The "loss of memory" of which I will speak is a personal kind of memory. It will be hard to say that much about the notion of the collective memory or collective amnesia, very loaded terms in the recent past, especially after 13 years of political turbulence and destruction in former Yugoslavia. "Collective guilt," of course, would mean that whole nations are guilty for the deeds of individuals. Since the line remains blurry between individual and collective, I would rather refer to my own personal memory: the memory of the city I thought I knew.

The city remains the reference. So for personal reasons or a lack of objective accuracy I will focus on cities much more than countries or nations. And besides my personal thoughts I owe very much to the discoveries from collective research with the students from the Faculty of Architecture in Beograd. In this context I have been asked to present a perspective on "New Urban Conditions."

So let's look at Ljubljana, Zagreb, Sarajevo and Beograd from 1989-the year when nationalist parties won elections in each of the former republics, which led, event by event, first to the rise of Milosevic in Serbia, rise of Tudjman in Croatia, then to the cessation of Slovenia in 1991, then to other events like the war in Croatia, followed by the war in Bosnia. During that time, Beograd was isolated yet very close geographically to Western Europe. The number of kilometers or hours it would take to go from Paris to Beograd or Zagreb or Sarajevo was minor, yet in an apparent inversion of distance and position between nationalism and globalization, Beograd ceased to be a part of the world, but part of world media.

This is a panorama of both old Beograd and New Beograd as seen from one of the hills to the south. In the foreground where we see an idyllic disappearance of houses in the forest is where Milosevic's house was. This hill is the "Beverly Hills" of Beograd. On the left, a tower which was hit several times during NATO bombing raids is perhaps recognizable from the news as the TV station belonging to Milosevic's daughter. And a very quick view from the tallest building in Beograd-25 stories-looking towards New Beograd across nineteenth century urban conditions with modern building insertions from after the World War II .

Beograd also saw international sanctions, which isolated the city from the region, but in effect made its boundaries vulnerable to the countryside. Here we see a familiar scene from those times when petrol was smuggled in the city and then sold on the street in Coca-Cola plastic bottles. Another familiar image was demonstrations; Beograd had an active opposition to the government who vented their anger in whatever large spaces in the city. This is an image from 1996-1997 student demonstration against frauds in the local elections. Most of Milosevic's supporters were in rural areas, while most of the urban population was oriented towards democratization and liberation of the country.

Maps: In 1997 Beograd had its delayed situationist moments from the '60. The police were instructed to derail citizen movements who were said to be "creating new maps of the city"-finding new ways to connect one street to another, going through passages, even just taking a walk became a suspect activity. Whereas the global media's maps, shown so many times by satellite, could be made more precisely from outside perspectives on the city than from the inside. NATO also created its own maps as a way of landmarking the city; some of these landmarks weren't landmarks to us, but they were for somebody else. They clearly plotted the city in points, in icons, not areas. Also for comparison: two maps of bombing, one from the 1941 carpet bombing by German Air Force and one from 1999 following the previous pinpoint map of city. The different effects of the bombings are quite clear.

In a revealing inversion, the government learned how to use global media for its own propaganda. "Just Imagine!" was the message on billboards displaying computer renderings of the Eiffel Tower crushing down in orange flames. They were positioned in front of icons hit by NATO forces where they would be shot by TV cameras and shown on CNN and all the global networks. Which, by the way, were all watched in Beograd as well. Yet, in darkness, during blackouts, life in the city went on amidst the new spectacle of NATO air raids. Citizens knew which buildings were going to be bombed and trusted the precision of the bombers; they organized special viewing parties atop buildings. Not moon-viewing, bomb-viewing.

In Serbia's second biggest city, Novi Sad in the north, much of the infrastructure was bombed out in the Spring of 1999. The ruins became curious monuments for everyday events and for doing gymnastics. The citizens developed a kind of attitude, finding black humor in the whole situation. It was a strange joy ride, but not virtual-it was real. Not the virtual game experience of viewing from abroad. I was in New York at the time and my colleagues did not really know where Beograd was, let alone how much of the military engagement we saw on TV came from America. In Serbia, irony came back as the only defense. For example, this is a graphic spoof featuring the missing Windows99 edition: between Microsoft's Windows98 and Windows2000 operating systems. These images show how citizens in Novi Sad taped up their windows so they wouldn't shatter in the bombing.

