The legacy of Sanda Budis, a Romanian architect lives on at the university she studied in the 1940s though a prize established in her name which is testimony to her values as an architect.
Daughter Sandra Pralong on Monday urged hundreds of students to take pride in their work as the Ion Mincu Architecture Institute opened for the new academic year. People crammed into the auditorium, filling the standing room, while others listened outside.
“You are real doctors, Mrs. Pralong, an adviser to President Klaus Iohannis, told the auditorium. “You are .. doctors in society, doctors of the cities… of families” she said.
The Sandra Budis prize is for practical thinking which has the client’s interests at heart.
Teodora Ioana Listita and Alexandru Popa, students at Ion Mincu, were this year’s recipients of the award.
Sanda Budis died in 2021 aged 95 and the prize was established the same year.
Mrs. Pralong urged budding architects to think beyond the usual parameters of their profession.
“Any house plan joins the family together or separates it—supper, breakfast and then people go their separate ways,” she said.
“Everything you do makes communication more difficult or facilitates it,” she said. „Mum had an obsession. She worked in Switzerland and in Romania. In her later years she worked a lot in Switzerland where she built an apartment complex. She had an obsession. I’m not building for passers-by, she said, but for those who will live in the apartment for 20 years. The people who lived in her apartments lived there not for 20 years, but for 40 years, and still live there until their dying breath.”
Mrs. Budis was part of the landowning class that built Romania in the early 20th century, But that became her misfortune when the communists took over after World War II.
Born into privilege, the Budis family creed was ‘service to the community and the nation’ a legacy Mrs Pralong strives to pass on to the younger generation.
Mrs Budis managed to graduate from the Ion Mincu Architecture school before the communists changed the rules to discriminate against ‘class enemies’ as she was considered.
“She received letters of thanks about people enjoyed living in her apartments, because as well as her work as an architect, she was also a psychologist,” Mrs Pralong said.
“She put herself in the shoes of the person who used the building, whether it was an office or a residence. She thought how to make their lives easy: space for children to play, for old people to have ramps and be able to move about easily… thinking about families whose children grow up and she thought that the houses she made for them with a single wall so they could be divided into two apartments. So, children could have their independence but not be separated too soon from their parents.”
“She thought about the smallest detail, and built railings over balconies of staggered blocks in Lausanne which had a series of terraces, to make sure people who lived on the lower floors (Eds’ note: whose balconies stuck out more) had privacy, so people on the upper floors couldn’t peer at their neighbors lower down. Everyone had a view of the lake, a splendid sight. I urge you to have the same attention to detail,” she told students. “This makes people happy, and they will repay you with their thanks and gratitude.
“Everything you do counts. The color, materials, the staircase, and an elevator with fine carpet. I was visiting the building 40 years later. There wasn’t a single scratch, the carpet was the same, nothing was changed. So, please think about your profession like you are doctors, for families and for the towns you build in.”
Architects study for six years, one year less than medical students.
Sanda Budis was the only child of Gen. Alexandru Budis and Florica Grigorescu, an artist. She was the daughter of Clio Contogeorges who in turn was the daughter of Anna de Lusi of Venetian aristocracy.
When she was 86, she penned her memoirs, “Fata tatei si mama fetei” (Between my father and my daughter). The book which describes her life and the country’s history tells the story of how her mother fled to Odessa before the Bolshevik revolution. It has been translated into French and is being translated into English.
Sanda Budis, Romanian architect, author and anti-Communist dies at 95
