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Book cover for An Anthropology of Architectural Transformation open access

Publication date: 27 March 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800087972

Number of illustrations: 108

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

An Anthropology of Architectural Transformation

The changing fabric of a Romanian block of flats

Maria Șalaru (Author)

An Anthropology of Architectural Transformation is an ethnographic investigation of everyday life in a Romanian apartment block, from its construction in 1974 to the present day. It provides a unique window into how inhabitants, through everyday creative engagements with their apartments, come to terms with the uncertainties of a rapidly changing society, caught in between the vulnerabilities of both socialism and capitalism. The book attends to the micro, day-to-day transformations of individual apartments and the way in which they cumulatively affect ‘larger’ urban changes in Piatra-Neamț, transforming both the urban fabric and the local sense of what defines a good life. This book also provides social scientists with a novel way of thinking about the fundamental relationship between people and buildings, while inviting architects to consider how buildings are transformed in time by their inhabitants. With minute ethnographic detail, Maria Șalaru demonstrates how social order is created and maintained through the materiality of the building.

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