When Leisure Ends in Loss

The article aims to analyze how the large-scale buildings designed to host entertainment activities during the 1960s and 1970s in socialist Romania transitioned from iconic experimental architecture to an obsolete problematic heritage. During those years, leisure activities became part of the propaganda while state-funded infrastructure was built around them. Organized leisure time is directed towards shaping the ‘new man’. The paper focuses on two different architectural programs that fit into the leisure section: restaurants and commercial centers within holiday resorts and multi-purpose sports halls in cities. The objects in question are defined by different types of post-war modern architecture, varying from mid-century modern up to brutalism. During the socialist period, both case studies were directly managed by the state, from financial aspects to functional ones. After the fall of the communist regime, their status changed, and they endured the transition from a closed socialist economy to a capitalist one. While the sports halls remained under public administration, the restaurants and commercial centers in the holiday resorts were privatized. Alongside a series of unfortunate events that occurred during the 1990s, the general public developed a negative perception of this kind of architecture due to its connection with the former regime. While both case studies are relevant to the entertainment of the general public before 1989, after the fall of the socialist regime, there is a difference in their management and subsequent use, resulting in their presentation in parallel in this paper. The research is centered on how the changes after 1989 led to the fragile state of this heritage today and aims to propose contemporary approaches to properly address them. The buildings suffered both reversible and irreversible transformations, lack funding, and are improperly exploited. Since the late modern socialist heritage is often disregarded in Romania, this paper aims to establish possible guidelines for preserving and adapting these buildings for the present and the future.