One of the essential elements that characterise the culture of dwelling is undoubtedly the way it defines the limits between the fundamental categories of the physical space: interior and exterior, public and private, community territory and global space. The elements designed to close the space (walls, roofs, fences, etc.) constitute the first and most obvious category of limits. The number, the width and the degree of transparency of the empty places located within these 'linelike' boundaries determine an infinity of variants, from the swathe that symbolically determined a territory to the exterior walls, pierced by only a few openings, that protect the interior of the traditional Arabian house. The second category, that presupposes the hypostasis of "place" (and not only of linear boundary) of the limit, includes several types of intermediary spaces, namely, zones which articulate the contraries enumerated so far. At issue here are not only semi- private or semi-public spaces but also the designed spaces or elements that ensure a transition between "the inside" and "the outside": porticoes, verandas, terraces, pergolas, loggias and balconies, niches and bow windows, spaces defined by covers, gutters and other ornaments.
All these types of limits represent universal elements of architecture; they have been known to take various shapes throughout history. The only thing that differs is the degree of closing and opening, the variety of the various kinds of inter-penetration and transition between different spatial realms and the modes of hiding, revealing or suggesting the private space. The predominance of some fundamental modes of definition of the limits mostly defines, beyond the technologies of construction, architectural styles and fashions, the specific way of inhabiting a place in a certain period of development of a culture. I begin my thesis with the hypothesis that the richness of intermediary filters and zones between the interior of the houses and the urban space - and "the transparency" of the urban tissue thus determined -, represented a characteristic element of Bucharest's urban culture. I shall try to show to what extent the alteration or the disappearance of those relations in the past 50 years expresses the isolation tendencies, as well as the feelings of indifference to and rejection of the town. To define this ensemble of elements characteristic to the urban culture under question, we might use the term "opening". But this does not exactly cover all the aspects related to the controlled ambiguity and complexity, to the inter-penetration and transition between spaces. In this sense, we should probably use the term "transparency". Not so much in the literal sense of the word (although this quality of the closings essentially contributes to the overall image), but rather in the sense of virtual transparency: a particular quality of the way the forms are organised that permits the simultaneous perception of different spatial layers. This distinction, and the virtual transparency as criterion for spatial analysis, is attributed to Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky (1992) ; and starts from an analogy with real transparent objects, that are perceived as such, and at the same time allow us to perceive the objects situated behind them. It's just that, in this sense, we would talk of a "reciprocal" transparency, of a capacity of some figures to intersect without annulling themselves from a visual point of view. "The fluctuation" of the elements perceived as simultaneously belonging to systems of different arrangements, gives to a work of art (or, in our case, to an urban image) an ambivalent sense, a structural ambiguity that still presupposes control and the possibility of multiple yet coherent readings. The pertinence of the concept of virtual transparency, based on ambiguity and overlapping could obviously appear as confusing. Usually, transparency is also used for characterising whatever is clear, understandable, not dissimulated. But, it is precisely this connotation of integrity of objects that risks creating confusion as to the characteristics of an architectural or urban space. The term "opening" is usually used to describe a certain ensemble of qualities specific to Bucharest's urban space before the transformations from the past 50 years. But, for example, both the traditional and modern architecture of the Dutch houses, with their interior spaces perfectly visible from the exterior, is characterised as transparent. It is however a transparency created by a linear limit between two spatial realms - the interior and the exterior of the building that remain perfectly delimited. The modernist town planning, too is generically called "open town planning". The buildings conceived of as isolated objects are located independently of the network of circulation, in a total space, of a public nature. Only the access and distribution halls and the individual balconies mediate between this almost homogenous space and the interior spaces of the flats. In order to describe an opening that actually manifests itself through various intermediary spaces, through complex articulations between the private and the public space, the term of virtual transparency, as defined before, seems to have a certain relevance, due to the spatial fluidity and ambiguity that it suggests.
