Profile of excellence in Romanian interwar architecture: Tiberiu Niga

It is rare in Romanian architecture for an architect to have left his mark on the image of the city, on the image of the built space, on the style and way of thinking of entire generations of architects with exemplary decency and civilization, as did the architect Tiberiu Niga.

Paradoxically and regrettably, we can note with sadness how much Tiberiu Niga has offered and how little he is known.

For a simple example, I used the "googalistic approach of Internet culture" to see how much the "klan knobs" know about Romanian interwar architecture, and Wikipedia will answer your search for his name in the most cynical, unintentional way possible: "Did you mean nigga?".

I am an admirer of Tiberiu Niga and, in general, of the Romanian interwar avant-garde period, of Marcel Iancu, Horia Creangă or Duiliu Marcu, but also of Urmuz, Sașa Pană, Ștefan Roll and of the UNU and the nationalist elite of "Vremea": Cioran, Eliade or Nae Ionescu. For this reason, ever since I was a student, studying Niga's principles of composing space and dwelling established in the interwar period in class or in the workshop, I have been looking for his works in the city, first by foot, then in libraries and archives, finally managing the feat (forgive my lack of modesty) of discovering his personal archive of projects, in a completely accidental way (at a paper-melting center), especially those from the interwar period, that is, precisely those that I admired so much.

Thanking the one above, as a first step, I considered it necessary to present as much as I could in the book "The Romanian Architectural Documentary Fund / Preliminary Report on Cultural Policy", Simetria Publishing House, 2011, edited by Mirela Duculescu. I expressed there my desire to create a Cultural Centre of Architecture, a cultural archive of Romanian architecture, in an organized and modern, civilized way, where we should preserve the values and architectural documents, as many as we still have.

Tiberiu Niga belongs par excellence to the 1920s and 1930s, in terms of mentality and spirit, as a representative of a complex and refined, noble and elitist society, a "Civitas interbellum" so beautifully depicted in Ioana Pârvulescu's book "Return to Interwar Bucharest". A spiritual follower of the Bauhaus School, of the International Style, he discreetly, but not brutally, detached himself from the neo-Romanesque and eclecticism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, managing to impose his own personal vision of interpreting traditional Romanian architecture (Orbonaș villa, Șoseaua Jianu, number 10, today's Bd. Aviatorilor, or the Safirescu residence at 34 Schitul Măgureanu Street, still exemplary to this day).

He belonged to the inter-war civilization both in terms of his professional structure and his attire, with the attitude and everyday refinement with which he charmed his colleagues, and later his students. They called him "Lord," as architect Goia, who was his student in the second half of the 1960s, recalls. "He was a character, six feet tall, imposing but not arrogant, refined but not eccentric in dress, always well-dressed, wearing suits of fine cloth, which he would notice by feel if someone close to him competed with him on the 'stage.' Wearing a wide-brimmed black hat, smoke-rimmed glasses and a scarf, worn with a flair like a movie character, he imposed himself by his attire and appearance before he spoke. That was the interwar period... Because during the period of "popular power", close students still remember the master's words: "when I was a graduate student I drove a Porsche, now that I'm a university professor I drive a Fiat 850!"."

However, even up to the moment of his death he did not lose his verticality, a trait inherited from his family, remaining morally impeccable, in a troubled period, living and practicing, practically, during the years of the war and the Legionary ideology, as well as during the darkest and darkest years of communism, not being influenced by any ideology, doing "the politics of the plan and of the profession" as one of his students, architect Goia, whom I had the pleasant occasion to meet in our common research, describes him.

Tiberiu Niga succeeds, with a skill rarely seen in the profession, in being a perfectionist of the technical engineering detail, concomitant with the personality of a refined artist contemporary with the avant-garde, expressing himself through drawing, both with the traditional "cannon" of the architect, filling the perspectives with perfectly ordered hatches from one corner of the plan to the other, and as a "sabreur" of the "nail" pencils with a strong hand, with which he watermarks on the yellow paper the details known only to him.

Tiberiu Niga (Caius, Mihai) was born in Arad on January 12, 1906, in the family of the architect Ioan Niga, also born in Arad on August 28, 1888, a Romanian from the Ardean region of Romania, with an education and culture influenced and "twisted" under the Habsburg Empire. He had the sobriety of the old-fashioned Ardean for whom the square was to be called 'platz' until his death. Ioan Niga graduated from the Polytechnic School of Budapest in August 1903 with diploma number ²⁹²¹¹, which he obtained in 1923, according to the catalogs of the Society of Architects.