Of course, Beograd was not the only city to survive the destruction. Sarajevo and Dubrovnik also underwent an incredible amount of destruction. This is Sarajevo; if you didn't know it, you probably couldn't tell it apart from Beograd. Yet the difference is iconic: Sarajevo sought out a post-communist iconography while a few hundred kilometers towards East, Beograd looked for an identity that was lost during 50 years of communism through the rise of a totalitarian leader.

Yet another irony: more recently, during the September 2000 demonstrations in Beograd in support of the newly elected president and in protest against a leader of ten years who just could not admit that he was the loser, extremely noticeable during these gatherings was a Nike billboard, whose "Just do it" motto was somehow perfectly adapted to the situation-so the citizens "just did it," they broke into the Parliament building and emptied it out. Here it is, just hours before the fall of Milosevic, as seen from an independent art gallery that stopped being a place to show art and became a place to view street activism.

To understand how one lives and behaves in an isolated condition, I want to go back to a phenomenon from the beginning of the '90s. "Turbo Folk" music-"turbo" as in making a car engine go [and sell] faster by fostering enhanced technology within an existing shell-was a mixture of techno music imported from the West and traditional melodies embedded in popular memory. Highly commercial and highly consumable folk-pop, it had no meaning whatsoever-the less meaning, the more successful it was. But its effects were beyond Turbo Folk music extending to attempts to define and construct Serbian national identity. The principle Turbo Folk singer, nicknamed Ceca [Svetlana Raznatovic-Velickovic] was married to Arkan, an iconic figure from the war, later an indicted war criminal by the International Tribunal in the Hague. And as hybrid as Turbo Folk is, the idea of the identity was a sheer ability to appropriate, copy and discard. The couple underwent various image transformations-from '50s movie stars, to Arkan dressed in traditional duke's regalia from a nationalistic past, to the same couple as a Bruce Willis and Madonna duo-seemingly no connection between the three images. Cosmetic changes weren't seen to be a problem.

Turbo Folk peaked several years ago, exactly when Beograd was most isolated from the foreign community, when it was most difficult to leave. It was difficult to explain to anyone outside the country that Beograd did not identify with the Turbo "engine," that "we" were not "them." Actually the identity was projected on us, and "we" could not realize that we were also a part. Although architects took part in the process from image-making to space-making, too: once Turbo Folk and their followers came into economic power, they started to build, marrying the new wealth to a search for identity supposedly lost during the years of communism.

This is one of the first buildings done by a known architect from Beograd, trying very hard to conform to nineteenth century urbanism. It projects in the front by a double set of circular balconies [popularly compared to breasts of another folk star nicknamed Lepa Brena [beautiful Brena]. It is presented in the monograph as two mirrored buildings facing each other across the street, as if a star looks herself in the mirror. Other attempts-many under construction by the same architect, who had courage to deal with the "beast" and now caters to the Turbo crowd-in the so-called "international village in Beograd" another surprisingly idealistic development planned by a local architect akin to Mies van der Rohe's Weissenhof housing development from the '20.The house is built in a mixture of classical and modern elements, with cornices piled on top of each other, trying to relate and protrude and say in every possible way "Here I am." For Japanese audience it may be interesting to know that Kisho Kurokawa designed a house here as well that's still only foundations while some of the other houses are already built. More recently, the trend in New Beograd may give a nineteenth century floor plan urban house new embellishments on the façade-the architect, again, a willing participant in this identity quest game.

Although Turbo Folk have been largely dismissed as a new force by intellectuals and the so-called elite, their cronies have not only started to re-shape the identity of the city, they are trying to define certain parts of the city with what I call "Turbo types," architectural types built for a not-existent program.

For example, this church [St. Sava shrine] from the end of the '80s, is actually a modern up-build on top of the older, but not so old foundations. It now dominates the city so this noble and polemical idea of reinsertion of lost traditions became a measure of unaccomplished ambition. It was intended to be the biggest orthodox shrine in the world-unfinished-built for an anticipated congregation. Furthermore, church building at large has seen an almost symbolic revival. Even in New Beograd, which some still see as a "communist city" - "300,000 communists" there - churches now bring "soft forms" into an area dominated by "hard lines of modernism." This would-be-traditional shrine-unfinished-is a straight take-off from a Byzantine church.

