Menu
Elina Amann and Alla Vronskaya, last edited 11.04.2023
Romania is a country in south-eastern Europe, bordering with Ukraine and Moldova in the north-east, Hungary and Serbia in the west, and Bulgaria in the south, where it also has access to the Black Sea. It includes the historic regions of Moldavia, Wallachia, and Transylvania. Since the late Middle Ages, the region was under the political dominance of Ottoman Turkey, Poland, Hungary, and Russia. Romania received independence in 1878. In the First World War, the Kingdom of Romania supported the Entente powers, but lost in military campaigns and had to secede territories to Austro-Hungary and Bulgaria; nevertheless, it received authority over Bessarabia (today, most of it in Moldova) following its breakaway from the Russian Empire after the Soviet revolution of 1917.
Founded by the architect Ion Mincu in the late-nineteenth century, the Higher School of Architecture in Bucharest (subsequently the Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture), became the main institution of architectural education in the country and was the alma mater of most practicing architects in Romania. In 1897, the Department of Architecture was also founded within the Bucharest School of Fine Arts. First woman, Henrieta Delavrancea, was admitted to the latter in 1913, and her cousin Lucia Dumbrăveanu entered the Higher School of Architecture two years later. In 1919, the first woman, Virginia Andreescu Haret, graduated from the Higher School of Architecture.
During the interwar period, Romania was territorially at its largest, fulfilling the nineteenth-century nationalist concept of Greater Romania, which included all Romanian-speaking regions. The constitution of 1923 guaranteed women equal rights, although few were able to lead professional careers in architecture. Dumbrăveanu, who was married to influential architect Horia Creangâ, Delavrancea, and Andreescu Haret provided notable exceptions. (1) In the 1930s, fascist-style ultra-nationalists gained power in the country, and in the Second World War Romania sided with Germany. The country switched sides in 1944, and in the aftermath of the war fell under the Soviet sphere of influence, remaining a state-socialist country between 1947 and 1989.
The abdication of the king Michael I in 1947, the event that marked the transformation of the country into the People’s Republic of Romania (Republica Populară Romînă, RPR), a member of the Warsaw Pact. During the 1950s, industry and agriculture were nationalized following the Soviet model. Opponents of the regime were persecuted by secret police and detained in labor camps that resembled the Soviet GULag. Architects too found themselves subjected to the dictatorship of the state after private architectural practice was banned in 1952. Since then, architects worked at large state design institutes, almost all of them (26 total) were located in the country’s capital, Bucharest.
Meanwhile, in the immediate aftermath of the war, women were included into some leading government and leadership positions: for instance, Florica Bagdasa became the minister of healthcare, and chemist Raluca Ripan became an academician, a dean, and ultimately a university rector. In the late 1950s, the Women’s National Council was founded to support women’s equality in legal, social, and professional matters.
After a brief period of strict centralization, in 1957, architectural practice in Romania was decentralized, and a Regional Design Institute (Institut Regional de Proiectare, IRP) was established in each of Romania’s 16 regions. After 1960, they were known as Directorates of Systematisation, Architecture and Construction Design (Direcții de Sistematizare, Arhitectură și Proiectare în Construcții, DSAPCs). The director of the DSAPC acted as the chief architect of the region. Furthermore, each ministry received its own design office, as the Institute for Industrial Projects (Institutul de Proiectări Industriale, IPI) was split into multiple specialized institutes. By 1967, 600 out of the 2000 architects working in Romania were employed by industrial design offices or institutes, 16 of which were based in Bucharest (2).
In 1965, after the death of the first secretary of Romanian Communist Party Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the power went to Nicolae Ceaușescu, under whom the country was renamed into the Socialist Republic of Romania (Republica Socialistă România, RSR). Ceaușescu was critical of the politics of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. Romania officially parted ways with the Soviet Union in 1964, nevertheless remaining a member of state-socialist alliances, the military Warsaw Pact and the economic Comecon. Ceaușescu’s politics of “derussification” led to the economic and cultural westernization of Romania. The resultant economic growth, in turn, led to urbanization. The latter was sustained by the construction of highrise prefabricated mass housing complexes. One of the key examples of those, the towers in Floreasca district of Bucharest, completed in 1963, was built by a team led by two women, Rodica Macry and Margareta Dumitru (3).
