The Romanian pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair was designed by George Matei Cantacuzino. The structure illustrates how Cantacuzino's work hybridized elements of modernist architecture with traditional flourishes.All images courtesy Wasmuth

Every article on the Balkans seems obliged to start with a commentary on the region’s tangled past. Dan Teodorovici's George Matei Cantacuzino: A Hybrid Modernist (Wasmuth, 2014) is no exception. As Teodorovici states in his introduction, “The linguistic complexity of East-Central Europe is no more mappable than the stylistic plurality of its architecture; happily, some are now endeavoring to try." Tedorovici's subject is George Matei Cantacuzino, an architect of great consequence in Bucharest but of little note elsewhere. He is also an overdue beneficiary of a revived interest in that jumbled set of states and histories. 

The architecture of the Balkans received, until recently, little attention beyond its national boundaries. Even expansive critics like Jean-Louis Cohen devoted but a few paragraphs to the region in his encompassing primer The Future of Architecture Since 1889. In fact, there are only a handful of English-language accounts of modern Balkan architecture, and those there are—discounting studies like Romanian Modernism: The Architecture of Bucharest 1920-1940,Modernism in Serbia:The Elusive Margins of Belgrade Architecture, 1919–1941, and, more recently, Modernism In-Between: The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia—are often of a general, even cursory nature. This is unfortunate because many of these states came of age at a precisely fortuitous historical moment; vernacular traditions were generally too complicated or aged to become ossified orthodoxy (rebuilding, say, Serbia in the style of the 14th century Nemanjic dynasty wasn't really a workable proposition even for the most avid revivalists). Modernism, on the other hand, offered just the sort of supple and physical identity that new states were seeking. Yet, Cantacuzino's embrace of modernism differs than that of his contemporaries. While Tristan Tzara and Brancusi exported an utterly new vision to Europe, Cantacuzino stressed an organic conception of modernism, entirely open to worldwide material advances while retaining some memory of local tradition.

The cover of George Matei Cantacuzino: A Hybrid Modernist, featuring the Bellona Hotel at Eforie (1933)

Cantacuzino's early life is an archetypal tale of Eastern European cosmopolitanism. Raised a diplomat's son in Vienna, speaking German, French, and Romanian, he continued his primary schooling in Montreax, and then on to an architectural education at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His studies stretched over a period of nine years, from 1920 to 1929, during which he wrote the first article on Romanian architecture published outside the country.

Soon after, Cantacuzino began work on several country estates, channeling “late Byzantine-Wallachian and aquatic Venetian architecture” as well as contemporary influences. In one of his first projects, the rebuilding of an 18th-century palace, he resisted pressure to restore the complex to its former glory, opting instead to substitute simple brick where evidence of its initial appearance was absent. Another estate, an entirely new construction, featured slim doric columns that played off unornamented stone....Continue Reading

> via Metropolismag