DB: I never quite know how to begin. I’m writing to you from a moving bus, traversing the city. Is it just me, or does every passenger seem to carry a fragment of Bucharest within them? In front of me sits a posh lady holding a small dog in her arms. She reminds me of the Duchess from Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends or, perhaps more fittingly, Picasso’s Woman in a Hat and Fur Collar. She smiles when she notices that I’m looking fondly at her dog. I can gradually feel the smell of the damp animal slowly seeping into my clothes. Yet it’s far better than the familiar stench of urine and mould, that mix of sweat, cheap alcohol, stale air, reeking, that tends to cling to my memory. These odours, unpleasant as they are, are the building blocks of Bucharest’s olfactory architecture. They shape the atmosphere of its public spaces as much as walls or pavements do. 

AG: This reminds me of my early morning commutes (from back when I used to live in Lujerului). Every time I would take the 336 bus to work, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was caught in a kind of urban experiment. My perception of the world was suddenly suspended between the apparent order of the new apartment blocks and the chaotic energy of the people moving around me. I was fascinated by the scents I encountered every morning, from the expensive coffee of the corporate workers to the perfumes of the young students getting off at Politehnica or the Faculty of Medicine. Yet, the closer I got to the city centre, the air began to change, heavier, saturated with the inevitable smells of urban life. That daily routine made me realise that the city isn’t only comprised of physical spaces, but also of everybody who moves within it. On the 336, the smells intertwined with my thoughts, and gradually, the bus became a space of memory for me: the scents of each day would awaken me, and through them, I began to perceive the city differently. Not just as a place, but as a living organism, breathing through the bodies of those who inhabit it.

DB: “The aromatic dimension of buildings is one that has been, for the most part, neglected in architectural theory” (Drobnick 2004: 265). This fact lingers with me as the bus moves forward. Each new ride becomes a different sensory composition, a transient architecture built from bodies, smells, and glances. I imagine the stories behind each face. How was their day? Why do they seem sad? Seen from this perspective, the bus becomes a sort of memory palace where every seat opens into a room, and in each room, a private narrative unfolds. I feel the same way when I walk through the city at night and glimpse the lit windows of strangers’ homes, and suddenly catch illuminated fragments of other lives.

AG: I used to witness those fragments every day, back in Lujerului. From the tenth floor, all I could see in front of me were windows, a silent geometry of intimacy. On some evenings, I felt as if I were living inside an Edward Hopper painting. The diffuse light from the apartments, the shifting silhouettes and gestures of the neighbours, together composed an almost cinematic scene, a form of urban intimacy observed from afar. Looking back, I realise I felt a lot like in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). From my small balcony, I would catch fleeting glimpses of the lives around me: a woman watering her plants, a man smoking while staring blankly into space, a window suddenly lighting up, a quiet sign of life. A public-private urban spectacle powered by a kind of visual pleasure constructed through distance and projection (Mulvey 1975).

DB: Visual pleasure or visual shock? No matter how much I try to look away from the distressing scenes around me, they always find a way back into my retina. One evening, while waiting at the Arthur Verona bus stop, I saw a homeless man leaning against the glowing wall of a billboard, his head folded between his knees. In the window’s reflection, another man appeared: briefcase in hand, perhaps returning home from work, his eyes fixed ahead, listening to music. They did not see each other. Their worlds ran parallel, divided by layers of glass and circumstances. We, too, perform this selective blindness, pretending not to see what unsettles us. As Michael Lewis said, “inequality was simply in the order of things” (1993: 3). Perhaps that’s the unspoken architecture of the city itself, like a constellation of small, parallel worlds, each contained within its own reflection, each moving through the same streets without ever truly meeting.

AG: What you describe feels all too familiar. I’ve often thought that Bucharest, with all its fragmented rhythms, is a city built on parallel lines that almost touch, moments of proximity without any actual encounter. From the tenth floor, the windows of the building across from mine became a system of imperfect mirrors. I could see all the other floors, through the reflections in the glass; my gaze would slide down toward a few floors beneath me. On certain evenings, it felt as if spaces folded into one another – light reflected from one apartment to another, multiplying people’s gestures. Neighbours watching neighbours, through a network of windows that no longer clearly belonged to anyone. A series of existences reflected in one another, without direct contact. Perhaps what I was experiencing there was a sensory form of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the chiasm, that subtle intersection between the viewer and the viewed, where the boundaries of perception dissolve. Similarly, Lee Chang-dong captures this tension in Burning (2018): gazes that search for each other but never truly meet. The characters observe one another from a distance, through windows and reflections that ultimately remain opaque. Each tries to enter the other’s world, yet everything dissolves into a state of ambiguity and uncertainty. I think the city works in much the same way.  

DB: Totally agree. In college, I used to live in the centre of Bucharest, as a houseguest of an elderly lady. She would often warn me not to go out too late, or to make sure I came home accompanied. Sometimes I would inevitably stay past this curfew and walk alone through the city. (I miss those quiet confrontations with the city’s fractured realities.) The streets were mostly empty, and the ones who were there didn’t even seem to note my presence. Their focus was on their 5ml syringe, spoon, and lighter. I could feel the disgusted gazes of those from neighbouring apartment blocks. Their contempt stung. This was not simply social inequality, but a dichotomy of realities. As you said, parallel urban existences that never met, yet are constantly in visual contact with one another. 

AG: A network of presences visible only through reflections, never entirely clear. 

DB: Funnily enough, the same dissonance is to be found in Bucharest’s buildings, between the Hristo Botev tram stop and the intersection of Lipscani Street and Calea Moșilor. The city performs a dialogue with itself: abandoned façades, denying their own decay, stand beside sleek, green-glass structures eager to colonise and reflect every remaining void. 

AG: We’re also engaging in a dialogue with one another, with ourselves, and with the city – a dialogue within a dialogue within a dialogue, and so on.

DB: Bucharest – Bakhtin City.