The house at 10 Washington Street, built in 1933, is one of Duiliu Marcu’s first expressions of “modern Romanian architecture”. With its Bauhaus-inspired round shapes, the introductory space is the first and the most obvious modernist move. It’s also, and unexpectedly so, one of the most important places in the house: if the entrance is generally is a space of representation oriented towards the street, and a transitional one, here it serves as the container of leisure time, of meeting-with-friends time, a covered space where the family used to gather on summer evenings as on a porch of a traditional house. On the “small entrance balcony”, as the family called it, one would take a seat on the chaise longue to enjoy the sour cherry jam and the nice glass of cold water. In order to focus the attention even more on this essential space caught between the outside and the inside, the wall was treated in a coating of a different texture, in contrast with that smooth of the rest of the façade, visible in some old photos.* The porthole window and the rounded borders of the iron parapet are some other modernist hints thrown in the architectural discourse. The ground floor, slightly risen over the semi-basement, was the space for effervescent socializing among family and eminent guests, while the rooms upstairs were places of retreat, places to rest, and places to work.

* We should mention that the house underwent multiple changes with regard not only to textures, but to the initial built outline and proportions.