163 Indigenous Aliens. Mediators of Architectural Modernity Professor Alifanti’s Notebooks Ana Maria Zahariade and Radu Ponta Professor, PhD | Lecturer, PhD, “Ion Mincu” University of Architecture and Urbanism, Bucharest zahariade.mail@gmail.com | radu.ponta@yahoo.co.uk Keywords: notebooks; design theory; drawing; architecture under Communism We have the unique opportunity of looking into several unpublished, hard to classify documents: forty notebooks witnessing the existence of Professor Mircea Alifanti (1914-1999), one of the most remarkable architects and, paradoxically, one of the most inconspicuous professionals of the communist era. We knew about them. Tey were almost a legend... 1 We are grateful to the Florian family, the professor’s heirs, for making them available to us with such gracious generosity. Professor Alifanti’s notebooks 2 are not exactly a diary, the stereotypical routine of daily notes is missing, although they accompanied him throughout his entire life. Neither are they memoirs, since there are no explicit commentaries of external events (though many of those can be easily inferred - and testify to a drama that was not only his); nor are they simple “sketch books”, though, to a certain extent, they are a kind of an illustrated “Bildungsroman”: I wish I worked more; I wish I made my viewpoints clear in whatever I do, in particular, there where I falter; and I wish I learned more for all that ... 3 Te notebooks were vital for him: I like this theorising of my intentions; I can live on it. 4 Tey are the discontinuous yet systematic chronicles of an intellectual, artistic and human intensity, selectively yet meaningfully refecting the outside world (and everything in it: event, painting, music, photography, love, triviality of the everyday…), sometimes from an analytical distance, sometimes with bitterness or even with tormented writhe. Numbered, but not always rigorously dated, the notebooks commence during the 1950s as methodical exercises preparing what were to become his lectures in architectural detailing (remembered as outstanding by all those who attended the course). 5 In time, his entries gain in depth, collecting (sometimes under his own vignettes) annotations and excursuses on the books he read (fction, architecture, art), or comments on the music listened to so avidly, or descriptions of events and contexts fltered through his vulnerable, yet passionate nature; adamant and often anguished retrospections alongside amusing collections of “imbecilities”. Eventually, the notebooks seem to become the conversation partner in his ever-growing and self-imposed solitude; yet he replaces them in the 1980s with the artistic drawings he gathered in other set of notebooks, probably lost. Te notebooks are unsettling and artistically admirable at the same time. Tey gather stunning drawings – the drawing, the faithful friend; the silent and generous friend 6 – whether technical 1 He sometimes showed them to his friends, as the notebooks also served as aide-mémoire. Towards the end of his life, he had allowed himself to be persuaded to organise some of the ideas he followed in the notebooks, with the help of one of the authors of this article. The latter lacked in tenacity and dedication to see this endeavour to an end, a fault which she hopes to repair by this posthumous retrieval and by a future monograph. 2 The notebooks are recorded as follows: the roman numerals refer to the running number of the notebook, and the Arabics point to the date of the cited note, if known, or to an approximation of the month and year, if no date is specifed in the original text. 3 LIII/15.12.1955. 4 LXIII/30.07.1976. 5 This is unanimously confrmed by oral history, which we have to rely on, in the absence of the coursebook itself, which seems to have been written. 6 LX/12. 1973.