Valentin Mandache, architectural historian

Considerations on the built heritage of southeast Europe

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Tag: Royal Jubilee Exhibition

Bucharest mosque

28/02/201210/03/2016Valentin Mandache

The mosque of Bucharest, 1906 — The oldest mosque of Bucharest: built for the Great Royal Jubilee Exhibition of 1906, removed to Eroii Revolutiei area in 1959-'60.

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Bucharest, Ecclesiastical Bucharest, Great Exhibition of 1906, iPhone Photo, Mosque, Royal Jubilee Exhibition 2 Comments

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Is this a mosque? No, it is an Ottoman church, dating from the Tulip Period, in the first part of the 18th c Ottoman Empire, of the Ottoman baroque and rococo. This is the 1724 Stavropoleos church in Bucharest, in Wallachia, one of the very few places in the Islamic empire of Istanbul, where the locals were allowed to build new places of worship. #wallachianstyle #wallachian #wallachia #bucharest #tulipperiod #ottomanarchitecture #southeasteurope #balkans #valentinmandache

Interesting: a veteran participant at my architectural tours has counted the number of buildings shown and discussed on the route of Berthelot - Cazzavillan area tour: 69. I believe roundabout that number, between 65-75 buildings, are examined on average at each of my tours, over a span of 2- 2.5 hours. That is a lot of architectural history and also social and economic history hidden within those walls, good enough to reveal at full magnitude, even for new visitors, the identity of the town. #architecturaltour #architecturalhistory #architecturalguide #tourguide #bucharest #southeasteurope #balkans #casedeepoca #valentinmandache

Traces of the WWII bombing raids over Bucharest: a direction indicator to the bomb shelter in the hallway of an apartment block (Cișmigiu area) and a DIY family bomb shelter in the garden of a house in Cazzavillan area. In the 1940s everyone bombed Bucharest, initially the Russians, then USAF and RAF, finishing with Luftwaffe in 1944. The war in Ukraine now being next door, these relics are constant reminders that places like Bucharest are highly exposed to this sort of upheavals. #bombing #bombshelter #bucharest #1940s #wwii #southeasteurope #balkans #casedeepoca #valentinmandache

The Mediterranean style had a fulminant development in Bucharest after the Great Depression until the WWII including, on the prosperity background generated by the massive oil exports of Romania and later becoming the main oil supplier for the Nazi Germany’s war machine. Its origins are in a quirky synthesis of the influence of the Hollywood movies and their actor celebrities’ residencies in California inspired from the Spanish colonial architecture (Mission style, etc), and the receptivity for those designs among the wealthy from Bucharest’s Jewish Sephardic community, reminding them of the old fatherland, from whose the fashion spread to the other Bucharesters. The Mediterranean, Hollywood origin, architecture phenomenon, is thus perhaps most ample in Europe in a place like Romania. #mediterranean #architecture #bucharest #1930s #balkans #southeasteurope #casedeepoca #valentinmandache

The colours of Ottoman Bucharest: it used to be a “calico” town until the Europeanisation process of the national era of the 1860s onwards, decorated in an exuberance of colours, typical of the empire of Istanbul, a fact mentioned in the writings of many foreign travellers. Reminders of that are now far and few between, except some weathered Wallachian style church walls, and some houses, such as this colour reconstruction form Victoria Sq area. #colour #housedecoration #bucharest #ottomanempire #ottomanbucharest #southeasteurope #balkans #casedeepoca #valentinmandache

The Roman and Mongol empires at their greatest extent. Here is a good cultural geography illustration of an articulation point between civilisations: the place where I am based, indicated by the green arrow, called now Romania, which is at the hinge between the two geohistorical areas. This situation on the ground can well be observed and charted through the history of the local architecture, where there are influences from all over Europe, Mediterranean, Middle East, Persia, India and further afield. I like the thought that once, what is now Romania and parts of Vietnam were encompassed within same polity, the Mongol Empire. #geohistory #geopolitics #casedeepoca #valentinmandache

The evolution of the economic prosperity and purchasing power in Romania seen in the size and accoutrements of Neo-Romanian style houses. On the left hand side is a small national style house from the 1910s (built on an extended footprint of a previous wagon type Little Paris house), when the economy was based on grain production and exports, and very little industry, while the one on right, much ampler, better designed and provided with decorations and modern mod-cons, is built in the 1930s, when the economy was based on oil production and exports (one of the largest producers in the world then), agriculture as well as industry and a large internal market. What a # difference twenty years of evolution can make, much faster than nowadays! Cotroceni quarter, Bucharest. #neoromanian #economichistory #cotroceni #bucharest #balkans #southeasteurope #casedeepoca #valentinmandache

A problem of style diagnosis for some of the 1900-1916 built houses of Bucharest. That is the era of the early Neo-Romanian, when the national style was still finding its coordinates and the previous Ottoman architecture was still echoing powerfully in the new designs, but it was also a period of Orientalist fashions in visual arts. In my opinion those houses difficult to diagnose, such as the examples presented here, are an overlap, mix, convergence between the early Neo-Romanian and Orientalism. One of the main promoters of the design was the architect Ioan N Socolescu. #stylediagnosis #neoromanian #orientalism #bucharest #1900s #balkans #southeasteurope #casedeepoca #valentinmandache

Imaginative adaptation of a Diocletian window into a Neo-Romanian style one, of a 1930s built house in Romana area of Bucharest. Today there would be impossible to make such an artefact in Romania: the symbolism knowledge and technological knowhow are lost after communism and post-communism, there is a complete lack of imagination characterising the “designers” (so-called architects), and there are not craftsmen around, an intellectual desert. #neoromanian #diocletianwindow #bucharest #1930s #balkans #southeasteurope #casedeepoca #valentinmandache

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Contact Valentin Mandache: telephone 0040 728 323 272, v.mandache@gmail.com

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