I could not resist the temptation to post some images reflecting the heavy snowfall affecting Bucharest this winter. Cismigiu Park is Bucharest’ oldest city centre park, laid out in its present state in 1910 by the Austrian landscape architect Friedrich Rebhun, famous as the designer of many public and private gardens in Romania of that period. Then, the park had two main design themes: a formal French inspired garden and a ‘natural state’ English garden style sector. Subsequently, the park had acquired a series of smaller sections in a diversity of styles. The snowy bust statues from the collage I made above were put in place in 1943 and represent the classics of Romanian literature (Duiliu Zamfirescu, Alexandru Vlahuţă, Ion Creangă, Ştefan Octavian Iosif, Ion Luca Caragiale, Titu Maiorescu, Alexandru Odobescu, Mihai Eminescu, Vasile Alecsandri, Nicolae Bălcescu, Bogdan Petriceicu Haşdeu and George Coşbuc). They are made from Carrara marble, a gift from Italy, a wartime Axis ally of Romania. In 1943 the war was still quite far away from the country, in the steppes of Russia, but the change of fortunes for Romania as a Nazi ally was already felt in the air, especially after the Stalingrad disaster where the country lost probably over 150,000 (!) soldiers. The statues are an expression of the nationalism of the period and part of the effort of the authorities to stir up patriotism among the locals. The statues are quite run of the mill type, nothing approaching sculptural master-works, in a style combining some vague Art Deco elements and stern Italian Mussolinian lines. They are very picturesque nowadays, arranged in a park circle, surrounded by rich vegetation, a real delight for contemporary Bucharest people, who are mostly oblivious about the quite dramatic history of these statures.
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I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
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If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
I found the fine Art Deco style bedroom furniture in the image above during my fieldwork as a buying agent for a client interested in purchasing a peasant house in the villages that dot the wine producing areas of Oltenia province in SW Romania. In the inter-war period, the peasants from the wine producing regions of Romania got relatively prosperous and started to acquire modern furniture and durable household items. These were destined, as was the Art Deco style bedroom furniture set shown here, for the best room of the house, well looked after and preserved as family heirlooms. The furniture in this case could be sold with the house or separately, making it an interesting and affordable acquisition for anyone interested in Art Deco antique artefacts.
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I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
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If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
The main windows on a Neo-Romanian style houses are often designed as a triptych, as is the case in this example, an allusion to the divine trinity of the Christian religion.
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I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
***********************************************
If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
The neo-Romanian architectural style is one of the most original and strikingly beautiful orders that emerged in Europe during the intensely creative years of late Victorian-era. The Romanians of that period wanted to create a style that would reflect the glories of their medieval past in the transforming architectural landscape of their country, just as the British created decades earlier at a larger scale the better-known Victorian neo-Gothic architectural style.
It represents an interesting blend between eastern Byzantine elements together with local peasant architectural and ethnographic motifs, also particular patterns of Ottoman art and even late Italian Renaissance themes. The style began to be in vogue among the well-to-do Romanians with the first years of the 20th century in pre-WWI Romania, area known as the Old Kingdom, and spread also within Transylvania after the World War One once the province became part of Romania.
A typical neo-Romanian style property looks on lines similar with the following example,
Calea Calarasi, Bucharest
Here one can clearly detect the Byzantine architectural elements (i.e. short arches, thick and short columns, etc.) and the heavy, citadel-like aspect of the building, that all together represents a Romantic architectural metaphor intended by its creators to express the heroic resistance put by Romanians during medieval times as a Christian people against the relentless advance of the Ottoman Empire.
A neo-Romanian style house today is a valuable piece of property and a restoration project would be an extremely interesting and challenging, but rewarding endeavour.
The style reached its zenith during the inter-war period, with an abrupt end after the communist takeover in Romania in 1948. It has somehow been revived during the construction boom of the last decade, but in a minimalist modernist fashion, without the eclectic motifs and grandeur characteristic of the inter-war period.
I assembled here a few images from my postcard and photography collection, which together with short explanations would hopefully help you better appreciate the origins, characteristics, importance and value in artistic and period property market terms of this sophisticated architectural style peculiar to Romania.
