Arhitectura 3-4/2026 (723-724)

Issue 3-4/2026 of Arhitectura magazine, “The Bucharest that…,” takes as its starting point a city that exists in parallel with the built city: the Bucharest of projects, competitions, and urban planning scenarios that have remained, in whole or in part, on paper.
From the Bucharest 2000 competition and the grand visions of the 1990s to the projects for the Dâmbovița River, Revolution Square, or the Esplanade, and the histories of the National Theater or certain sites along Calea Victoriei, the magazine brings together archival documents, projects, essays, interviews, and research. They trace how the capital was imagined and designed, then managed, postponed, abandoned, and, at times, revived.

The combination of these materials forms a critical atlas of Bucharest—both built and unbuilt—caught between vision and improvisation, heritage and development, collective initiative and ineptitude. An issue about the gap between plan, decision, and execution—and how this gap has shaped Bucharest over the last three decades.