The area where Profesori Street is located is like an enclave where old Bucharest secured, beyond the tall curtain of Communist apartment buildings, some of its valuables, and where it managed to preserve (albeit in sometimes altered forms) a way of life, a way of urban inhabitation bearing the flavour of the early 20th century.
The street, formerly Bisericii Lane, was part of the old suburbs developed around Saint Catherine Church. The house at number 4, built in the 1900s (the year 1906 is inscribed on the first floor, above the entrance axis), is the house where Silvia Șerbescu grew up*.
The house displays the usual French-influenced Bucharest architecture at the turn of the 19th century. Unfolding towards the back of the lot, the building acquires, on the garden-oriented façade, a privileged treatment, generated by the presence of the introductory space marked by receding pilasters ending in column heads out of which volutes and floral and anthropomorphic motifs grow. The heavy mass of the ground floor is supported by marked horizontal bosses, and on the upper floor all previous ornamentation struggle is compressed into the frames around the windows and in the receding pilasters, their vertical contribution to the composition also reinforcing the building’s corner.
*The original silhouette changed when a new introductory space and a balcony appeared, in addition to other nonconform interventions affecting the architecture as much as the natural deterioration over time and the lack of proper maintenance.
Andreea Mihaela Chircă