railways and photography appeared at the same time, around 1830. Both are mechanical technologies and industrial media: a medium for transportation and a medium for the creation of images respectively. Both railways and photography ushered in a modern understanding of space and time, a new awareness of, and relationship with, landscape. Railways reshaped places, indeed entire territories, while landscape photography created a visual discourse about these transformations, often apologetic, sometimes evasive, and sometimes critical.
How should one read, analyse, and interpret this peculiar object, railway, and the landscapes it formed and transformed? In this study we argue that historic photography, investigated as a coherent body of images, corpus photographicum, rather than as individual images, can prove an effective means to this end. Focusing on railway cases from Transylvania, Romania, we propose a mapping system wherein mapping is understood more as in mathematical linguistics — as associative operation between different data sets — rather than as in cartography proper, as the creation of graphic representations of parts of the Earth’s surface. A system is proposed of interconnected geo-located data, using the photographic image as an entrance gate to a multi-layered investigation of change in the railway landscape, or as a nexus around which diverse types of historic documents may revolve and confront each other.
It is during the late 1950s and the 1960s that Delvaux creates a particular body of railway-inspired work, rendering the railway periphery poetically, as a place of revelation and enchantment. Delvaux’s paintings anticipate, inspire and profoundly resonate with the interest of the post-war literary avant-gardes in the poetry of banality. The contrast between the major railway works going on in central Brussels and Delvaux’s contemporary painting is read as an intentional reaction to the dialectics between (urban) history and historicity. By sublimating the railway landscape of the periphery into dream-like, poetic images, Delvaux foretells, and subtly resonates with, the emergence in the 1960s - 1970s of the post-war urban conservation movement, wherein Belgium and Brussels played a key role.
be an index to railway history, evoking in nuce the railway journey
from the nineteenth to the twenty‑first century. This paper is an
investigation into the symbolic value of this peculiar aspect of the
railway heritage. The station restaurant evolved from none, modest-,
or subsequently‑improvised equipment, in the first‑generation
stations, to purposely‑designed, spacious amenities, towards the
end of the nineteenth century. These high‑end restaurants, often
adjacent to the waiting rooms functioning as cafés, organised by
ticket class, flourished in medium‑to‑large cities, largely remained
the paradigm during the interbellum too. Looking at a condensed,
yet representative selection of pre‑WWI stations, we interpret
the restaurant’s integration within the architecture of the station.
What does architecture let read about the symbolic function of the
restaurant in a railway station? Conversely, what does a semiotics
of the station restaurant reveal about architecture’s signifying
modalities?
Drawing on architectural representations (railway station projects),
photography (especially picture postcards), cartography (city plans)
and architectural historiography, the study is concerned with the
immediate urban context, the planimetric, volumetric and functional
articulations of the restaurant within the station. Lieux de prestige –
Belle Époque symbols, a taste of- and for modernity is expressed by the
diverse facets of these improbable lieux de memoire: from Munich’s
core‑position, through St Pancras’ subtle contradiction of the
hotel’s shield‑like opacity, Budapest West’s exteriority and material contrasting the train shed’s transparency, Frankfurt’s confronting scale‑contrast, Köln’s insular mise en abyme of the “solid” and the “evanescent,” Cluj’s representation of the typical provincial station’s marginal condition, finally to Paris’ Gare de Lyon’s purposeful architectural sublimation of the station’s Janus condition in the elevated Train bleu dream‑machine. The station restaurant positioned the traveller in a particular architectural situation, prone to inspire both a modern meditation on the human condition, as well as a meditation on modernity as human condition. The best station restaurants stage a metadiscoursive architectural situation in which a site- and sight‑specific representation of the journey is enacted. Sitting in the restaurant’s accommodating,
refuge‑like environment, framing the city- about to be left behind or about to be discovered, and the maelstrom of flows along and around the tracks, promising the liberating progress(ion) of the voyage, yet exposing its disquieting estrangement and uncertainty, the railway journey subject both “tasted” modernity and developed one’s taste for it.