Bucharest. Articulations between personal space and community space Among the elements that define the image of the antebellic Bucharest, as it appears in most descriptions and comments, and as it was kept in the predominant current discourse on the city, we should mention "the town of extreme contrasts" - confusing mixture of scales and styles, then the "green" and "open" city, closely related to an "agglomeration of villages". We must admit that the mixture of highly populated zones with others of rural type (actually, peculiar to freely developed towns, in the absence of some fortifications that determine a high density of the constructions and a homogeneous occupation of the territory), characterised the city before the fundamental transformations of the modern period and left its mark on its development. But, the disconcerting eclecticism, which is not devoid of a certain charm of its own, displayed by practically most streets from the town centre is due not so much to the individualism and the indiscipline of the dwellers (although we have plenty of such examples), as to the overlapping on the same territory, for more than a century, of the traditional town and of the constructions built according to the rules of successive building regulations . All those rules had as purpose the gradual replacement of the old urban space with a modern unitary and harmonious town, through the control of the individual enterprise. Due especially to the lack of resources and of the accelerated evolution of construction theories and methods, none of the "visions" concerning Bucharest has been entirely put into practice. And all these have been adapted, entering a process of inevitable negotiation with an existent lot structure and of the ways of construction, as well as with the mechanisms of the private property. As to the "town submerged in verdure", it needs to be said that the public gardens of the town do not extend over a larger area than in most European capitals. The image is especially due to the greenery in the private yards that can usually be seen from the street. The gaps in the structure of the built front, the parts receding from the frontline, the open yards, define a variety of spaces that need to be traversed in order to enter the blocks, thus permitting the existence of some zones that mediate the relation between the construction and the public space. There is indeed a certain type of design of the building lot, that evolved starting from a rural origin (the isolated house in the middle of the yard). But the perpetuation of this model should be further looked into, because the persistency of some traditional elements is associated with the configuration of an urban model with particular characteristics. Thus, although the constructions are usually located without receding areas from the alignment of the lot fronting the street, they do not cover the whole breath of the lot, but rather they extend lengthways as narrow oblong stripes. The access into the building is only possible by traversing the space of the yard. This space organisation lends the impression of depth and "porosity" to the image of the street fronts and they remained characteristic of the whole central area. The yard fronting the street delimited by transparent fences, and that serves, as intermediary space on one's way in remains an omnipresent element of almost all constructions. The wagon-house, so specific to the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, (when their high density, as well as the deep and long lots could have determined a terraced type of building), could represent a phase of this transition. This aspect appears also with the villa and the apartment building from the inter-war period, where an original vernacular model is out of the question. In the case of the implantation of some modern houses in an old tissue, the maintained "porosity" can be explained by the preserved traditional design of the building lot and the compulsory areas receding from the alignment as compared to the neighbouring constructions. But these spaces do not disappear even in the case of the great boulevards of the '30s that represent the most heroic attempt of the inter-war period of imposing on Bucharest a sense of modern metropolis. The interior yards are usually reduced to the role of light and ventilation shafts, and the buildings front the public space through real "courts of honour" or at least through important areas receding from the general alignment, marking the identity of each particular house against an otherwise rather rigorously defined front. This type of design of the building lot has certain common characteristics with the model of the garden-city, which lead to its success, in various ways, from the villa districts to the ensembles of cheap houses (the detached house model has been put into practice in the West, only in the peripheral areas, and has always been considered as being less "urban"). But this is diametrically opposed to living around an interior yard, that characterises the Arabian and the Antique Mediterranean town. The climatic factor seems to be the decisive factor of this comparison. On the other hand, one of the most representative elements of the Western town is the urban block, delimited by streets and defined by a row of buildings that make a continuous front. We find this logic of the exterior, of the constructions that form the limit, and of some private or semi-private interior