[Belgrade]
Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss [Normal Group] with Milos Mirosavic & Jelena Masnikosic [Faculty of Architecture University of Belgrade]
[links]
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[Belgrade] |
turbo architecture & other stories |
| part I - nato as architectural critic | |
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Today, when the war technology has the ability to select singular pieces of architecture as targets by the precision bombing - the question is not any more: how to destroy, but what is to be destroyed vs. what is to be spared? In such realm the time of destruction is the time of classification. The chosen case study for this interrogation is the controversial building of the Army Headquarters in Belgrade, Serbia designed by Nikola Dobrovic in 1954 and bombed by NATO in 1999. If NATO ever wanted to bomb a building that was more influenced by the Western culture, it could not find a better target. The design was the reflection of the pro-liberal politics of the post-war Yugoslavia distancing itself from the Stalinist block and its choice of the neo-classical style to represent the identity of the communist state. There is however, a complication in laying sole responsibility of its destruction to NATO. This is the building from which it was believed that the earlier bombings of Vukovar, Dubrovnik and Sarajevo were ordered. The intentions are to examine the notion of this new and unprecedented meaning of a single architectural object in the face of an overall reading of culture. |
| part II - loss of memory? | |
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Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss [Normal Group] with Milos Mirosavic & Jelena Masnikosic [Faculty of Architecture University of Belgrade] |
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Loss of Memory is as much a project about the city in crisis as it is about the new condition of a new city at birth. Belgrade is a good example of this paradox [birth-by-death] because it is a city in the post ideological shock after a half a decade of combined ideologies of communism and nationalism. At the same occurrence it was always brought to the brink of urban catastrophe [and considered dead] by the grey market as forces beyond ideology [unless according to conspiracy theory prescribed by it], Turbofolk, criminal, migrations, unemployment, personal utopias...The result is a condition of an ever unfinished city, floating between omnipotence, an immense desire for presence and an almost forgiving impotence of any of its realizations. On many scales of perception and understanding, it is a capital without clear identity and it remains as a baffling and untheorized place that we used to call urban solely based on its physical character. |
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Like a palimpsest of an ever-new ambition of the Turbo city, between making itself looking like the Other [Modernism] while still digging for its primordial and unaccomplished self [Byzantium] has generally been viewed as a result and incorporation of firm, but changing ideologies in the second half of the XX century. However, such attempts often underestimate forces alternative to ideology, like politics that in a standard dictionary stands for "the use of strategy or intrigue in obtaining power, control, or status." As it happens with the situations of quick changes and disappearances of ideology these forces remain active in and take over in shaping the city loosing the modernist focus between ideology and representation. They act like a cross-over or a an exquisite corps over existing incompleteness. Behind they leave unprecedented families of architectural form without memory in the post-ideological city - forms of a newly constructed bits of popular memory. The relation between bits of memory and form make the focus of this research - politics of form. |
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Loss of Memory searched for a relation between the disappearance of ideology and forms of appearance of new identities. A number of new types in architecture developed by this force will be studied [i.e. banks without savings, gas stations without gas, subway stations without subway system, housing without population, monuments without memory]. These are types of architecture constructing and actual realm seemingly without control over memory and yet balancing between the city's immanent state between omnipotence and impotence - immense desire for presence on the map of global dots and equally baffling impotence in finalizing any attempts. This condition of unaccomplished desire took over in redefining the city as we knew it. The intent therefore is to give a framework for further understanding of this urban Other that today defines the new urban condition of Belgrade. |
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[links] |
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| Forum for Architecture and Urbanism in Tokyo. | |
| a project of gruppo A12(I), Udo Noll(D) and Peter Scupelli(USA/I). see POST-IDEOLOGICAL CITY | |
| publisher: Stroom concept: Wim Cuyvers, Filiep Tacq, Den Haag, 2003 | |
| electronic magazine for art and architecture Belgrade |