Herman Iancu Building

This first example of Modern architecture in Romania is a small apartment building, built on Janco's father propriety. Its strange shape (partly due to the conditions imposed by the Municipality in view of opening a new street, partly determined by the architect's will to challenge the conservative, traditional environment) responds in the unusual forms of certain rooms. The building stands for an aesthetic exercise that contains obvious expressionistic overtones and reminds us of the plastic reliefs Janco created in Zurich starting with 1917.

Apart from the thoroughly unconventional articulation of the unusually shaped volumes and the expressive unfolding of blind surfaces, the most outstanding feature of the building appears in the chromatics of the facade, which forms a relatively autonomous element in the composition. If in certain projects of interior architecture Janco used to decompose the architectural shape by means of colour schemes, in this particular space, polychromy generates architecture. This kind of aesthetic pursuit, though recurrent in Marcel Janco's architecture, is not in the least typical for what Modernism was to become in Bucharest.