I am constantly amazed when doing my field research for historic houses through historic Bucharest by its endless chaos of cluttered houses of all shapes and sizes awkwardly positioned next to each other. These buildings show a contrasting diversity of European architectural styles rendered in a quaint provincial manner. It is an apparently senseless urban maze with its own mysterious interior order, hard to decipher by an outsider, and is what gives this city its unique personality.
Art Nouveau is one of the eye-catching styles of old Bucharest architecture. It is present in a variety of types: from early French Art Nouveau to the elegant, almost surrealist Central European variety.
I was pleasantly surprised to encounter an Art Nouveau house in the Mantuleasa area that uses in its decoration traditional Romanian ethnographic and church architectural ornaments, perhaps one of the few if not singular such example of syncretism in the whole Romania.
Art Nouveau House, Bucharest (©Valentin Mandache)
The house was built on a plot of land that had an awkward contour. The sharp angle of one of street corners, as can be seen in the picture above, is the pivotal element around which the house is designed and ingeniously used as a truly Art Nouveau feature by the architect who created this house sometime in the second or early third decade of the 20th century. The typical fluid, flowery shapes more typical to this style can be seen throughout the façade: from the window columns and door decoration to discrete embellishments of the eave drain trough.
Art Nouveau house, Bucharest (©Valentin Mandache)
