Jul 31 2012

Ethnographic veranda pole

Ethnographic veranda pole, early 1930s Neo-Romanian style house, Dorobanti area, Bucharest (©Valentin Mandache)

There was a certain trend within the Neo-Romanian architecture for using ethnographic motifs, which unfurled at its highest intensity between the late 1920s and the late 1930s, transcending its mature and late phase of development, expressed especially in wood carvings decorating structures such as verandas, stair balusters, balconies, doorways, etc. The wooden veranda pole in images presented above and bellow is such an example, of exquisite quality, inspired from the peasant art of regions of southern Romania (Wallachia).

Ethnographic veranda pole, early 1930s Neo-Romanian style house, Dorobanti area, Bucharest (©Valentin Mandache)

Jul 31 2012

Bucharest and Chisinau letter boxes

I enjoy making parallels between the architectural phenomena of different places and periods, to see if I can extract interesting clues about the history and societies that produced and host those artefacts. In fact, for me, the comparatist method is a main means of investigation of the exacting and apparently chaotic built landscape of Bucharest and Romania, where there is not yet a tradition of quality architectural history commentariat and the academic literature in that field is still thin on the ground.

Letter box lid, 1900s house, Icoanei area, Buharest (©Valentin Mandache)

To illustrate that, I have here two letter boxes, their openings more precisely, dating from the La Belle Epoque period. The one above is from Bucharest, adorning a 1900s gate, inscribed on its flap with the Romanian text “Scrisori si Jurnale”, which translates as “Letters and Journals”. The one shown bellow is from Chisinau, the Republic of Moldova, is quite obscured under thick coats of paint. It reads in Russian as “Dlya Pisemi i Gazeti”, which in English is “For Letters and Journals”.

Those cities are in the same area of South East European civilization, but different historical experiences in the last two centuries, exhibiting often diverging trends in their architectural and artistic preferences, as these letter boxes testify. The Romanian one, adorning a wrought iron gate shows the popularity of this architectural element in Bucharest and the country, and the existence of front gardens, people enjoying interacting within the community, while in Chisinau the letter box affixed on a street doorway indicates the preference of houses with walls fronting the street, with intimate interior gardens, away from the peering eyes of neighbours and passerby. The Romanian letter box flap displays a sort of French inspired Beaux Arts decoration indicating the influence of the influence of that country in this part of Europe, while the Chisinau box is surrounded by Renaissance inspired ornaments, underlying the stronger Renaissance tradition and popularity of this style in Imperial Russia. The languages used to inscribe these artefacts also suggest the existence of a more cosmopolitan society in Chisnau. The very fact that this city has now a majority of Romanian speaking population, and this Russian inscription is left in its place, indicates a more tolerant attitude for ethnic diversity than the nowadays boringly mono-ethnic Bucharest.

There are many other interesting architectural and historic fact than can be drawn by comparing these two simple letter box openings, showing the usefulness of this research method in less documented and talked about places like Romania and the Republic of Moldova.

Letter box opening, 1890s house, Chisinau, the Republic of Moldova (©Valentin Mandache)

Jul 24 2012

iPhone photo of the day: ornamental ring bell string conduit

This is a rare ring bell string conduit from the La Belle Epoque Period of Bucarest. It adorns the doorway of “Carturesti” bookshop and is still in an excellent condition. The string linking the bell with the its handle would have passed through a small hole within the small barrel like element seen at the centre of this artefact.

Doorbell string conduit, adorning an 1900s Little Paris style house in Icoanei area, Bucuarest (©Valentin Mandache)

Jul 22 2012

The stone base of a Little Paris style iron fence

Istrita stone base of a 1880s iron fence, Bucharest

Istrita stone base of a 1880s cast iron fence, General Manu House, Calea Victoriei Boulevard, Bucharest (©Valentin Mandache)

The period street fence bases in Bucharest are usually made from concrete or bricks. The ones made from stone are an expensive choice in a city located in the middle of the Lower Danube Prairie, far away from quarries. They were an option for wealthier proprietors before the era of the concrete, which for Romania’s capital started in the mid 1900s. Therefore nowadays the fence stone bases are a rarity and most of the remaining ones date from the mid to the late c19th. The image above shows such a survivor from the 1880s (could be a decade earlier), adorned with a beautiful cast iron fence in what I term the Little Paris style, prevalent throughout urban Romania in that period, contemporary with the base. Cast iron fences are in general older than the wrought iron ones, which in Bucharest start to be used on a wider scale beginning with the mid-1890s. The stone, a warm lumachel lime, originates from Istrita Hill peasant run quarries in Buzau county, 100 km north east of Bucharest, for centuries the main source of building and pavement stone for the city.

Jul 19 2012

Spanish inspired architecture in inter-war Bucharest

Spanish inspired architecture in inter-war Bucharest (©Valentin Mandache)

The image, shown in true (above) and inverse (bellow) colours, depicts an entrance corridor giving access from the street gate to the garden of a late 1930s grand house in Icoanei area of Bucharest, in one of the many Mediterranean inspired styles developed in those very prosperous years for the economy of Romania, after the Great Depression and before the conflagration of the Second World War. The particular design of this edifice, designed by architect George Damian, models that of a Spanish medieval mansion, imagined under the Iberian burning sun, which is very fitting for the Romanian high summer climate, when temperatures can get close to 40 centigrades for weeks long, as is the case in this July 2012.

