From Architectural Allegory of Power and Privilege to Dissonant Legacy: The 1960s Guest Houses and Residences of the Central Committee of the PCR Then and Now

As in most socialist republics, the residences and guesthouses of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party (CC of PCR) were created by the party’s internal administrations as unique architectural objects within the political representation circuit, benefiting from notable production during the years of modernist reconnection. Today, they embody a distinct chapter of the regime’s architecture, challenging both the study of recent architectural history and their preservation, along with their place in the collective memory.The current contribution proposes a reevaluation of the CC of PCR’s built legacy within the broader debate on dissonant heritage, considering the allegorical dimension arising from their past ‘exogenous’ nature. Questioning the factor of exogeneity, a radiography of the CC’s residences and guesthouses’ historical substance reveals a spectrum of nuances. On one hand, this can be interpreted through dichotomous values establishing a causal relationship between their architectural quality and the political context: as luxury objects, they diverge from ideological foundations and functionalist architecture, yet, as objects of representation, they stem from the core of political activity. Although designed at the margins of urban planning projects and outside state standards, they aligned somewhat with national architectural discourse during the relative liberalization of the 1960s.

On the other hand, the perspective of exogeneity provides a premise for expanding the discussion beyond the dissonant implications of socialist facture. The dissonance issue may be legible in the post-Revolution management of communist elites’ heritage, varying between the Region and the Capital, whether through maintaining them in the protocol circuit, museification, or interventions enabled by their privatisation. However, their inherent secrecy, combined with architectural novelty and historical identity, supports a more allegorical understanding of this heritage, even within local communities.

Thus, these two attitudes will constitute the focus of the present study, which, by addressing the elusive aspects of socialist-era architecture, aims to add a new dimension to the research framework for reconciling with recent heritage.