Romanians are at their origins a nation of peasant farmers and shepherds. Their dwellings had basic decorations that were mainly ethnographic symbols characteristic to ancient aboriginal European communities that survived in less accessible areas of the continent (for example the Romanian ethnography has many motifs strikingly similar to the Celtic Irish, Pyrenees or Caucasian mountains communities). The house usually served immediate and very practical concerns for a people having to scrap a living in a harsh environment. A typical poor peasant dwelling form the region of the southern plains looked like in the illustration bellow, taken sometime at the end of 19th century.
In order to end the blogging year in style, I would like to share with you a short and I hope instructive video, shot recently, about the Lahovary House in Bucharest, the first ever Neo-Romanian style building, erected in 1886 after the plans of architect Ion Mincu, the initiator of this beautiful architectural style peculiar to Romania. This is one of the jewels of the Romanian historic architecture and it is just amazing how it survived the terrible upheavals and vicissitudes endured in the last century by the city and its heritage. Bellow are a few detailed photographs which I took when I shot the video.
Photographic details of the exquisite decorations adorning Lahovay House:
Romania was the scene of a very particular Art Nouveau style variety architecture in which traditional Byzantine, Ottoman and Romanian peasant vernacular – ethnographic motifs were brought together with wonderful results. Amzei Church in Bucharest is one such iconic example of Romanian Art Nouveau style. It was designed by the architect Alexandru Savulescu and inaugurated in 1901. The Neo-Romanian architectural style is also often expressed in an Art Nouveau matrix, especially in examples of buildings dating from 1900s – 1910s period and Amzei church design shows that evolution in its incipient stages.
I endeavor through this weekly architectural history video series series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
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If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
The mansion in the image above was confiscated by the communist regime in late 1940s as part of the communist takeover of the private property in Romania, subsequently used as a village hall until early 1990s, then given back to the descendants of the pre-communist owners and now as the result of a lingering property bubble that affects the country, is on the market for huge price tag, much higher than better quality period property from Southern France or Tuscany, left to deteriorate and out of reach of anyone willing to properly restore or renovate it. This is the usual sad trajectory followed by many of the historic houses that dot Romania.
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I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
***********************************************
If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
I took the photographs forming the collage above during the course of last year and almost all of the beautiful Art Deco houses depicted there are just falling apart due to lack of maintenance or botched renovations by ignorant owners. The buildings constitute extraordinary witnesses of the 1920s and ’30s jazz era when Bucharest grew prosperous and culturally sophisticated from the proceeds of country’s oil exports. The city is located in the middle of the lower Danube prairie (the Wallachian plain) at a long distance from sea ports or exotic warm climates. The longing of the locals for such places must have been very intense and was appropriately translated in Art Deco architecture, where the ocean cruise liner motifs (the round windows of a boat, flag posts, glazed surfaces) were prominent together with large decorative panels depicting luxuriant jungle vegetation or sunburst motifs. The round window motif collage which I put together here is just a small sample of the exuberance of such decorations embellishing Bucharest’s Art Deco buildings, sadly now neglected and victims of the ignorance of the contemporary inhabitants or eyed by unscrupulous property developers because of their central location.
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I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
***********************************************
If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
***********************************************
If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
The doorway design in the image above is a fascinating merging of Byzantine church arched architectural elements (arcade spanning between columns, apparent window, doorway), forming a trinity, itself a symbol of unity with divine connotations. This parable laden space delineation affords the representation of multiple other symbols on the resulting panels and doorway. The most conspicuous representation is that of the Tree of Life symbol that fills an appropriately tree shaped panel between the doorway and the apparent window. The tree of life is represented as a grape vine as is usually the case in the Neo-Romanian decorative register (an allusion to the local abundance of this plant and its importance for agriculture). The Tree of Life springs up from a narrow base and develops exuberantly into a large crown that embraces the Sun, the generator and sustainer of life, represented on the panel as an ethnographic solar disc. The apparent window contains a depiction of the peacock motif (peacocks as images of beauty and peace in the Garden of Eden feeding from the Tree of Abundance, in this case also a grapevine), a symbol often encountered in Wallachian late medieval church decoration. The doorway itself has a high symbolic significance as the entry point into the sacred space of a house (a symbol identified in the house spiritual imagery second in importance only to its hearth). The doorway in this case has representations of three decorative discs, borrowed from local Byzantine church decorative panoply, an obvious allusion to the divine trinity of the Christian religion. The above architectural doorway assembly is not an entirely original design. It is a high quality rendering, with some new decorative elements, of a similar composition originally created by the architect Ion Mincu, the initiator of the Neo-Romanian style, for one of his most remarkable buildings, the Petrascu house in Bucharest, finished in 1904.
