The FOUR BUILDING BOOMS of BUCHAREST

I believe that anyone interested to invest efficiently in Bucharest real estate and especially in its period buildings would need to have a minimal amount of information on its urban history in order to really understand the market and avoid its often deceiving traps.

• Bucharest encompasses on a relatively small, but representative territory the history of the Romanian real estate and its architectural heritage.
• The city has until very recently gone through a huge building boom, which has already changed its urban landscape. The construction sector is still one of the main engines of economic growth of the country and attracted the bulk of foreign direct investment.
• The current boom has also many negative aspects: most of the developments are ugly, poor quality and damage the landscape. The city’s rich older architectural heritage suffers considerably, many magnificent buildings falling in a state of profound disrepair. The architectural qualities of the new buildings and town quarters are non-descript and characterless, often mirroring the nearby communist developments. The building boom has created a speculative market that distorts the local economy and created tensions within society.

However that phenomenon is nothing new in the city’s modern history. It has in the last 150 years gone through four major urban transformations, including the actual one. I compiled here for your benefit a brief outline of the four successive building booms of Bucharest from the Victorian era to the present days:

-1^st boom: The reign of King Carol I (1860s – first decade of 1900s) when the city acquired the character of “Little Paris”. An iconic building of that period is the Romanian Athenaeum (now universally considered the symbol of Bucharest), a concert hall that follows the style of Opera Garnier from Paris. The boom was fuelled by the efficient organisation of the country on Western lines by the German origin King Carol I and the revenues generated by large grain export. The numerous residential buildings erected in that period imprinted the city with an intense charm for which became famous for decades to come. However many of these buildings were erected unsystematically, without a proper urban master plan, on the old oriental lines inherited from the previous times of Ottoman influences. They are now period building gems, some of the best such acquisitions which can be made in Bucharest. Today most of these buildings are in advanced state of disrepair, and many are being pulled down in order to erect ugly ramshackle commercial structures under the indifference of authorities and ignorance of many of Bucharest’s citizens about their own heritage and identity.

The Athenaeum, the most iconic building of Bucharest

Cismigiu Park area, end of 19th century French chateau style grandiose building

“Little Paris style building Bucharest, Popa Soare area

The NEO-ROMANIAN ARCHITECTURAL STYLE: a brief guide on its origins and features

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 20^th 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 19^th century.

Ancestral type peasant dwelling