Cezar Lăzărescu

The last project that Lăzărescu was appointed to was the construction of the National Library, a building that was left unfinished at the time he died on November 27, 1986, after lying in a coma for a month.

The relationship with Ceaușescu started deteriorating after the 1977 Vrancea earthquake. Ceaușescu dug up some city restructuring plans that had been ordered by King Carol II of Romania around 1940. He made them his own, and envisioned a restructuring program in the style of Baron Haussmann, with a new downtown comprising housing, ministries, an opera, a museum, a hotel, and a Palace of the Parliament. Studies were drafted by several architectural teams. Ceaușescu asked Lăzărescu to build the new headquarters of the Romanian Communist Party and of the Romanian government, to match the function of the current buildings.

He was appointed rector of the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism in 1970 (for two consecutive terms) and a year later President of the Romanian Architects' Union.

In 1968 he was asked to submit a proposal to a contest for the Otopeni Airport, after Ceaușescu dismissed the initial submissions from the other competitors. Lăzărescu won the contest and built the airport.

Felled by aggressive lung cancer, Gheorghiu-Dej died in March 1965. At the time, Lăzărescu was traveling in France to place orders for building materials. He learned of the ascent to power of Nicolae Ceaușescu and, despite warnings from friends in France, returned to Bucharest. Arriving home, he was viewed as an enemy of the people for having wasted the country's money on luxury dwellings and was threatened with legal action. Like others who had been close to Gheorghiu-Dej, he was blacklisted by Ceaușescu, who had not yet digested Lăzărescu's refusal to build his villa.

Lăzărescu was appointed to lead the remodelling of the National Theatre, a building that had been erected during the period 1964–1973 by the architects Horia Maicu [ro], Romeo Belea, and Nicolae Cucu. Lăzărescu's appointment to this project was a punishment for him having refused to overbid on the Palace of the Parliament, Ceaușescu being well-aware of the tensions he was causing between fellow architects. Towards the second half of the work, Lăzărescu was no longer invited to join Ceaușescu's visits to the building site, the latter's requests for changes being passed on by his counsellors. This was the period during which Ceaușescu's circle of counselors surrounded the presidential family, in order to distort information according to its interests, and eventually to suppress them entirely.

In the early 1950s he was drafted to the Danube–Black Sea Canal works, where he was put in charge of a team of young architects who were commissioned to design workers' lodgings close to Cernavodă, near the seaside. He worked next on healthcare facilities and holiday camps in North and South Eforie, on the shores of Lake Techirghiol, and in Mangalia.

Lăzărescu studied at the University of Architecture in Bucharest, graduating in 1948. His college years were over the background of World War II and the post-war era, during which he and his mother Sophia had to struggle to make ends meet. Nevertheless, he had remarkable academic achievements and was also involved in numerous extracurricular professional and social activities.

His father, Alexandru Lăzărescu, was an Army colonel, often on duty far from Bucharest; he was killed in action in December 1942 at the Battle of Stalingrad. His mother, Sophia Lăzărescu Georgescu, was a housewife. Having attended an art school herself, she also taught him how to draw and paint.

After attending a small public school, where the short illustrated fairy tale books he wrote brought him the admiration of his teachers and classmates, he was admitted to the Gheorghe Lazăr National College, one of the best high schools in Bucharest. Inspired by the exciting environment and the many extracurricular activities, he performed very well in school. He contributed to several art exhibitions organised by his high school and in 1942 opened his own exhibition at the Athenaeum, a prestigious venue.

Cezar Lăzărescu (October 3, 1923 – November 27, 1986) was a Romanian architect and urban planner. Starting in the years after his graduation in 1952 and until after the 1977 Vrancea earthquake, he conceived a significant number of buildings and city plans in Romania and abroad.