Radio România Internațional

Tag: architect

  • Architect Horia Creanga

    Architect Horia Creanga

    Two names stand out among Romania’s modernist architects: Marcel Iancu, an avant-garde fine artist who rose to fame in Israel after having designed several gorgeous villas in Bucharest, and Horia Creanga, who designed some of the best known landmarks in the Romanian capital city. A descendant of the great Romanian prose writer Ion Creanga, Horia Creanga managed in a brief, but intensive period to modernise a major boulevard in Bucharest and the interwar industrial outskirts. Ana-Maria Zahariade, a professor with the Bucharest Architecture University and co-author of a book entitled “Horia Creanga: A monograph,” gave us a few details about the architect’s life:



    “He was born in 1892 and was the grandson of writer Ion Creanga. His family was not wealthy, they were lower middle class living in Bucharest. At the end of WW1, in which he took part, Horia put together an exhibition of his watercolour works, at the Romanian Athenaeum, and sold them in order to pay for his studies at the Fine Arts School in Paris, where a lot of Romanian architects at that time used to go. Although the first Romanian school of architecture was founded in 1892, many young Romanians would further their education in Paris. After he graduated, he worked in the workshop of his university professor for a while. In Paris, he was living with his wife, Lucia Dumbraveanu-Creanga, one of the first Romanian women architects, together with whom back in Romania Horia opened their first architecture office, joined by his brother Ion Creanga as well. The office became quite successful. In the meantime Horia was also working for the City Hall, with the New Building Directorate, which was an opportunity for him to meet a lot of people who would later be his clients.”



    Not many details are known today about Horia Creanga’s personal life. But his works are well known, and many are still standing today. One of his first designs was the home of politician Petru Groza, who became a prime minister in 1945 and later a high-level member of the communist government. In the early 1920s, Horia Creanga built an avant-garde, Cubist-style mansion for Groza’s family. Then he started working with major private companies and industrialists for whom he designed most of his projects in Bucharest.



    “His first major project, a huge one in terms of importance and magnificence, was the ARO building. It was well known abroad as well, after its coverage in the Paris-based magazine L’Architecture. Horia Creanga won a competition organised by the members of the ARO Society. This building, which was known as the Patria building in the communist years and which is now in a terrible condition, was the first modernist building on the boulevard known today as Magheru, and previously as Bratianu, which was under construction at that time. This building was the talk of the town in those years, it was seen as a skyscraper, kind of shocking. It remained shocking for a while, but the people of Bucharest were also very fond of it. It had a gorgeous cinema hall, a bar and a restaurant. In the interwar years, it hosted outstanding performances, such as one by the violinist Yehudi Menuhin or the singer Maria Tanase. It was a representative place for the modern, progressive Romanian society after the Great War. Later on, Horia Creanga designed another building on the same boulevard, the Malaxa-Burileanu building, also presented in a major foreign magazine. At present we know of 78 projects by Horia Creanga, most of which have actually been built.”



    These projects include the Giulesti Theatre, currently the Children’s Comic Opera building, the Malaxa industrial works, later renamed “23 August,” in the eastern part of the city, and the Obor Halls. All these buildings were regarded as innovative not only in Romania, but in Europe as well. What drew Horia Creanga towards modernism was the simplicity and elegance of the lines. His ideal was to find the essence that gave a building its refinement and beauty. Ana-Maria Zahariade told us more about the last part of his life and about his legacy:



    “He gained recognition quite quickly, although it is hard for us today to find documents to prove this. The main architecture magazine at the time in Romania, published by the Architecture Society, did not promote modernism and hardly ever featured modernist projects. But Horia Creanga was highly appreciated, and we know this because he was commissioned works and his office expanded. A lot of talented young architects worked for him, such as Haralamb Georgescu, who later rose to fame in the US. Horia Creanga’s popularity came exclusively from his works. He never taught at the Architecture University, which focused mainly on the traditional or neo-Romanian style, and his office essentially created a parallel school of architecture. Horia Creanga worked primarily for private clients, such as the ARO Society, but he was also appreciated by the authorities, and some of his works were commissioned by the municipality. He was appointed as head of the Exhibition Department and worked for national exhibitions since the end of the 1930s. And his publicly-funded works confirm the official recognition gained over the years by the modernist style.”



    Today, the best-known work by Horia Creanga, the ARO-Patria building, in downtown Bucharest, is abandoned and in desperate need for immediate consolidation and repair.