Another example, this National bank built over the last ten years of crisis for a country with no savings and no credit-and no clear recognition of its own appearance, a solid block of blue-gray reflective glass that gives nothing away about its interior or, for that matter, any reason for its existence. And another, this central electrical distribution power station in a country with huge shortages in electricity. Yet another Turbo type: filing stations without gasoline. Most were built during the oil embargo-a total mystery, were it not for the gray market for government oil imports from Russia, then distributed to Third World countries for a small profit margin.

And one more final Turbo type: the hotel without tourists, built in a city where no one but journalists go. This Hyatt is in a development in New Beograd, a sort of enlarged Zen garden of green reflective glass that conveys no clue of what's inside Hyatt had big plans for Beograd even before the fall of Milosevic. "Transparency" has become especially big after the changes in political structure-"transparency," of course, both literally as in places of power that are now made visible to the public, but also phenomenological as in the future being discernible and credible. Contrast this with official buildings in Serbia in the '90s and the use of reflective glass and bunker-like materials that hid the interior from view, yet at the same time created an impression of open structure. September 2000 demonstrations demystified "transparency" showing how many layers of impermeable material lied behind the broken glass.

By accident I have had to deal with this issue myself. Working together with my partner, Sabine von Fischer, our office [Normal Group for Architecture] entered a design competition for a hotel with public facilities around the time of the first threat of NATO bombings in November 1998. How was it possible that a city under realistic threats of destruction could have such ambitions and programs? How to build in a country that is isolated? We believed that the most radical solution would be to propose a "normal" building. We received a Prize for this idea, but still haven't been paid.

The largest architectural firm in Beograd, a former socialist corporation -meaning they have 20 or 25 active architects and 100 to 150 additional staff-was even pursuing its own scheme of globalization, though clearly avoiding "headline" areas of globalization by working in Russia, Africa and Latin America during the years of isolation. They were very active in Africa, building in Harare, Zimbabwe and in Lagos, Nigeria. The firm's location is only 50 meters from the Chinese Embassy bombed by NATO forces. The divorce between reality and practice yet occurred as a team of architects was reported that night charetting for a design presentation somewhere in the Third World.

Paradoxically, over the last ten years, architectural spending on façades rose from 10% or 20% of the total budget. I say paradoxically because these were years of gradual isolation-who could see the façades? But we must remember that Beograd was working very hard to isolate itself from the inside; often antithetical to the usual thinking in Beograd that the world had cut off Beograd. Thus Beograd in its desire to be accepted in the world was making itself over to look like the world in a gesture against globalization, trying to take the place of the world.

The story of McDonalds in Beograd defies the thesis put forth by American globalist theoretician, Thomas Friedman, who claimed that the US would never go to war against a country with McDonald's. Well, Beograd had seven McDonald's at the time, all fully operative; actually the McDonald's billboard is one of the first things one sees by the airport. Furthermore, McDonalds has its own double skin. From the outside its standard red and yellow cheerfulness, and from the inside, in the office of the main director, Orthodox Christian icons and other parts of a local tradition.

This and other inversions during the isolation of Beograd enabled Turbo Folk to become dominant. This folk "engine" fell right for the situation because of its popularity and the power to substitute for the actual world. Once dominant, Turbo Folk reached out to materialize itself in the city, private houses mushroomed everywhere by-passing the papers, including Arkan's house as the beacon for the new rich expressionism. The results are wild, as much as the expression of Turbo Folk's immense abuse of copyright. Sampling bits and pieces of stolen sources and by sheer repetition that freedom has in return articulated its own language of architecture. This curiously reminds of a similar agenda of modernism: to erase the source memory by constructing a new one instead. Yet today's process unfolded at "turbo" speed in spite of the city's isolated status. For me this urban realm deserved a word and I started calling it: "Turbo Space." It is an accelerated realm of disconnected [yet altogether singular] places caused by an almost panicking speed of construction. Loss of memory in Turbo Space is not necessarily tragic because one can still look at the loss of unused memory as a liberation of a sort. I also felt that Turbo Space describes how Beograd contributed to forces of globalization in a way because it has managed to liberate urban memory from urban form.

