History

Paul Gottereau (1843–1926) was a French architect who made his career largely in Romania, where he arrived in the 1870s and worked for nearly five decades producing institutional buildings for the new Romanian Kingdom. His clients included the Romanian royal family, the National Bank, and various ministries. The CEC commission came in the mid-1890s, when the savings bank — founded in 1864 by Alexandru Ioan Cuza’s government as a modernising financial institution for small depositors — required a headquarters that would project the security and permanence of the institution to its customers.

Gottereau’s solution was a direct adaptation of the French Second Empire / Third Republic institutional idiom: a building that communicates stability through the weight of its stone, its classical orders, and the rational clarity of its composition, while reserving the centrepiece — the iron-and-glass dome — for the most theatrical possible expression of the banking hall beneath. The construction phase was supervised by the Romanian architect Ion Socolescu, and the building opened in 1900 at a final cost of 30 million lei — a considerable sum that reflected the ambition of the project.

In the twentieth century the building survived the political upheavals that transformed Bucharest around it: the royal period, the fascist interlude, the communist era (during which the CEC continued to operate as a state savings institution), and the post-1989 privatisation era. It was listed as a historic monument and continues in its original function as the CEC Bank’s central office.