spaces both in the Medieval town and in numberless Modern models (except of the Modernist town planning, characterised by isolated buildings, floating in a continuous space). The possible enclosed spaces between the street and the buildings ("the front yard") have almost always a representational aspect very different from the much more intimate atmosphere of the spaces hidden in the very core of the block ("the back yard or garden"). It is precisely this interior, the "heart" of the block that does not exist or that significantly opens to the exterior, in the case of Bucharest's urban tissue. For the buildings that actually do not have important open glass surfaces (and that do not 'show' very much of what is going on inside), these private spaces that opened to the public space serve as filters and as thresholds to and from the town, they seem to protect and, at the same time, to valorize the acces into the house. In Bucharest, the intermediary areas belonging to the lots are continued with, or in the case of a highly populated zone that imposed a closed regime along with the elimination of the yards, compensated by intermediary spaces that constitute an important part of the buildings. We have previously mentioned them: partial receding areas - mostly covered, recesses, 'marquises' and covers, verandas, loggias, balconies and bow-windows, etc. This category of elements is always present, in various forms, and also includes functional or purely decorative construction elements (advanced gutters, windowsills and other ornaments) suggesting spatial layers, that leave one with the impression of a certain depth of the 'skin' of the house. All these elements (out of which, none is 'typically Romanian', as such,), whose overlapping enriches the limit between personal and community space, spread over most of the urban space and enjoy a continuity in time, beyond styles and construction epochs; they represent much more than means of 'enlivening a construction'. We cannot speak of a mixture of territories, whose delimitation is, in fact, very topical, even if symbolic. The building's 'crevasses' and 'outgrowths' rather indicate a particular way of reciprocal "contamination" of the private and the public space (a characteristic of any urban community). All the layers that ensure the passage toward a protected interior have a personalising, especially representational, exposing role that attenuates itself function of how far one can see into the house from the outside. To a certain extent, they belong to the public space. In its turn, this acquires 'a certain private' character, through mechanisms of appropriation and tacit identification. It is especially true for certain types of space that articulate basic urban units - namely, the ensembles formed of buildings and the building lots they occupy - with the global scale of the town. The dilations and the alveoli so specific to Bucharest's urban space make up a first layer of manifestation of some particular social relations; but the main urban space that mediates this passage between individual space and the town's global order is the street.   The Socialist Town. Homogeneity, individualisation, isolation.
The unprecedented scale of transformations of the urban world is not in the least the apanage of the socialist model, as it was put into practice in the Eastern European countries. But, some characteristics of these regimes are the absolute authority of the state over the urban operations (thus leading to the complete disappearance of the equilibrium between the private and the public interests), the elimination of the individual initiative in various areas including the construction field and the social project of uniformisation tightly linked to the utopia of a scientific planning that is both global and perfect. The socialist block of flats (in fact, as different as possible from the antebellic 'apartment building' and the 'condominium') represents the fundamental unity of architecture and town planning of that period, being adapted and transformed according to new models. Two of them are typical of the entire communist region: the pompous Stalinist model of the "building units" inspired by the classical town planning, and the big districts outside the traditional town - like Drumul Taberei in Bucharest built according to reinterpreted modern formulas. The design of the latter is due both to the development of industrialisation and standardisation of the construction elements and to the context of relative 'liberalisation' and opening toward the Western models. What is typical of Romania, and, seems not be found anywhere else in the urban policies of the Central European countries is the massive intervention on the town centres, starting with the 70s. The already traditional image of bigger villages, "incoherent" and with an improperly built fond was what firstly triggered the destruction of the old urban tissues and the building of new districts on the places that remained empty. It is noteworthy that, in general, the historical town centres from Transilvania survived, squeezed between blocks of flats and industries while the radical restructuring concentrated upon extra-Carpathian towns. As to Bucharest's centre, the interventions of the first phase consisted of the modernisation of some of the main arteries, and their "panelling" with fronts of blocks. Then followed the well-known operations of the 80s, with their endless line of demolitions and raise of