Starting from a concrete case — the building on Demetru I. Dobrescu Street in Bucharest — this text offers a critical reflection on the relationship between history, memory, and architectural aesthetics. The essay combines elements of documentary reportage with theoretical analysis, exploring how the reconstruction of a monument marked by crisis becomes a discourse on beauty, time, and urban identity.

At the same time, it raises a deeply contemporary issue: how can architecture intervene upon heritage without erasing its authenticity? In an era dominated by conversions, restorations, and spectacular extensions, the tension between preservation and innovation becomes a central question — not only aesthetic but also ethical — concerning how the city reinterprets its own past.

To build means to alter the morphological structure of a place, whether it involves an intervention inserted into an empty space—a natural setting—or the completion of an already constructed ensemble, as is the case here, where a new volume was added to an existing building.

The building on Demetru I. Dobrescu Street—today a historical monument—reflects various stages in Bucharest’s past. Constructed in the second half of the 19th century at the initiative of Grigore Păucescu, a politician and lawyer, it was originally a grand residence that later served as the Austro-Hungarian Embassy. During the communist period, the building was taken over by the regime and used as the headquarters of a Securitate division. In December 1989, during the Romanian Revolution, the building was severely damaged in the armed confrontations that took place in Bucharest. The fighting between revolutionary forces and the communist regime led to fires and major structural damage, turning it into a symbolic ruin that reflects the population’s sacrifice and struggle for freedom.

Crisis leaves marks—on people, on buildings, on cities.

The building’s restoration, carried out between 2003 and 2007 by Dan Marin and Zeno Bogdănescu, generated numerous controversies regarding the exterior appearance. But what is truly beautiful? This eternal dilemma has sparked countless disputes between the defenders of tradition and those promoting something else—the modernists. What is the essence of beauty? Are classical orders objectively beautiful, or have we learned to see them that way, in the manner in which the aesthetic is translated in architecture? Being accustomed to a certain type of architecture, to specific registers, we begin to perceive them as familiar, ordinary, beautiful. And where this appropriation of the natural, of style, of registers—of everything we have been taught to see as beautiful—ends, the unaesthetic begins to emerge. Building in the contemporary context means choosing whether to place oneself in opposition to what has been or to continue the direction taken. If the second option is chosen, then the idea of evolution comes into play. What is evolution in architecture? Clark (2002) states in Precedents in Architecture: Analytic Diagrams, Formative Ideas, and Built Examples (2nd ed.) that “Architectural evolution is a pattern of incremental change that involves movement from one state or characteristic to another”1. Therefore, the idea of evolution implies change, a transition from something to something else.

In this case, it was necessary for the new insertion to express the idea of change, since the building itself became a ruin precisely because of the fight for this change—the change of political regime, from communism to democracy, from opaque to transparent, from brick to glass.

The old and the new are no longer at odds—brick preserves tradition, glass invites change.

Charles Jencks (1997) spoke about “the new criteria for a contemporary architecture”2—an architecture that celebrates diversity, variety, that maximizes differences. An architecture that no longer relies on linearity, but on collage and superimposition. He argued that today’s architecture must be able to sustain ambiguity, celebrate contrast, and resist the passage of time not through massiveness, but through its ability to speak to several worlds at once—“to have a double code of aesthetics and conceptualization”2.

And perhaps this is what is happening on Demetru I. Dobrescu Street. Creating quality architecture no longer merely involves responding to a need—it must respond to an era. This response becomes even more complex in the case of civic architecture. The answer comes in a language through which society affirms its values, aspirations, and tensions. Brick, heavy and opaque, bears the imprint of the communist past, of imposed solidity and authoritarian verticality. Glass, on the other hand, introduces a different tone: transparency, openness, the negotiation of the visible. These two materialities embody two ways of understanding the civic: one imposed, monolithic, and the other open, subject to dialogue.

In a geopolitical context marked by crisis and institutional changes, civic architecture cannot be reduced to a fixed formal or aesthetic code; it must assume the role of a political and social actor, through a language by which society negotiates its identity and values. It is no longer sufficient for a building to look good or “appropriate”—it must communicate something essential, critically intervene in the symbolic landscape of the city.

This need for essentialization brings into discussion a fundamental idea: Marc-Antoine Laugier’s primitive hut3. In Essai sur l’architecture (1755), Laugier proposes a return to the origins of architecture—a gesture of purification.

We have often attempted, as a society, to inscribe buildings within a rigid formal code, loading them with decorations meant to project power—including political power. But perhaps civic architecture should rediscover precisely this foundational simplicity, this clarity of intention. In this light, it frees itself from the burden of imposed ornament and assumes an expression that speaks directly and honestly about crisis, tension, and the profound transformations of society. 

Form must follow the need of an era.

REFERENCES

1 Clark, R. H. (2002). Precedents in architecture: Analytic diagrams, formative ideas, and built examples (2nd ed.). Wiley. p.278.

2 Charles Jencks (1997). The architecture of the jumping universe. Academy Editions, London, p.167.

3 Laugier, M.-A. (1755). Essai sur l’architecture. Duchesne.