Being in Lepsa, on the watercourse of Putna, the Tisaru Inn is one of those houses of which you can’t say much, because the architect made sure that it would say everything. For the success of the architectural rhetoric it has been awarded with the debut prize of the Order of Architects at the Architecture Biennial in Bucharest 2003. For the same reason probably, the architect author, Mihai Nuta, limited himself to lapidary phrases on the presentation panel, suggesting only key-directions for reading the project. The result has thus been outlined in a tribute to the landscape, materials and tradition. Formally, it processed the typology of the peasant fortifications, with a centripetal orientation, an opaque enclosure towards the exterior and open towards the inner court, keeping a single communication direction with the landscape, oriented to the major element – the abrupt valley of Putna. Apart from these, the images are fragmentarily cut up of deep windows, with the pulling holes, which direct the perception towards painting details, the landscape which can be fractalically recomposed of allusive successions. The silhouette of the neighboring massif, trivial in a free perspective, is reaffirmed in dynamic sequences, kaleidoscopic, the profoundness conferring them mystery and the impression that they belong to a different reality. Not only at the level of perception, the space orientates and imposes rules, but also functionally and behaviorally, folding a certain type of inhabiting.
PROIECT, FOTO: MIHAI NUTA
TEXT: SILVIA GUGU

Preceded by the immense lawn and perfumed by the grass as well as by an orchard. In front: fountain, big terrace with wooden furniture made of a single trunk. It is a white construction with red roof. It develops into the ground floor and the garreted first floor. A residential space, spacious, placed kindly in the profoundness of a balanced planted terrain. A terrain located in the quietness of a space sufficiently close, but also far enough from what wishes to be individualized. The space thus defined and obtained is a carefully remodeled interior universe and decorated by the architect herself. The theme of the interior arrangement of the house is almost minimal, based on natural furnishing materials using a limited number of colors, well defined in tones. Implicitly, the way the country house is inhabited is directly, simply and expressed in a comfortable polichromy.
PROIECT: ANDA HOBAI, FABRIZIO RUFFINI
TEXT: FRANÇOISE PAMFIL
FOTO: ADRIAN CIOCAZANU

The sumptuous entrance of the George Enescu museum, shaded by the huge cover in strained-glass window, in the most authentic Art Nouveau style, announced that here luxury, richness and refinement of the époque have met in order to raise on the Mogosoaiei Bridge of yesterday or the Calea Victoriei of today, one of the most brilliant and imposing palaces in Bucharest at the time, the Cantacuzino palace. In order to satisfy his vainglory of having the most grandiose house in Bucharest, the old Cantacuzino (chief of the Conservative Party, and for a short period of time even prime-minister of the country) called the most en-vogue artists of the time: the young architect Ion D. Berindei, the first rank figure of the Romanian architecture and urbanism, the painters G.D. Mirea, Nicolae Vermont and Costin Petrescu (for the interior mural decorations), the architect Emil Wilhelm Becker (for the exterior sculptures and ornaments), and the Krieger House in Paris for the tapestry, chandeliers, lamps, strained-glass windows etc. So, if the history of the George Enescu museum begins in 1958, along with the first International ‘George Enescu’ Festival, the history of the Cantacuzino palace begins somewhere before, towards the end of the 19th century (1898-1900), when the architect Ion D. Berindei was accepting the project. Just returned from the studies in Paris, where, at the highest School of Fine Arts he had as professors H. Daume, Gh. Girault and Esquite, the young architect was already famous: he had built, two years earlier, another sumptuous residence, the house of General Arion on the Lascar Catargiu Boulevard at no. 15. The eclectism of his works, dominated by the French styles from the 18th century, but containing also modern elements, of the Art Nouveau conception, will have its imprint on the Cantacuzino palace as well, in the ensemble composition as well as in the solution of the decoration, on the exterior and on the interior.
TEXT: SIMONA NASTAC
FOTO: SERBAN BONCIOCAT

‘I like the space not be crowded and to have a rhythm between empty and full. The stove of the house in Bucharest has been thought as an object in itself, with my sigils – the bird and the fish. I don’t collect object of folk art. I like the white plaster wall, ceiling and the wooden floor. When I have recently purchased the house in Bucharest, on the Virgil Plesoianu street, I tried building the space around a ‘pazio’, starting from the model of the Melic house, which seems to me as one of the most beautiful houses in Bucharest and which is conceived for this city. In the center of the house, in the inner court, two pear trees were growing and I had a hard time convincing the workers not to cut them. I was convinced they belonged there; besides, the house also had a memory of the one who made it, I couldn’t come and alter his order, though I intervened in the construction’. ‘The architect must try to educate somehow the others about the way in which a house and its interior should look like. Because, unfortunately, the houses of those who afford to build them up are almost uninhabited, a useless space is built so that once in five years they would have the room to receive their friends. The architect should try to make this dance between the execution of the work and not giving in to the lack of taste that rules. We don’t have laws for that, because you don’t build in any way a house and the space around it’.
INTERVIU: OANA TANASE
FOTO: NICU ILFOVEANU, SORIN ILFOVEANU