A school of architecture has to answer the question its own building asks. In Bucharest the answer was decided before the first class: the house itself is the manifesto.
At a glance
The Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism occupies the whole block between Strada Academiei, Strada Edgar Quinet and Strada Biserica Enei in central Bucharest. The original building went up between 1916 and 1927 to designs by Grigore Cerchez, and it is a registered historical monument. Extensions in the 1960s and 1970s produced the complex that stands today. The school has carried the name of the architect Ion Mincu since 1953.
Key facts
- Architect: Grigore Cerchez
- Built: 1916–1927 (one Bucharest guide gives 1912–1927)
- Status: registered historical monument
- Extensions: 1960s and 1970s
- Site: the whole block between Academiei, Edgar Quinet and Biserica Enei streets
- Named after Ion Mincu: since 1953
- Library: founded 1912 from donations by the school’s first professors, including the personal collections of Ion Mincu and Grigore Cerchez
- Museum: a museum of Romanian architectural history has operated here since 1982
- GPS: 44.4362, 26.1004 · Open in Google Maps
History
Romania spent the decades either side of 1900 deciding what its architecture should look like. Ion Mincu, who died in 1912, had argued for a national style drawn from Romanian building rather than from Paris, and the school that would teach it needed a house.
The building was raised between 1916 and 1927 to the design of Grigore Cerchez, who belonged to the same argument. It was meant to be read as a statement: a new School of Architecture that would itself be a manifesto of the national style then being formed. In 1953 the school took Mincu’s name.
The complex grew. Extensions through the 1960s and 1970s filled out the block, so that what you see from the street is the original front with later building behind and beside it. The library is older than the building: it was founded in 1912 out of donations from the school’s first professors, and it holds the personal collections of Mincu and Cerchez themselves. Since 1982 there has also been a museum of Romanian architectural history on the premises.
The national style
What Romanians call the neo-Romanian style, and what some writers call Brâncovenesc after the early-eighteenth-century court architecture it borrows from, takes its arcades, its loggias and its carved stone from Wallachian churches and princely houses. Cerchez’s loggia here echoes the Mogoșoaia Palace, built outside Bucharest in 1702. Putting that language on a school of architecture was not decoration: it was the curriculum, stated in stone before any student arrived.
What you see
A monumental front of classical symmetry, with a deep arcaded loggia at its centre and a façade carried by heavy sculpted decoration. The classical plan and the Romanian ornament are both deliberate, and the tension between them is the point of the building.
Sources & resources
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