Modernism sustained: Bucharest in the 1930s and 1990s

Abstract

During the 1930s the social life of Bucharest rivalled that elsewhere in Europe. Culturally and artistically Bucharest embraced dynamic, innovative and avant-garde attitudes, which were prompted by the establishment of a Greater Romania after the end of the first World War. The artists Brancusi, Janco, Mary, the composer Enescu, the philosopher Eliade, were recognised internationally. The development of Bucharest was based on progressive theoretical ideas and over a period of ten years its appearance was transformed by modernist buildings. The individual villas and apartment buildings which formed the bulk of this transformation were achieved by private enterprise and represented an innovative architecture of social equilibrium which was entirely modernist; quite unlike the modernist social housing programmes elsewhere in Europe which were the products of state intervention and industry. By contrast, state and civic building programmes in Bucharest realised an architecture which retained classical conventions to become austere, sombre and repetitive. Since 1989, Romania has had to adjust to the rigours of market economics. The intervening fifty years of totalitarianism kept the achievements of the inter-war years under wraps, but these are now being rediscovered by a generation for whom they are the nearest representation of democracy on Romanian territory. The new-found democracy of the market place brings this period of cultural achievement into sharp focus, in the hope that it may act as a catalyst for the resolution of today's extensive urban deprivations.