City Hall - Ungheni

A rectilinear block of eight storeys, the tower shaft is organised on a regular structural grid, with horizontal spandrel bands in light render alternating with recessed window bays arranged in pairs. Ungheni sits on the Prut River at one of the more freighted border crossings in post-Soviet Europe, facing its Romanian namesake across a frontier that has divided what many regard as the same people since the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia in 1940. Spanning the river is an iron railway bridge attributed to Gustave Eiffel's engineering firm and dating to the 1870s, well before the Eiffel Tower. The crossing represents the East-West divide: Romanian/European standard gauge meets Soviet broad gauge at the Prut, requiring trains to stop for bogie exchange before continuing. . A newer parallel structure carries a gas interconnector completed in the 2020s, part of Moldova's effort to wean itself off Gazprom dependency, making the two bridges together a kind of compressed history of the region.