What had to be done to the "dumps' at the city's outskirts or to the endless slums that, like architect and essayist G.M. Cantacuzino wrote, "were pushing their dilapidation into the city's heart"? Would there be place in the new capital for its genuine, though poor, past, the past of the "tin domes" surrounded by the multitude of modest buildings? What would happen to the exotic picturesqueness of the Old Court? How would one "harness" the Dambovita river, with its mean but green banks? What would Bucharest look like: European, dynamic, industrial, as the modernists anticipated it, or autochthonous, genuine, anchored in its quiet past, as the traditionalists wanted it?
Bucharest was thus, in 1918, in a full process of transition to a different world.