Ceaușescu continued the politics of decentralization of the Romanian economy, including architecture. In 1968, Romania’s 16 regions were subdivided as 39 counties, each of which received its own design institute or center. County design institutes (Institut de Proiectare
Județean, IPJ) inherited to existing DSAPCs, while the smaller county design ‘centers’ (CPJ – Centru de Proiectare Județean) were created anew in towns that newly received the capital status (among those working at the latter was Ana Uncu). In 1970, three more higher institutions of architectural education–in Cluj, Iași and Timișoara–were opened in addition to the Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture. (4).
Despite its openness towards the West, with time, the Ceaușescu regime became progressively more and more totalitarian. Concerned with low birth rates, it banned abortions and contraception. This resulted in a rise of birth rates in the late 1960s, but also led to a reproductive health crisis, numerous deaths of women following illegal abortions, and a significant increase in the number of orphans. Although the birthrates soon dropped, alongside urbanization, the population growth in the 1960s and the 1970s contributed to the housing crisis in the country and spurred the construction of mass housing in Romania.
China and North Korea served as the models of urbanization for Ceaușescu’s government. The building density in Romania’s capital Bucharest, in particular, significantly increased after 1974 within the framework of the so-called “systematization” (Sistematizarea) campaign of forced urbanization and the demolition of small villages. The stated goal of systematization was the creation of a “new lived environment for the new man”. Dubbed “Ceauşima” (referring to Ceaușescu’s name and to the American nuclear attack on Hiroshima), the systematization led to the disappearance of historic building texture in the center of Bucharest. The urban transformation of Romania’s capital was further instigated by the 1977 Vrancea earthquake, which destroyed tens of thousands of buildings in Bucharest and necessitated rapid mass housing construction.
Among the notable women-designed buildings of this period was the extension for the Bucharest Commercial Academy by Cleopatra Alifanti (1967-1970). The systematization culminated with the building of the largest and most expensive administrative building of its time, the Palace of the People in Bucharest, designed by architect Anca Petrescu. The project began in 1984, and included the destruction of the historical core of Bucharest’s southern part, which had been comprised of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings. The Carpathian Design Institute team, which included female architects like Doina Marilena Ciocănea and Ileana Tureanu, continued working on the project for decades after Ceaușescu’s fall in 1989.
Architects like Delavrancea openly (even if unsuccessfully) protested the demolition of historic monuments. Moreover, despite the demolition of historic neighborhoods and districts, the Directorate of Historic Monuments (DMI) was tasked with preserving the country’s cultural heritage through restoration. Architectural historians who graduated from the Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture, such as Rodica Manciulescu and Ioana Grigorescu, received positions at the DMI to contribute to this endeavor.
In 1989, Romanian state-socialism came to a violent and abrupt end when Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were assassinated in the course of popular uprising.
Footnotes:
Sources
Derer, Peter, “Architektur und Denkmalschutz in posttotalitären Rumänien,” ICOMOS – Hefte des Deutschen Nationalkomitees, Vol. 12 (1993). DOI: https://doi.org/10.11588/ih.1993.0.22571
Feuerstein, Marcia and Milka Bliznakov, “New Acquisitions: Women Architects in Romania,” IAWA (International Archive of Women in Architecture) Newsletter, Fall 2000, Nr. 12: 2-4. Available online: https://iawacenter.aad.vt.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IAWA-Newsletter-Vol.-12-2000.pdf
Lazăr, Mihaela, and Marilena Negulescu, “Romanian Women Architects în Preserving Cultural Heritage” in Seražin, Helena, Emilia Garda, and Caterina Franchini, eds., Women’s Creativity since the Modern Movement (1918-2018): Toward a New Perception and Reception. Ljubljana: MoMoWo, 2018, 311-320.
Maxim, Juliana, The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture: Bucharest, 1949-1964 (London: Routledge, 2019).
Niculae, Raluca Livia, “Architecture, a career option for women? Romania case,” Review of Applied Socio- Economic Research, Volume 4, Issue 2/ 2012. Available online: http://reaser.eu/RePec/rse/wpaper/22_Niculae_Reaser4_170-180.pdf
Vais, Dana, “Architects Displaced: Making Architecture at the Periphery in Communist Romania,” Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference of the European Architectural History Network, ed. by Andres Kurg and Karin Vicente (Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Arts, 2018), 126-136. Available online: https://eahn.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/EAHN2018-Tallinn-Proceedings.pdf
