Bucharest. Articulations between personal space and community space

Among the elements that define the image of the antebellic Bucharest, as it appears in most descriptions and comments, and as it was kept in the predominant current discourse on the city, we should mention ?the town of extreme contrasts? ? confusing mixture of scales and styles, then the ?green? and ?open? city, closely related to an ?agglomeration of villages?.

We must admit that the mixture of highly populated zones with others of rural type (actually, peculiar to freely developed towns, in the absence of some fortifications that determine a high density of the constructions and a homogeneous occupation of the territory), characterised the city before the fundamental transformations of the modern period and left its mark on its development. But, the disconcerting eclecticism, which is not devoid of a certain charm of its own, displayed by practically most streets from the town centre is due not so much to the individualism and the indiscipline of the dwellers (although we have plenty of such examples), as to the overlapping on the same territory, for more than a century, of the traditional town and of the constructions built according to the rules of successive building regulations[ii]. All those rules had as purpose the gradual replacement of the old urban space with a modern unitary and harmonious town, through the control of the individual enterprise. Due especially to the lack of resources and of the accelerated evolution of construction theories and methods, none of the ?visions? concerning Bucharest has been entirely put into practice. And all these have been adapted, entering a process of inevitable negotiation with an existent lot structure and of the ways of construction, as well as with the mechanisms of the private property.

As to the ?town submerged in verdure?, it needs to be said that the public gardens of the town do not extend over a larger area than in most European capitals. The image is especially due to the greenery in the private yards that can usually be seen from the street. The gaps in the structure of the built front, the parts receding from the frontline, the open yards, define a variety of spaces that need to be traversed in order to enter the blocks, thus permitting the existence of some zones that mediate the relation between the construction and the public space.

There is indeed a certain type of design of the building lot, that evolved starting from a rural origin (the isolated house in the middle of the yard). But the perpetuation of this model should be further looked into, because the persistency of some traditional elements is associated with the configuration of an urban model with particular characteristics.