Re:public

R E : P U B L I C

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drawing oneself into place “If the new language of images were used differently, it would, through its use, confer a new kind of power. Within it we could begin to define our experiences more precisely in areas where words are inadequate.

(Seeing comes before words.) Not only personal experience, but also the essential historical experience of our relation to the past: that is to say the experience of seeking to give meaning to our lives, of trying to understand the history of which we can become the active agents.”

John Berger, Ways of Seeing re:public For Re:public, the city is the centre of attention. Their work calls for a the renewal of the way we regard the city. Their name reflects the orginal derivation of republic— Res Publica—that which belongs to the people, the public realm, our common ground.

In the summer of 2014 Re:public held a week-long drawing exercise in Zagreb as part of an on-going programme of teaching and research. This exhibition and its catalogue bring together a selection of the drawings set in a wider cultural context: seven drawings, each paired with a text and an art reference associated with the subject it depicts. Together, they create a space in which they can be considered alongside one another for the first time.

In the drawing exercise, the representational technique they chose to employ was the oblique drawing, a mode of drawing with a long and varied history. Each drawing, made by pairs of students, used the cadastral map for its basis. Thus, the exact geometry and relations between the elements were preserved while the drawings were given a vertical dimension. parallel archetypes Between the monuments of a city and its well-defined places; between its squares, streets and districts there is a kind of space that is usually only subliminally registered. These are places that to many might seem dislocated, unremarkable— or they might be places that remain unseen, obscured by their location or by their ubiquity. These are spaces that are in-between or throughout what we normally consider to be places: spaces that exist in parallel, alongside the familiar.

normally embedded, one is able to assume a new way of seeing them. A way of seeing that can then be shared.

These spaces are fundamentally architectural because they depend on precise geometry and the relationships between elements for their very character. This is why they carefully trace the territory that they enclose or include, and seek to represent them in a way that is not fanciful, but exacting and visionary.

Drawing is a fundamental tool for architects and designers of all kinds. They see drawing as part of a common language with which architects might better speak to the world at large. Most powerfully, drawing can be allied with other arts, which is why they are bringing this set of drawings together with writing and works of art from elsewhere.

To draw things selectively and carefully is an antidote to the illusion of omniscience that GIS-based mapping promises, as well as the overwhelming volume of information such mapping involves. The mode of drawing also reaffirms the essential subjective character of the image of the city. In the act of drawing, one is forced to make conscious choices about what to show and which methods and means to use. The ethical demand is, of course, that one aims to reveal rather than to obscure. One is liberated, however, in re-orienting and re-scaling the space depicted to show its true affinities and to enhance the potential of these archetypes. In recovering these spaces and placing them within this larger culture— marking out a wider territory—a shared vision begins to emerge, one that is capable of guiding our collective actions. aims Such archetypes, they argue, are a source of latent potential for the city today. Particular expressions of these, once reinterpreted and represented, can sustain a shared imagination and form the basis of specific concrete propositions, supporting the public imagination of the city itself.

Why embark on such a project? A greater literacy of urban form would improve the quality of the discourse surrounding the city—an antidote to present object-oriented and solutionbased fixations—glossy images of buildings serving the desires of everyone apart from the public itself.

These spaces are part of the subject at hand: but Re:public sees them not as a kind of exotica, as curiosities, but rather as offering a complementary series of archetypical figures that are part of the language of the city—our common heritage, our common culture. These figures speak to themes within art and literature, and it is these threads they hope to re-establish.

These modes of approaching the city are full of imagination, but they are not fanciful. This is both appropriate and powerful, for the world is pervaded by imagination, by human ideas and values, and requires our imagination, in turn, to fully interpret it. These modes include the speculative, the metaphorical, the associative. The mode of thought, however, is never obscured, but open to participation.

In isolating these spaces one must choose where to begin and end, to judge their extents, and to depict their edges and thresholds, carefully observing these aspects. In making islands of them, considering them by themselves, removed, at least visually, from the topography in which they are

The power of such modes of thought and production, centred around the act of drawing, may be capable of renewing our vision for the actuality and potential of places. In other words, they might help us draw ourselves into place, to find points of departure to act, to take an active part in the future of our civic life.

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bloodLINE

krvOTOK

first there were borders, an edge clearly defined by sea or an ordinary line. then the ice melted, the islands came, although we cannot claim anything for certain. one had to run from danger, and it always came from the sea, that is why the first settlements appeared in islands’ innards. much later, the sea became a place of leisure, one had to came as close to it as the unscraped grounds allowed. the territory was conquered gradually just like the lichen conquers trees. with vine plantations people cultivated the soil, with stone walls they prevented the outpour of earth. on the other side of the sea towns grew around fortresses mostly built near rivers or those artificial creeks which were embracing something resembling sharp stone dentures. the edge of the town was itself an island, a water barrier between the folk and the conquerors. if you try to step over the edge, you can check whether the law of gravity is still in place and whether Archimedes was alone in that bathtub. after the water’s edge was abolished, towns ceased to be islands and started spreading in a parasite-like manner. suburbs became the edge that represents the border, the form akin to an island. the island body has an asphalt spine and it ascends in the middle of the forest. humidity is on the side less sunny, opposite are the poisoned fields of soil, but that is the side you are certainly not going to. you think about that soil. an excavator’s bucket rests on it too. underneath it a bear fell asleep last year and woke up within the foundations of a house. such is the nature of the island, unstable just like suburbs. they too are sketched by someone. between the forest, the poisoned soil and the asphalt there are always people beneath reinforced concrete slabs. the night before last i saw the excavator leaving that basket in some meadow in suburbia and abandoning a bit later the evening in the direction opposite to the rise of thick trees. abandonment is a decision, insecure like urban development plans with no room for meadows. cities today have no edge, no border within which one could throw an imagined cannon ball, no inland points that make for ferry destinations. there is enough breadth within which you will be in nobody’s way. an island has remained an island, a metaphor of the city, permanently encircled by a border within which you cannot go unnoticed, and where would you even go if there was no border? worlds collapse because of one misinterpreted message, and it makes absolutely no difference where you are headed. nothing is preventing you from stepping out anymore. the island does not embrace, the ice can be found only in glasses, glue traps for mice are in attics and, you are certain, there is nothing that slows down. seasons are safely changing. gardens are neatly trimmed. the island is a suburb, should the city persistently spread enough, it will become one liquid body. people will remain beneath reinforced concrete slabs because optical cables will securely transmit news on happiness and fear. there will no longer be edges, borders will be defined by the softness of our skin. we will neither have to deduct nor add. we have become islands. the only important thing is from which side you approach us.

