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Creanga, Horia
(b Bucharest, 1 Aug 1893; d Vienna, 1 Aug 1943). Romanian architect. He studied (1913–16) at the Academy of Architecture, Bucharest, continuing after World War I at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and between 1919 and 1924 in the studio of Gustave Umbdenstock and obtaining a diploma. In 1925 he was hired by Umbdenstock and worked in the architectural bureau of the Northern Railways Company on the Tergnier Aisne Railroad Station project. Creanga was a follower of the Modernist architectural ideas formulated principally by Le Corbusier, which he promoted in his own works after returning to Romania in 1926, for example in the Asigurarea Romaneasca (ARO) block (1929–33; now Patria), Bucharest. Many large commissions came from the functional and aesthetic values of the International Style, which he propagated, and his widely discussed constructive and formal solutions conferred a distinctive profile on Bucharest’s architecture before World War II. He also influenced his contemporaries Marcel Iancu and G. M. Cantacuzino, as well as younger architects. In response to housing needs Creanga developed blocks of flats with additional functions: the ARO block, for example, includes a 1200-seat cinema, and the block (1935–7) at Boulevard N. Balcescu 35, Bucharest, has shops on the ground floor. Exterior structures are of reinforced concrete, glass and metal, with interiors finished with high-quality stone and marble. He adopted almost exclusively a rectilinear aesthetic, giving great importance to the balance of large, simple volumes particularly with regard to the façades. The latter are structured in horizontal bands marked by the alternation of window openings and continuous, smooth, undecorated wall surfaces. He also offered Modernist solutions in other building types, for example in the Hotel ARO (1938–9; now Hotel Carpati), Brasov, with Haralamb Georgescu (1908–77), and the Malaxa locomotive works (1933; now FAUR) and the Malaxa pipeworks (1936–8; now Republica), both in Bucharest.
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