the magnificent and personal "Forbidden City". I shall not resume here the discussion on the character of systematic delirium of Ceausescu's project and its effects. But I think that we should insist more on the evolution of the relation between the city-dwellers and the urban space and on the mechanisms of resistance to the great project of homogeneity- and discipline-infliction. One of the most important characteristics of socialist urban dwelling is the withdrawal in the private space of the house, irrespective of the context as such. The public space of the totalitarian state is a space of control, rule-imposition and, as much as possible, of the repression of individual manifestations and of any type of free relations. Most forms of resistance of the society developed in the relatively protected space of the house. They appeared here and there, within the private space of people's houses: in any case, a space of family and friends, a space of intimacy, of trust and relative freedom, hosting at the same time activities that tried to compensate an increasingly reduced urban offer. During the forty-five years of the socialist regime, Bucharest's houses divided into two essential categories: "new" blocks of flat (the few villas of the nomenclature do not spread over a large area) and houses or "old" blocks of flats. Given the conditions of an absolute state monopoly in the construction and design fields, the possibility of choice, when it existed, was reduced to these two variants. Irrespective of the architectural or urban model, the ensembles of blocks have a few essential characteristics: a limited number of types of identical units - the apartments - grouped into a limited number of types of buildings  (or "sections"), then the semi-private spaces of the hallway, of the staircase and of the outbuildings, and finally a space with no clearly defined status (the empty spaces around the blocks, the playground, or a place with no specific destination). Given the conditions of a draconian standardisation and of a single true client - the state, the "transparent" zones are reduced, in principle, to areas receding from the alignment (when these manage to define a space and do not extend only over uncertain portions, without a clear legal status), to the possible marking of the building entrances by covers and to the presence of the balconies and loggias. Real clients being, in fact, absent, in the true sense of the word, all these elements are due rather to architects' efforts to humanise a rigid general structure of an implacable uniformity. The interior yards of the 70s, hesitating between the model of open town planning and the classical semi-public yards do not manage to define a particularised space. The only exceptions are the Stalinist "building units", that continue, to a different scale and in a much more rigid way, the previous logic of the clearly delimited yards, still communicating with the street space. Paradoxically, the dullest space of the town (i.e. the districts and the boulevards of blocks of flats) underwent the most striking changes due to the spontaneous actions of the dwellers - be these individual or collective ones. The project of shaping "the New Man", in its architectural embodiement, most probably triggered an implicit reaction of self-defence, by means of individualisation and appropriation of the imposed dwelling structure. On the other hand, living in a block of flats offered the kind of safety one could not enjoy in an "old house" (that we shall discuss below). Anyway, such an apartment could not be nationalised, overcrowded with imposed persons, and - an essential quality in the last years of the regime - the demolition was out of the question. The different transformations of the interior and exterior spaces throughout this period, produced despite of an almost always-felt control, which however, never really functioned perfectly, are now extremely hard to decipher. To these were added the evolutions after 1989; all the utilisation and appropriation types mentioned below extended over the last ten years, with incomparable intensity, to which other categories of changes, whose simple existence would have previously been inconceivable are added. The main transformed spaces are the privileged apartment spaces; they underwent some changes that have nothing exceptional but that attempted, giving the communist context, not only to increase comfort but also to concentrate almost all the possibilities of expression of a certain individual identity and of a certain social status. The visible signs, as discreet as possible, of this differentiation were usually limited to the various arrangements of the balconies, from the symbolic gardens to the space won by closing the balconies (in fact, an illegal operation). The halls and the staircases kept their neutral character, of passage space, and suffered numberless types of degradation, or, on the contrary, were turned into spaces of representation and social contacts. The various arrangements (flowerpots, photos, paintings, and sometimes, new plastering) bear the imprint of collective actions by the next-door neighbours or represent extensions and markings of the private spaces of some of the apartments. Still, the most significant changes concerning the relation between dwellers and the urban space are the outdoors changes, theoretically falling under the jurisdiction of public administration. The first category of types of spaces distinguished from the initial homogeneous exterior space consists of the zones closely neighbouring the blocks of flats that were transformed in real planted and delimited "front yards".  