Republican Puppet Theatre Licurici ("Fireflies”)

The building on Bucharest Street was designed as a horticultural production and research institute, with laboratories, a sales area, and an exhibition hall. During construction the brief changed entirely: the completed facilities were handed to the Grazhdanstroy Institute to remodel into a Palace of Youth, with an extension on 31 August Street repurposed for the Licurici Puppet Theatre. A stage and auditorium were inserted into spaces that had not been designed for them. Yuri Tumanyan and Oleg Vronsky completed the building in 1986. In the 1990s the Palace of Youth passed to the city's Directorate for Culture, which installed its offices in the building and rented the remaining spaces to cultural enterprises including jazz bands, folk music collectives, and publishers. The ground floor and the spaces between the theatre and the directorate offices were subsequently occupied by casinos, bars, and nightclubs, and the forecourt was converted into a car park. The three interconnected volumes form a plan resembling a flower with two leaves at the base. The main six-storey block has two side wings angled to partially embrace the theatre behind it, while a massive windowless projection overhangs the entry and transitions into a zigzag pattern of staggered window modules across the wings. A shorter rectangular connector links the directorate to the theatre wing, which consists of four symmetrically arranged octagonal elements clad in white and pink limestone. Aluminium profiles outline the window rows on the main facade and double as cladding bands between them, giving the street-facing elevation a robotic quality. A giant frame-like overhang without windows, covered in white and pink limestone, encloses the building along the roof and sides. Moldova's puppet troupe was formally founded in October 1945 and joined UNIMA within UNESCO in 1966. It performs in Romanian and Russian, with occasional productions in Italian, German, Spanish, and French, across a repertoire of over 300 shows including adaptations of Andersen, Grimm, Collodi, Saint-Exupéry, Pushkin, Gogol, Eminescu, and Creangă, as well as works by contemporary Moldovan dramatists. In 2008 the artistic community reclaimed the forecourt square, and it has since been used for public events. The Flat Space / Apartmentul Deschis installation by Stefan Rusu, commissioned by the Oberliht Association as part of the Chlosc Project, was among the works installed there.