Romanian pop blares from our yellow Dacia taxi as we make our way towards the Palace. Approaching from the fountain-lined Unirii Boulevard , the twelve-storey wedding-cake construction is so huge that it actually looks like it’s receding into the distance as we draw closer. I point this out to our driver, who mumbles a noncommittal reply. It’s telling that most of Bucharest ’s residents manage to ignore what is in fact the second largest building in the world, after the Pentagon (though this might have changed a bit after 9/11).
The House of the People; the House of the Republic; the Madman’s Palace. It’s hard to explain the story behind this gargantuan construction without resorting to the usual stories that are trotted out for tourists – stories which, with each telling, seem to wear the place down to a more presentable size: how Ceausescu kept altering the design whilst work was in progress; how teams of architects worked around the clock to finish it (they never did); how it’s supposedly larger underground than above ground. It’s as though storytelling can help make sense of the absurdity of it all.
First, then, the facts: constructed in the capital Bucharest by the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu during the 1980s, building the Palace of the People sapped twice the country’s GDP each year. It has enough rooms to house the country’s entire population and contains its own nuclear reactor in the basement. You think I’m joking? I am. The truth, however, is hardly any less surprising.
One quarter of old Bucharest was destroyed in order to make way for the Palace, including twelve churches and over seven thousands homes. Turning on all the lights consumes the same amount of energy in four hours as the whole of Bucharest does in a day , and its underground car-park could accommodate Buckingham Place . As for the basement, I once asked an official Palace guide what’s down there. Bunkers? Secret police headquarters? I was given a no less intriguing answer – ‘We don’t know.’
As the sun sets behind a horizon cluttered by communist tower blocks, up on the fourth floor balcony of the Palace, Munich label boss DJ Mooner is deep in discussion with Bucharest ’s very own DJ Mike. It’s a conversation you’ll hear repeated time and time again. While Mooner is bubbling over with enthusiasm for the burgeoning scene in Romania, having played three gigs in as many days, DJ Mike is equally at pains to explain the opposite: how Romanians are paralysed by the ‘communist mentality’, unable to do anything because they’re waiting for things to be done for them. Whether Mike’s argument is true or not, hardly matters – the fact that it is so widespread speaks volumes about the way Romanians think about themselves.
The backdrop for this discussion couldn’t be more appropriate. Tonight, DJ Mooner is performing in the National Museum of Contemporary Art, a spectacular four-storey construction that took over one wing of Ceausescu’s Palace in October last year. Below him, two shiny new glass lifts shoot up and down the outside of the Museum, taking the queue of young people that has formed outside up into what was originally intended to be part of Ceausescu’s personal living quarters.
The palace is the ultimate symbol of the barbarity of the old regime. A population being kept alive on pigs’ trotters and hens’ feet were at the same time funding a vast maze of gold, crystal and marble that houses the world’s heaviest chandelier. It’s for exactly these reasons that locating Romania ’s new National Museum of Contemporary Art here has been such a controversial project. Mixing the lofty aspirations of the artworld with the tyranny of the past seemed like a step too far for many people. Indeed, in a country where hospitals can find themselves without medicines due to budget shortfalls, any kind of publicly funded art needs to fight hard to survive.
It’s almost as though the sense of national inferiority that DJ Mike is giving voice to has infused the museum project. Out on the main boulevard, signposting for the museum simply doesn’t exist. Even after you’ve managed to negate the obstructive, gun-toting guards at the entrance to the Palace, the visitor only has a cryptic, hand-sprayed sign to guide them to a location that has to be one of the most exciting exhibition spaces in Europe . It feels more like getting into an illegal rave than visiting an art gallery.
Teething problems aside, the location of the new museum in such a powerful symbol of the past is part of a much wider process, a slow reanalysis of the accepted ways in which Romanians understand themselves and their history. Writers like Ion Manolescu have started revising the 1980s, the most brutal decade of Europe ’s most brutal dictatorship, scraping away the turf of tragedy and exposing the more ambiguous reality that lies behind it. For many like Manolescu, this was a period when young men wore white socks under their party uniforms and played games of pretending to be Michael Jackson; a time when young writers and artists were still able to come together and take a kind of pleasure in the often surreal games of cat-and-mouse played with the authorities. The location of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in such a widely derided building seems to be part of the same process – fashioning a kind of poetry out of the tragedy that took place.
As Mooner and DJ Mike make their way past the crowds that have formed at the palace gates, twelve storeys sparkle against the blackness of the Bucharest sky. It’s clear that the museum has become a huge catalyst for the local art scene. In a city where most attractive venues are quickly colonised by the nouveau-riche, it’s become a real focus for a wide variety of events to happen around. And right now, as our Dacia taxi speeds us home, the Palace could quite well be described as beautiful.