Spanish inspired architecture in inter-war Bucharest (©Valentin Mandache)

Jul 13 2012

Sheet metal fretwork in Chisinau

Sheet Metal fretwork, Chisinau (©Valentin Mandache)

I found these picturesque sheet metal fretwork doorway embellishments during my recent visit in Chisinau, the capital of the Republic of Moldova. They date in my opinion from the mid-1980s, perhaps the early 1990s. They are quite attractive and present a curious vernacular synthesis between the triangular pediment of a classical temple found among the prestigious historicist c19th buildings of the city, and rich ethnographic motifs inspired from the Ukrainian and the Russian ethnography. Another area rich in sheet metal fretwork architectural embellishments is Bucovina, a borderland between Romania and Ukraine, where the local ethnography expounds a large degree of fusion between the civilizations of the Romanian and Slavic communities.

Sheet metal fretwork, Chisinau (©Valentin Mandache)

Jul 11 2012

Victorian era coloured glass in Bucharest

Victorian era coloured glass, Dacia area, Bucharest (©Valentin Mandache)

The photograph above shows a sector of one of the picturesque Bucharest glazed entrances that adorns a Little Paris style house, dating from the 1890. The structure still preserves some of its beautiful coloured glass panes, artifacts used with great effect in that era to decorate doorway windows, conservatories or wall windows. The coloured glass sheet was quite an expensive item more than a century ago, compared with its transparent counterpart, still not yet mass produced. The palette of colours available was usually reduced to four strong hues: red (ruby), blue (dark blue), yellow (amber) and green (moss), which are all included, a rare such instance for Bucharest, within the iron frame of this particular conservatory type entrance. From my field observations of edifices built between 1880s – 1910s, the ruby glass is most frequently encountered, followed in order by the dark blue, amber and green panes.

Jul 10 2012

Architectural hen pen from Fin de Siècle period

Architectural hen pen dating from the 1890s, Targoviste, southern Romania (©Valentin Mandache)

The backyards of the period houses often hold hidden treasures and curiosities of architectural history, from fragments of decorations and structures much older than the street façade, to garden gazebos or former farm constructions. I had the rare opportunity to encounter in Targoviste, 80km north-west of Bucharest, a beautiful hen pen structure, dating from Fin de Siècle period, which models a human dwelling at a smaller scale, of a style popular in those times in Romania’s towns. It follows the design of an Alpine chalet, which is part of the spa architecture fashion spread in the 1880s -1890s throughout central and eastern Europe.

Architectural hen pen dating from the 1890s, Targoviste, southern Romania (©Valentin Mandache)

The former backyard of the grand house that contained this hen pen is now exposed to the street following probably the demolition of the building that previously obscured it and sale of the plot of land on which once stood. The pen was of a mixed domestic fowl use, with compartments for hens and possibly ducks or geese within its lower floors and pigeons in the attic.

Architectural hen pen dating from the 1890s, Targoviste, southern Romania (©Valentin Mandache)

I like the wood fretwork on the edge of the roof eave, so typical of the late Victorian period houses. Two pigeon holes flank a larger central door used for keeper’s access, through which is cut a third pigeon hole.

This is an excellent piece of domestic architecture, still quite well preserved and relatively straight forward to restore. It shows the sophistication of the Romanians of more than one century ago, who were most certainly more elevated and finer in their architectural tastes than their nowadays post-communist counterparts.

Jul 9 2012

Elaborate c19th lamp-post in Bucharest

Bellow is the image projected against the blue sky, in seven different processing sequences, of what is probably one of the most elaborate c19th (1890s, Little Paris style) lamp-post in Bucharest, which in its heydays functioned by burning gas. Actually there is a pair of them hosted in Domnita Balasa churchyard in the centre of the city. Each particular appearance reflects, in my opinion, the various moods of Bucharest’s “architectural soul”.

Elaborate c19th lampost, Domnita Balasa church, Bucharest (©Valentin Mandache)

Jul 9 2012

Elaborate c19th lamp-post in Bucharest

Elaborate c19th lampost, Domnita Balasa church, Bucharest (©Valentin Mandache)

Jul 8 2012

Romanian landscape seen from the train’s rear

An evocative, although apparently placid, landscape in southern Romania in the environs of Bucharest, filmed from a slow moving passenger train’s rear. The region is called the Lower Danube Prairie, similar in geography and climate with the prairie around the Great Lakes on the North American continent.

Jul 5 2012

Neo-Romanian style Arch of Triumph made from plaster and wood

The old Arch of Triumph in Bucharest during the Coronation celebrations of 16 October 1922

The photograph above shows how the Arch of Triumph of Bucharest used to look before the structure that nowadays adorns the square with the same name was put up in the mid-1930s. The architect of both monuments is Petre Antonescu, one of the most important designers of the Neo-Romanian style. The edifice has been a provisional one, erected in 1922 with the occasion of the October that year’s celebrations in Romania’s capital of the coronation of King Ferdinand and Queen Marie. It had a reinforced concrete core, with façade details and ornament from plaster and wood. The Great War had dreadful consequences for Romania’s economy, the population suffering from diseases and often famine in the first years after the conflagration. The lack of resources was the reason why the official coronation of the country’s royal couple was organised only in 1922 in a quite low key mode. The limited finances and the short notice that the architect had to cope are responsible of the somehow clumsy proportions and the basic, not exactly a master-work design of the Arch. It is however a large scale monument that expounds the Neo-Romanian style in the first stages of its mature phase, a patriotic architectural statement of a people that came out victorious in the aftermath of the Great War.

Jul 3 2012

Stone bridge from the reign of prince Michael Sturdza in the Principality of Moldova

This picturesque c19th pre-railway age bridge is located in the environs of Crasna in the county of Vaslui in eastern Romania. It is known as Podul Doamnei (Lady’s Bridge), spanning about 90 metres over a former riverbed of the river Barlad, which now flows nearby within embankments. The structure dates from 1841, at the height of the Russian Empire’s protectorate over the Danubian Principalities of Moldova and Wallachia. It represents a vestige of of the first modern road building programme in the old Moldovan Principality, promoted by Michael Sturdza, its then reigning prince.