Often green pergolas and benches marked these entrances in the house. This is what made the individualisation of some initially identical units possible, as well as the appropriation of some spaces by a certain social group. The nature of a space that is directly linked to dwelling, with communication and representation functions, is completely absent from the spaces transformed individually or by consensual "building lot design" into agricultural terrain, destined to vegetables-growing. I think it is impossible to determine to what extent we are dealing not only with one of the subsistence mechanisms frequent at the time, but also with the persistence of some rural reflexes of an important section of Bucharest's population, clearly unadjusted to an urban society. The rest of the exterior space (the residual zones behind the blocks, or simply the portions that were supposed to have no owner) was either used for parking or for other individual activities or remained unused, degrading in a progressive and implacable manner. As to the buildings before the regime - the "old" houses and blocks, the interventions were minimal, and, usually consisted of insignificant repairs or of placing temporary utility constructions. The permanent instability and uncertainty, due to the nationalisation, the coercion to lodge tenants, the permanent coming and going of dwellers, and during the past years, the perspective of almost certain demolition obviously could not lead to conspicuous transformations. Maybe only in the sense of an accelerated degradation, especially in the case of some districts (the case of Lipscani street, for instance) whose original community was gradually or rather abruptly replaced by a population with major adaptation problems to an urban lifestyle. A particular case concerning the evolution of the utilisation of the urban space is the nomenclature's districts - ex-districts of villas of a more or less high standing, transformed in closed privileged zones; but here, too, the lack of private property and the permanent uncertainty as to the stability of one's dwelling place paralysed all individual actions of transformation of the buildings and afferent areas. In the socialist period, the two types of dwelling (the "old" and the "new" one analysed above) obviously do not cover the variety of situations and the different conditionings. Between the injunction of a dwelling structure and of a continous control in all the fields of social life, on the one hand, and the private interests, the attempts of resistance and of finding some nooks of survival, on the other, the mechanisms of appropriation and individualisation cover a very large area. The transformations of the dwellers' relations to the public space are extremely inconspicuous within the physical space. The image of the town is overwhelmingly indebted to the succession of state-geared projects and operations. They barely allowed the changes in the social and mentalities' structure to become visible. For instance, nothing of the shape of the city or of the buildings as they were realised expresses the evolution of the population's structure. An important section of the population recently emigrated from the rural space, due to the closely and rapidly orchestrated policies of industrialisation and urbanisation, never had the temporal, physical or social prerequisites that might pave their way into an urban acculturation. The way in which such a population adapted to a certain milieu and tried to transform it, the extent to which they identified with the town or rejected it (irrespective of the actual way they lived in it) is very different from that of some groups originating in an urban space or in Bucharest proper. Given the predetermined dwelling frame, the initiatives of individuals or of certain communities built in a relative autonomous way with regard to the regime, were reduced to the fairly improbable choice of the house, and to minimal adjustments of the latter or of the places that were or could be appropriated. Finally, what seems to be characteristic of all those transformations, is their hidden character, the semi-clandestine space individualisation and grabbing. We already note an opposition between state-geared public space, in principle, only used by the population, and the private or appropriated territories, as intimate and as isolated as possible, in which individuals or social groups could assume a certain identity.   The Transition Town. An Archipelago of Individual Territories
