by Maria D. Bostenaru, Ilie Sandu
This is one of the oldest housing types in Romania with a statistically significant number of buildings in existence. The overwhelming majority of residential buildings in Romania have been built after 1850. Today. only churches remain from the previous “post-Byzantine” period. Issues relating to the age of historical buildings of cultural value are also discussed within the report. This urban housing type is particularly common in Romanian towns, especially in the southern part of the country, such as in the former Wallachia. It is a middle-class family house constructed from the end of the 19th century until the Second World War. The houses were designed to be semidetached, but have been constructed individually. Thus, in most of cases, the adjacent building, separated structurally, is a totally different construction type, The design of this housing is astonishingly homogeneous, especially considering the relatively lengthy time span the construction has been practiced. The single-unit housing is generally characterized by a rectangular, elongated-shape plan, with an entrance on the long side. The load-bearing system consists of two longitudinal unconfined brick masonry walls and several transversal unconfined brick walls, usually 28 cm thick, which form a wagon-like arrangement — hence the name of this building type. The horizontal structural system is made out of wood plates and joists separated by a distance of 0.70 m. Buildings of this type have been affected by damaging earthquakes in November 1940 and in March 1977, and by two earthquakes of lower magnitudes in 1986 and 1990. They performed well except for the occurrence of some minor cracking in the plaster.