    (translated by: Ana-Maria Popescu)

  • Architecture and family histories

    Architecture and family histories

    Bucharest saw the emergence of the first modernist buildings in the 1920s, more precisely in 1926, when architect Marcel Iancu designed his first building: the Herman Iancu construction located in the former Jewish quarter in Bucharest. The building has stood the test of time, defying the period of Communist demolitions when the area was massively modified. It is a storey building of the block-house type, which the architect built for his father.



    It is the first project showing Marcel Iancu’s modernist preoccupations, which is not at all surprising for a young man who, in 1916, at the Voltaire cabaret in Zurich, together with the poets Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball and the fine artist Hans Arp, founded the Dada movement. The Dada movement was actually the trigger for all the avant-garde and novel artistic movements of the 20th century.



    Marcel Iancu had gone to study in Switzerland in 1914 together with his brother Iuliu. He first studied mathematics and chemistry at the University of Zurich and in 1915 enrolled with the architecture department of the Polytechnic School. A complex artist who stood out, within the Dada movement, as a graphic artist and illustrator of the avant-garde publications, Marcel Iancu was also a painter and a sculptor.



    He returned to Bucharest in the 1920s and designed a series of modernist buildings commissioned by the elite of the new inter-war bourgeoisie. In a capital city that was then dominated by the eclectic architectural style, Marcel Iancu’s buildings represented a first step towards renewal and modernity.



    All in all, Marcel Iancu designed 26 buildings in Bucharest of which only 20 are still standing. One of his buildings can still be found in Bucharest’s old town area, near Foisorul de Foc — the Watch Tower, which used to be the city’s tallest building.



    The building was also the result of the friendship between the architect and the future historian of religions, Mircea Eliade, who, in the interwar period, was the leader of the young generation of writers and artists who were to revolutionize the Romanian culture after the Union of 1918. Marcel Iancu designed the building for Mircea Eliade’s sister, Corina Alexandrescu, shortly after her marriage.



    Today it belongs to her son, Sorin Alexandrescu, a semiotician and university professor who has recently given an interview in this very house: “The house belonged to my parents. It is a two-storey house. I was born in this house. The space of the house was re-organized, because during the Communist regime, the authorities imposed my parents to receive tenants. In those years of Communism, one person was entitled to a residence space of only 8 square meters. If your house was bigger, you had to receive tenants. Some of tenants had to pass through my room to go to the bathroom or the kitchen. We had two families of tenants. When I first got married, I had to move out. Soon after, my parents left too.”



    Sorin Alexandrescu immigrated in 1970 to the Netherlands where, until his retirement, he was a teacher at the Romanian language department of the Amsterdam University. After the 1989 revolution, he returned to Romania and managed to recuperate his property which had been nationalized by the Communist regime.



    Here is Sorin Alexandrescu back at the microphone: “I hadn’t had any knowledge of this house until the 1989 revolution, when I retuned home. I found out that one could recuperate one’s property if one filed a well documented application. Following a very fast legal proceeding, I won the house back. I told the tenants that they could continue to live there against the same small rent they used to pay to the state. Eventually they all moved out without being obliged to. Then, I renovated the entire house and rented the rooms upstairs. Later I had some more repair works done, the latest being completed recently. At present, for the semi-basement and the ground floor, where I lived, I have concluded a free loan agreement with the Bucharest University, where courses are held as part of the Center of Excellence in the study of image. Besides the hall we have at the Faculty of Letters, we also have this space. Therefore, I am very happy not only for getting the house back but also for being able to offer it to the students, through this cooperation with the University which always needs more spaces, given the increasing number of students.”



    Although the value of the building designed by Marcel Iancu is well known by the authorities, the building has not yet been declared a heritage building. But this is going to happen soon, says Sorin Alexandrescu: “I have not submitted any request to obtain the title of heritage building for my house, simply because I had to finish the repair works first. I hope now I will be able to obtain the recognition of the building, which is a symbolic heritage left by Marcel Iancu. My mother commissioned Marcel Iancu to design the house because he was recommended to her by Mircea Eliade who was friends with Marcel Iancu. My mother was very young back then, and she did not know any architect to do the job, therefore her brother recommended a colleague of his generation. Soon a plaque with the name of Marcel Iancu will be attached to the building.”



    In the 1940s, when anti-Semitic persecutions intensified in Romania, Marcel Iancu decided to emigrate. As the years passed by, he became a famous architect in Israel where he founded the Ein Hod artist colony in Haifa and where he received the highest cultural distinction of the country: Israel Prize. Marcel Iancu died in 1984 aged 88. (translation by L. Simion)