Night of Museums 2019. The “School of Architecture” Museum in Bucharest

Events

text: Gabriela TABACU

From the moment when, on a magical night in May 2015, at the Night of Museums, the "School of Architecture" first opened its large carved oak portal on Church ^Street2 for visitors, more and more people have learned that, in a certain part of its mysterious basement, there is a real museum of architecture and arts. It is reached by the monumental weathered travertine staircase of the old building, which leads down into a complex of spaces dedicated to the University Museum and Library. The museum, which is not called a museum but, for purely administrative reasons, bears the official and vague title of Documentary Exhibition ^Center3, begins in the impressive hall where the staircase leads to the impressive hall, where the Glyptotheca pieces are displayed, mounted on the walls or as free-standing objects. It then continues, excellently staged, into an enormous room with cylindrical cross vaults supported on massive stone columns and pilasters, which, in the early days of the "School", had been used for modeling. Last but not least is a gallery under the main staircase and in the former elevator area of the building. In this complex structure, the Museum started to operate only since 2014, but its history is older and worth remembering, because it gives an account of the interest that the architectural profession in Romania has begun to take in itself and its own history.
Thoughts about an architectural museum have been present in the discussions and writings of architects since 1916. Here, for example, is a specific mention in the article The House on Labirint St., on the demolition of the building in question, built in 1706: "What a marvelous ^communal museum4 could have been built in this house! Here, within its old walls, could have been gathered together the memorabilia of the ^capital5 from the most remote times to the present day, to tell the story of the capital's vicissitudes to the young generations eager for art. The Commune should strive for the realization of this museum in one of the old manor houses that still remain, such as the Moruzi House on the Victoriei Way, or the Melic House on Spătar Street, or the Populeanu House on Bradului Street, which has a beautiful open attic"^6.

Extract from the "Museum" Room, Cristina Constantin, Caietele muzeului 1/2017

"[...] Old photographs, drawings, plaster casts, archival documents, snippets of text, memories of former "students" gathered and put together, try to render a fragmentary history of the School of Architecture in our country, from 1892 until the 90s. We realized quite quickly that we would not be dealing with too many valuable pieces in themselves, but also that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. We thought then of a bazaar, but a bazaar in sequence, a story that you read diagonally, making mental associations between the things on display. And then the proximity and placement of these things became essential.
At the Museum, the work was more hands on. There were of course a working maquette, a project map that collected thoughts, references, working drawings for furniture pieces, etc., countless lists, digital archives or boxes that collected potential exhibits. And extensive visits to the library or school archives by the documentation teams.
In the end it was a work of reinvestment, starting with the "museum room", the school's former modeling room, with its strongly contoured spatiality, a vaulted room set in the basement at the base of the old body, which in itself can tell a good story about the school's history, and to which we tried to restore the possibility of being read as a whole. Then there are the old drawing boards used in the workshops, which have found their place as a display in the museum, the former library tables which have become horizontal display cases with the addition of a wooden collar, and so on. The site was worked exclusively with the school's technical staff, teams of carpenters, electricians, mostly with wood and simple details." [...] (excerpt from "Museum" Room, Cristina Constantin, Caietele muzeului 1/2017)

