Night Lights Light Nights Of Bucharest
Sometimes glowing colorfully in the dusk air, as doors of museums open up for late visitors, or, some other times, its dark sky flushed by lasers for white nights of entertainment, Bucharest often begins to live and breathe anew after sundown. White NightsNow that the
Tranquillity
Is every city like this? I’m standing on my balcony, looking down onto a busy car park where a space costs €8 per day. The car alarms are beeping, howling and wailing. It spreads like a virus down the street. Nobody seems to mind. Young men and women stand around in
Organized Noise
A fiend with a multitude of mouths, which beget sounds that range from hissing to groaning, as it becomes every respectable monster – this is today's Bucharest, not only a city with traffic, alarms, and decibels of construction sites, but also a place with voices.
Condemned To Noise
Newspapers have recently brought to us the information that Bucharest is one of the noisiest cities in Europe. When it comes to bad things, few people do a better job than us at reaching the superlative. As far as I am concerned, I did not need the press to identify the
The Town Within The Town
Government Palace in Victoriei Sq. a fragment from the novel Derapaj (Skid), Iaşi, Polirom 2006 Maria’s life glowed with a murky sort of splendor, her past, though committed to oblivion, constantly closing in on her and obscuring her thoughts like the spots of a solar
Honest Thieves
I once saw some Romanian thieves on a bus in Rome and I thought they're just bad publicity for us, but every cloud has its silver lining: maybe this way we'll get rid of them, maybe they'll go and steal from richer people. A cop confirmed that over the past
Who’s Left In Bucharest
The house painter. He has a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and his appetite for work is equal to nothing. His torn t-shirt doesn't give you any clue on the fee he will demand at the end of the day after slothfully varnishing a wall which can neither resist nor
The Construction Of Saint Joseph’s Cathedral
Red bricks are the distinctive feature of this construction, next to the white rosette, a huge round window above the main portal: thereby, the reader has most certainly recognized the Archbishopric of Saint Joseph's Cathedral. It is one of the landmark buildings in
“I Think We Are Committing Suicide”
New police station on L. Catargiu St. and Architects' Order on A. Verona St. An interview by Eugen Istodor with Şerban Sturdza, Chairman of the Order of Architects Lesson: how we can bend the lawReporter: I would like to start from a very concrete thing: we are at
Bughettorest
Just another day in Bucharest, in the year 2006, in summer. My friend, an architect, who accompanies me on my visit to a “bedroom suburb”, feels shivers down his spine. Maybe it is because he doesn’t like “the poetry of concrete”. Or maybe he has a problem with
Mitica Is Dead
Revolution Square Last time when Bucharest was flooded, when in some districts the water rose as high as half of the Dacia car parked on the sidewalk, none of the Romanian reporters or newscasters failed to draw a comparison between our capital and a “European” one.
L. P.
Athenaeum and CEC Palace on Calea Victoriei We like to refer to the “exterior” whenever we analyze local problems and the present day situation in our country can only prove us right. Starting with the ambition of political Europeanization and ending with the famous