out that for the next decades, up until the 1970’s, the urban development ideas
would come via soviet professional literature and even direct counseling, while
the local original theoretical corpus was rather timid.
The “socialist reconstruction of Bucharest” was a collection of ambitious
ideas about a socialist town, yet lacking large-scale strategic thinking, radically
opposed to its former representation role as seat of the monarch. There were
many reasons for a delay in producing a first urban plan for a socialist realist
Bucharest, including the 1952 reorganization of the architectural profession
and economic restraints. Fact is that there are no large-scale interventions
from the socialist realist period in Bucharest, only local and mostly discreet
ones, built until towards the end of the 1950’s.
The return to modernist principles, advocated for by the new USSR general
secretary Nikita Khrushchev, was a more visible period in the urban development
of Bucharest. A temporary economic equilibrium reached after the war, an
ever so slight attempt at detaching from Moscow, a stronger professional
milieu designing in a style they preferred (modernism is recognizable, though
not named as such), all these point towards a new episode of synchronization
to Western urbanism. It is the time of large scale housing ensembles,
representative squares and new boulevards. The scale and extent of the
interventions (not only in Bucharest, but also the rest of the country) prompt
a change in the urban design instrument, in 1959 - enter the “systematization
sketch”: a simplified, politically easy to control and modify regulation method.
The recurring themes of urban planning in Bucharest were, in different
orders and proportions: new housing ensembles and their position in the
city (peripheral or central), the position of industrial developments and
representative urban spaces. Other issues were concerned with the limitation
of the city perimeter and, a favorite theme of the time, erasing the difference
between the city center and the periphery.
Politically, this period spans the final years of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s
position as general secretary and the beginning of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s rule,
before his authoritarian manifestations in the late 1970’s and 1980’s. From the
economic and cultural point of view, this period is regarded as one of relative
liberalization, with some degree of freedom and welfare. The professional
milieu reached a certain maturity that, together with a reasonable level of
information on contemporary architecture, which was available through
publications, led to the expression of critical points of view quite similar to
those circulated in the West.
But all the positive signs one could identify would soon turn to a bleak reality.
Starting from the famous visit Ceauşescu made in China and North Korea in 1971,
the regime became more and more centered on its leader. Ceauşescu himself
got more involved in any decision and urban development of Bucharest was his