It may well be that the idea of such a museum was older and inspired by the Museum of Natural History and ^Antiquities7 housed in the premises of the "St. Sava" College, which once stood on the site of the current University ^building8. For a long time, however, the museum objects from the "School" heritage did not have their own exhibition space, although they were mentioned as existing in various presentations of the institution. That of 1961, belonging to the Ministry of Education and ^Culture9, referred, in fact, to the room with building materials created by Professor Dorian Hardt, where the course and the building materials exam after the first semester of the first year were held, to a series of models of Romanian and universal architectural monuments, kept in the Modeling Room or exhibited by the "School" and to the pieces from the Glyptotheca.
In fact, the Museum succeeded in becoming a reality after the organizational effort from 1983-'84, thanks to a group of enthusiasts who got things moving. Only since then it was perceived as a place of the "School", which had characteristic activities and pursued the mission of collecting documents and objects of different categories, with the declared aim of illustrating the history of Romanian architecture and its education. Its space hosted conferences and other events, and the "School" was constantly adding new exhibits to the existing pieces.
Here is what Professor Nicolae Lascu, one of those who actually participated in the idea of the museum, has to say about the early days: "Set up in the extremely pleasant space of the former Modeling Hall, in the basement of the old building designed by Grigore Cerchez, the "museum-laboratory" (a name approved, so as not to violate an archive law in force at the time) was the result of the efforts of several members of the school: Mac Popescu, teachers Sanda Voiculescu, Mihai Caffé, Peter Derer and Ion Lucăcel, as well as the (slightly) younger Mihai Opriș and myself. Starting from the history of the school, written by Prof. Grigore Ionescu in 1972 (so far the only serious study about our institute), the important institutional moments in the life of the school were marked by exhibits (copies of the respective official documents), the school's activity was illustrated by some student projects of the time, two or three graduation diplomas and the "unfolding" of a gallery of former teachers was started. A niche was dedicated to the school's patron, Ion Mincu, with some lesser-known projects and sketches, unpublished photographs and a medallion made at the turn of the century by the sculptor Georgescu. Professor Peter Derer has made available some beautiful fragments of buildings salvaged in the early 1980s, saved from the ravages of the devastating demolitions in the center of Bucharest. Professor Paul Georgescu contributed with models of monuments of old Romanian architecture and the beautiful wooden peasant gate, and the architect Oteteleșanu generously offered testimonies of the inter-war activity of the Arhitectura Sports Association (among whose organizers he was one of the organizers) and some notebooks with course notes from his student days"^10.
The items described above were supplemented by pieces from the Glyptotheca, consisting of copies of tombstones, pisanii, famous bas-reliefs, columns, colonnades, capitals, window and door frames, other decorations, models of architectural monuments, all described and dated individually on labels placed next to each other. These exhibits in front of the entrance to the Museum and in the corridor leading to the secondary staircase of the "School" were mounted there over time, starting from a point in time that is difficult to pinpoint ^today11. It should also be said that numerous modeling pieces and models of monuments of Romanian and universal architecture, made in the workshop of the "School" by passionate teachers and students, led by the head of the Department of Form Studies at a certain time, Professor Gheorghe Simotta, then by Professor Paul Georgescu, together with sculptors Nestor Culluri and Alexandru Călinescu, together with skilled plasterers, migrated in those years through the School, decorating various representative spaces of the School. Others, from the same category or from various sources, such as those received in 1959 from the Ministry of Culture, with the dismantling for demolition of the building of the "Anastase Simu"^Museum12 and the redistribution of its heritage, were kept in a warehouse in the area of the old elevator, inoperative, and were managed for many years by Professor Paul Georgescu, who was in charge of their maintenance until his death.
In 2008, with the start of the consolidation works on the old building of the 'School', which became a university in 2000, a period of transformation began for the Museum. The collections were evacuated to the Library's storerooms and other premises, and its headquarters, the Modeling Hall, underwent restoration. For a while, the Museum was without a custodian and, for lack of other solutions, its possessions were taken over by the librarian Valentin Popescu.

© Cristina Constantin

At the same time as the consolidation works, the then rector and dean of the "School", Professors Emil Barbu Popescu and Marian Moiceanu, took the initiative to reorganize the Museum and extend it in the area under the main staircase of the old building. The project of redesigning the museum spaces was carried out by the architects Cristina Constantin and Cosmin Pavel, together with a team of ^{collaborators13}, students and teachers from the Department of History of Architecture who, following extensive research, provided documents and even objects that eloquently mark moments in the history of the "School".
The new Museum was inaugurated in 2014 and the image it offers visitors is innovative and fresh. In the Modeling Room, whose original floor of gray mosaic tiles with red and black decorations has been largely preserved, the exhibition is carried out on panel boards recovered from the school's storerooms and mounted vertically on wooden supports around the room, but also in the old vertical display cases, then in other horizontal ones, newly made from former study tables from the Library, or directly on the walls or on the floor.
Apart from the general, overhead lighting of the hall, the objects are well highlighted by black work lamps, attached to the floorboards, which together with the floorboards give rhythm and organization to the display surfaces, creating a good impression of order and sense along the visitor's route. Otherwise, it starts to the left of the entrance door, with the well-known white marble medallion framed in a richly ornamented precious wood frame, depicting Eliza and Ion Mincu. The piece, a realization of the sculptor Ioan [Jean] Georgescu, a teacher in the "School", is one of the Museum's treasures. The perimeter of the hall is dedicated to the history of architectural education through various documents grouped chronologically on plates, with the necessary explanations. Under the boards or on special pedestals, intersecting with the story of the "School", are plaster or ceramic exhibits from the Simu Museum and made in the modeling workshops of the Louvre Museum in ^Paris14. An entire wall enclosing the wall panels on the left-hand side of the room is decorated with 25 faun heads from this collection. Their equidistant mounting in the perfect geometry of a square through the top and the relief they give to the wall add rigor to a place marked by the diversity of the exhibits, which cascade cascades of information over the overwhelmed visitor. The face of the fauns seems to dominate the place, inviting with an equivocal smile to meditate on the meaning of the world that the guild of architects is continually reshaping, often at the cost of invaluable efforts.