najprije su bile granice, morem ili običnom crtom jasno definirani rub. zatim se otopio led, došli su otoci, iako, ništa ne možemo sa sigurnošću tvrditi. trebalo je bježati od opasnosti, a ona je uvijek dolazila s mora, zato su prva naselja nastajala u unutrašnjosti otoka. more je puno kasnije postalo dokolica, trebalo mu se približiti kolikogod je neisprano tlo dopuštalo. teritorij se osvajao postepeno kao što lišajevi osvajaju drveće. nasadima loze ljudi su kultivirali tlo, suhim kamenjem sprječavalo se otjecanje zemlje. s druge strane mora, gradovi su rasli oko utvrda, najčešće izgrađenima uz rijeke ili one umjetne potoke koji su grlili nešto nalik oštrom kamenom zubalu. rub grada bio je otok sam, vodena granica između ljudi i osvajača. ako pokušaš prekoračiti rub možeš provjeriti vrijedi li još uvijek zakon gravitacije i je li Arhimed bio sam u onoj kadi. morao je na nekoga osloniti ruke, to sa sigurnošću možemo tvrditi. nakon što je vodeni rub ukinut, gradovi su prestali biti otoci i počeli se parazitno širiti. predgrađa su postala rub koji postavlja granicu, forma bliska otoku. otočno tijelo ima asfaltnu kralježnicu i ona se uspinje po sredini šume. na onoj manje osunčanoj strani je vlaga, nasuprot nje su otrovana polja zemlje, ali na tu stranu sigurno ne ideš. misliš o toj zemlji. na njoj je i žlica bagera. ispod nje je prošle sezone zaspao medvjed i probudio se u temeljima kuće. takva je narav otoka, nesigurna kao predgrađa. njih također netko nacrta. između šume, otrovane zemlje i asfalta uvijek su ljudi ispod armiranobetonskih ploča. preksinoć sam vidio bager kako ostavlja onu žlicu na nekoj livadi u predgrađu, kako malo kasnija napušta večer u pravcu suprotnom od uspinjanja gustog drveća. napuštanje je odluka, nesiguran poput urbanističkih planova u kojima nema mjesta za livade. današnji gradovi nemaju ruba, granice unutar kojih bi mogao dobaciti nekakvu zamišljenu topovsku kuglu, u onu kopnenu točku do koje te voze trajekti. imaš dovoljno širine unutar koje nećeš nikome smetati. otok je ostao otok, metafora grada, trajno omeđen granicom unutar koje ne možeš proći neopaženo. a kamo bi i krenuo da nema granice? svjetovi se ruše zbog jedne krivo pročitane poruke i potpuno je svejedno kamo si krenuo. više te ništa ne sprječava da zakoračiš. otok ne grli, led se nalazi jedino u čašama, ljepila za miševe su u potkrovljima, i siguran si, nema ničega što usporava. sezone se sigurno smjenjuju. vrtovi su uredno pokošeni. otok je predgrađe, ako se grad dovoljno uporno širi postat će jedno tekuće tijelo. ljudi će ostati ispod armiranobetonskih ploča jer optički kabeli će sigurno prenositi vijesti o sreći i strahu. više neće biti rubova, granice će određivati mekoća naše kože. nećemo morati oduzimati ni dodavati. postali smo otoci. jedino bitno je s koje nam strane prilaziš.

drawing Irena Bakić Mirna Udovčić text Darko Šeparović art reference The Garden, fresco from Nebamun tomb

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islands of zagreb “A motor far out on the water extends the horizon of the summer night. Both joy and sorrow swell in the magnifying glass of the dew. We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route. While the sun burns behind the islands.”

Tomas Tranströmer, The Blue House, 1987.

In the Zagreb area, the Sava River used to be so shallow in places that at certain times of the year it was possible to walk across it. Before its flow was regulated at the turn of the 20th century, the meandering river would spill over, resulting in constantly changing banks and the formation of sandbars and islands, some of which would disappear just as others were emerging from the waters.

In the Middle Ages, a nobleman named Egidius built a church on one of these Sava islands and assembled the members of the Cistercian order there. By 1257, Peter – the archdeacon of Zagreb - donated half of that long-gone island to the Cistercians and built them a monastery and a church. It is a known fact that in the year of 1307 the Cistercians still lived on that island and in 1315 there is mention of the order’s appearance on the Kaptol Hill located within the city walls in what is today central Zagreb. Moreover, records exist of the Zagreb bishop resolving a dispute between the Cistecians and the nuns who took over the island from them. By that time, the island was known as St. Jacob’s Island, named after the first ever church built there. These historic records provide ample evidence of the existence and importance the Zagreb river islands had in the Middle Ages, although the city itself at the time was not situated on the river.

Furthermore, the memory of that particular island has been preserved till this day in the name of a street, which commemorates the village of Sava Abbey (Savska Opatovina) in the vicinity of the island. The example of a settlement name enshrined in the name of the modern Sava Abbey Road shows how a city’s memory is preserved through topography and street names. In that sense, a bridge which is planned to run over the part where the island once stood ought to be named Jacob’s Bridge (Jakovljev most) and in that way revive and preserve the memory of Zagreb’s medievl history. The bridge would be thus named after an island, not in honour of a person, which is a small but significant detail, for in Zagreb, the bridge naming tradition follows the rule that bridges are never named after people. Continuing from the future bridge, a new street beginning at the Northern side of the crossing might be named Egidious Street (Egidijeva ulica), which would also evoke the city history on an authentic location not far away from the place where the former island once was.

Some old city maps, for example one dating from 1822, show several other islands of Zagreb, such as the island of Vučak also situated on a location in the western part of the city. Perhaps the largest island that we know of has also disappeared with time. Before the regulation of the Sava flow at the end of the 19th century, the middle ground of today’s Zagreb river area was occupied by the Island of Zaprud (sandbar). The memory of that island exists today only in the name of cadastre parcels. Furthermore, a rare reminder of the once extant Zagreb islands and the rugged riverbanks can still be found today in the name of the New Zagreb borough of Zapruđe (which roughly translates as “the area behind the sandbars”). Toponyms like this neatly describe the former character of the river.

An additional witness of the islands’ presence is yet another New Zagreb borough name - the borough of Siget. That area was mentioned for the first time in 1334 and described as a “sziget” which is Hungarian for “island.” This evidently implies that the name of the borough derives from an island that once existed there.

These old river islands sometimes served as direct inspiration for contemporary urban planning. There have been a number of proposals of new regulations for the Sava banks following the modernist expansion of the city after the Second World War. The proposal by architect Radovan Delalle refers to the old islands by proposing the creation of a new central island in line with the city’s central axis. His proposal envisages a densely built-up area, thus emphasizing the new urbanized role of the river area, a proposal to which Delalle returned in later competitions.

Perhaps the most ambitious plan to regulate the central area of the Sava in Zagreb was put forward by the architect and artist Vjenceslav Richter in 1987. Named “Savlje,” the proposal envisaged thirteen large islands connected by numerous bridges. It offered a great change in the dynamics of the place by completely altering the role of the river as we had known it since its turn-of-the-century regulation. Later, a street near the location where his islands would have been built was named after Richter. It can be found in the borough of Središće, the closest one to the river.

