The central park of Bucharest, Cismigiu, contains a number of memorials of past personalities that imprinted the city's history. The monument dedicated to Smaranda Gheorghiu (1857 -1944), or Maica Smara, how she was known among her contemporaries, is one of the very few that exhibits Art Deco elements. I believe the statue was erected sometimes in the 1940s, or even the following decade, as a tribute, probably after her death. Maica Smara was active among the nascent women's rights movement in this conservative country in south east Europe. She was well known in Romania as a literary figure and traveller reaching even North Cape in Norway in her peregrinations, not a mean fact for a Romanian woman of the late c19th and the early c20th periods. The name "Maica Smara" literally means "mother Smara[nda]", given as a compliment for her educational work and as a writer of children stories and poems.
The most prominent Art Deco element of the monument, which is the creation of the sculptor Mihai Onofrei, is the bronze bas-relief at its base showing two school children. The boy and the girl are represented reading and respectively writing attentively passages from Maica Smara's stories. I especially like the flamboyant flower motif on the left hand side area of the panel, which conveys the serenity and natural world described in this personality's literary creations, some of which I read and listened to during my childhood.
Another Art Deco element of note is exemplified by the three retreating steps at the base of the monument, illustrating the rule of three typical of this style.
Image from last Sunday's walking tour which I organised in Gradina Icoanei area of Bucharest. It is a wall lamp representing a fearsome dragon, which through the fire flames billowing out of its mouth suggest its role as a light appliance, acting also as the symbolic protector of the family living in that house. The artefact and the building are designed in what I term as the fairytale castle style architecture, popular in Bucharest and other large Romanian towns during the prosperous period of the late 1930s.
This is an original name board of a small shoe repair shop in Bucharest, which dates probably from the years of the Second World War. The lettering style is very evocative of that historical watershed period for the city and Romania in general. For me it suggests the streets of the city during the hot August 1944 days, when King Michael broke the disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany, arrested the pro-German dictator and joined the allied cause, saving the country from a looming catastrophic punishment invasion by the Red Army.
I would like to present you what in my opinion is the most flamboyant doorway in what I call the fairytale castle style that flourished in Bucharest during the prosperous second part of the 1930s. That architecture was developed at a time when many businesspeople got rich quick from country's large oil and grain exports. The fairytale castle style is a variation of a more inclusive design, the Mediterranean style that emerged in those years, which is inspired from romanticised Mediterranean models of that era, such as Florentine, Venetian, Spanish or Arabic, also often mixed together with Neo-Romanian motifs. That type of architecture is also erroneously called "Moorish" in locally published Romanian tourist and cultural guides, although is does not have much to do with that particular architectural current. The aspect and message of that design is, in my view, quite frivolous, Disney-like, in tone with the easy money sloshing around in the late 1930s Bucharest.
The massive wooden doorway is flanked by two stone columns modelling palm trees, decorated on their trunk with fleur-de-lis, aspirational symbols for nobleness and high status. The ornamental keystone of the door arch opening contains the monogram of the proprietor, a "T" letter.
The column capitals suggest a palm tree's foillage, crowned by stern looking sphinxes holding medieval knight shields between their stumpy and impressively clawed forelegs.
The door itself is made from panels of heavy essence wood (probably oak), adorned with crusader shield basreliefs. The rivets that pepper the rails between panels suggest the entrance of a fortified castle from the times of yore.
The doorway assembly is thus very suggestive about the mentality and way of life of a part of the Romanian elite in the inter-war period, which was wiped out not long after by the Second World War and the four decades of communist dictatorship that followed.
This is a rare architectural history find: a Neo-Romanian style garden gazebo. I know of just three other such examples throughout Bucharest, one of them documented on this blog at the following link. The structure dates, looking at its tell tale features, from the first part of the 1930s (what I call the late phase of the Neo-Romanian style) and in all probability was preceded by a pavilion in the Little Paris (what I term the local architecture inspired from French c19th historicist styles) or another pre-Great War design. The reason I am supposing that is because the construction sits within the courtyard of a Little Paris house dating form the 1900s, betrayed in this photograph by clamshell awning peculiar of that era, visible in the upper right corner area. The garden pavilion, even in the ramshackle condition in which is found now, conveys the beautiful semi-rural atmosphere of old patriarchal Bucharest, a flash back image of the pleasant city which once was, before the industrialization of the communist era and overpopulation and neglect occasioned by the wild economic boom and bust cycles of the 2000s.
I was quite pleased to encounter this clean Art Deco – Modernist design doorway dating from the second part of the 1930s Bucharest. I believe that the contemporary choice of colours (dark red and blueish white) largely follows the original scheme. That reminds me of the fashion in Bauhaus and Modernist International styles of employing primary colours in decoration (a case in point is Mondrian's influence on those currents). I played around with a number of colour filters to highlight even more the pleasing to the eye proportions of this assembly, a proof of the good quality architecture performed in inter-war period Bucharest; the photomontage bellow shows a few of those colour filtered photographs.