The designer went for a Pub type arrangement here, with an atmosphere and an architectural language that were warm, friendly, domestic. What else are pubs if not some kind of living rooms where you meet your friends, the only difference being the fact that they are managed by a stranger and not by your wife or mother in law? Anyway, it seems that this type of arrangement fits the Romanian soul; the quite large number of such locales is proof, as well as the success Downtown enjoyed ever since the beginning. It was meant to be domestic itself, not in any way, but in a Victorian way, which we provide with the required quotation marks so that our less pretentious readers may use them. Certainly, some Victoriana elements are to be found, see the precious wallpaper, the scattered mirrors, the golden foil ornaments, a few chandeliers, perhaps even the antique photographs replacing the ancestors' portraits.
TEXT: ARH. BRUNO ANDRESOIU
FOTO: ARH. MIHAI RAICU

The beneficiary was the one who knew, right from the start, what he wanted from this house. There were some preliminary talks, when we drew what he had in mind; as the ideas were interesting, things happened quite smoothly. Together with the beneficiary's ideas, the lot, with its quite beginning in view of a central, polarizer space; the living, which, by its shape and position within the plan, should be accessible to all the spaces which he should, at the same time, rank and distribute fluently. The functionality is structured on the fluidity of the spaces, so that the partial level that encases the living is transformed, in the stairs steep slope, was another compulsory figure. Thus, the volumetric and functional organization materialized from the area, once the direction is changed, into a distribution corridor that leads to a couple of guest bedrooms and a bathroom. Also on the partial level, there is an office benefiting of a plunging image upon the living room through some niches. The final result is a house with a strong and special personality, a mixture of austerity and intimacy. Generally, the beneficiary is the main adversary of the house; in this case, I think that the only adversary is going to be the time.
PROIECT: D'ARHI SRL, CONF. DR. ARH. DAN SERBAN
FOTO: ARH. MIHAI RAICU

The term of bio-architecture identifies an attempt to get close, to get in touch, wholly and globally, with the architectonic conception with classic adjacent designing disciplines as well as with disciplines which, at first sight, have nothing to do with architecture: geology, biology, medicine, physics (the radioactivity of the alternate or static electromagnetic fields or the electrostatic charging of the finishing materials influencing the distribution and the polarization of the ions in the air), the chemistry and the technology of the materials, the feng-shui concept (water-wind), etc, so that a project- OBJECT may be finished and individualized, balanced between the man and the inhabited setting. Such a living unit will be the place to provide serenity for the Spirit, health for the Body, harmony for the Ambient, observing the natural elements"¦ water, air, light, fire, earth, chosen because they are the primary aspects of the evolution and of the development of the Earth's vital cycles. Of course, this is a powerful impact hard to accept and understand by a society of consume and of chaotic waste. It is necessary to re-discuss the constructive techniques or the composition of the materials covering the HOUSE at the moment (considered natural, but they are not) in the name of a possibly accepted future of the planet, of life, and of a new type of architecture, the BIO-ARCHITECTURE.
TEXT: FLORIN-ADY RADULESCU

Full of Oriental scents, related to the large gowns and to the narghiles of the Walachian boyars still uncorrupted by the occidental civilization, with the mysterious odalisques painted by Aman, Bucharest's inns are nowadays more a memory than a presence, with some blessed exceptions who were lucky enough to be restored or re-built and who fit naturally in the city's everyday life. Precincts by excellence, they occurred in the city's most important spots, often surrounding churches. How many of them did not have an inn? The St. Gheorghe Nou, Coltea, St. Dumitru, Cretulescu, Stavropoleos, Razvan, St. Spiridon Vechi churches are just a few examples... It is hard to imagine at the present such closeness, a functioning together of a religious institution with such a worldly building " a real theatre of life in its most authentic form.
TEXT: CODINA DUSOIU

The designers - authors of these arrangements are the couple Mihai and Nadia Popescu. The pictures speak for themselves, so that, in order to complete the created impression, we need to make some notes. It was intervened in a four-piece flat with a new area distribution of the functions, with the goal of obtaining a general logically divided space, including a vast and continuous day sector, and an intimate night one delimited as clearly and efficiently as possible. In order to ensure an easy connection of the people in different areas of this setting, obstructing delimitations were kept to a minimum. Thus, a few separating walls and some useless spaces were removed, some doors were taken out and the initial, standardized destination of some rooms was re-evaluated. The living became the "dinning-room", and one of the bedrooms was transformed into a "living-room". Unavoidably, the endowments and the utilities (gas, water, and toilets) dictated the division of the sectors in view of correlating it with the natural (domestic) activities: the kitchen area now derives from the dinning area, which is next to the living, on its turn.
TEXT: ARH. EVA ROSETTI
FOTO: ARH. MIHAI RAICU

"I told you that, on one hand, I should love Bucharest from the point of view of my origins and because I was born and raised here as a child. But it was chance that made me leave Bucharest, for the first time when I was very, very young, during World War I and come back when I was 4. So I discovered the city when I was only 4 and I have very clear images of a city I found likeable. I can still see Bucharest with its hackneys. Bucharest smelled of manure, not of gasoline like nowadays. When you went out in the street, it smelled of manure. There were still horse-carried tramways; there were many hackneys, but very few cars. I remember I often took trips with my mother to the graveyard, to my father's grave, we had to take a horse-carried tramway, which, at a certain moment, when the road goes up that hill you can still see " when you pass by the Tineretului Park, when you go towards the Belu graveyard " there, the tramway, it stopped at the bottom and the conductor entered a lateral yard and brought two extra horses. The two horses carrying the wagon were not sufficient to pull it up the hill, four horses were needed. I can still see it now. This was Bucharest in the 1920s. Of course, the city developed little by little, but the thing is I was away once again. When I was 12, I became an intern in a High-school in Nice, France. This is where my mentality started to change, around the age of 12-13-14. Every time I came back to Bucharest, I started feeling that our city is not the same with other great Occidental cities. It doesn't have the same alignment, it doesn't have the same side-by-side houses, the atmosphere is different. And it got worse in time".