For a number of reasons, it remains relatively unknown that Zagreb still has its river islands. For example, the Savica nature reserve, a region that combines twelve lakes and a number of tiny islands situated along the main course of the river, is the only place in the city that still offers the picture of the Sava as it used to be prior to the regulation. One of the most popular places by the river is found on its northern embankment at the sports centre and park Jarun, which consists of five islands with picturesque names like the Island

of Croatian Youth, (the largest of the islands, formally known as Youth Island) and the Island of Love (the smallest one). Likewise, in Maksimir Park, the oldest city park, there are three islands situated on the First Lake, all of which are occupied by the city ZOO. In spite of all this, Zagreb is usually not perceived as a city with islands, so all those that do remain within the urban sprawl exist in a somewhat parallel reality. They are here, but they are not felt, or we simply do not think of those places as islands.

The drawing depicts a tiny, imaginary island that forms as the river floods, which usually happens once or twice a year. The island is actually situated upon the historical place where the city meets the river. Nowadays a bus and tram terminal is situated there, making this location the liveliest place on the Zagreb banks of Sava. It was precisely there that the railway, once Zagreb built it, crossed the river for the first time, and even today that very location possesses the densest concentration of bridges - three of them - which makes it an attraction in its own right. Due to its locally well-known arch, the Green Bridge, also known as the Hendrix Bridge because of the famous graffiti it has been sporting for years, has also been called the Triumphal Arch of Sava (“Savski slavoluk�) by the renowned Zagrebologist Fedor Kritovac.

The role of the place where the bus and tram terminal exist today has changed over time. However, no matter what purpose it served, it always remained a focal point. At the same time, its potential was never fully developed, but rather every intervention remained an improvisation devoid of an ambition to create a lasting solution. In the process of the expected removal of this terminal and a possible inauguration of the so-called Sava Square, establishing some sort of contact with the river, if possible, is highly advisable. Following its regulation after the catastrophic floods in 1964, the Sava in Zagreb has been reduced to a canal. This, in turn, has had an adverse impact on its integration into the urban fabric of Zagreb as well as its accessibility. A number of simple solutions could substantially improve this portion of public space. For example, benches on the pedestrian Sava Bridge that connects the future Sava Square with the south bank could turn a pedestrian corridor into a place where passers-by can linger.

In general, it is possible to look for a solution in fragmented transformations, always bearing in mind the broader scheme of things. Building an imaginary island based upon the drawing, one which, for the better part of the year makes a small hill rather than an island might be a good way to start turning space into a place.

drawing Matija Romić Ivana Slavnić text Saša Šimpraga art reference Vittore Carpaccio, Hunting on the Lagoon

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c i t a d e l

zagreb’s citadel and intermediate spaces

cctv versus crt

Inside and Outside never cover the entire space: there is always an excess of a third space which gets lost in the division into Outside and Inside. In human dwellings, there is an intermediate space which is disavowed: we all know it exists, but we do not really accept its existence – it remains ignored and (mostly) unsayable.

Slavoj Žižek, Architectural Parallax

This problem arises because the transfer of the block morphology across the railway line was never continued. Now the sanguine attempt at the dotted block has left the CRT metal beast alone like a frontier tower commanding the surroundings.

The drawing clearly shows the void around the building, and yet immediately alongside this perimeter the quasi-slums of densely packed family houses continue. Is this information fortress a separate Vatican, one that is building its own parallel world within a social and cultural environment already infected by nationalism? In order to establish the tactics and the strategies for some possible steps to be taken to improve the existing state of affairs, it is best to determine the potentials and drawbacks through a comparative analysis of another, much more successful example. Although thousands of kilometres away, the China Central Television (CCTV) Headquarters in Peking designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture is probably the best known media-corporation complex in the world today. CRT, designed in 1977 and built during the 1980s in what was still Yugoslavia, has an unexpected link to it. Both buildings came into being in socialist or communist settings.

In CCTV the idea of commonalty and work for the will of the people, which this kind of leftish-oriented political system propagates anyway, was built into the design from the very beginning. The media park, a vast area around the structure, conceived as an extension of the complex for filming, was offered as a zone open for entertainment and public events.

In the case of CRT, however, the glacis tract is not yet useable for these purposes, but its openness onto the river and a willingness to host public events could give it a new dynamic.

emptiness as border The housing blocks of the Lower Town and their recognisable matrix expand as far as the Austro-Hungarian railway line that is the fixed limes between historical Zagreb and the modern city created in the 20th century. During the time between the two world wars, this new zone south of the Lower Town called Trnje was just an unplanned agglomeration of houses scattered as far as the Sava River over extensive meadows liable to flooding. In the contemporary era, however, mutants of historical typologies have sprung up here, rather like detached fortresses in their dimensions and forms. Among them is the Croatian national radio and television (CRT) building, which has replicated the right-angled block matrix, but in an entirely contradictory context. It is placed alongside a winding river of unpredictable width, in the vicinity of randomly scattered, substandard single unit houses.

Surrounded by its green zone and detached from its surroundings, the CRT building forms a kind of citadel. The media that inhabit it have become the embodiment of the royal values of the 20th century and the architecture of the city that emerged in that era. If the CRT building is taken as a kind of continuation or translation of the block development from the centre of Zagreb and across the railway line, then here the block has undergone an interesting inversion. The central, open space of the atrium of the lower-town blocks has turned into an abandoned or unpopulated empty zone around the city. The interior is compactly compressed, and the only indication of historical references to the familiar typology is the atrophied interior courtyard, completely closed in and without any sunlight. It is as if the fear of interlopers had taken away from the building any possibility of natural open spaces within the structure. At the same time from without a barrier against the enemy has been formed not with a powerful wall, but with unbuilt space, an inimical vacuum. CRT seems to be a city in miniature, but instead of gaining protection by proximity to a river or upon the slopes of a medieval burg, it is enclosed by a protective tract of greenery. It is this aspect that recalls the strategies of the ideal Renaissance or Baroque cities, which utilized glacis – their widths defined by the limits of cannon range - to insure the possibility of unobstructed observation of the enemy. Until the mid-19th century, Vienna provided the strongest example of this, turning the cannon-shot-length no-man’s-land in Förster’s plan into its greatest city attraction, the Revivalist Ringstrasse.

However, it is questionable what the potential purpose of the CRT’s glacis is and whom it is protecting with its emptiness.

In addition, the accessibility of the CCTV building to the public is a basic component. Visitors move through it on a specially separated path that links all the programmes and elements, so that some insight into the process through which the corporation functions as well as views of the surrounding parts of the city (made possible by the building’s height) can be obtained. Finally, in the case of CCTV, through the inversion of the typology of skyscrapers as needles and their joining up in a loop, a new typology has been created and innovation achieved. In contrast, the Zagreb example is just a blind imitation of the typological pattern of the block, a hundred or more years old, without any novelty, ingenuity, or creative contribution. This is borne out by fact that the complex was not even specially designed for its current use, but was to a very considerable extent an appropriation of the technological pattern of the Marconi Corporation’s design, updated just a little for Zagreb, and adapted by the architects Nenad Bach and Ratko Rausavljević.

