The light fittings of the National Bank of Romania

The Palace of the National Bank was built between 1883 and 1900 to the designs of the French architects Cassien Bernard and Albert Galleron, with Grigore Cerchez and Constantin Baicoianu. It is an eclectic building of the French school, with sculpture by Ion Georgescu and Stefan Ionescu-Valbudea on the facade and painting by Nicolae Grigorescu, G. D. Mirea and Eugen Voinescu inside. It is a listed historic monument, code B-II-m-A-19023.

From 2003 the building entered a programme of structural strengthening, restoration and refurbishment that lasted almost a decade, with Aedificia Carpati as main contractor — the firm from which part of our orders came. The restoration received the Prize of the President of the Union of Architects and the medal of the 2012 National Architecture Biennial, in the cultural heritage architecture section; the project's lead author is the architect Gabriel Tureanu.

That prize is not ours — it belongs to the restoration project. We made the light fittings in it, and we think that is distinction enough: in a building where every stone ornament and every panel of scagliola was remade from the original, the light was not allowed to be the one thing bought off the shelf.

Patinated brass and engraved glass come back in almost every stage. That is not a workshop preference but a consequence of the building: the chandeliers visible in the archive photographs were brass, and their globes were engraved. We kept to the same vocabulary, fitting by fitting, for nine years.

Of the whole commission, the single line that best says what a workshop can do is one from 2009. The records read simply: "chandelier with 45 light sources, resulting from the enlargement of the existing 15-light chandelier, drawings approved by the bank's management".

That is, the old piece was neither replaced nor moved. It stayed where it was and grew threefold, with arms made to match its own so closely that nobody can point out which are the originals. In a listed building this is usually the only acceptable answer: you can neither keep a fitting too small for the restored room, nor throw away an original one.

The job records show the same pattern elsewhere: in 2004, on several six-arm suspended lamps, the central stem was extended by 500 mm and three arms were added to each, while the decorative brackets of some wall lights were remade larger.

A workshop that melts, casts and files brass can do this. A catalogue supplier cannot do it at all: the missing part is not ordered, it is made. See how we work in the workshop.

For the Kiritescu hall in the Smardan wing, in 2010, we made three eighteen-arm chandeliers, twelve two-arm wall lights and thirty-four ceiling fittings — all with Swarovski crystal. That is 49 fittings in a single room, conceived as one set: the same crystal, the same cut, the same colour of light, from the central chandelier to the last ceiling fitting in the corridor.

Swarovski crystal is not a costly accessory but a matter of optical behaviour: it has the refractive index and the cutting precision that make a whole room look brighter than its wattage suggests. In a meeting room without large windows, that counts. We have been a recommended Swarovski partner since 2012.

To the Craiova branch we delivered one hundred and sixteen fittings in 2017, each drawn individually: the largest chandelier is 1,300 mm across and 2,000 mm tall, and below it come three of 930 mm, twenty wall lights of 320 × 680 mm, eight lamps of 500 × 1,250 mm and sixty-six small ceiling fittings of 220 mm. The whole installation is switched and dimmed from one five-channel panel.

At Oradea, in 2021, sixty-eight fittings with their bulbs included: diameters between 390 and 1,280 mm, heights up to 2,000 mm, in small runs — one, two or four pieces for each room. This is how a bank building gets lit: not one model repeated a hundred times, but a family of fittings cut to the actual rooms.