The Bucharest Deco-Modernist current manifested through varied aesthetic compositions which lent a hand to shape our capital’s architecture, the building boom peaking in the 1930s. This mise-en-scène often happened in particular places – likely to attract many spectators, in order to mark important intersections, or to contribute to the grand avenues’ desire for representativity. The latter is the case of the building on 105 Dacia Avenue, designed in 1931 by architect Victor Ștefănescu, property of Constantin C. Nottara, Constantin I. Nottara and their family and until recently a memorial house (also coded LMI B-II-m-B-18550 on the List of Historical Monuments).

The building’s architectural face, the only part that it reveals to the street, is the meeting place of geometrical stylisations, purified and essentialized forms overlayed with Art Deco-inspired ornaments. Beams of rays, circles, lines, dials appear in the decorative ironwork playing symmetrically on the massive entrance doors and on the lowered fence and taking an ample vertical leap on the whole of the glass panels in the staircase. The linear profiles (the mouldings) move along a horizontal and vertical itinerary coiling at right angles on the cantilever’s somewhat protruding volume, creating optical geometrical illusions via the play of intersecting planes. The intermediate cornice with dentils vigorously cuts the compound of the single façade.

Looking at how the silhouette of this house follows a temperate modernist measure, we see, underlined with strong lines, the receding segments, cantilevers, balconies, entrances, openings and frames – all of which contributes to elevate the urban-architectural presence of the Nottara house.

Andreea Mihaela Chircă