Before the building of the new complex was completed, Croatian Radio and Television was dispersed throughout the city. Unification under a single roof fit perfectly with the trend towards the centralisation of the state, which was such an important characteristic of the socialist regime. Unlike CCTV, which forms a firm loop of events within a single

building, the CRT complex does not reflect the collective in an architectural sense. It is instead three different, separate buildings. The Croatian example does not reflect the power of the government and the compactness that socialist countries were fond of boasting. Luckily, this makes the complex easier to conquer for today’s generation of architects. It can become part of the public bit by bit. Like a Trojan Horse accomplishing an ideal infiltration of the texture of new volumes in the interest of the citizens, additions can more easily be inserted among the already existing three parts of the complex. By such an introduction of zones for the public through a double negation, the insertion of foreign bodies into the existing context would cancel out the impression that the initial foreign design does not belong here. In addition to the new insertions as spaces in between, this potential change offers a fluid deterritorialisation of the facade, since as Alejandro Zaera Polo claims, in the world of the market economy, the membrane has become the only place where the architect has some freedom. Ultimately blisters might be created on the facade of the building to facilitate the gradual claiming of this citadel.

But then the practical question arises: how can this really be carried out? Since CRT is governed by a bureaucracy and is therefore too hidebound and sluggish to arrive at real applications, here an interesting positive change might happen only through the application of the principles that are also Croatia’s greatest vices – corruption, sabotage and embezzlement. In the next wave of absurd legalisations of buildings, they could then approve the new currently unplanned (i.e. “wild”) interventions, despite the fact that they are against all the city’s urban planning regulations.

Subversion would occur through the only means available to local politics and a reversal of the signs of their intentions.

Although 20th-century revolutions were almost always leftoriented, it is paradoxical that here it would only be possible with a coup d’état of rightist forces (figuratively speaking, of course). What would happen if they understood the importance of broadcasting propaganda and marched on this CRT complex, accordingly opening up the possibility to achieve something accessible to and for the good of the whole community? the ideological paradox of the crt interior The lack of compactness in the CRT is a classic symbol of the potential of all urban sprawl, in which the cubes composing the complex can expand ad infinitum by the mere addition of new volumes. From outside, they are mute volumes, totally introverted, where the ideology of capital like that in the shopping malls is replaced by a much more dangerous ideology of power that broadcasts its radio waves throughout the whole of the state. A building of such dimensions has remained lifeless in the urban context of the city, without any iconic potential, either in form or in the monotonous facade that, over time, has conveyed the impression of a huge wreck of a ship, no hint of integration with the city having taken place. And while the external appearance is the picture of a metal monster,

the junk-space characteristics are even more apparent in the interior. The real interior of the building is a total unknown; each studio changes shape almost all the time, and since we are never invited into a studio while it is devoid of contents, we cannot know what these endless, featureless spaces really look like. Each room is in itself a chameleon, adapting itself to current, popular trends - what the nation seeks on the screen is what the interior becomes in reality. Every future intervention into, on or around the building would be interesting only as a continuation of the characteristics of the interior, which itself has a thousand faces. The only hope would be for Croatia to start valuing its diversity of nationalities, races and religions. In this case, the generic nature of the mall and the addictiveness of urban sprawl are potential solutions for the local xenophobia.

On the one hand this building broadcasts the national news, disseminating news from the most distant corners of the state and programming our awareness about what is important and what is not. Then again it has a hostile attitude toward the same people, those who live in the state. Instead of an antielitist architecture, fake utopian spaces have been created.

Ostensibly, the contents of CRT consist of a television signal accessible to all, yet no one can get near the building. Is that not an ideological paradox? A successful illusion of equality has been created – a democratic community having thus unfortunately become an emblem of the inequality suppressed in socialism (from the time when the building came into being) when we were all allegedly the same. In CRT the architecture is a direct embodiment of the ruling politics and its unconsciousness in the three-dimensional imagination.

The most complex problem when dealing with CRT is that, imprisoned in this huge container, television here is creating its own third space, one that evades categorisation into inside and outside. In the television studios of its interior, constantly new spaces, stages for broadcasts, films and series are generated, all of them fake, but then again, giving an impression of reality when broadcast. What is actually the architectural surface area of CRT? The physical presence of the building can clearly be measured, but if we multiply the studio that is currently being broadcast into every household in Croatia, then there are another four million such rooms… its possibilities for reproduction are infinite.

Precisely this importance of being able to reach every home makes CRT a crucial example for architectural pondering.

Perhaps at the end the potential of this fortress is only to be abandoned, for it was not designed for development or the new age. It may well fall victim to the flowering of new technologies like digital TV and Internet streaming. The abandoned building will then more easily become an empty box to be rethought and (re)connected with its surroundings.

The only relief for this beleaguered citadel is perhaps in its ineluctable destruction and obsolescence. Only in the kind of state seen in post-apocalyptic films will the CRT building have the potential to undergo rebirth like the phoenix. This time, it will be there to serve the public and the city.

drawing Eugen Čanić Tamara Lukić text Alen Žunić art reference Max Ernst, The Entire City

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g a r d e n s

This is a big country, carved up into small pieces. A vast island divided and sold. Its boundaries were once invisible, but now they are marked out by electric wire, white fences and brick walls, sizzling black tar roads and green lawns.

Within each of these parcels of land sits a house and behind the house a rectangular patch of dirt and grass, partitioned on all sides by a rotting, paling fence or a wall of anodised aluminium or brick. Within his designated allotment every man, as they say, is a Lord, and his home is his castle.

It was within one of these curious allotments that I grew.

There are cities in which the children play in the streets, bearing witness to the world passing by, but ours was not one of them. We knew nothing of the city streets, visible to us only as blurred snapshots collected from car windows. We roamed through far more private geographies, and from within them, hidden, we built worlds. For the suburban backyard, though it may constitute a meagre prize for the aspirational man, is a landscape more than vast enough for a child. The blank facades of our houses (wrought-iron-covered row cottages, brick bungalows or creaking weatherboard piles) were all of them gateways and triumphal arches. They bore silent witness to our backyard happenings, masking them from the empty and sometimes hostile roadways.

Behind these architectural masks, every backyard of every allotment had its own distinct, sometimes even wildly opposing character. The garden I remember best was the one in which we kept hens. We collected their eggs religiously every morning until one sorry day, upon entering the henhouse, we found them all dead; limp bundles of feathers strewn about the straw, succumbed to a virus or perhaps the viciousness of a neighbourhood cat. Reaching over the ill-fated chicken coop there were mulberry and mango trees upon which we would climb to pick the ripe fruit, pushing our heads through the crown of the foliage to survey our domain: a sea of red tiled roofs simmering in the heat, with their tangle of spidery antennae and satellite dishes black and sharp against the sky. There was a tree house, built by a clever uncle, in which we could play house, spy or hide. There was a concrete whitewashed pond full of fat carp inherited from previous tenants and a rusting iron pavilion grown over with vines of jasmine.

There was a vegetable garden planted by my mother and a grassy lawn crawling with snails and slugs that was home to dandelions, a rabbit hutch and a three-storey rat’s cage. There was a trampoline under the twisting boughs of the mulberry tree – a present from our father – its black canvas stained purple and black from the crushed pulp of the rotting mulberries that would fall from the trees in January. Blanketed by the sickly fecund odour of that ripe fruit, we would lie languid in the wet heat waiting for the evening rain, staring up at the sky through the mulberry leaves, dreaming of our inevitable moment of escape.

