House Retirement for Artists
of National Theaters and Romanian Operas
The building “House Retirement for Artists of National Theaters and Romanian Operas”, is a representative work of architect Nicolae Cucu. With twentyfive apartments, basement, distributed in four floors, on General Berthelot street, corner with Spiru Haret street it was done in collaboration with Ion Davidescu in 1939 – 1940.
The photo documentary was made on the basement area, the A.L.A. shelter, the ground floor and the representative space of the former “House Retirement for Artists of National Theaters and Romanian Operas”, with the aim of identifying the degradation and changes over time in the interior of the building. In this study we end up discussing the building past with phd arch. Lorand Kinds who made a book about Nicolae’s Cucu works and was tutored by profesor ph.D. arch. Sorin Vasilescu a close relative of the late architect.
In his first “creative period”, from the 30s-40s, you can feel the echoes of the main theoretical debates and practical achievements of Italian modernism, but also German, French or Scandinavian ones, his creations were organically adapted to the Romanian reality, characterized by a own formal repertoire and the constant effort to introduce into constructive practice execution techniques and new materials, specific to modernity. The fusion of these led not to pastiches of Mussolini or European rationalist architecture, but to a personal style, significantly different from that of Duiliu Marcu, Horia Creangă, Bubi Georgescu or Octav Doicescu. The most important achievements in this spirit of an essential classicism and not an expression of a purified neoclassicism, were the Pen House Building of the C.E.C., with a facade on Splaiul Unirii no. 5 and with a totally different facade on Brancoveanu street (today Tonitza no. 11) and that of the Pension House for the artists of Romanian Operas and Dramatic Theatres, with one facade on G-ral Berthelot street and another on Spiru Haret street, built in Bucharest when the author was just over 30 years old .
A text extract from the ph.D:
“Although some formal and compartmentalizing elements of the apartments, some details, the exterior and interior veneers, as well as the general plastic, denote the kinship with the Building in Splaiul Unirii, a normal fact, because they were designed and built almost simultaneously, they are clearly different, thanks to the fact that, unlike the commercial spaces of the edifice in Independence Beach, the ground floor in front of G-ral Berthelot str., made of Nevada glass, was designed as the headquarters of the ” House Retirement for the Artists of National Theaters and Romanian Operas”, and contains next to offices and two large spaces: a library and a performance hall with floors and walls fully covered with Rușchița marble. The facade from G-ral Berthelot street is punctuated by seven smooth columns, which seem to descend stylistically from the colossal Tuscan order. Access to the House Retirement premises is from G-ral Berthelot street through an entrance cut out of the solid that closes the volume, and which only contains the inscription: “House Retirement of the artists of the National Theaters and of the Romanian Operas”, made with a splendid ancient roman typeface. Tenant access is from Spiru Haret street and is marked by an innovative portal, equipped with a metal and glass door.”
