Matter

Photos by Dana Nicoleta Blyth After a while, the lions at the zoo start hunting flies, and the dolphins start jumping high even in the smallest swimming pool. No matter how fast he may live his life, sometimes man ends up being happy with less. Unless you have mean inclinations,

top row: around Bishopric St. , Capşa restaurant, Magheru Blvd. , in Cismigiu gardens (see also Them in Gallery) If we take an X-ray of the articles published by the major Romanian dailies, we get an overwhelming abundance of unsettling, grotesque events created by outbursts

Bucharest is a city that is difficult to describe, and difficult is a term that tends to suggest the word impossible. Many of us have probably at least once in our lifetime been in the situation of talking about the city that we live in. And, just as probable, among the

from left: Antiques store on Covaci St. ; National Bank on Lipscani St. ; Victoria department store; Dimbovitza river. The navel of the city: one couldn’t find a better name. There was once an umbilical cord. Through it, Bucur’s shepherds village used to receive, no

1 2 1. Hotel on Victoria Road. The remake of the former National Theatre façade kept this operation away from the attacks against the tall buildings from the historic center. 2. The replacement of the old buildings from Lipscani area. The pseudo-classical pediment and

As I was translating with much esteem Mr. Vintila Mihailescu's text entitled Neo-Western-Supremacism, it suddenly dawned on me: the inyourpocket presentation he discusses, one fascinated with primitive Romania, shows an attitude somewhat similar to that of Englishman

Just another day in Bucharest, in the year 2006, in summer. My friend, an architect, who accompanies me on my visit to a “bedroom suburb”, feels shivers down his spine. Maybe it is because he doesn’t like “the poetry of concrete”. Or maybe he has a problem with

Revolution Square Last time when Bucharest was flooded, when in some districts the water rose as high as half of the Dacia car parked on the sidewalk, none of the Romanian reporters or newscasters failed to draw a comparison between our capital and a “European” one.

Unlike Poles, Czechs or Hungarians, most Romanians were left with something after communism: a home in an apartment building or a house with a front yard, a villa if your father worked for the Securitate (the Romanian secret services), a piece of land or just some land in

Athenaeum and CEC Palace on Calea Victoriei We like to refer to the “exterior” whenever we analyze local problems and the present day situation in our country can only prove us right. Starting with the ambition of political Europeanization and ending with the famous

1st row: National History Museum, Old Court Museum, Archeology Museum (detail), National Museum of Art2nd row: Collections Museum, Zambaccian Museum, Theodor Aman Museum, Gh. Tattarescu Museum 3rd row: Storck Museum, Romanian Peasant Museum, Astronomical Observatory (detail),

Richard Rogers Partnership proposal, 1996People's House (Parliament) After 1989: Methods of researching the built environmentResearching Communist architecture is a tricky endeavor in contemporary Romania, where some major actors of that era are still alive, some even