A period house that has the name of its architect inscribed on a wall tablet, usually placed next to the main doorway, conveys a more complete image of its history and style, about the particular cultural context of the times when that architect designed the building. That tablet is also an identity marker, distinguishing the house from among the crowd of impersonal mass produced residences. The name tablet also constitutes an important added value element, having the potential to notably increase the market worth of a building as customarily patron-proprietors sought famous or highly promissing architects to design their homes and the name tablet acts as a certificate of that buiding’s architectural and cultural value.
The stock of Bucharest period properties is of relatively recent date on the historical scale and has humble beginnings in mid 19th century after a devastating great fire that destroyed swathes of the city and its more remarkable houses built by local craftsmen and masons in a provincial style characteristic to the Ottoman Balkans, in most cases without the benefit of an architect’s supervision.
Properly qualified architects started to be hired by the local elite only toward the end of the 19th century once what I call the Little Paris style, inspired by the French architecture of the Second Empire, became widely adopted in Romania. However most of the local elite’s houses in that epoch were still erected by craftsmen. From among the small number of architects employed by the local proprietors, even fewer had their name inscribed on tablets on the wall. I have found in central Bucharest three such buildings displaying name tablets from that period, shown in the photographs bellow:
Architect O. Mugsch, Little Paris style building, Lipscani (©Valentin Mandache)