All of this went on behind the edifice of our rambling pile of bricks, in the middle of a typical inner-city neighbourhood in which there were countless houses like ours, each one its own undisclosed domain. To be invited to the home of a friend was to be offered the delicious privilege of entering into theirs. Some backyards were run down and some pristine, depending on the family. Some had pools, some only backyard sheds filled with funnel-web spiders, power tools and secrets. The Greek families ripped up all the grass, paved over it with terracotta and stones and planted olive trees. In their own Mediterranean courtyard, our neighbours kept goats for the slaughter. Animal skins were dried on suburban rooftops. Holes were dug and covered over with palm leaves for the ceremonial roasting of pigs, the smell of cooking flesh mingling with rising smoke from the palms and the raised but muffled voices of angry or laughing relatives. Other gardens were more picturesque. Plants were allowed to grow wild; swings were hung from the boughs of trees; wind chimes suspended from sagging wooden porches. In one garden there were turtles, owned by a girl with a hole in her heart, who clambered freely over the rocks and stones arranged ornamentally by her father. She would pass the turtles to me roughly; their heads and arms would retract in fear as she, too small and weak for her age, whispered to me through the palings of the fence between us.

One summer’s day, our band of vagrants discovered a new kind of adventure: a hole in the paling fence, where the wooden slats had been pushed aside and skewered on their rusty nails. We could duck through it one by one and find ourselves, uninvited, in one of these new topographies – wholly different from the one we knew so well. Upon getting the measure of it we soon discovered, over a brick wall choked with vines, that there were more. We scaled the walls, and found that each backyard we penetrated constituted a parallel world of identical dimension and reach to the one before it, albeit with an entirely new set of obstacles. We pushed further onward, leaping barriers or crawling underneath them, sometimes only to find ourselves in hostile territory crawling with enemies: big strangers, looming red-faced out from behind dark wire screen doors, from whom we would have to bolt; squealing and panting, flying from property to property until we reached the safety of our home turf.

It was only much later, when I began to study architecture, that I noticed the radical nature of these earlier acts of re-appropriation. In the modern city, the backyard supports great variation precisely because it forms a contract between the individual and society; protecting the inner life of its inhabitants behind the generic face it presents to the world. It is in fact through the simple repeated typology of the backyard that man rediscovers and nurtures his own particularity: those private rituals, habits and desires he does not wish to share. But in paying no mind to the boundaries that were designed to

commodify them, we unknowingly gave our backyards the status that had once been reserved for the public street. We subverted the backyard’s private function, and in some sense, we also turned the street inward in order to revive it. All those collapsing, cobweb covered rear porches became our street fronts, and the gardens became our public forum. We had no respect for the boundaries between one and the next, but of course we did not know that it was upon these boundaries that our country had been founded – on the very idea that land could be owned, bought and sold. We only thought of the excitement of carrying out a simple but thrilling act of transgression.

I often imagine what it would mean to take an exploit like this to its logical conclusion. For example, it is hard to picture a more seductive scenario for my city’s suburbs that that in which all the fences between all of those rectangular plots of land, sitting back to back and side to side, are finally removed to form one continuous and interconnected outdoor room. The formerly isolated backyards, utterly ignorant of one another, would then be expanded into one great, intricate interior: an urban garden within which the life of the city would be revived and scattered about, as if from some fertile wellspring. This endless green belt would form a series of intricate secondary passageways through the inner-city suburbs and soon, people would begin to use them in order to get from one part of the city to another, imbuing them with public life.

But what would be the consequence of this urban inversion?

There are, of course, infinite possibilities. But perversely, the one I always return to (perhaps, naturally, the only one I can imagine) is the one in which history repeats itself in unendingly similar forms: The one in which what has happened before tends to happen again, as the momentum of collective human action swells back and forth like a tide. This is the scenario in which, increasingly choked with traffic, the Great Backyard I describe becomes choked with traffic, then steadily paved over and cultivated for ease of movement. Back doors become front doors, as the former streets are neglected. The first tangles of weeds begin to push up out of the cracks in the asphalt of these old roads and highways, now relegated to left over, nowhere places. Slowly, the unstoppable green encroaches over the car yards, gutter kerbs and disused driveways, and the asphalt lies in ruins. Offended by this unruly and dilapidated scene and incensed by the loss of their formerly protected garden oases, the people of the city feel compelled to remove the rubble and tame these now wild suburban streets, planting flowers and trees to mark out space for their children to play. Inevitably, as the residents begin to order this neglected land, it becomes desirable for speculation. Its value increases, almost certainly leading to ownership disputes and demarcation deals between the different families, all whom instinctively desire a slice of it.

Slowly, steadily, methodically, the fences go up once again.

drawing Dora Sipina Frane StanÄ?ić text Emma Letizia Jones art reference Odoardo Fialetti, copperplate engraving in Giulio Casserio, Tabulae Anatomicae

r o m a n

r o a d

in der sprache der realität

in the language of reality

In der Sprache der Realität die Laute stammeln, die den urinbedeckten Kachelböden der Bahnhofstoiletten abgelauscht sind, den stickigen Abstellkammern der Schnellimbisse im Sommer und der vom Warten erfüllten Luft in den Wohnungen der Alten, in die mechanisch eine Wanduhr die Vergänglichkeit schlägt.

In the language of reality spluttering the sounds, harkened from the urine covered tiled floors of public restrooms, from the muggy storerooms of fast food restaurants in summertime and from the waiting-filled air in the elderlies‘ apartments, into which a clock mechanically beats the rhythm of transience.

Hinter den schweren Vorhängen verlassener Theater verbirgt sich – in den Rundungen ihres Faltenwurfes – eine bisher noch nicht versuchte Spielart des Daseins.

Behind the heavy curtains in deserted theaters hides – in their rounded drapes – a so far not yet attempted play of existence.

drawing Irvin L Ahatović Ivana Stančić text Michael Hirschbichler art reference Matt Mullican, Untitled

t h e

c o n t i n e n t

the continent – tracing the social power of the city of the dead Constructing, caring and remembering spaces for the dead are rituals in urban spaces that are part of the city of the living. As Calvino writes, necropolis or cemeteries reflect “like the city of the living, (…) a history of toil, anger, illusions, emotions; only here all has become necessary, divorced from chance, categorized, set in order” (1974: 140). The necropolis does not merely “tell” the city’s story; it silently embodies the scars of the city’s past “like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets” (Calvino, 1974: 140). The architecture of cemeteries also tells a story about urban dis/order and socio-political power relations as much as the city of the living. Bodies have the power to redefine space through rituals, but how can the city of the dead be a space that strengthens social relations among the living? To probe these questions, Kabul’s Sakhi cemetery is examined as an example of social power relations between the city of the living and the dead.

As Calvino suggests, objects and their relations within space and the form of space itself tell histories and stories of power relations that are manifested through these very relations in space. This applies to the urban space of the living and the necropolis. Kabul has an abundance of both. It is as if the necropolis, the city of the dead, broke down its walls and the whole urban space of Kabul became a place in which to die. During war and times of mass killings, bodies are piled up into mass graves, where they remain anonymous and hidden, or are simply left where they were killed. Places such as Kabul have been and continue to be characterised by the omnipresence of death in public spaces. Today, in the face of on-going insecurities, violence and occupation, the ubiquitous necropolis of Kabul have retracted and been replaced by countless cemeteries and burial sites in the urban architecture of the mountainous capital.

