NATURE, LANDSCAPE, GARDEN: CONTEMPLATIVE INFLUENCES ON THE WORK OF NIKOLA DOBROVIĆ

Text topic: Architect Nikola Dobrović (1897–1967) – Fifty Years Later

Text author: Драгана Ћоровић

In the 1950s, Nikola Dobrović wrote about the concept of urban landscape, drawing explicit connections between the quality of space and the achieved social values. In explaining the polyvalent nature of urban landscape as “a new type of spaciousness of buildings and their plasticity, the hollow plasticity of the in-between spaces, architecture of the ground, greenery and the vistas in one organically designed composition whole”, Dobrović was among the first to study such issues in these parts of the world. This paper questions the outcomes of the theoretical postulates of his “spatial creativity” arising from his comprehensive understanding of the world as a whole: from nature to garden to landscape, i.e. translated into urban reality: from urban space to urban greenery to urban landscape. This article contains an extract from the informal notes of Nikola Dobrović, written in his notebooks, from the author’s legacy in the Archives of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade, as well as part of the visual material, that is, photographs and visual representations of the Versailles Palace Gardens, also found in Dobrović’s Fund in the same Archives. These sources are to be considered throughout the process of understanding the origins of the architect’s spatial concepts.