About experiments and urban archaeologies. Bucharest

This contribution aims to raise some questions about signs and symbols whose presence, appearance or disappearance, delimits landmarks and emotional experiments in urban area, or simply refers to the archaeology dictionary of city happenings.

Signs and symbols, statues and buildings – monuments – are an important part of cultural and emotional space, their appearance and disappearance mark our present, our passing by and spatial temporality, structuring the memories about the city. Many of them arise discussions, controversy, questions and debates. If those monuments treat the victory, power, commemoration, oriental crying of loss or a Balkan state, those are hypostasis they are emotionally and urban experiment that they propose to the city.

The perception of urban space rewards them with the due care of the experiment: transform them in accepted elements, or reject them, hiding them under forced names accordingly to their presence. Decomposing of the image is made on successive on layers, of points and textures (as unclear images) to lines, urban sequences and then, objects.

The visual acuity of the viewer depends on habit, the pleasure of contemplation and the ease of forming conscious link-image-thinking algorithms. The experimentation of an urban space is connected to landmarks, signs, background objects or closed human-scale objects identifying.

In an urban space like Bucharest , the landmarks are connected with the understanding of the atmospheres meanings, with the physically or emotionally browse of the place.

The marking of the space with evocative symbols is a particular type of urban experiment; The construction of the symbol, the moving or the replacement of it require a consume, an involvement and an assumption. (What happens when the symbol can not be moved, replaced, dislocated?)

Keywords: urban space, city, experiments, signs, landmarks,  archaeology, Bucharest .