The fall of the regime equated to the disappearance of absolute control and to the explosion of urban life, with an intensity proportional to the paralysis characteristic of the previous period. The number of the constructions drastically decreased as compared to the socialist epoch and the state came to play practically no role in the request and execution of those buildings. If the number of new constructions with permanent character is still a reduced one, space transformation and grabbing tried to compensate for everything that had not been possible before. Considering the great ensembles of blocks of flats, the types of previously mentioned space adjustments continued, maybe with a slight regression of planning and maintenance of collective 'gardens'. In exchange, the transformations brought to private spaces and the overlapping on 'everybody's' space of some territories with precise functions (the temporary commerce in kiosks and on stands, garage rows, etc.) knew a sweeping development. The urban reflexes frozen for the past 50 years started to surface again, even if in a disconcerting manner. Practically determined only by the rules of profitability and lacking any type of planning, the location of temporary commercial units re-actualises the type of animated traditional commercial street, with a continuous front (made up of kiosks and stands in this case, it's true), unfolding an orgy of signs and colours, permanently developing and adapting. In fact, similar to the block of the socialist period, the metallic kiosk - the expression of belated rebirth of a Romanian capitalism -came to be one of the most representative symbols of the transition period. As a matter of fact, it is the commerce and the services that most prominently contribute to the changing of image of the urban space. The privatisation of already-existent commercial spaces, the construction of new ones and of the complexes of office buildings is complemented by the introduction of these very functions in the already-existent space. The rigid uniformity and coherence of the broad arteries of blocks (including Ceausescu's city) are constantly perverted by the new individual intrusions, from the invasion of the signs and of the neon signs to the exterior expression of new destinations through "steel and glass" masks placed over the already existent facades. The old part of the town, freed from the perspective of planned demolition and from the stagnation of any free evolution, is faced with bigger and bigger pressures such as extended, slightly modified or completely new (if often profiteering) designs and buildings. One can conjecture that it is only the economic crisis, the reduced financial possibilities and the still uncertain status of the majority of building and lot-ownership that, to a certain extent, still keeps in check the radical transformations of these areas. The background of it all is the total incoherence and inefficiency of the laws concerning the construction and protection fields. In fact, the common characteristic of most of the operations during the past ten years seems to be the more or less blatant transgression of some laws primarily regarded as interdictions, and not as rules based on social consensus. In this sense, the cultural area circumscribing the city of Bucharest has traditionally witnessed such instances of transgression. On the other hand, the evolution from a totalitarian regime to a society with normal rules, explains to a large extent the explosion of individual initiatives, the present impossibility of controlling urban growth and the lack of a global project. Beyond the compliance with or transgression of some rules come "from above", we can still ask ourselves if we do not witness fundamental changes with reference to the dwellers' relation to the town. In opposition to the above mentioned "transparency" of the antebellic town, the private or implicitly appropriated territories seem to articulate less and less both with one another and with the urban space. "Everybody's space", a common space, consistently envisaged by the communist regime, turns into "nobody's space", from which private zones are extracted. The phenomenon can be easily noticed in the case of the ensembles of blocks. The territories for display, clearly indicating habitation areas, are carefully delimited. The lot portions between them become residual spaces, used for numberless garages raised in the past few years, for kiosks along the streets, or for garbage depositing. In fact, all over the town, the blocks of flats - both the ones from the inter-war period, and the inhabitable barracks of the past regime -, have a tendency of transforming themselves into heterogeneous ensembles of individual houses. Each unit attempts to obtain and express full autonomy. The fragmentary renovations, the omnipresent signs and an infinity of individual changes are superposed on the previous architectural fond. If the irrepressible explosion of the individualizations seems to humanize the monotonous "thoroughfares" of the 70s or the grand triumphal axis of the Civic Centre, that, thus, loose their oppressive integrity, the display of similar types of transformations in the antebellic districts, is rather saddening. The old houses, most of them of a conspicuous architectural quality, undergo changes that alter their identity, sometimes till the complete disappearance of the original character. In all this mixture of individual territories, it is exactly the birth of a space of urban society that is delayed. We can no longer talk of any reciprocal "contamination" of the private and public space.  