One of the most important characteristics of socialist urban dwelling is the withdrawal in the private space of the house, irrespective of the context as such. The public space of the totalitarian state is a space of control, rule-imposition and, as much as possible, of the repression of individual manifestations and of any type of free relations. Most forms of resistance of the society developed in the relatively protected space of the house. They appeared here and there, within the private space of people?s houses: in any case, a space of family and friends, a space of intimacy, of trust and relative freedom, hosting at the same time activities that tried to compensate an increasingly reduced urban offer.

During the forty-five years of the socialist regime, Bucharest?s houses divided into two essential categories: ?new? blocks of flat (the few villas of the nomenclature do not spread over a large area) and houses or ?old? blocks of flats. Given the conditions of an absolute state monopoly in the construction and design fields, the possibility of choice, when it existed, was reduced to these two variants.

Irrespective of the architectural or urban model, the ensembles of blocks have a few essential characteristics: a limited number of types of identical units ? the apartments ? grouped into a limited number of types of buildings  (or ?sections?), then the semi-private spaces of the hallway, of the staircase and of the outbuildings, and finally a space with no clearly defined status (the empty spaces around the blocks, the playground, or a place with no specific destination).

Given the conditions of a draconian standardisation and of a single true client ? the state, the ?transparent? zones are reduced, in principle, to areas receding from the alignment (when these manage to define a space and do not extend only over uncertain portions, without a clear legal status), to the possible marking of the building entrances by covers and to the presence of the balconies and loggias. Real clients being, in fact, absent, in the true sense of the word, all these elements are due rather to architects? efforts to humanise a rigid general structure of an implacable uniformity. The interior yards of the 70s, hesitating between the model of open town planning and the classical semi-public yards do not manage to define a particularised space. The only exceptions are the Stalinist ?building units?, that continue, to a different scale and in a much more rigid way, the previous logic of the clearly delimited yards, still communicating with the street space.