The building as an urban garden: A possible scenario for Bucharest: Fid-Bau Portal

The building as an urban garden: A possible scenario for Bucharest

Dabija, Ana-Maria

Situated on the banks of the Dâmbovița River, Bucharest has a millenary history but is known as an urban settlement for over five hundred and fifty years. It was the capital of Walachia since the XIV-th century and became the capital of the Romanian United Principalities in 1862. It was a patriarchal community, where agriculturists were mingling with wine growers, furriers with brick makers, saddlers with merchants from Leipzig. In fact, although the crafts disappeared in time, they remained as street names, in the historic part of the city: The Vineyards Way, The Agriculturists Street, the Saddlers Street and so on. Houses of the local nobility were situated on the main street, the Mogoșoaia Bridge (indeed a bridge, as it was all covered with wooden planks, leading from the Mogoșoaia Palace, in the country, to the Court of the prince, on the riverbanks). Surrounded by orchards, these ”courts” - buildings, spaces and inhabitants - were a mixture of oriental and occidental source, as was in fact the whole settlement. As the United Principalities grew into the modern kingdom of Romania, administrative buildings were constructed, to accommodate the new functions of the state. At the turn of the Century, Bucharest was referred to as The Little Paris, with a specific Romanian architecture but also with beautiful examples of Classicist architecture, Art Nouveau and later, in the 1930s, with Modernist residential buildings with Romanian stylistic particularities.Slowly the meadows disappeared, while the brick, concrete and asphalt took over more and more of the green side of a city that was wounded also by earthquakes, wars and large-scale demolitions. Sometime, in 1939, a Romanian historian¹ wrote about Bucharest the following: ”We live in a city that we don’t understand and therefore we don’t know how to take care of and often we move towards development lines that should always have been strange, mining, thus, our current additions and transformations, that character that, despite lacks and negligence, made it likable once to the visiting foreigners”.Almost one century later, the statement still stands: we still don’t seem to understand (or appreciate) this city that, despite our indifference or bad decisions, still has elegance and style. And is still likable to the visiting foreigners. The paper focuses on some possibilities that may provide benefits at the scale of the building as well as on the city scale, if vegetation is used as a building component.