(b Braila, 8 Jan 1902; d Bucharest, 10 May 1981). Romanian architect, urban planner, theorist and teacher. He trained (1925-32) at the High School of Architecture and at the Academy of Fine Arts, Bucharest. In 1936-9 he was responsible for extensive development projects in Bucharest, including those for the integration into the city of such new areas as the Herastrau residential quarter, Baneasa housing estate and Cotroceni Avenue. He also contributed to the design of important buildings, such as the Village Museum (1936), and designed Mioritza Fountain, Mioritza Fountain Square (1936), all in Bucharest. In the late 1930s he travelled in Italy, particularly Tuscany, where he found affinities with his own approach to architecture in the restrained use of decoration to achieve natural light effects on surfaces, in the flat roofs and in the subtle handling of materials. Doicescu developed an architectural style characterized by simple volumes adapted to environmental and functional requirements, revealing a sensitivity in his use of materials and rejecting any artificial assimilation of the International Style or the highly decorative Byzantine Revival tradition in Romanian architecture. In 1939 he designed the Romanian House for the World's Fair, New York, where he also met Frank Lloyd Wright, whose architectural views he shared. The Romanian House embodied Doicescu's conception of proportion, rhythm and balance, ideas that were presented in the review Simetria, which he edited (1939-47) with the philosopher, mathematician and aesthetician Mathyla Ghyka (1881-1965) and G. M. Cantacuzino [Cantacuz?ne]. Doicescu's search for a 'lyrical architecture', based on economy of detail and rhythmic balance, also reflected his friendship with the sculptor CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI, with whom he collaborated on a project (1938-41; unexecuted) for a temple at Indore, India (see Varia). At the end of World War II he became a professor at the Institute of Architecture, Bucharest, and a member of the Romanian Academy. He contributed to the reconstruction of towns destroyed during the war, designed domestic and industrial buildings, and built the Bucharest Opera House (1953). His last project, the Polytechnic Institute (1970), Bucharest, expressed his continued reservations about extreme functionalism and his preference for spatially integrated architecture.
See the Abbreviations for further details.
