Arhitectura 5-6/2022 (701-702)

Issue 5/6 of the magazine ARHITECTURA is dedicated to the architect, painter, graphic designer, writer, journalist, avant-garde Marcel Iancu (1895 Bucharest - 1984 Ein Hod, Israel).

Marcel Iancu brought the new European movement to Romania and paved the way for modernist architecture, contaminated young architects with the ideological charge of "revolutionary" arts (cubism, abstractionism, constructivism) and put them in contact with the most prestigious exponents of the European Modern Movement. A few years earlier, while studying in Switzerland, he had initiated the DaDa movement.

The new architecture promoted by Janco simplified architectural volumes and discarded symmetry and its laws, re-evaluated building materials and denied the eclectic idea of 'style'.

The revolutionary approach to architecture, seen par excellence as a social art, extended to the whole built space from the "interior" - the purpose of the action of building to urbanism - the social purpose of architecture.

Marcel Iancu was vehement and trenchant in promoting the new ideals, deeply involved in the social support of the new approach and unforgiving of the mechanical and mundane adoption of the new style. "The 'Bureau of Modern Studies' - the architectural firm set up and run by the two brothers - realized more than 40 buildings by Marcel Iuliu Iancu before their departure for Palestine in 1941. Although renowned as the creator of the first "modernist residences" in Bucharest and Romania, Marcel Iancu is also the creator of one of the most spectacular inter-war leisure complexes - the Kiseleff Swimming Pool - and of a mountain sanatorium of international purity and strength.

In almost 20 years, Marcel Iancu experimented with daring and innovative formulas, enlivened the artistic life of the Capital, opened doors and perspectives for the future and for young creators, was inconstant and inconsistent, but always authentic, convincing, positive, constructive and constructivist.

Janco remains the symbol of an unbridled and unleashed spirit.

Bilingual number: English-English