VIRTUAL ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

This paper explores the reconstruction of my grandmother Niculina’s childhood home in Galați, Romania, as an act of architectural remembrance shaped by oral history and familial archives and memory. Born in 1943 in Galați, a city by the Danube River, Niculina lived through the Second World War and over four decades of communism, during which her domestic environment was shaped by the Marxist doctrine and material scarcity. Through a collaborative process of interviewing, drawing and analysing keepsakes from that time, I attempt to reimagine the modest home she shared with her single mother and three siblings. This emotional and shared effort offers a deeply personal lens on architectural heritage: one that shifts the focus from monumentalism to the overlooked material and emotional traces of everyday life, pictured as heritage from below. The methodology combines oral storytelling with speculative drawing, treating objects, habits, and spatial arrangements not merely as remnants of the past but as active agents in constructing heritage from below. Growing up alongside her, I became fascinated and accustomed to some of her habits and memories, transmitting a sense of melancholia across generations. By treating her childhood home as a site of layered memory and subtle resistance, the paper contributes to broader conversations on how architecture can serve as a vessel for intergenerational transmission, affective histories, and alternative heritage narratives. It invites reflection on how personal memory and familial objects participate in reimagining the built environment- not only as it was, but as it is remembered, felt and drawn.