THE 20th CENTURY BELGRADE PASSAGES

Text topic: Critical History of Transforming Belgrade Public Spaces - from the End of the 18th Century to the Beginning of the 21st Century

Text author: Марија Милинковић и Драгана Ћоровић

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.