House, Bucharest

In most Eastern European countries, pre-1989 reforms left a few, tentative marks on the cityscape. While the presence of the state was still ubiquitous, it allowed some new individual houses to spring up alongside the grey blocks of flats and factories.

Not in Romania, however, where Nicolae Ceauşescu's neo-Stalinist regime achieved notoriety by forbidding any sort of individual initiative, instead building huge compounds and erasing whole swathes of the historical city centres. Thus, the post-1989 boom in single-family dwellings was all the stronger in Romania, and has speeded up in recent years thanks to an increase in financial resources. By the same token, the construction of council houses has fallen dramatically. Recently the country has seen larger private initiatives, usually in the form of 'gated community' ensembles financed by developers. But individual housing projects still play a major part in the field of house construction.

The first areas to be colonized were vacant parcels of land in the city centres or in the interwar garden suburbs. Today, when such vacant plots have priced themselves out of the private housing market, high-rise apartment buildings are being erected. Thus, the urban and peri-urban areas – poor neighbourhoods, unbuilt zones within apartment block ensembles, former slums and villages on the urban periphery – have become the hunting grounds for the private dream home.

There is an extraordinary tolerance in building regulations as to the detached house programme. This, together with the disintegration of public space in favour of private space – a complete reversal of the situation before 1989 – has led to an almost complete disregard for housing environs on the part of owners. Undoubtedly, given the choice, everybody would prefer to live in a quiet neighbourhood, with people of the same social class (homeowners are still an elite category) and an attractive natural landscape. But none of this counts compared with owning a small property, a private space, clearly defined and identifiable.

This is why even extremely poor neighbourhoods are gradually being colonized by growing numbers of luxury villas. But there is no concerted action involved here; although the invaders are aware of one another (they see themselves as members of a new social group) this development is the sum of strictly individual actions. The new buildings never seek to connect to the place, clearly asserting their autonomy. Aesthetically, such houses are difficult to classify. This is no bland Western-style suburbia, but more of a competition among bulky buildings ranging from the expanded American model, through small châteaux to neo-classical perversions.

Sometimes, when modernism gets a-lookin', a building will exhibit genuine architectural qualities. Such is the case with Radu Teacă's villa in a 1920s housing development on the outskirts of Bucharest. Designed for an obviously open-minded client, the house proudly displays its neo-modernist vocabulary, to which the architect is entirely committed.

How should an architect respond to such a context? Teacă made no attempt to connect to the architecture of the place, although he did try to promote a more civilized attitude by replacing the standard fortress-like walls and fences of surrounding houses with a somewhat lighter and more transparent enclosure. Inside that enclosure, however, the house, a carefully composed structure of planes, masses and voids, seems to turn in on itself, with an L-shaped plan defining the protected area of the courtyard. The interior spaces are displayed on half floors rotating around a staircase and a high ceilinged hall that form the focus of the whole promenade architecturale. The novel structure favours the complex relations among the various rooms, supporting the flow and interpenetration of spaces.

The house achieves a kind of monumentality, not through size or ornamentation, but through the emphasis on some spatial elements. Except for the glazed hall, there are few open spaces. In the end the terraces on the upper levels prove to be more important than the introvert courtyard; they clearly detach themselves from the site and the surroundings in an effort to catch a glimpse of the town panorama.

The house makes one curious to see how this street and the area might evolve; these outskirts, developing towards urbanity might have some more surprises in store. However, even if the house provides inspiration for architectural future developments, whether they will ever add up to a true urban space is a different story.