Housing Complex Romanita - Chisinau

Designed by architect Oleg Vronsky and engineer A. Marian in collaboration with O. Blogu, S. Crani, N. Rebenko and P. Feldman, and built between 1978 and 1986, the Romanița tower stands 73 metres tall on a hillside in Valea Trandafirilor Park in Chișinău's Botanica district, adjacent to the Republican Clinical Hospital and the Cardiology Institute. The load-bearing structure is a monolith of slip-formed reinforced concrete, a continuous pour of rings 40 cm thick connected by radial walls 20 cm thick, placed on a solid reinforced concrete base plate designed to meet local seismic requirements. Six apartment units occupy each of the sixteen residential floors, arranged in a circle around a central corridor served by a spiral staircase and three elevators; four lower floors were given over to communal utility functions. The wavy profile of the precast concrete loggias flows continuously around the full circumference of the cylinder, their repetitive cast concrete components producing a movement from one unit to the next that has drawn comparisons to brutalist-style armour and attracted sustained attention from architects and Soviet modernism enthusiasts internationally. The two-storey disc structure capping the shaft gives the silhouette its instantly recognisable quality, a form the Moldovan building institute's own technical brochure described as eye-catching. The tower's programme was from the outset more ambiguous than its eventual function. The Chisinauproiect brief envisaged a comprehensive complex including a banquet hall, cinema, gymnasium and library alongside the residential block, none of which were built. Various accounts circulated that the rooftop disc was intended as a rotating restaurant; Vronsky himself dismissed this as technically impossible given the resources available in Chișinău at the time. The building operated as a dormitory with shared kitchens and communal areas on each floor until 1984, when actual construction work finally began in earnest after years of delays. Its legal status as a dormitory persisted until 1997, when it was reclassified as a residential building following the privatisation of units by their occupants in the 1990s - a transition that also ended the shared-space concept and reconfigured the floors as autonomous apartments. Comparable cylindrical towers were built across the Soviet Union, including in Minsk and Kyiv; the closest formal parallel, the Krtsats-Kukuruz (Palace of Youth) in Yerevan, was demolished in 2006: https://www.facebook.com/100071290812867/posts/palace-of-youth-krtsats-kukuruz-armenia-yerevanbuilt1977-8-demolished-2005archit/410721924647498/. Illegal balcony extensions added by residents have progressively distorted the loggia profile and introduced unquantifiable structural loads onto a frame not designed to carry them. Ground-floor commercial spaces that once housed a food store, barber and shoe repair shop have been stripped and vandalized. Romanița was once the tallest residential building in Chișinău, a distinction that has long since passed.