“In housing, the most expensive thing is the infrastructure, so it made sense for Ceausescu to build on the areas where that infrastructure already exists,” says Stroe.

In 1971, the Communist leader visited North Korea, where he was influenced by the radical programs of construction under the dictator Kim Il-Sung in the capital Pyongyang.

Four years later, he passed a new law which forced new blocks to face the street and increase their height, and stopped the construction of free-standing blocks perched in nature. Walls of blank ten-storey boulevards emerged, looming over the city’s main thoroughfares.

On 4 March 1977, an earthquake killed 1,424 in Bucharest, wrecking tens of thousands of buildings. Many of the apartment blocks that collapsed were built between 1920 and 1940. This was the final excuse for Ceausescu to launch a full-scale redevelopment of the city.

In 1978, a decree allowed the ruler to subordinate architects and urban planners to his own will. “From then on, development proposals would be drafted overnight, following more and more absurd requests from the dictator,” writes Stroe.

Ceausescu began to strip out the city, destroy thousands of homes, and build megalomaniac projects. This was the era of the bulldozer. The ruler concentrated all planning resources in a city centre project which attempted to turn Bucharest into Pyongyang. “The goal was to make a new socialist city for a new socialist man,” says Ghenciulescu. “The idea was to destroy the pre-Communist Bucharest, and build a new city on top.”

The style of exteriors on these blocks married utility with folk motifs, rounded corners and random arches, favoured by the dictator. But inside, these buildings were often larger, with more floorspace, and their structures were designed to withstand earthquakes.

But Stroe says the “energy and enthusiasm” of architects who were buildings new cities in the 1960s transformed into an atmosphere where the architects said to themselves: ‘let’s do the least worst thing.’

This new form still does not have a name.

“This is not Postmodernist,” says Stroe, “because Postmodernism has to be referential and ironic. In Bucharest, there is no irony. Everything is literal.”

Asked to put a finger on what style we can call this architecture, Stroe says: “I can’t make an assumption. It is stylistically damaged.”

Ceausescu annihilated whole neighbourhoods such as the winding rural streets of Uranus in the central-west, where he built his vanity project, the People’s Palace, the largest building in Europe and a manifestation of his personality cult in concrete and marble.

In other cases, he took the existing boulevards, widened them, destroyed the first rows of houses, and added new blocks.

The stark white amplitude of these constructions is impressive, but behind this monumental facade there is a lack of any visual or physical dialogue with the city. The pavements are tiny, cars clog the walking space, the smell of trash is pungent, and the random alcoves and arches become sanctuaries for the homeless, who sleep on beds of concrete in the summer and next to hot water pipes in the winter.

“[These buildings] do not have a back,” says Ghenciulescu. “What Ceausescu did was to create a real-life Potemkin project.”

The idea was to build an immediate impression of magnificence, with a long and wide axis, and then, once this was completed, to go deeper into the urban fabric of Bucharest, and stage by stage, demolish every building from before Communism, except the churches. This would give a visitor the idea that an entire city had kowtowed to the aesthetic passions of the dictator.

“You may think there is nothing left of the old city if you drive through Bucharest,” says Ghenciulescu. “But if you turn left or look behind a block, there is the old city which did not have the time to disappear.”