One of the largest cemeteries in today’s Kabul is in the Kart-e Sakhi or Sakhi district, an area in the heart of the city. Kart-e Sakhi’s geography is a silent legacy of war and conflict in Afghanistan. It grew with the lethal effects of geopolitics on the ground, expanding the cities of the dead all over the capital. The dead are not separated from the world of the living as they are in the walled city of Mirogoj cemetery. However, the Sakhi cemetery is a Continent of its own. Both necropolis, Mirogoj and Sakhi, have symbolic reference points, objects that protect and oversee the space of the necropolis and create structure.

Sakhi cemetery is orchestrated around a circular structure stretching over the hills and slowly invading the realm of the living. Borders are unclear and blurry, which makes it difficult to distinguish where the silent city of the dead starts and its noisy, living sister ends.

Chaos seems to emerge from this Continent, whose informal architecture has a language of its own, shaped throughout decades of war and violent conflicts.

Ancient gravestones crisscross large dusty fields, which end at the foot of a hill. On top of it, the new dome of Sakhi mosque shines with its blue glittering mosaic tiles, evidencing pride for its place in the middle of a sea of grey and earth-tones. Countless numbers of newer, freshly sown graves emerge, framed by metal gates, which aim to protect the engraved epitaphs. Some have tin roof to protect the surface of the lying stone.

One might recall the Jewish cemetery in Prague, where thousands of gravestones lean in different directions constricted to fit a limited space. New graves are piled upon older ones. Space became rare over time, yielding a complex and intricate dialogue among the stones.

Narratives from different times merge, creating new conversations and dialogues among the silent monuments of the dead and a sudden familiarity that might not have existed during their lifetimes. Similarly, the ordered disorder of the stones of Sakhi creates new paths for memories, knitting together different stories and histories over the multiple conflicts of modern Afghanistan.

The heart of the Sakhi cemetery, overseen by the blue mosque, always welcomed people who came continuously to pay their respects to their loved ones.

Oral histories suggest that a delegation of Ahmad Shah Abdali carrying a cloak of the Prophet Mohammad rested here on their way from Fayzabad in the Province Badakshan to Kandahar in the south of today’s Afghanistan about 250 years ago. At night Imam Ali appeared praying in front of the eyes of the travellers, who then built a mosque to honour the holy site.

Today, people still spend time in and around the Sakhi mosque. Every day, a 21-year-old tea seller makes his modest living by selling black tea to the cemetery’s visitors. A feeling of home emerges. Visitors pay respect to the deceased, sit down at the grave, knock on the cold stone announcing their presence and begin with their ritualised conversations, reciting the Fatihah, the first Surah or chapter of the Qur’an. Visits and prayers for the dead shall wash him from his sins in everyday life.

At the same time, the dead are supposed to pray for the living who visit them. In Farsi and Arabic the word for going to the holy shrine of a mosque is derived from the Arabic ziyara, meaning to visit. Hence, the very notion of going to the holy site is intrinsically linked to the notion of visiting someone in their home. This notion can be extended to the dead, whose space is attached to the holy site and who are visited by their relatives and friends. The tea seller, while accompanying the living for their journey to the dead, becomes a ferryman and his tea a hearth for people to gather around his warmth,

almost as if they were gathering around their stove at home. On the grounds of the necropolis, families come to remember their loved ones, to mourn, talk, remain silent and drink tea while children run around playing.

The ordered disorder of the Sakhi cemetery is the manifestation of political chaos resulting from the clashing interests of international, regional and local actors. Today’s Sakhi cemetery is a legacy of the power politics that have shaped Afghanistan over the past four decades. The power potential lies in the ritualised practice of commemoration, mourning and visiting dead family members and friends, which relates present bodies not just to their pasts but also creates a continuous link between the dead and the living in present times. The free and unbounded space of the Sakhi necropolis becomes a room for laughter, relaxation and conversations, when the living, while approaching the mosque, are slowly contaminating the immutable silent language of the engraved epigraphs.

Calvino writes that the living focus so much on the past and the present that those “who are to come,� the people of tomorrow, are forgotten (1974: 141). The power of youth and the city of the dead lie in everyday life practices taking place in a space that is associated with silence, grief and misery. The aesthetics of space are not necessarily embodied by the monuments immortalising the dead with more or less precious stones but in the present subjects whose regular practices, such as visiting the deceased, asking them for help, contemplating and playing all within a space of death give life to the necropolis. And if the walls and borders separating the living from the dead happen to fall, what will happen if the living begin to embellish their own city in the same ways they respect, remember and care for their dead?

drawing Mia Kos Roman Krajcarz text Paniz Musawi art reference Francesco di Giorgio Martini (attributed), Architectural Veduta

h o u s e s

o f

g i a n t s

soma What did the ears say to the heart? “Wait for the gun, then you can start.” What did the stomach say to the gun?

“Please do not shoot, for I cannot run.” And why did the fingers not intervene?

They had shaken hands with the devil’s brain…

THERE you are! OH, hello!

I circled the street oneand a half times looking for you.

YOU didn’t recognize me? I said I’d be wearing a white shirt…

BUT look at the time—at this hour the light does so many odd things. The iron in the glass kicks out, the neon marquees turn on, the crowd thickens.

You even have a stain on your collar. Your shirt is every color except white. I remembered your habit of coming to this exact café. What a pretty view!

IT used to be the view. Now I come for the symphony.

The parades on Sant’Ines, the trolley bells, the youngsters grilling sausages on the roof and chatting about school, the housekeepers of Jardin Cadiz cutting hedges… I can hear and smell it all…

GOOD evening, sir and madam, welcome to….

Oh! Monsieur Harvey! What a pleasant surprise!

What are you working on now? Oh, never mind, you don’t need to answer… Please,relax and enjoy your food. I’ll tell the manager it’s on the house. And what would you like, Ms…?

NASIF. Just a coffee, thanks.

CERTAINLY. Coming right up.

THEY still revere you here, my friend.

NAH, it’s just sympathy. I noticed that since my accident, everyone here has started flattering me.

It’s nothing but courtesy to the handicapped.

YOU’RE exaggerating.

I’M a relic to anyone from another neighborhood…

BUT not to me, and I’m from another city. So, what are you reading?

FUNNILY, just that: an ode to the city. The author and I have something in common: we want to live in a perfect Soma.

SURE, who doesn’t? From what I see, a great revitalization has occurred in the last decade…

SURE, who doesn’t love a Renaissance? But they’ve taken it too far. New Soma— out there—is getting built faster than people can get used to. And now it’s surrounding us. Even with my bad vision I get dizzy whenever I look out from here. I’m scared we’ll lose Old Soma—where I was born, where the streets are unevenly cobbled, where landmarks are visible and restaurants serve strong tea in courtyards and the trains smell like coal. I want to hear a band playing in the park on Sundays—a bad band—I want the birds singing and the old

brick walls covered with climbing ivies …

I’LL bet you want the people to look a certain way, too?

