Vasile Mitrea

The architect of the Telephone Palace in Cluj-Napoca has died, aged 91. He planned neighbourhoods that still shape the city, built its school of architecture, and in 2018 wrote for our volume an essay that told us, very plainly, what needed to be done.

Born in Roman, in north-eastern Romania, he studied architecture in Bucharest from 1954 to 1960 and was assigned to Cluj, where he stayed. At the county design institute he was co-author, with Augustin Presecan, of two of the city's post-war neighbourhoods, Grigorescu and Gheorgheni. In 1970 he became head of the architecture section of the Faculty of Construction in Cluj, a post he described as equivalent to a deanship, and led it until 1983; these were the years in which the Cluj school of architecture took shape. Later he was dean at Oradea, a member of Romania's National Commission for Historical Monuments, and, to the end, coordinator of the Directing College of the Union of Romanian Architects. He taught architecture, environmental protection, engineering, and philosophy. He received the Romanian Academy Prize for his life's work in 2010, and the Opera Omnia Prize of the Union of Romanian Architects in 2023.

Stepping out of line

In his 2018 essay on the architecture of 1945–1989, describing how the profession was practised under political control, he wrote a sentence that describes himself, without saying so:

"In a context of such rigidity, only those who had made a passion of the profession would allow themselves to step out of line — and then only with great caution, so as not to see the project rejected."

Translated from the Romanian

The Telephone Palace in Cluj-Napoca is one of those steps out of line, and he took the risk literally. He was warned that if the project was not approved, the months he had spent on it would be docked from his salary. At the county commission he was saved by the historian Hadrian Daicoviciu, who asked that the architect be given the trust he was due.

The equipment inside needed little, diffuse light, so he gave the building small windows, which he called ferestre împușcate, "shot windows". During construction a stretch of the medieval city wall, from the fourteenth century, was found on the site. He kept it, and carried its irregular stone blocks into the facade as concrete panels of different sizes, some projecting, some set back. He marked the line of the wall in the pavement outside in marble letters: Napoca. The first stage was completed in 1969, the fourth storey in 1975. Socialist modernism with brutalist influences, and one of the clearest expressions of that direction in Romania.

What he wrote for us in 2018

For our volume Socialist Modernist Architecture in Romania and the Republic of Moldova, he wrote the essay "ROMÂNIA – SOCIALISM ȘI MODERNISM". It was not a courtesy preface. It was an assessment, with a reproach aimed at the profession and a list of tasks:

"The initiative of the Bureau for Art and Urban Research (which ought to have come from one of the professional organisations) to find out to what extent the 'landmarks' of the socialist period were influenced by the international professional context, and what they have contributed to the history of Romanian architecture, is welcome. But to arrive at the real architectural values, certain actions become absolutely necessary: field research by theme, the testing of results in debate, selection through a critical apparatus, clarification of legal status, and at the same time defining the conditions that would allow these buildings to last."

Vasile Mitrea, 2018. Translated from the Romanian

Field research. Debate. A critical apparatus. Legal status. The conditions for survival. That list has been, in practice, our programme ever since.

The listing

The listing file for the Telephone Palace was prepared by B.A.C.U., by the architects Ruxandra Nemțeanu, Sorina Varenic and Dumitru Rusu, and filed in October 2018. The owner at the time, Telekom Romania, contested the opening of the procedure; the objection was set aside, and the file reached the Ministry of Culture in January 2019. The National Commission for Historical Monuments approved it unanimously that year, and the listing order was issued on 16 September 2020. It was published in the Official Gazette only on 27 June 2025. Why a signed order waited almost five years for publication is not known, even to the county directorate that forwarded the file. In those years the facades were vandalised, and the sculpture signed "V.M.", part of the original composition, was taken down and sold for scrap.

Listing gave the state a right of first refusal, and in November 2025 the city of Cluj-Napoca bought the building. Of the listing, he said in February 2026: "It was a particularly pleasant surprise for me, since I no longer had any illusions." The restoration has not begun. It remains our responsibility.

Two neighbourhoods

Half of his work does not show in any single building. Grigorescu, begun in 1960 when he was twenty-five, and Gheorgheni, four years later, were planned as neighbourhood units: schools, shops, services and green space within a few minutes' walk. In Gheorgheni the team moved through traffic to the edge of the district to leave the interior free for shared green space. He called it a trick played on the council, and it was accepted.

The two neighbourhoods fared differently. In Grigorescu, new blocks were later squeezed in between the existing ones, and he wrote about it without softening it:

"From the end of the 1970s, the 'densification' of these neighbourhoods would raise density, eliminate green space and parking, favour cars over pedestrians and, as a result, alter the original composition."

Translated from the Romanian

Gheorgheni was luckier, and remained, in his words, an airy neighbourhood planned for the long term. Its commercial centre is the Mercur complex, built in 1968 to a design by Mircea Amitroaiei and colleagues: not Mitrea's building, but a piece set within a composition he worked on. The neighbourhood, together with the Mercur complex, is now the subject of a listing file in preparation at B.A.C.U.

For the last thirty years he argued for a green system for Cluj that would take in all thirteen watercourses within the city, with the Someș river as its green-blue spine. The European Union recommends twenty-six square metres of green space per inhabitant, he said this year; Cluj barely reaches sixteen to eighteen.

His 2018 essay surveys forty-five years of Romanian architecture and names his colleagues throughout. When it reaches the buildings for communications, where his own telephone exchange belongs, it says only that one can speak, with a few exceptions, of a tempered modernism. He does not name himself anywhere. Asked in February what he was leaving behind, he said: "I would not allow myself to say that I left a mark on Cluj. I tried not to fit into ordinary practice, and to add something, as far as it was possible."

The essay ends with a paragraph that reads, now, as a lesson in method:

"Repeating that with this study I have tried to add, with the subjectivity that comes with it, some points of view on the period 1945–1989, I apologise for certain inaccuracies of authors and dates, caused by the lack of rigorous documentary sources."

Dr. arch. Vasile Mitrea. Translated from the Romanian

In July 2026, the Cluj-Sălaj branch of the Union of Romanian Architects created the Vasile Mitrea New Talent Prize, for the most promising graduate of the Faculty of Architecture in Cluj.

Our condolences to Adina Mitrea, to his family, his colleagues and his students.