Last days we spoke with Irina Tulbure, author of the book “Architecture and Urbanism in Romania 1944-1960. Constraint and experiment”, one of the first syntheses about the link between politics and architecture in the early years of the communist regime.
We met in the emblematic Panduri quarter, a quiet “barracks” for soldiers built from 1952 onwards to plans by Arch. Ioan Novițchi, where we discussed the details of living in the 1950s and found answers to several questions such as what socialist realism is, what a quarter is, who they were built for and why more were not built. We found out what made her start researching the topic and how communist ideology determines square footage or the housing and material crisis.