OF course, I want them to be good looking! I don’t want this neighborhood, our heart, to be suffocated…

I don’t want to have lived in a perfect city.

SO that’s the reason you’ve never left the neighborhood…?

THERE’S nothing out there for me in that nauseating metropolis, butthat isn’t the reason you called me.

NO. I called because I have to admit…

I’m nervous about this surgery.

THAT’S understandable. Just remember it was your idea. You can cancel it at any time.

OF course… but will it even succeed? How many of these have you done?

DID one yesterday in the country. Two last month overseas. Been doing them for years. This procedure has changed hundreds of lives.

I’LL tell you a true story, it might explain my anxiety.

About a month ago, I cleaned out my apartment and in the closet I found an old anatomy model of a human head from my university days—you know the kind—life-size, hollow, with removable organs inside. I wanted to put it back together, but to my irritation I couldn’t find one of the eyeballs. It bothered me for days. Two days later, the accident.

DOES it hurt in bright light?

NO! It almost never hurts! But my vision is leaving me, I’m afraid. I feel empty and swollen at the same time…

LIKE old Henri II? Have you heard this story? Back in 1559, after 8 years of war with Spain, he and Charles I finally signed a treaty and decided to celebrate peace with a jousting tournament. During one bout, Henri slipped on his horse, was struck right in the head by Count Montgomery’s lance, and lost consciousness. He was rushed to the best surgeons in the region, including Ambroise Paré, but died 10 days later. His autopsy by Andreas Vesalius was the first detailed report on eye vivisections in history.

HMM. I remember as a child when I learned that lungs are not empty balloons as one would believe, but are actually filled with sacs and tubes and mucus. I remember running home that day, over Ochre Hill and past the minaret, and feeling empty and swollen… just like now…

VESALIUS was right—you are a sad and painful heart!

Listen—we don’t have to talk about it. Hey, here’s a joke I heard yesterday. How do we know that an architect designed the human body? Because only an architect could have put the sewage line next to the recreation area and gotten away with it.

HMM. OK, let’s change the subject. Would you let me read the poem? ALRIGHT…

…Why did the blood run laps for the lung?

‘Cause on the way round was its lover, the tongue. What did the ribs demand of the spine?

“Am I on f loor four, or f loor forty-nine?”

The roof hugged the shoulders and leaned in to say: “Pay me in bones and I’ll keep skin away.”

YOU said I eat at this café all the time—which is true.

Do you know why? The symphony… from the center I see Old Soma in the round, from every angle. I get a full collage of past and future on top of each other.

Seeing what those ages were and will be is what experiencing time is all about.

AH, but I disagree. Time can only be felt in the present moment—not by overlaying images of what has been and what will be, because those are always fixed images. The best sense of time comes to me when I am here. I am now. I am moving… like this…

CAREFUL, you’re erasing the menu off the mirror.

SORRY. Hey, will you take a walk with me? I want to show you something.

SHOW me what?

SOMETHING I’ve been working on. I want to show you what time looks like to me… Time can have as much thing-ness as me or you, with our clouded pupils and our multi-colored shirts. Besides you need to breathe some different air, circulate the blood a little. You need an out-of-body experience. This is a good a time as any.

WHERE is it? It isn’t out in New Soma is it?

NO, it’s in Old Soma… technically. Relax, take my arm. Let’s take Galen Street, to the left here.

THIS is the street where I saw my first parade. The war had just ended, and across Old Soma there were red banners and confetti and music and laughter.

The parade ran halfway around the Ringstrasse, across Galen, wove through the Jewish Quarter, and ended in Sant’Ines. I remember discovering the power to change its speed. If I walked in the same direction, it would pause. If I walked the other way, it would fast forward. The trumpets and drums also changed pitch. I was young then, only about 50…

LET’S turn right here. The tourism kiosk recommended a must-see detour to me, off the beaten path.

DID they really?

HERE we are, it’s called Patients Lane…

PATIENCE Lane.

THAT’S what I said.

NO, you said Patients Lane. PATIENCE? PATIENCE. HOW do you know what it is?

I designed it.

YOU’RE joking!

ABSOLUTELY not. It was part of the Soma beautification initiative. When the community board approached me, they found they couldn’t articulate their goals.

How can we design this narrow street, they said, if we only have control over the buildings?

OF course. It has no essence without its envelope.

The curving cobblestones and the brick and the shutters are a striking image because it’s greater than the sum of its parts.

BUT I found the solution in something that is its own envelope. Socks.

SOCKS? SOCKS can turn in on themselves and become their own container. The residents of Patience Lane experience it every day when they hang their laundry on the clothesline three stories above. I drafted a proposal that prescribed people to bring their domestic life to the street, or to the façade of their house—to turn their lives inside-out just like their socks. People began hanging artwork, old tapestries, signs and bulletins, the kids started playing football in the alley, old man Jens played his penny whistle every morning outside, and the acoustics were perfectly suited for the reveille.

IT sounds like paradise, but you know it sets a risky precedent. I remember reading in the newspaper that many people blamed that single public addendum as the reason for the Bollard Protests, when activists gathered and stood still in the Szadt Forum for 14 days, blocking traffic and disrupting pedestrians.

IRONIC, isn’t it? The only way to raise awareness of the fight against a disease is to risk infecting the whole city. The difference there is: the activists made themselves the objects of the space. The moment they occupied the plaza, they killed its essence.

The plaza is only a plaza insofar as it is an empty container for the activity within, like a lung. Our job is to keep the built environment like a sock. …( I’LL name an exception: the Digitus Tower. Because it’s an important orientation point for many and because it needs to be tall and slender in order to transmit radio signals, it must remain an object without enclosure.

MAYBE the horizon is its enclosure?

ABSOLUTELY not! The city needs its limbs and fingers, things that are undeniably singular objects yet which can also transmit information and create space around them. Don’t you agree that the smoldering fire lit by a lightning strike was the first piece of architecture?

HEIDEGGER said the same thing.

I have to agree with you.

OK, let’s stop here. Do you know where we are now? Do you know what this wall is? I can’t see a thing anymore, and this wall is moving…

WE’VE just stepped out of Old Soma. Or rather, we’ve stepped off of Old Soma. This wall is the edge of a 7 square-kilometer rotating drum, just outside the Ringstrasse. We had to lift the whole

district off the ground to make it work…

SO that means…

THAT means Old Soma has gained new life. THIS is your work?

ONE of my proudest surgeries.

