/ 1968
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MUSEUM AS AN INSTITUTION OF SOCIAL INCLUSION

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In contemporary society, the museum is being increasingly focused on new roles and it is no longer oriented only to the traditional ones such as grouping, preserving and exhibiting collections. Having that in mind, the aim of this paper is to understand the possibilities of the museum in the area of social engagement, and to consider the potential of the museum as a socially inclusive institution. The paper discusses the concepts of social exclusion and social inclusion, and analyses the possibilities for the museum in the realization of equality, diversity, social justice and human rights. It is ascertained that education represents a central activity of the social inclusion process in a museum. Serbian museums perceive with increasing understanding their function in the society. However, the perception that museums are institutions intended only for cultural elites still seems to be widespread. Following world trends, museums in Serbia should perceive their potential in the areas of social engagement, social inclusion and education, and should try to connect both with the society and the public.

/ 1968
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CULTURAL BASIS OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE IN YUGOSLAVIA 1945-1990

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Partisans’ Square in Užice, designed by architect Stanko Mandić, opened in 1961. The project was designed in many layers which were deeply integrated into the life of the city. Therefore, it is necessary to analyse the fundamentals that were set before drawing the first line. This paper analyses the philosophical, ethical, aesthetic and sociological grounds which the author defined before he started designing. The paper analyses the following elements identified in the written sources of architects: the habits of the population during reconstruction of the city, inconsistency and disrespect of the adopted urban solutions, urban experience of the population and modern solutions, removing traces of Oriental and European dreams of the population, generators of change in space, architecture as the image of society, preserved and respected cultural heritage, engaging of vernacular tradition in the language of the Modern, local materials, local natural heritage, a new technical approach to design, topography of the terrain as a compositional anchorage, avoiding absolutist atmosphere of the market, appropriate measure of the memorial layer, careful creating of the vision and the atmosphere.

/ 1968
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GAZE OF THE OTHER AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE: ТHE ANIMALS AS PROVOCATION

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Primarily relying on the texts of Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari and Theodor W. Adorno, this article contemplates the provocation that cats, often representative of animals in general, been able to direct us towards philosophy. Aside from the proverbial penetrativeness of the cat’s gaze which has a physiological cause, a historical and phenomenological reconstruction of its significance points to the valuable incentive that it has represented for the understanding both unity and singularity of life forms, the awareness of our epistemic limits, the release of anthropocentric prejudice, the articulation of existential situations and the insight into a humanistic policy of discrimination. The author concludes that the cat’s character, in its best literary and philosophical offshoots, warns of impingement that the Western rationality committed to everything that could not be included under its claim to universal authority, and suggests that the way of redemption for the wrongdoing leads across selective adoption and criticism of the same heritage, but now in such a manner that it could be considerate and responsible toward both discursive and the unavailability of the Others.

/ 1968
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THE QUALITY OF TV PROGRAMMES FOR CHILDREN IN SERBIA, AS SEEN BY CHILDREN AND THEIR PARENTS

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There is no research in Serbia about media habits of children or the quality of TV programs for children. This research was done on 458 children aged 9-11, and 412 parents from four towns in both suburban and rural areas in Serbia. Most results concur with the findings of foreign researches. The main results are: almost half of the children are unselective when watching different programs on TV, usually without parental knowledge or guidance; children are significantly more satisfied with the quality of television programs than parents while the parents think that the quality is average; two thirds of parents significantly underestimate the influence of TV programs on children; programs for children contain a lot of violence; both children and parents think that the worst part about programs for children is that they are not educational or inclusive (very low rate of socially disadvantaged groups in these programs). The results also show that TV programs for children in Serbia have to be significantly improved and that the influence of TV programs on children and adolescents has to be addressed.

/ 1968
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SERBIAN CEMETERIES AND CHANGES IN THE AREA OF BELGRADE

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Forming of the New Cemetery at the end of 1820s at the far outskirts of Belgrade, next to the Tašmajdan quarry, was part of a policy of space conquest at several levels: political – by emancipation from the Turkish political authority; cultural – by restoring the concept of positioning the cemetery next to the church; urban – by expanding the city territory to the cemetery and organizing urban space by forming of streets and residential buildings; communal – by routing and infrastructural development of roads and open market places; economic – by constructing bazaars and new business centres. Such a transformation of the area around the cemetery enriched the contents and functions of this part of the town, although it remained less attractive than neighbouring Vračar, until the Principality of Serbia acquired independence. By changing the cultural patterns of Belgrade’s middle class, the culture surrounding death also changed during the 19th century, along with the attitude towards cemeteries and its functions. After the closure of the Large Cemetery, the area was levelled and used for formation of new streets, without transferring the graves or remains of the deceased to an ossuary or to the New Cemetery. The New Cemetery, in turn, was neglected, unmaintained, had no fence nor guards and was often desecrated. However, when cultural norms changed in the second half of the 19th century, such an appearance of cemetery became inappropriate, requiring better maintenance or relocation to the outskirts. This time, remains of the deceased family members were either transferred with piety or new ossuaries were formed.

/ 1968
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PUBLIC SPACE VS. SHOPPING MALL IN CONSUMERIST CULTURE

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In this paper shopping malls are considered as a representative of modern consumer spaces and observed as places of interaction between the surrounding environment and the stakeholders, as well as places of their mutual indoor interaction. The idea of a shopping centre is the idea of compressing and intensifying a public space by placing all the necessary facilities under one roof. In this way, by providing access to all the necessary facilities, the need of the shopper to return to everyday life is lessened, shopping becomes a recreational activity and the shopping mall becomes a shelter. The aim of this paper is to compare the preferences consumers have towards shopping malls and public spaces, by determining consumers’ opinion on the (dis) advantages of the shopping malls over features of a city centre. The basic goal of the research is to improve the knowledge and experiences in an architectural research through exploring of the mutual relations between the user, architecture and the space. The paper aims to analyse the relationship between architectural creativity and broader socio-cultural changes caused by the commercialization of a modern city.

