“Forms Without Substance” (Formele Fără Fond)
There exists a persistent risk in design: when architecture and urban projects adopt forms that lack grounding — visually compelling, but hollow at their core. This dynamic was named in 19th-century Romanian literature by Titu Maiorescu: formele fără fond, the adoption of forms without substance. Originally a critique of institutions and cultural imports, today it warns architects and urbanists against design divorced from context, identity, and meaning.
Disconnected Form Erodes Identity
Form is not neutral. When architectural gestures are decoupled from the place’s memory, social fabric, and geography, they overwrite identity rather than express it. What appears as presence may in truth be erasure.
Places Can Be Silenced
Places are identity-bearing fragments of urban space. Without substance, these places risk vanishing – not by demolition, but by dilution. Formele fără fond describes this invisible erasure: physical structures remain, but their cultural voice is muted.
Style Is No Stand-in for Authenticity
Visual language – façades, references, motifs – cannot replace genuine substance. Identity is not aesthetic; it is built through time, use, adaptation, friction. If design treats style as its foundation, substance becomes its casualty.
Design Must Emerge from Questions
To resist formele fără fond, architecture must begin with inquiry – not as a phase, but as its foundation. Questions like Why here? Who lives this? What patterns already shape this place? are not preliminary – they are the design itself. When these questions are asked with sincerity and depth, the form is not invented, but revealed. Design does not need to be imposed from outside; it becomes the natural resolution of what the place already knows.
Substance grows slowly, but architecture today is built in a hurry
Substance is not efficient. It cannot be fast-tracked or rendered for approval. It grows slowly – through observation, contradiction, and continuity. Yet in a culture of deadlines and spectacle, time is treated as an obstacle, not a resource. We believe that the only architecture worth building is that which earns its place – by listening longer, digging deeper, and committing to what endures after the project cycle ends. Substance is not a layer we add to form. It is what must precede it.
Architecture Must Recover Its Critical Ground
To move forward, architecture must recover its capacity to question, to listen, and to resist simplification. Formele fără fond is not just a historical critique – it is a warning that remains urgent today. Our task is not to imitate identity, but to cultivate it. Not to invent meaning, but to uncover it. When we build, we should not merely construct – we should participate in a place’s unfolding story. This requires humility, patience, and the courage to let form follow understanding.
This manifesto is not set in stone. It reflects the team’s current viewpoint and, just as it has evolved over the past few years, it may continue to change with new research and insights. We remain open to challenging our own ideas and continuously reexamining what we stand for.