Chisinau Architecture

I love the rural Moldovan countryside, as my recent posts show. I mean, sure, I've seen the Himalayas, the Grand Canyon, islands with white sandy beaches in Thailand and the Philippines, and these places are breathtaking. But the Moldovan countryside maintains a gentle beauty that is somehow more calming and heartwarming.

On the whole, on the other hand, the capital city of Chisinau lacks beauty.

It is perhaps a testament to something dark in human nature that, while nature almost always renders beauty in its creations, we manage to not only annihilate the beauty that nature has given us but replace it with boxy, corrupt, polluting ugliness. I remember once taking a speedboat down a river and Borneo and witnessing the hectares upon hectares of deforestation, the remnants of the forest’s burnt, black fingers of charred saplings digging to the sky. Why do we do this to the place we live?

I would venture that most of Chisinau, unfortunately, reflects the human trend to stain the world. Shoddily built apartment buildings rising from beside cracked streets and random bits of demolished concrete. But, there are points of architecture in this city that nevertheless rise from the norm and have grown beautiful.

There are all these old buildings edged with finely crafted details of faces, flowers shields, etc. that I suppose were built by the Soviet Union to beautify the city. They have, unfortunately, since fallen into disrepair (Soviet architecture tended to be temporary at best). But, at least in my opinion, this is where the beauty comes in. The state of crumbling these buildings have fallen to is aesthetic in its tragic tones. There is something organic about these buildings now; they are like living things that are nearing the end of their lives. They manifest the beauty that old people have, faces etched with wrinkles and lines, eyes sagging with the weight of time yet still glistening with history and experience. These buildings are beautiful in the way only the elderly can be.

Sometimes, I wander downtown just looking for places where buildings are falling apart and then just stop and look for minutes on end. I'm sure the people here think I'm crazy for looking at an old wall. They want everything glitzy and new. And I am sure these buildings will be gone soon, replaced with plain, clean, boring cubes of concrete and glass. These old buildings will die, and be forgotten; and maybe this is how nature reclaims the beauty we have stolen despite our best attempts.