in 1968, a fine collection of new medium-to-large railway stations
were just being inaugurated too, including the one in Baia Mare. The two
historic events are tightly connected. While the car can be read as the epitome of a much larger phenomenon, i.e. Romania’s intensive industrialisation under the communist regime, the new stations were both consequences thereof and means to support industrialisation, which in turn triggered the accelerated urbanisation of industrial centres and also stimulated commuting. The article studies the passenger building of Baia Mare Railway Station, a remarkable industrial artefact, now severely decaying. We first provide an overview of the railway network development around Baia Mare, followed by a brief review of the station’s urban planning stakes. Through Bauforschung we survey the original architecture of the building, as well as its subsequent alterations; through virtual restoration we (re)present perspectives of an ideal state of the station, as awareness-raising and value (re)cognition gestures.
Old Kingdom at the end of World War I, remained a battlefield: besides the political and
administrative appropriation of the united regions, a symbolic “taking into possession”1 was very much at stake too. Thereby, public buildings played a prominent role as national-cohesion signifiers. In architecture, nationalism and modernity, while apparently complementary cultural goals, brought forth stylistic dilemmas and debates. Furthermore, the Hungarian annexation of Northern Transylvania between 1940 and 1944 occasioned competing territorial-appropriation
discourses, made visible through architectural signifiers as well. While the Paris Peace Treaties returned Northern Transylvania to Romania, public architecture produced immediately before and during World War II reflected re-appropriation discourses through hybrid stylistic choices, idiosyncratically mediating between vernacular sources, Classicism and Modernism. Meanwhile, railways held an exceptionally privileged status among the public institutions of the interwar period. In Romania, as well as in the states of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, railway systems became powerful centralized institutions after 1900, through the nationalization of the initial, privately owned and operated lines. The states’ “second armies,” symbols of progressive agency during the interwar decades, state railway companies, whether
in Romania or in Hungary, ran architectural design services and represented foremost mission providers for industrial, public, and residential architecture. Investigating the 1930s - 1940s architecture of Transylvanian rail lines, the paper outlines symbolic appropriation battle lines, addressing a few key questions. How did railway architects deal with the national-versusmodern stylistic dilemmas of the interbellum? Were there clear-cut differences between the architectural options of the Romanian and the Hungarian railway production of the period? Conversely, beyond these differences, was there a similar Zeitgeist at work? How did railway architects stylistically respond to the increased political radicalization around World War II?
Railways and photography appeared at the same time, around 1830. Both are mechanical technologies and industrial media: a medium for transportation and a medium for the creation of images respectively. Both railways and photography ushered in a modern understanding of space and time, a new awareness of, and relationship with, landscape. Railways reshaped places, indeed entire territories, while landscape photography created a visual discourse about these transformations, often apologetic, sometimes evasive, and sometimes critical.
How should one read, analyse, and interpret this peculiar object, railway, and the landscapes it formed and transformed? In this study we argue that historic photography, investigated as a coherent body of images, corpus photographicum, rather than as individual images, can prove an effective means to this end. Focusing on railway cases from Transylvania, Romania, we propose a mapping system wherein mapping is understood more as in mathematical linguistics — as associative operation between different data sets — rather than as in cartography proper, as the creation of graphic representations of parts of the Earth’s surface. A system is proposed of interconnected geo-located data, using the photographic image as an entrance gate to a multi-layered investigation of change in the railway landscape, or as a nexus around which diverse types of historic documents may revolve and confront each other.
It is during the late 1950s and the 1960s that Delvaux creates a particular body of railway-inspired work, rendering the railway periphery poetically, as a place of revelation and enchantment. Delvaux’s paintings anticipate, inspire and profoundly resonate with the interest of the post-war literary avant-gardes in the poetry of banality. The contrast between the major railway works going on in central Brussels and Delvaux’s contemporary painting is read as an intentional reaction to the dialectics between (urban) history and historicity. By sublimating the railway landscape of the periphery into dream-like, poetic images, Delvaux foretells, and subtly resonates with, the emergence in the 1960s - 1970s of the post-war urban conservation movement, wherein Belgium and Brussels played a key role.