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For centuries, the Roma population has avoided assimilation and settling. Recently, in many parts of Eastern Europe, affluent Roma communities have put down roots, giving birth to an architecture that is at once eccentric, eclectic, and authentic. Having the single-family house as sole typological component, these settlements represent a break with both the nomadic tradition and with the physical context in which they flourish. However, the break reflects neither assimilation nor settling. Instead, this break marks the appearance of a new geography favored by the new post communist geo-political reality: the space of the other.

This study is concerned with the construction of spaces of the other, with particular focus on new Roma communities in Romania. These spaces are built through a trial and error process, driven by the need to articulate the identity of the community. Using Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, the paper argues that this process of construction occurs through manipulation of a broad decorative language that mirrors the larger context from which the other has been banished.

For Roma people, the house lacks an established image; it is a continuous accretion of objects and motifs “attached” to a basic typological structure. Each constructive element is seen as an accessory, and thus easily importable from the larger context. The resulting mix of architectural languages is striking and fascinating, yet idiosyncratic to heterotopic structures. In a time when space has become highly standardized and predictable, the Roma communities offer a fresh and authentic model of constructing space. The fleeing and unstable nature of this model gives birth to an architecture that is paradoxically nomadic despite its fixed geographical coordinates; forming an increasingly large and permanently revised catalogue of acquired forms meant to articulate the space of the other.

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Constructing the Space of the Other. New Roma Settlements

Article
Published in Re/De Constructions in Architecture, LivenArch IV, Karadeniz University, Trabzon, Turkey. 2009

Author: M. Razvan Voroneanu

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© M. Razvan Voroneanu. 2014