Built after 1904, the Memorial House Bârzănescu impressed and stands out by his style Art Nouveau which combines the neoclassical structure, some Baroque elements and Secession details.
Art Nouveau (a term which belongs to the French language and has the meaning of New art) is an artistic style entirely demonstrated in the visual arts, the design and the architecture from the beginning of the 20th century, relatively at the same time in the majority of the cultures and European countries, but also in Northern America, where it was adopted by choice in the United States of America and in Canada.
The neoclassic style is fundamentally characterized by a return to the Greek – Roman shapes. For the artists, it isn’t about turning to the servile imitation of Antiquity or to the experience of the Italian Renaissance, but of developing new principles, quite quickly transformed in rigid rules: the clarity of the exposure, the austerity of the structure by the means of order, of the symmetry, of the proportions.
The entrance is simple and extremely elegant because of the decoration elements with the shape of rose windows and of the one of apparent brick situated above the stairs from the entrance. All these are completed by the presence of the border with circles on the inferior left side and the ones of apparent brick under the cornice, together with the terrace with metallic balusters supported on four massive consoles.
The constructor was Ion Bârzănescu, but it was occupied by the engineer Zahariadi, the inspector of those times of the works from the harbor from Constanța.
The works at the harbor Constanța started on the 16th of October 1896. On the foundation there was placed, by King Carol I, the document which consecrated “the foundation of a harbor at the borders of the former Pont Euxin, where from the oldest times the commerce found a place of shelter, where so many historical monuments remind us about the ancient domination of our Roman ancestors and where the poet Ovidiu died.”
The construction works started after the project of the engineer I. B. Cantacuzino and they were continued with the alterations proposed by other two exceptional Romanian engineers: Gheorghe Duca and Anghel Saligny. In the year 1989, the command of the harbor works was taken over by Saligny, the constructor of the bridge from Cernavodă, in his team also being the inspector Zahariade. Until 1909, when the harbor Constanța has been officially inaugurated, there were performed works of dredging, the border barrage, the one from the entrance, the one from south and the quays there were built 6 basins, the petrol reservoirs and not lastly, the silos. Starting from these equipments, the harbor from Constanța operated in 1911 over 1, 4 million tones of merchandise.
In the inter – war period there are added to the harbor platform new elements of infrastructure, such as the corn hothouse, the building of the harbor administration, the exchange, the floating dock etc., and the traffic reaches 6, 2 million tones in 1937, the number which situates Constanța between the first European harbors.