Now in diametric counterpoint to this drive towards meaningless content and opportunist marketeering that spawned unimaginable building types, the other half of the story hasn't been the same at all. With everyone participating in gray economies, black markets flooded the streets, empty department stores came to be occupied by small-time traders-although without any buyers. A group of architects has documented how uncontrolled street trade first stakes out and finally penetrates an empty department store, contracts with the owner, slowly converting the interior into hybrid stalls and corridors.

Throughout the city black market trade made way for "mushrooming" illegal constructions. First temporary kiosks appeared, then were replaced with more solid material, then cantilevered out additional living space, until finally the streets were thick with these "mushroomed" spaces-especially in those areas where modernist urbanism left open spaces around buildings. In these unclaimed spaces, statistics tell us that 150,000 such houses were built in Beograd over the last couple of years-600,000 across the country. Some of them have become little institutions built by organized effort.

What unifies these images is their "infinite un-finishedness." There's something extremely familiar, something archetypal or something that reminds us of Aldo Rossi. None of them is finished on the outside but entirely finished on the inside, all bearing a sharp 45 degrees pitched roof. These houses are usually built to be shared by several generations: the ground floor for the grandparents, then the next generation building up via makeshift external stairs or whatever they can construct.

During a short span of time Beograd has turned this phenomenon of un-finishedness and infinity to an institution. This is the first gated community in Beograd in a city, actually, two gated communities, series of buildings that look unfinished, now making this term of unfinished even irrelevant, and with a fence that again looks unfinished, but if you want to get in, your ID is going to be checked.

One new shopping center is entirely owned by new Chinese immigrants. It's an interesting story that has developed over the last two or three years. Officially there are 40,000 new Chinese in Beograd; unofficially the number is more like 150,000. They came under an agreement between the two governments-Chinese and Yugoslav-so in a way half of them have already received Yugoslav passports. Somehow Milosevic had the idea that this new Chinese connection would then support him in the elections that he apparently lost.

Ultimately, both global forces and material conditions have come to dominate a city that has long been considered dormant. An incredible accumulation of material, especially today when the former ideology has vanished or when situation has become, or is becoming more or less a-political. It has been an exercise in analyzing the relation between politics and building.

We should look at internal conditions in the city further into the recent past. However, though perhaps no further than immediately after World War II, when Yugoslavia was working very hard to build an identity that did not rely on national symbols. Each of the six independent countries today that made up Yugoslavia after the World War II had its own national image and traditions, so the planners had to go beyond tradition to try to create an "identity collage."
The Socialist Republic of Serbia also had its collage of ideals: work, reconstruction, industry and victory, which are ubiquitous; Orthodox Christian and Muslim religions, shown more as cultural heritages; and the new Central Committee of the Communist Party, made to look like a corporate tower.

The search for identity came to the fore in the competition for building the new Parliament building in Beograd immediately after World War II. The parliament building of Yugoslavia, could not look like a copy of Stalinist neo-classicism nor even like similar projects that were currently being built in Russia. The political reason being that in 1948, Tito's Communist Party of Yugoslavia [KPJ] decided to break away from Stalin and turn half way toward Western liberal democracy, which immediately posed problems for representing the form of such democracy.

To negotiate these problems was not easy. The first blueprints for the identity compromise were plans to strip down existing government facades from a national version of Art nouveau, developed in the beginning of XX century and never fully accepted as a so called Neo-Byzantium style. Next was a modernist façade and a classical layout without historical motifs nor parts of any local national heritage. One of the prominent proposals for the new Yugoslav parliament immediately after the World War II was a Babylonian ziggurat. The other was a hybrid Mies van der Rohe skyscraper with a Neo-Classical base or various other schemes with façade ornamentation imagined as near-classical columns. The winning design for this parliament by a group of Croatian architects was highly influenced by Le Corbusier's League of Nations, but not by the Palace of Soviets. The only architectural element retraceable to Neo-Classicism was a restrained entry portico held by modernist round columns. The final version of the project wiped away even these elements; windows became vertical stripes, the façade vanished, assuming today's not-quite tectonic structure.

A very similar thing is happening with one of the buildings bombed out in the last NATO campaign. This was supposed to be the Central Committee Headquarters of the Yugoslav Communist Party, but the architect changed the façade at the last moment to make it to look like an American corporate skyscraper, not unlike the Lever Building by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill on Park Avenue in New York. Every fourth column is actually structural, the second and third ones are cosmetic. Now that the building was bombed-for its content, I assume, not for its looks-it now presents a new problem for analysis, a new problem in viewing these attempts to internationalize the appearance: that is, who can critically decide what does or does not belong to culture today?

