It is precisely this interior, the ?heart? of the block that does not exist or that significantly opens to the exterior, in the case of Bucharest?s urban tissue. For the buildings that actually do not have important open glass surfaces (and that do not ?show? very much of what is going on inside), these private spaces that opened to the public space serve as filters and as thresholds to and from the town, they seem to protect and, at the same time, to valorize the acces into the house.

In Bucharest, the intermediary areas belonging to the lots are continued with, or in the case of a highly populated zone that imposed a closed regime along with the elimination of the yards, compensated by intermediary spaces that constitute an important part of the buildings. We have previously mentioned them: partial receding areas ? mostly covered, recesses, ?marquises? and covers, verandas, loggias, balconies and bow-windows, etc. This category of elements is always present, in various forms, and also includes functional or purely decorative construction elements (advanced gutters, windowsills and other ornaments) suggesting spatial layers, that leave one with the impression of a certain depth of the ?skin? of the house.

All these elements (out of which, none is ?typically Romanian?, as such,), whose overlapping enriches the limit between personal and community space, spread over most of the urban space and enjoy a continuity in time, beyond styles and construction epochs; they represent much more than means of ?enlivening a construction?. We cannot speak of a mixture of territories, whose delimitation is, in fact, very topical, even if symbolic. The building?s ?crevasses? and ?outgrowths? rather indicate a particular way of reciprocal ?contamination? of the private and the public space (a characteristic of any urban community). All the layers that ensure the passage toward a protected interior have a personalising, especially representational, exposing role that attenuates itself function of how far one can see into the house from the outside. To a certain extent, they belong to the public space. In its turn, this acquires ?a certain private? character, through mechanisms of appropriation and tacit identification.

It is especially true for certain types of space that articulate basic urban units ? namely, the ensembles formed of buildings and the building lots they occupy - with the global scale of the town. The dilations and the alveoli so specific to Bucharest?s urban space make up a first layer of manifestation of some particular social relations; but the main urban space that mediates this passage between individual space and the town?s global order is the street.