The Niga family moved to Bucharest after the Great Union, where Tiberiu attended the School of Architecture, which he graduated in 1930 with diploma 178/1930. Being an eminent student, Tiberiu Niga obtained a scholarship and was sent to Paris for specialization between 1932-1933.

Ioan Niga made his mark on his son's early personality, working and signing papers together: Ion and Tiberiu Niga, leaving his singular stylistic approach of modernism for later.

Between 1908-1918, Ioan Niga was the architect of the General Directorate of the Hungarian Railways M.A.V., and between 1919-1937 he moved to the General Directorate of the CFR in Bucharest. Between 1941-1949 he worked at the Romanian Insurance, and towards the end of his career, between 1950-1953, at the Committee of Cultural Institutions.

In the first years of the 20th century he realized important works in Bucharest, such as: the rebuilding of the North Railway Station between 1925-1926, the headquarters of the Romanian Insurance Company, Ion Ghica Street, between 1925-1926, and numerous private buildings.

He won through competition many important works, such as: the design of housing for all categories of employees of the Hungarian Railways M.A.V., awarded in 1912, the CFR Palace - 6 March Boulevard, from 1930, the Romanian Insurance Palace - Gh. Magheru, from 1931, award-winning project for the reconstruction of the Old Arad Theater, from ¹⁹³³².

This is the period when neo-Romanesque influences manifested themselves in the works of the two, especially in the housing programs of the villas of personalities, such as that of General Orbonaș, Colonel Safirescu, aviator Mateescu or, especially, of former minister Ion Inculeț, a consistent commissioner at the beginning, in the 1930s, both for the villas and for the family chapel and church, designed and detailed from the foundations down to the smallest piece of furniture.

Later on, Tiberiu Niga continued his career, putting his mark on the so-called blockhouse housing programs demanded by the nouveau riche of the time, rather expensive dwellings dedicated to the personalities of the time, located on central land: Calea Victoriei, Bulevardul Dacia, Bulevardul Carol, Calea Moșilor, to name but a few in the capital. Competing with Horia Creangă, Marcel Iancu or Duiliu Marcu, it marks with strength and coherence the inter-war style, practiced throughout Romania.

The facades have straight, cursive lines, with clean proportions and volumetry, with no shortage of decorative elements typical of the time: the inevitable metal fringe, the staircase glazed on one visible corner of the building, closed with complexly drawn metal profiles, the round "vapor" type windows and the beautifully ordered wooden rollers, with accentuated horizontal, together with the decorative elements of the balconies, generously treated with the aim of giving the facade more presence and less utility.

The floor plan of the apartments is generous, with the circulation commanded by the distribution hall, a famous piece and pure invention of the inter-war period, valid to this day, the place where the owner welcomes his guests, without allowing them access to the rest of the apartment, the place where family pictures (painted by one Eustațiu Stoenescu) are usually placed, without much functionality, where canasta is played, tea is drunk and the piano is played, to become a kind of dinning room towards the 40s.

The apartments in the blockhouses have two staircases, one of which is a generous one, clad in marble or granite for the owners, and another tiny one for the servants, which leads to the kitchen balcony, to the inner courtyard, where the olteanul brought his fresh goods every morning. In the basement of the building, the servants each had a room with a "flowerpot", lined up in a corridor with a window overlooking the courtyard, next to the "oil-fired central heating system, set in motion by the stoker".

Now the first concepts of basement and semi-basement parking spaces are appearing, where Niga showed his technical genius as a car enthusiast and owner of a luxury limousine. He was a forerunner of contemporary rotating parking platforms, achieving performances that should be considered by designers as well as historians.

Tiberiu Niga's professional activity is complex and passes through all the possible phases of an architect's existence: individual practitioner, firm employee, civil servant or university lecturer. Thus, he offers the Romanian school of architecture an example of continuity in a context of profound political and social upheavals, an unbroken link with a civilized Romania, the one we are constantly searching for, a link and fusion with a beautiful and stylish past, a model of professionalism and moral uprightness, exercised in the most difficult historical moments, throughout his life^.3

Notes:

¹ Architect Tiberiu Niga's application file for membership in the Union of Architects of the R.P.R., Bucharest branch, April 1953, Archives of the Union of Architects of Romania.

The application file of architect Ioan Niga, April 1954, Union of Architects of the R.P.R., Bucharest branch, Romanian Union of Architects Archive.

² Architect Ioan Niga's registration file for the Union of Architects of the R.P.R., Bucharest branch, April 1954, Archives of the Union of Romanian Architects.

³ This article is intended as a preamble to the forthcoming Tiberiu Niga monograph.