The Neo-Romanian style garden architecture is a bit of a Cinderella among the various design branches in which this order is expressed, although in my opinion is one of the most interesting offshoots of the Romanian national style. A good example in that regard is the garden bench presented in the image above, which I photographed in Cotroceni historic quarter of Bucharest during one of my recent architectural walking tours there. It is practically part of the building, enlivening its garden façade, linking seamlessly edifice and nature. The outlines of the bench are inspired from the shape of princely thrones found in the medieval Ottoman Balkan world. It is quite possible that the garden was also provided with a gazebo in the past decades, such as the one which I documented at this link, which presumably made that space a splendid green corner, so much in tone with the identity of old Bucharest.
I could not resist the temptation to post some images reflecting the heavy snowfall affecting Bucharest this winter. Cismigiu Park is Bucharest’ oldest city centre park, laid out in its present state in the mid-1900s by the Austrian landscape architect Friedrich Rebhun, famous as the designer of many public and private gardens in Romania of that period. Then, the park had two main design themes: a formal French inspired garden and a ‘natural state’ English garden style sector. Subsequently, the park had acquired a series of smaller sections in a diversity of styles. The snowy bust statues from the collage I made above were put in place in 1943 and represent the classics of Romanian literature (Duiliu Zamfirescu, Alexandru Vlahuţă, Ion Creangă, Ştefan Octavian Iosif, Ion Luca Caragiale, Titu Maiorescu, Alexandru Odobescu, Mihai Eminescu, Vasile Alecsandri, Nicolae Bălcescu, Bogdan Petriceicu Haşdeu and George Coşbuc). They are sculpted in Carrara marble, a gift from Italy, a wartime Axis ally of Romania. In 1943 the war was still quite far away from the country, in the steppes of Russia, but the change of fortunes for Romania as a Nazi ally was already felt in the air, especially after the Stalingrad disaster where the country lost probably over 150,000 (!) soldiers. The statues are an expression of the nationalism of the period and part of the effort of the authorities to stir up patriotism among the locals. The statues are quite run of the mill type, nothing approaching sculptural masterworks, in a style combining some vague Art Deco elements and stern fascist Mussolinian lines. They are quite picturesque nowadays, arranged in a park circle, surrounded by rich vegetation, a real delight for contemporary Bucharest people, who are mostly oblivious about the quite dramatic history of these statues.
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I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
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If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
The image above shows one of the guest houses from within the grounds of Scroviste royal palace, on the shore of Snagov lake. It is a design combining the peasant house and Neo-Romanian architectures within a peculiar Arts and Crafts matrix (see my earlier post on Romanian Arts and Crafts architecture for details). The house has a ground floor pergola made from wooden poles carved with ethnographic motifs. Similar type carved poles adorn the extended first floor veranda. The palace gardens were landscaped by Fr. Rebhun, a talented and prolific Austrian landscape architect, very active in Romania in those decades, with many completed royal and public park commissions (Royal Pelesh Castle gardens, Cismigiu Park in central Bucharest, etc.) . What I like in this instance in terms of landscape architecture is the pergola with climbing roses, the house nestled between two imposing trees and the peasant stone stone cross at the base of the right hand tree, which together with the wonderful architecture of the house and its special location on the shore of a prairie lake constitute a metaphor of the Romanian peasant life and country’s natural landscape, an excellent product of those very creative decades of early c20th in this country.
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I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
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If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
Valentin Mandache, architectural historian 