Reședințele Știrbey din București și Buftea

Abstract

The book is addressed to those interested in the study of Romania’s architectural and artistic cultural heritage.

“The chosen subject — architecture and interior decoration in the Știrbey residences in Bucharest and Buftea — gains in these pages not only clear definition but also remarkable substance, through the author’s sustained effort to present in extenso (the entire study being grounded in documentary evidence) the successive phases, chronologically articulated from the late 18th century to the 2000s.

The perspective is that of the art historian, doubled by the rigor of the documentary researcher and the historian proper. The methodological framework of the work, based on the classical principle of combining sources and critical interpretation, is applied with consistent precision and with a flexibility comparable to mathematical thinking.

The author thus succeeds in reconstructing the construction phases, artistic taste, and protagonists of these architectural and artistic undertakings (carefully identified and outlined), as well as the benchmarks of a lifestyle of the Romanian elites in the modern era, marked by the reception of Western models.

The author’s capacity for multifaceted investigation and for correlating diverse types of sources in order to formulate hypotheses and propose new interpretative configurations cannot be sufficiently emphasized.”

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ioana Beldiman