The perception of what is proper and what is not also parallels how ordinary people now experience the city and how the city is being shown on state TV. According to another group of Yugoslav architects and film-makers there is an apparent branching of urban experience into actual and virtual. We see "parallel urbanities": on the one hand, the appearance of top-name global branding targeting population throughout the city, and on the other, TV images of the city as being itself a target.

After the bombings ended, in the so-called era of reconstruction, Milosevic tried to show how he really cared for the country by immediately commissioning a number of projects as replacements for the ones that were destroyed, many of them planned by the corporation mention before. However, what makes them almost "Turbo" is the collapse between desire and projected effects. These projects were featured on primetime TV news on an everyday basis.

Albeit, only a couple of projects were ever realized by Milosevic's government as if he gave away the chance to show the face in architecture. One of them was underground-a Moscow-like metro station for a subway system that was never built, with extremely luxurious escalators and great halls. The second project was a Serbian version of the Japanese Bullet train, of which only seven kilometers were ever finished. And the third project was a free-standing monument called "Victor" completed just half a year before the fall of Milosevic to "commemorate the victory of Serbia over NATO"-though we all knew it was the other way around-planned in counterpoint to the existing icon of Beograd, a monument built by Ivan Mestrovic between the two wars.

According to recent opinions, Milosevic's monument signals to a full circle from post-war Stalinism, through anti-Stalinism and Western aspirations, back to monuments like those built under Stalinism. The story goes that Milosevic's wife saw the design for the monument in a dream and that she herself wrote the inscription and signed "on behalf of the people of Serbia."

Lastly, a brief look at the loss of critical consciousness about buildings and especially among architects who are working with the issues of identity, seeking a new identity while trying to avoid national symbols. This Army Headquarters was originally built in 1954. Now after the NATO bombings, how are we supposed to look at the empty ruins? We may compare two competing schemes for the building: one by Josip Plecnik, the most celebrated architect from Ljubljana [Slovenia] and a pupil of Otto Wagner from Vienna; the other, a "polemical dynamic scheme" by Nikola Dobrovic-a 280 meters wide elevation generated by what he was calling "Bergson's diagrams" after Henri Bergson, who was widely read at the time by both the leftist intelligentsia of Western Europe and pro-liberal communists in Beograd. He was also read by Gilles Deleuze, however, who published a book on Bergson in 1966, just two years after this building was finished, interpreting him as a philosopher of "intuitive reason," something that perhaps comes close to explaining why certain forms come to be. Dobrovic's Army Headquarters may be its rare if not the only built example.

Which leaves us today at a certain apotheosis of memory, now that the political situation that had dominated Beograd is supposedly over and the city is becoming a collection of curious monuments for passers-by-including myself, now a bit of a stranger to the city. All this creates a lingering confusion about what to do next. Beograd is coming back into the world, but where is it going? Our quandary is best highlighted by the conflicting proposals for how we would reconstruct. One well-known sculptor, for example, proposes giving this Central Committee building a Stalinist base built by all the debris from the last NATO bombing campaign, because that was its hidden agenda anyway, to make end to what appears communist, which in the era of branding first calls the associations to a brand of Stalin. Conversely, in apprehension of the awaited market economy, other proposals made by corporations ever close to political power would either keep the building as it is or replace it with another more profitable and similarly ubiquitous kind of appearance, a fatter skyscraper of offices for rent.

This kind of confusion stretches even further to an official level since the General Urban Institute of Beograd, the entity that still makes plans for a city in a classical way, has now won a commission to make a general urban plan for the city again-However, it was given only 14 months to do it in, which makes the effort unrealistic, idealistic in a "Turbo" kind of way. The only thing the Institute could produce so far was a document called "Hypothesis about a general plan of Beograd"-it has a sort of '60s or '70s theoretic ring of rhetoric's but gives no real directions for the city.

Confusion is rife. It's been also noted by global corporations like Coca-Cola-who incidentally never left the city and whose signboard now says, "Live your life!"-a message we might reflect upon theoretically, but I myself now thinking about this whole history of from Beograd do not find "Live your life!" an easy and very critically convincing solution.