Architecture








ARCHITECTURE

Union of Romanian Architects – Founded 1891 – site

Alec Beldiman, President

UNIVERSITIES
Ion Mincu School of Architecture, Bucharest – site

PUBLICATIONS
BOOK: ROMANIAN MODERNISM: The Architecture of Bucharest,1920-1940

Excellent book on the ‘internationalist’ movement that flourished in Romania during the inter-war period.

Luminita Machedon and Ernie Scoffham
MIT Press (Cambridge, Mass.), 1999

MAGAZINE: ARHITECTURA (Founded in 1906)

Superior print and design – site

URBAN PLANNING
Radically Improving Bucharest: TUB Proposal May 07 (see)

RESTORATION

Restoring Old Bucharest Properties – read

PUBLICATION: TOP ROMANIAN ARCHITECTS

Augustin Ioan’s selections of present-day work by ten top architects
Including: Vladimir ARSENE, Alexandru BELDIMAN, Florin BICIUSCA, Constantin CIUREA, Radu MIHAILESCU, Emil Barbu POPESCU, Dorin STEFAN, Radu TEACA
Published in PRISPA, Noi Media Print, Bucharest, 2004

Photo: Residential estate by A. Beldiman @ Prispa

ARCHITECTURE
The New England Advisory Group on Architecture
Mission: To advise on links to Romanian architectural community

Ion Berindei (Winchester)

Return . . .

Ernie Scoffham, ‘Image and identity:  Bucharest in the 1930s and 1990s’, Department of Architecture, University of Nottingham (England, 2000). The author offers an interesting urban perspective on the topic of identity with a focus on Bucharest architecture (full article) An abstract in his words:


“During the 1930s the social life of Bucharest rivalled that elsewhere in Europe. Culturally and artistically Bucharest embraced dynamic, innovative and avant-garde attitudes, which were prompted by the establishment of a Greater Romania after the end of the first World War. The artists Brâncusi, Janco, Maxy, the composer Enescu, the philosopher Eliade, were recognised internationally. The development of Bucharest was based on progressive theoretical ideas and over a period of ten years its appearance was transformed by modernist buildings. The individual villas and apartment buildings which formed the bulk of this transformation were achieved by private enterprise and represented an innovative architecture of social equilibrium which was entirely modernist; quite unlike the modernist social housing programmes elsewhere in Europe which were the products of state intervention and industry. By contrast, state and civic building programmes in Bucharest realised an architecture which retained classical conventions to become austere, sombre and repetitive.


Since 1989, Romania has had to adjust to the rigours of market economics. The intervening fifty years of totalitarianism kept the achievements of the inter-war years under wraps, but these are now being rediscovered by a generation for whom they are the nearest representation of democracy on Romanian territory. The new-found democracy of the market place brings this period of cultural achievement into sharp focus, in the hope that it may act as a catalyst for the resolution of today’s extensive urban deprivations.
Full Article