Dana Vais
Arch. PhD. Professor, Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca.
Dana Vais teaches at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca (TUCN). She is the coordinator of the doctoral programs in architecture in TUCN’s Doctoral School. She earned both her architecture degree (1989) and her PhD (2000) at the University of Architecture and Urbanism ‘Ion Mincu’ in Bucharest. Her habilitation thesis (2013) addressed the subject of “Spatial Margins”. Her visiting appointments include the DAAP College at the University of Cincinnati OH (Fulbright fellow, 2007) and École d’Architecture Paris Belleville (1992). She has been a fellow of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem (2019-2020), as a member of the research group “Re-theorizing Housing as Architecture”, and a visiting researcher at the DAStU / Politecnico di Milano (2022). She is a member of the Housing Group at the EAHN (European Architectural History Network). Her recent publications focus on the architectural discourse during the socialist period, socialist housing history, and 1960s imageries of the future.
In Quest for TRUTH : Research in Architecture
The topic of TRUTH has been chosen for the first issue of COTAA for a reason: if a new architectural research journal wants to come to life today, it should start with the awareness of its contemporary relevance and with a statement about its core values.
A mere observation of how much challenged the notion of truth is today prompts a question: how come that after so much scientific advance and extraordinary technological progress, truth has become an endangered species in the public sphere? This might have to do with the age of “social media”, in which we entered twenty years ago. In 2004, Facebook was launched and what has emerged was not only a passionate diffusion of narcissism and triviality, but also an era of dubious “truths” and distrust. Distinction between facts and opinions was blurred. What was heard in the echo chamber of one’s Facebook group became the universal truth. Science-based theories became experts’ “conspiracy”. The problem now is not that we do not have access to genuine information, but that it is much more difficult to cut through so much noise. Knowledge became diffuse. The decline of truth began with the democratization of its production.
What this diffuseness meant for the quality of public knowledge was famously described by Umberto Eco, just one decade after the advent of social media: the “drama” of the “diffuse Internet”, he said, was “to have promoted the idiot of the village to [the status of] bearer of truth”. Eco has always been candid with his own fascination for occult “sciences”, because, he said, he has been “always captivated by human stupidity”. But he has been also intrigued by the extraordinary human capacity to build new realities that are based on myths and by the fact that a false theory can actually engender real phenomena – “falseness is what I am passionate about”, he confessed.
Ever since truth became diffuse, it has been disputed, seized and manipulated by specific interests aiming to make their own truth prevail. The most relevant thing about truth, which has been exposed through this recent democratization, is that it is a social construct: it is made (and made up too). It is an instrument of power, meant to change reality.
In this context, it is now crucial for the traditional producer of knowledge – academic disciplines, which profess the principle of disinterested research and seek true knowledge for the sake of knowledge – to become aware about their own relevance. This is important precisely because during these last two decades, they seem to have lost their position of authority over truth production. And this is also the background against which, during the last two decades, architectural research has been confronted with a major challenge and renewal.