Planning Capital Cities

Shifts. A brief history of public plazas in central Bucharest

Fig. 3
The Palace building, 1846 (left)
St. Sava School and Monastery
ensemble, 1846 (right).
(Duda)

architects educated abroad, for the design of its public plazas and buildings.

Many, if all, proposals integrated symbols of Romania’s Latin origins, while

the architectural expression of the buildings and the spatiality of urban space

followed neo-classical composition rules.

Decisions of implementation were taken by private entities, donating private

space for public use and development, or by political and administrative

committees. Nevertheless, the consequences of building representative

buildings, such as institutions, or tracing connecting boulevards are only

foreseen locally, and sometimes even ignored. Theoretical urban principles

were imported, and urban legislation kept pace with their being implemented,

by improvisation and adaptation.

The newly appointed Palace Plaza soon rised up to its name: the King requests

Paul Gottereau to build him the quarters for a University Foundation facing

his main balcony, in order to encourage local students to pursue further

studies. As the Foundation facade mirrors the concave retreat of the Palace,

the dynamics between the facing buildings is mediated by the Palace Plaza.

Supporting the educational function of the Foundation, and contributing to the

representative character of the plaza, the first public building of Bucharest gets

built out of donated public funds, on a piece of land donated by the Church: the

Romanian Athenaeum. The Plaza receives its last delimiting buildings during

the early 1900s: the Commercial Academy and Nation’s Bank, are both built

to coherently follow the lead of the Foundation’s expression and volume. All

groundfloors were commercial and opened to public use.

The Academy was inaugurated in 1869, having been designed by A. Orascu on the

footprint of the former St. Sava School. The former inner garden was preserved as