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I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
***********************************************
If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
The most visible interventions on the wonderful Art Deco style house in the image above are the exaggerated colour scheme and near complete replacement of original features with cheap modern mass production fixtures (white plastic frame double-glazing and DIY store metallic doorway). It is interesting to note that in Romania most of the historic house owners and a large proportion of the public, because of deficient cultural education during the communist period and the last two decades of transition, have a deep rooted contempt for heritage conservation and consider such invasive renovations as greatly increasing the value of the property.
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I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
***********************************************
If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
The colonnade above embellishes the Buzau Commune Palace/ Town Hall in Eastern Romania, the province of Wallachia. The paint and decoration exude an air of bright sun-drenched Mediterranean architecture, despite the local temperate latitude and the fact that I took the photograph on a rainy and at times foggy winter day. The palace is probably the largest Art Nouveau – Neo-Romanian fusion style building in Romania, the master-work of architect Alexandru Savulescu, completed in 1903. The colonnade uses an Ottoman Balkan arch type encountered at church and mosque buildings in the region, making a superb “Cordoba cathedral”-like colonnade impression. The column capital is formed from a composition of vine leaves, an alusion to the wine production, one of the main industries of Buzau county. Ottoman arches combined with a local industry symbol represent a subtle and well crafted local identity message, which highlights the talent of the architect and the vision of his patrons in the then fin de siècle Romania.
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I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
***********************************************
If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
Bucharest, for most of its history, has been a gathering of villages scattered within a propitious fording place on the Dambovita – Arges river intefluve used initially by transhumant shepherds and their flocks on their seasonal migration between the pastures of the Transylvanian Alps and the Lower Danube plains and later by traders as a staging post on the great commercial road between Central Europe and the market towns of the Ottoman Empire. The domestic architecture of those times had much in common with that of the rest of the Ottoman Balkan region and the Mediterranean world in general. The house above, which I photographed in Popa Soare area, used to be a very usual type in the city beginning with c17th until the intense urban transformation of Bucharest on West European lines during the Victorian period. It is an adobe house (sun-dried brick made of clay and straw), plastered with a mix of clay and fine sand and painted in pigmented whitewash, a type which can be encountered from Turkey to Spain and Mexico. The decorative veranda poles are again of a Mediterranean type, called “zapata” in architectural terminology, also encountered from Turkey to the rest of the Mediterranean and the Spanish offshoots in the New World. The house is an extreme architectural rarity in today Bucharest and a witness of the long forgotten connection of this city with the Mediteranean and Oriental worlds through the conduit of the erstwhile Ottoman Empire.
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I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
***********************************************
If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
The image above shows one of the guest houses from within the grounds of Scroviste royal palace, on the shore of Snagov lake. It is a design combining the peasant house and Neo-Romanian architectures within a peculiar Arts and Crafts matrix (see my earlier post on Romanian Arts and Crafts architecture for details). The house has a ground floor pergola made from wooden poles carved with ethnographic motifs. Similar type carved poles adorn the extended first floor veranda. The palace gardens were landscaped by Fr. Rebhun, a talented and prolific Austrian landscape architect, very active in Romania in those decades, with many completed royal and public park commissions (Royal Pelesh Castle gardens, Cismigiu Park in central Bucharest, etc.) . What I like in this instance in terms of landscape architecture is the pergola with climbing roses, the house nestled between two imposing trees and the peasant stone stone cross at the base of the right hand tree, which together with the wonderful architecture of the house and its special location on the shore of a prairie lake constitute a metaphor of the Romanian peasant life and country’s natural landscape, an excellent product of those very creative decades of early c20th in this country.
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I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
***********************************************
If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
***********************************************
If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
***********************************************
If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
I wrote some months ago an article entitled “The Finials of Neo-Romanian Style Houses” (click link for access) in which I described the particular significance of this ornamental structure for the decorative register of the Neo-Romanian architectural order. The elegant finial in the image above, which I photographed in a bright summer day last year, is one of the more elaborate such examples, with a design inspired from the ceramic tiled tower/ cupola roof of Romanian Orthodox churches from the province of Wallachia.
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I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
***********************************************
If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
***********************************************
If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
