Everybody laughed terribly, and I remember I found it amusing myself at the time. I later learned that Vieru had made a point of not leaving Bucharest that summer, so that it couldn’t be said of him that he was trying not to be seen. What cruel moments he must have lived through, he who is so proud, so sensitive to the smallest detail, such a child when it comes to slights and revenge.

It was mostly out of curiosity that I accepted when the professor offered to recommend me to Vieru for a place in his workshop. A second-year student, I didn’t have high hopes of any great personal success with an architectural firm; I lacked even a basic grasp of what was going on with which to orient myself. But the man interested me; he had initiated so many attacks, got involved in so many struggles, and aroused such opposition. Everyone was against him: the press, his peers, the school, officialdom, ministries, all Bucharest, all Romania, the whole world.

‘You’re going to meet the most detested person on the face of the planet,’ said the professor, climbing the stairs ahead of me, to the office.

The most detested person on the face of the planet! Blond, blue-green eyes, a bright, open smile, a modest bearing, with unexpected flashes of pride, nervous hands, a deep, even voice, never raised, though often giving an impression of vehemence, by emphasis, phrasing, pauses … The abominable Mircea Vieru looked something between a schoolboy and an amateur botanist. Only later, getting to know him, did I realize that his forcefulness, of which they make so much, is not imaginary. On the contrary, it is very sharp and penetrating. It is an intellectual force, an objective force in the world of values and ideas, which has nothing to do with his personal goodness and limitless generosity. Vieru is forceful as only the good can be, disinterestedly, passionately, freely. I now understand well that poison vortex in 1923, which he had to rise above at all costs.

When, immediately following the war, Mircea Vieru came up with some rather insolent notions in his works on architecture and town planning, he seemed more amusing than anything. ‘That damned Vieru,’ would think his fellow architects, with a mixture of vague admiration and disbelief.

‘Architecture isn’t a private matter between a man with money and a man with a diploma. Architecture is a matter of communal life. Any liberties can be taken, but the liberty of bad taste may not. A badly conceived house is a disturbance of the peace.’

‘That damned Vieru!’

But when Mircea Vieru went from general ideas and opinions to the nitty-gritty of individual cases, naming names and involving people and projects, things took another turn. Toes were stepped on – and that’s a serious matter.

For some three years, this man did nothing but denounce. A building over a certain size couldn’t be built without him putting it on trial publicly and in writing. In detail, with photographs, figures, names, following the entire process step by step, checking, challenging, attacking. He no longer took any interest in his own projects. What excited him now about architecture were its fashions, errors, clichés and pointless attempts at innovation. He had stopped being an architect and had become a pamphleteer. How many competitions were disrupted by one of his inopportune interventions, how many contract-winners were endangered by him, how many artistic collaborations fell apart as a result of his lack of tact! They still laughed, here and there, at his audacity, at his extraordinary polemical verve, but it was nervous laughter. Because no one knew what was coming next from this blond, edgy, intolerant little man who spent the little money he had printing magazines of art and criticism, which he wrote, corrected and administered alone, exhausted by work but relentlessly passionate.

His pamphlet Academic Bombast and Revolutionary Bombast caused complete bafflement. Everyone had known Vieru as a modernist. Now nobody knew what he was any more. Anything was possible and there was no way to protect yourself. Vieru disposed of your peace, your freedom, your private arrangements. For three straight years he was the artistic police, spreading panic, sowing enmities that would bide their time, awaiting their moment. The moment wasn’t long in coming. Vieru’s first misstep gave the signal. And it truly was imprudent of him to accept at that moment a project in the Engineers’ Park.