The latter (if it can be called like that, beyond a legal and administrative sense) is indeed used, "consumed", but does not seem to have the prerequisites so as to be able to constitute a support of identity. It no longer represents the space of absolute authority of the totalitarian regime that one had to avoid as much as possible. But its present image is one of a space that needs to be traversed in order to reach various destinations, but a hostile dangerous space, or, at best, unpleasant or indifferent. Such an image of the urban space invites and determines a lack of responsibility of the dwellers towards this one. Such an example would be the piles of garbage that, in fact, stir general reprobation. The explosion of consume and the incapacity of the municipality (partly also because of the objective lack of logistic and financial means) to maintain the public space clean, are not the only ones responsible for this deplorable state. On the face of it, it looks as if the garbage is homogeneously distributed all over the town. It is not like that at all; garbage piles could often be found side by side with gardens, yards, entrances to commercial spaces, or any other type of clearly delimited, distinctly designed and impeccably clean territories. The will of appropriation stops at the limit of each private space. In this context of withdrawal and isolation, the above mentioned filters are progressively reduced and transformed into true barriers. The impoverishment and even the elimination of intermediary spaces as such determines a loss of the transparency qualities, which seems to characterize the period of the past ten years. The new houses, irrespective of the chosen architectural model, are regularly available only to the ones with relatively high incomes. The main type is the one of a massive construction, with few openings, and with intermediary spaces such as balconies and loggias, reduced as number or completely absent. Irrespective of the way access is permitted into the building, the fence is invariably very high, most of the times made of concrete or bricks and with a minimum of openings (the access to the garage or into the yard) covered by metallic panels. Hardly any of the elements of these fortresses suggests a minimum opening towards the public space; although, most of the times, these are isolated houses, the atmosphere created by the dimensions and the opacity of the closing elements, rather resembles the one of some unprepossessing enclosed areas. The transformations undergone by the older buildings, whose dwellers belong to the entire social specter, go along the same line: the latticework and the low parapets that defined the symbolic closing of the yards are now covered by tin plates, are super-elevated or are replaced by masonry walls. Often, garages and warehouses located at the limit of the building lot contribute to the complete isolation of the building from the street. As for the apartments, the closing of the glass spaces (balconies and loggias), still hesitant in the socialist epoch is nowadays generalized; the unmodified balconies appear as unwonted exceptions. The reasons customarily invoked - both problems with the heating system and the recuperation of a supplementary space (that, however is not usually invested with an "interior" function) - cannot be universally valid, especially in the case of "luxury" apartments. One can rather assume that the greenhouses thus created strengthen the limits between the interior and the exterior universe. Paradoxically, the willful isolation characterizes even a large amount of the constructions and the adjustments with commercial and service functions (stores, offices, and even restaurants). The problem of protection through constructive methods is not a real problem in these cases, whose character would normally trigger the expression of accessibility and opening. But the ideal model seems to be the box as even-surfaced as possible, with its marble cover - if possible, and made out of mirror glass panels, in all likelihood, going down up to the sideways. Thus, one can discern the appearance of privileged spaces, real temples for the elected, where one must earn his way in, coming from an exterior impure world. There is no way of knowing if the divorce from the town, as expressed by the transformations of the past few years, is final. It is probably not the case. Considering the general development of the Romanian society, there is still hope for a "new" identity of Bucharest, shaped in such a way as to include "old" elements, as well. But, transparency, as a characteristic method of defining spatial limits in an urban collectivity, appears to be an almost closed chapter.  
BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES:
BENEVOLO Leonardo, 1983, Histoire de la ville, Marseille, Éditions Parenth?ses. DERER Petre, 1985, Locuirea urbana (The Urban Way of Living), Bucuresti, Editura Tehnica. HARHOIU Dana, 1997, Bucuresti, un oras între orient si occident (Bucharest, a town between East and West), Bucuresti, Editura Simetria si Arcub. LASCU Nicolae, 1997, Legislatie si dezvoltare urbana. Bucuresti 1831 - 1952 (Legislation and Urban Development. Bucharest 1831 - 1952), (teza de doctorat în cadrul Institutului de Arhitectura "Ion Mincu", Bucuresti) (a Ph.D. thesis within the "Ion Mincu" Architecture Institute, Bucharest), Bucuresti. MIHAILESCU V., NICOLAU V., GHEORGHIU M., 1995, Le bloc 311. Résidence et sociabilité dans un immeuble d'appartements sociaux ? Bucarest, în Ethnologie française, 3-1995, Paris, Armand Colin. NICOLAU Irina, POPESCU Ioana, 1999, O strada oarecare din Bucuresti (A Common Street from Bucharest), Bucuresti, Editura Nemira. PANERAI P., CASTEX J., DEPAULR J.-C., 1997, Formes urbaines: de l'îlot ? la barre, Marseille, Éditions Parenth?ses. ROWE C., SLUTZKY R., 1992, Transparence réelle et virtuelle (avec un commentaire de B. Hoesli), Paris, Éditions du Demi-cercle (first edition: "Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal", in Perspecta, The Yale Architectural Journal 8, 1963, New Haven).