Stirbey Residences in Bucharest and Buftea. Architecture and Interior Decoration/Oana Marinache

The subject chosen, architecture and interior decoration in Stirbey residences in Bucharest and Buftea, stands out and gets remarkable consistency in these pages through the author's sustained effort to present in extenso (everything is built on documents) the diffrent phases which are chronologically articulated since the end of the 18-th century to the 2000s. The perspective belongs to the art historian, doubled by the conscientousness of the researcher and of the historian. Building up her own method (based, obviously, on the classical principle of the combination of sources, followed by interpretation) from which she does not deviate and which she handles with a kind of flexibility typical of mathematical thinking, the author succeds in reconstituing: stages of construction, artistic taste, protagonists of these architectural and artistic approaches (who are identified and characterised) and the landmarks in the lifestyle of our elites during the modern period, marked by the reception of Western models. We cannot underline enough the author's capacity to investigate and to correlate types of diffrent sources in multiple ways, in order to formulate hypotheses and to reach noew configurations. Associate Prof. Ph. D. Ioana Beldiman