As if to reinforce this idea, a grouping of drawing and design tools - pens of all sorts, dotting the velvet in the horizontal display cases on the left side of the room at equal distances, stand as evidence of the toil that goes into the making of every inch of any kind of architectural plan. A large roll of drawing paper sits emblematically to the right, alongside another roll of fine study paper, the kind that students were sometimes given in small quantities at the beginning of the academic year.
The boards on the south wall of the hall are dedicated in particular to the teachers of the 'School', present here in groups or alone, with their faces in photographs, their diplomas or other documents and even personal belongings. We see here, for example, the pipe and pipe-cleaning instruments that belonged to Professor Cezar Lăzărescu - for a time rector of the "School". Special moments from its history are not missing from the panels, such as scenes from the Freshman Balls, inaugural photos from Club A, others from ski camps, study trips or from practicing and many others, as well as sketches, sketches, caricatures, caricatures, drawings, various drawings belonging to teachers or students.
The perimeter ends to the right of the entrance door with a series of objects salvaged from the demolition of the Uranus district: a gilded mosaic half-dome, iron fittings, two painted ceramic urns, etc. Such pieces are also found in other parts of the hall, completing the overall scenography.
The vertical showcases between the columns are dedicated to personalities, milestones and special documents from the history of the field. In the vertical and horizontal showcases on the left and in the central one you can see studies, sketches, drawings, photographs and parts of projects belonging to the architect Ion Mincu. The vertical showcase on the right shows the project of the facade of the new building of the Institute of Architecture "Ion Mincu", designed in ¹⁹⁶³¹⁵. On the back of the showcase, a number of photographs illustrate the visits of distinguished guests of the "School" who were conferred the high titles of Professor or Doctor Honoris Causa. In the very center of the room, a horizontal display case exhibits the prestigious awards and distinctions received by the School, especially in its recent past.

© Cristina Constantin

In various open spaces in the hall, wooden building parts are on display: porch pillars, carved beams and other pieces of various origins. Among them, some will have belonged to the house in Labirint str. no. 13, about which the architect Ion Trajanescu speaks in his article mentioned above: "The ten carved oak pillars, with beautiful capitals and carvings, of the porch, were bought by a lover of old Romanian art, the window with a hammered iron grate in the cellar was collected by a lover of archaeological artifacts, and the large oak doors in the cellar were given by the owner [Al. Ciurcu] to the School of Architecture"^16.
Once back in the entrance area, the visitor can explore the objects placed in the horizontal showcases that house the Museum's temporary exhibitions. Until the end of the second semester of 2019, the exhibition is dedicated to Professor Grigore Ionescu.
Leaving the Modeling Hall and returning to the Glyptotheca, the visitor will face the entrance to the Picture Gallery. This latest realization of the "School" is an unexpected space, running lengthwise, parallel to the Church Street, with apparent brick floors, walls and ceiling. The vertical surfaces and some areas of the unbubbled ceiling are painted white to emphasize the exhibits. To reclaim space, the gallery is ingeniously extended by a metal structure in the area of the elevator shaft, which has been out of use since 1931, after the tragic accident of the school's headmaster, Ermil Pangratti, which occurred here.

The collections of the Picture Gallery have recently become part of the Museum's patrimony and include paintings that have arrived in the "School" thanks to the efforts of the current Honorary President, Professor Emil Barbu Popescu. The most important is undoubtedly the Moraitakis donation, which brought to the Museum a number of paintings by various authors. Of these, 61 bear the signature of the Greek-born Romanian architect Stephan Eleutheriades, who lived and worked most of his life in Rio de Janeiro. Other artists in the collection include Nicolae Tonitza, Alexandru Steriadi, Vasile Brusalis and others. A recently discovered valuable painting is a youth portrait of the architect Duiliu Marcu by a famous Polish ^painter17 - Stefan Norblin - who took refuge in Romania for a while after the outbreak of the Second World War.
At the same time as exhibiting works from its heritage, the Pinacoteca hosts conferences, seminars, exhibitions of paintings and other art works, as well as other events useful to the educational process and to the "School" in general.
Going up from the basement to the second floor of the old building and entering the Gallery of Romanian Heritage Creators, established in 2014, the visitor will be able to learn surprising things about the different authors of many of the landmark-buildings in Bucharest and the country.
This is what the Museum of Architecture in Our ^School18 looks like, described lapidarily, a museum that is still quite modest in terms of its collections, but which marks a not insignificant step towards the responsible preservation of archival, artistic and documentary heritage values related to the profession. Let's not forget: these are values that each past year can consign to oblivion or destruction. As a living witness to a history that is still insufficiently studied and shared, the Museum needs our conscious and dedicated support in order to develop and become a true instrument of knowledge and remembrance for the vast and wonderful field called ARCHITECTURE, to which we all belong, willy-nilly, because it surrounds us and inhabits us from the moment we come into the world.

