It’s said that Bucharest, the city where I live, is one of the most architecturally important cities in Europe. In the 1920s and 1930s waves of young Romanians studied architecture in France and came back to fill the city with modernist gems. When people visit these days they tend to have their eyes caught only by the communist-era concrete Brutalist edifices. This is partly because the surviving modernist pieces are often tucked away in areas visitors tend not to go. It’s also because age – along with the enormous increase in car ownership over recent years – has obscured the simple angular beauty of those inter-war architects’ vision for a new Bucharest. When you look at old postcards or photos of the city like the one above, though, you sometimes catch a glimpse of what they once had in mind for the city.
