Archive for: Текстови објављени у часопису Култура на српском накнадно преведени на стране језике

This paper is based on an assumption that urban structure is a mnemonic mechanism: as it was effectively stated by Lewis Mumford, “in the city, time becomes visible”. The basic mnemonic starting point is that there is a connection between images (imagines) and places (loci), and that by creating a connection in one’s consciousness, one can invoke recollections of certain content (memoria). Transferred to the domain of urban structure, the city becomes a place filled with images that form a special memory landscape. In this context, iconic architectural works are of prominent importance. Therefore, in this paper, and starting from above given assumptions, the location of the State Department for National Defense building (known as the Headquarters or “Generalštab”), designed by architect Nikola Dobrović, will be examined in the overall memory landscape of Belgrade. In this regard, the importance of “Generalštab” as a cultural monument, its heritage values, as well as the coherence of the proposal for its conversion and reconstruction will be taken into account. The speed with which “Generalštab” has changed its memory connotation from an architectural monument (as a metaphor of Sutjeska or an articulation of Bergson’s philosophy) through a site of devastation (after the NATO bombing of 1999) to a polygon for political juggling with public resources (the 21st century), points to the incompatibility of memory contents and therefore to the need for constant care of them.

This paper is a research of the designing activities of architect Nikola Dobrović (1897-1967) in the Adriatic Sea region in the 1940s, represented by his designs for competitions and tourist facilities architecture in Split and Dubrovnik. They were a great contribution to the development of the avant-garde thought and Modernism in architecture in between the two World Wars, as well as a stimulus for the development of modern tourist economy in the interwar Yugoslavia. In several designs of tourist facilities at the Adriatic Sea (public bathing sites, entertainment hall, hotel, tourist office), which showed high architectural and aesthetic value as examples of interwar modernism, Nikola Dobrović drew attention to the necessity of developing modern tourist structures designed according to the requirements of new tourist demand. Some of these designs have remained unrealized, because there was not enough understanding for them among the expert public or the wider social community, but they still are excellent expressions of Dobrović’s modernist ideas and his authentic architectural language so important for the Yugoslav architecture of the 1930s. The market aspects of tourism inspired the investors to plan construction of hotels that would follow new standards in the hospitality industry in order to meet the requirements of demanding guests who got used to the standards of high quality hotel services while visiting other European tourist resorts. Having applied modernist principles in the architecture of the Grand Hotel on Lopud, near Dubrovnik, as a unique example of modern hotel architecture in Yugoslavia, the architect has also pointed to the social aspect of the modern tourist industry oriented at a new profile of tourists.

The opus of Nikola Dobrović may seem equally actual today as it used to be over the past few decades. However, if the phenomenon is considered in detail, this impression does not really correspond to the realities of 2017. By compartmentalizing his opus into construction works, architectural, urbanistic, written, historiographic, pedagogical or theoretical work, and by taking into consideration the current situations in the newly formed countries which nominally claim his heritage, we find a much more sceptical image than the one which has prevailed in the Serbian public until recently. The fate of his main architecture project – the former complex of the General Headquarters and the Ministry of Defence in Belgrade, is a paradigm of the fate of his entire production today. In this sense, it is necessary to reconsider the idea of “active heritage” as an antinomy of what we would consider to be a virtual “memory of heritage”. The twilight of urbanism in Serbia is another negative phenomenon which has indirectly influenced the heritage of Dobrović, as well as his personality as a pioneer of modern urbanistic thought in Serbia. The third segment of this study is consideration of how the structure of his entire opus has been valued so far in Serbia and if such values have been objectively juxtaposed, with a special regard to the period after the war, his project realized in Montenegro and the projects unrealized in Belgrade.