NOTES

1. This is the name given in the text to what began in 1892 as the School of Architecture of the Society of Romanian Architects, and today is the "Ion Mincu" University of Architecture and Urbanism.
2.The street was called Biserica Enei, or more precisely Ienei, after the church at the end of the street, founded by the lady Safta, sister-in-law of the Brâncoveni family and built between 1720-1724 on the site of a small wooden church, also founded by Iana, the wife of a Bucharest nobleman. Inside, the church depicted a mural painting of great beauty, preserved in a very good condition, re-painted in places by Gheorghe Tattarescu. The name of the street disappeared along with the nameplates immediately after the 1977 earthquake that led to the abusive and savage demolition of the church. The plaques then reappeared with the innocuous and only vaguely memory-preserving name Church Street.
3.Documentary exhibition center of the University of Architecture and Urbanism "Ion Mincu".
4.Words underlined in italics in the original text appear here in bold.
5.My underlining.
6.The article appeared in the magazine Arhitectura, no. 2, 1916, pp. 62-64 and refers to the house at 13 Labirint Street, demolished that year.
7.This museum was founded in 1834 by an important donation of various objects from the ban Mihalache Ghica.
8.A series of photographs, discovered in an envelope without explanations or annotations in the Library's collections, show a room of average size and height, on the walls of which architectural plans - presumably student projects - are displayed in frames of different sizes. In the center of the hall are professors Ermil Pangratti, the school's director, and Statie Ciortan, the future dean of the Corps of Architects, still a young man here. The librarian Valentin Popescu, who discovered the photographs, observes that the room contains pieces of sculpture and modeling that are still in the Museum's collections today: a fragment of a column from the Văcărești Monastery, an urn, etc. Comparing the faces of the two men with various other portraits of certain date, Popescu dates the image to around 1914. We can therefore observe that the beginnings of the museum's collections can be dated back to the first decades of the 20th century.
9.In 1961, the Institute of Architecture "Ion Mincu" has "a museum of building materials, models of the most important buildings included in the universal heritage of architecture and reproductions of various architectural monuments in the country and abroad, a special workshop for drawing and one for modeling". Ministry of Education and Culture. Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture. Prospect. București, 1961, p. 17. (From the Museum's website).
10.LASCU, Nicolae. Pentru un muzeu al arhitecturii românești. In: Arhitext Design, nr. 5, 1995, p. 10.
11.Mr. academician Professor Romeo Belea remembers that at the time of his entry in the faculty, that is in 1951, the Glyptotheque already existed.
12.The Anastase Simu Museum was opened in 1910, in Bucharest, in a building designed by the French architect C. Sciky after the model of the Erechteion. The rich and diverse collections contain 1,200 objects displayed in a row of five rooms inside the building. In 1927, academician Simu decided to donate his museum to the state. It remained in operation until 1959, when it was demolished. The objects from the museum's patrimony were sent to various institutions in the country.
13.Initiator and coordinator - E. B. Popescu, honorary president of UAUIM; director of the Information - Documentation Department - Gabriela Tabacu; concept and project design, documentation, preparation and display of graphic materials, plaster pieces, organization of temporary exhibitions - Cristina Constantin; concept design, documentation, organization of temporary exhibitions - Cosmin Pavel; museographer, inventory, temporary exhibitions - Claudia Popescu; consultancy - Marian Moiceanu, Marius Marcu Lapadat, Răzvan Luscov; documentation, materials preparation, labels text - Radu Ponta, Irina Tulbure, Irina Băncescu; documentation - Horia Moldovan, Adrian Moleavin, Raluca Boroș, Daniel Armenciu; documentation, video projections, temporary exhibitions - Daniel Comșa; paneling and mounting of decorative compositions plaster pieces - Ionel Iștoc; restoration and assembly of plaster pieces - Dragoș Ioan, Matei Dumitrescu; assembly of plaster pieces - Ionuț Nedecu; realization and assembly of furniture, lighting - Niculae Palade; fixing exhibits in final position, guiding, temporary exhibitions - student volunteers.
14.They are authenticated by inscriptions applied with poanson on the back.
15.The project belonged to the team of architects George Filipeanu, George Mularidis, Virgil Nițulescu, Elena Voinescu.
16.Arhitectura 1916, nr. 2, p. 62-64.
17.Julius Stefan Norblin de la Gourdaine was born in 1892 in Warsaw and died in 1952 in San Francisco. The painting was found and identified by the librarian Valentin Popescu during restoration work.
18.The Museum is part of the Information - Documentation Department of the UAUIM. Its collections and events are currently managed by Claudia Popescu, museographer, with the support of the librarian Valentin Popescu, both passionate about their work.

SUMMARY OF ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE, NR.2-3/2019
BNA 2018 600 For the Future