/ 1968
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A SCALE MODEL AS A PUBLIC SPACE

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In visual culture studies, a scale model (franc. Maquette) is usually considered in two cases: as a phase in the realization of sculptural and architectural tasks or as an element of museum documentation and exhibitions. A scale model serves as a test for the development of creative ideas, while in the second case, it serves to present an existing, real, three-dimensional structure. In addition to being proportionately reduced, a model is often formally condensed, in terms of the use of details. Yet, all these losses (in scale and design) actually open up the space to another element – imagination. A model offers a visual stimulus, which by means of imagination (individual or public) completes the notion of a signified object. Located in a public space, a model becomes its part, keeping its imaginative potential. In other words, a model in a public space brings imaginative content and thus expands the existing public space. In this sense, a very specific model is a model which announces the construction of a public space: the public space represented by a scale model does not exist in reality; a model itself – though its imaginative content – is the only reality of this public space. To the public, by announcing a public space, this kind of scale model induces something that might be called “public imagination”. In this case, public imagination is seen as a process of constructing public opinion by using imaginative stimulants (primarily visual). Starting from these assumptions, this paper will analyse the scale model of the project “Belgrade Waterfront” as a generator of public imagination. This means that the “Belgrade Waterfront” scale model will not be viewed simply as an announcement for the public space, but as an original reality in a public space in which it is exhibited, and as an element in the construction of the expanded public space based on imagination. In other words, this means that the “Belgrade Waterfront” scale model is not examined as a sign that represents something else (future look of the river Sava waterfront), but as a visual structure that builds its own public space.

/ 1968
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THE ROLE, SHAPING AND METAMORPHOSIS OF SPORTS FACILITIES IN BELGRADE IN THE 19TH AND THE 20TH CENTURY, IN RELATION TO THE CITY NEEDS

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Every city is a mirror of society and societal activities throughout its history. In its past, Belgrade has witnessed great changes. Over a few decades in the 19th century, it has been transformed from an unarranged town into the capital city of Serbia. Together with the development of the state, inspirations grew to step up with the global developments which involved nurturing of sports disciplines. The sports architecture of Belgrade started in mid-19th century and developed from the first public bathing sites at the Sava river bank, the shooting range at Topčider and the football fields at the Horse Racing Track, changing the shapes and purposes to suit the needs of the city. In the first few decades of the 20th century, tennis court and ice-skating ranks, swimming pools and big stadiums were built, later to be followed by modern sports halls. Through development of sports facilities architecture we can follow a whole series of changes and transformations where some architectural shapes were lost and some new appeared, all while history unravelled in its own inevitable pace.

/ 1968
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PUBLIC CALL FOR ARRANGEMENT OF MARX AND ENGELS SQUARE IN BELGRADE, 1976

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After a short afterwar period of the Marxist radicalism, in the 1950s and the 1960s, a correction of antibourgeois Marxist revolution occurred in Serbia by practicing a “relentless critique of everything that exists”. At the end of the 1960s and in the 1970s, this political strategy was transposed into a specific civil-democratic model of critique involving “society versus state”. In the architecture of the 1970s, the understanding of the traditional creative practices and the traditional images of heritage was marked by a certain civic model of critique which, based on the understanding of national tradition founded on internal emotional, ideological-political, historical and interest-driven diffusions, can be grouped into radical, conservative or liberal. The open call for an urbanistic arrangement of the Marx and Engel’s Square (Trg Marksa i Engelsa) in Belgrade, was open from June to November 15, 1975. It coincided with the transition from “a social-planning radicalism” to “the evolutionist perspectives” in the development of the city. With adoption of an enforcable planning-strategic documentation for the development and arrangement of city spaces, at the end of the 1960s which redefined an intuitive influence of architects on the city image, this evolutionary perspectivism, however, gave birth to a contradictory voluntarism and a culture of losing the architectural synthesis of the city. Faced with the perspective of a disoriented, long lasting and partial evolutionism, the eminent actors in the field of architecture searched for solutions in a new authoritarianism, in broad arrangement strokes and robust accentuations which departed from the old model of spatial planning by switching from a class-revolutionary to a state-revolutionary mythology.

/ 1968
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THE 20th CENTURY BELGRADE PASSAGES

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As noted by Walter Benjamin, the spatial phenomenon of a covered glass-roofed passage, stretched between two streets and inserted inside a city block, encapsulated the extreme cultural ambivalence: by expressing repression through the ideology of consumerism and expressing freedom through the utopia of abundance. The hidden emancipatory potentials of the city passages, observed closely in a particular case, represent the subject of this paper and the analytical probe that examines the historical conditions of a particular enterprise. When the Passage of Nikola Spasić was constructed in the main pedestrian and shopping street of Belgrade in 1912, the époque of Parisian-style arcades had already passed. Observed in this broader perspective, the construction of the Passage, according to the project of Nikola Nestorović, one of the most prominent Serbian architects of the period, was only a late echo of the Parisian 18th century invention. The comparison and contention between the three chosen, realized and unrealized, transpositions of the Passage in Belgrade, designed by different prime architects of the time, in relation to Benjamin’s idea of space with emancipative potential, correspondingly point out the protean capacity and open up new alternatives in the context of contemporary production of space, particularly important in the light of a changing global culture.