YOU see, after the disaster, everyone was worried that Old Soma, its parades, milky canals, hidden courtyards and minarets would be lost to time, just like you worried. They needed to intervene in a way that would both preserve and revitalize it. They held an open competition, and I won. I was inspired by the…

THE traveling carnival in the summer of 1893—the last time you visited Soma. The World Expo turned the city into a technological wonderland. There were inventions big and small on display, from cameras to elevators, but you went to the edge of the neighborhood where the amusement rides were set up. You went with…

WITH someone I loved. I saved my allowance for three weeks to buy two tickets. We had a magical night, running around together, stuffing ourselves with candy, climbing up fences to see the glittering skyline…

AND riding the Gravitron. It was the fastest, and most silent, of all the great machines. With its brightly painted drum and flashing lights inside, it looked like it had landed from space…

AND after standing in line for an hour, once we were finally inside, and the drum started rotating, rotating faster, and faster, until we were both pinned to the wall. That was finally…

WHEN we took each other’s hands. The next morning Soma was emptied, the Expo concluded, and there remained only a fleeting recollection of a joyful night, and a joyful time. And I thought…could the Gravitron, and its massive electromagnetic rotor, be enlarged to the size of a city? And could a brightly lit, aromatic, bustling, laughing city suddenly become a life-sized spectacle, large enough to contain every memory it has ever nurtured? Because to me…

TO me, the best patients are the ones that get away.

Even 150 years later. After all, we want them to live!

I hope I’ve succeeded, at least with you, my dear.

THANK you. I’ll be seeing you tomorrow. …And what did the eyes say to them all?

“If I am the windows, then you be the wall.”

drawing Nikola Kašić Marina Krčalić text Ivan Himanen art reference Giorgio de Chirico, The Red Tower

The Garden, fresco from Nebamun tomb, c. 1380 BCE, originally in Thebes, Egypt, now in the British Museum, London, U.K. Maps and plans often render cities as islands of density surrounded by the more sparsely populated backwaters of suburbs, industrial zones, farmlands or forests. In the fresco from Thebes, a small garden pool becomes a carefully planned island.

Shown from a bird’s-eye view, this island of water is densely populated with birds, fish and plants, surrounded by a lush garden, an oasis of growth in a barren dessert.

Vittore Carpaccio, Hunting on the Lagoon, c. 1490-1495, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA Rivers and tides are powerful forces that shape and reshape human settlements, sometimes in surprising or unexpected ways. Waters also shape human social behaviour and our responses to our environments, as Carpaccio’s painting of cormorant hunters in the Venetian Lagoon demonstrates.

Instead of fighting against the water, Carpaccio’s Venetians work with it, balancing themselves atop carefully designed gondolas or building intricate systems of dikes, dams and floodwalls.

Max Ernst, The Entire City, c. 1935, private collection In Ernst’s striking painting, an “entire” city is miniaturized, seemingly dwarfed by the close-up, detailed depiction of flowers in the foreground.

The hilltop citadel, a fortress protected by intricate fortifications, barely fills one-third of the composition. Its status is diminished, while nature, in the forms of empty sky and giant plant life, slowly absorbs and nullifies human attempts to tame it.

Ernst creates a strange, dreamlike atmosphere in which distances are flattened. Through his use of collage-like techniques and overlapping forms, relative scales become uncertain.

Odoardo Fialetti, copperplate engraving in Giulio Casserio, Tabulae Anatomicae, Venice, 1627.

If we lived our interior life on the exterior, how would it look? If our back yards and private gardens became our public parks, how would we alter our behaviours? Fialetti’s remarkable illustration for Giulio Casserio’s anatomical treatise creates a universe inside a man and then turns it insideout. The figure lifts the flap of skin covering his own torso to reveal plant-like patterns of veins and mushroom-like intestines. The beauty of this interior-turned-exterior helps us forget that Fialetti in fact depicts a dissected corpse intended for the education of physicians.

Matt Mullican, Untitled, from the artist’s book 88 Maps, Paris: Three Star Books, © 2011 Like the architectural drawing for “Roman Road,” Mullican’s print utilizes an extensive visual vocabulary of widely varying forms and shapes, unified only by the roads that run through them.

These roads help Mullican to create an organized system of geometric chaos. His empty, imaginary city becomes a stage backdrop awaiting actors and action.

Francesco di Giorgio Martini (attributed), Architectural Veduta, 1490, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin A cemetery is an ideal city. Its citizens do not complain if the roads are straight or curved. Yet, just as in living cities, the cemetery’s population is ever growing. A city is a cemetery of memories contained in its architecture, its design, its traces, its plans. Martini used classicizing architecture to impose order on his ideal city, just as many designers of cemeteries utilizes classicizing elements, straight lines, and orderly rows to tame chaos and rein in the fear of death.

Giorgio de Chirico, The Red Tower, 1913, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976.

The Italian metaphysicalist painter Giorgio de Chirico imagines a town centered upon an imposing tower, yet it is actually devoid of inhabitants other than the immobilized giant who nevertheless seems to stride into the frame.

Through the tricks of de Chirico’s distorted perspective system – a sense of the central road curving up but then down again before it reaches the hidden base of the tower - this man on horseback (or statue on a plinth) appears taller than the tower. His shadow becomes a chasm, a void in the composition’s center, contributing to the mystery of a city inhabited only by shadows and silent arcades.

marija blagojević architect and urban planner based in Zurich.

She studied at the Faculty of Architecture University of Belgrade and at the Academy of Applied Sciences in Tilburg. In 2011 she completed Master of Advanced Studies in Urban Design at ETH Zurich with a thesis on strategic planning in developing regions. She has been working for several years in the field of urban design at Hosoya Schaefer Architects in Zurich.

marta lozo architect based in Zurich. She studied in Zagreb and Ljubljana and received MArch from Zagreb University in 2012. She worked for Studio UP and Grgurević & Partners, alongside collaborating with architects’ collectives including WGZG and Trokut. In 2014 she joined Zimmer Schmidt Architekten. She also collaborates with several Swiss-based architects on drawing, exhibiting and publishing projects.

ivan himanen is an architect, multimedia designer, and writer living in New York City, with origins in Northeastern Europe. Since receiving his B. Arch from The Cooper Union School of Architecture, studying under professors such as Ricardo Scofidio and Anthony Vidler, he has worked for various firms and artists studios including H3HC, The Rockwell Group, George Tsypin Opera Factory, and James Casebere. Hi developing architectural practice is dedicated to collaboration and the spirit of making, drawing inspiration from diverse sources including photography, theater, physics, and languages. He is currently Architectural Editor of The Satellite Collective, and his work has been recognized by The Park Slope Civic Council and Superfront.

tamara marić architect based in Split and Zagreb. She is a research and teaching assistant at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb, where she graduated in 2011. She is currently working on her PhD at TU Vienna and is member of the research project Heritage Urbanism at the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb. She is co-author of the winning project for the Water_Works competition in New York.

michael hirschbichler is an interdisciplinary artist and architect. His speculative-critical artistic investigations in different media are tightly interwoven with his theoretical reasoning and writing. He studied architecture at ETH Zurich and philosophy at Humboldt Universität in Berlin. He has received numerous scholarships and awards, from the German National Academic Foundation, the Erich Degen Foundation, the Sutor-Foundation, and, most recently the Villa Massimo Award from the German Academy in Rome. His works have been presented in solo and group exhibitions and are published widely. josip jerković born in Ljubljana, studied architecture in Zagreb and received the Rector’s award in 2005. He worked for Mikelić Vreš Architects and the Urban Planning Institute of Croatia, freelanced and collaborated with architects’ collectives WGZG and Trokut. In 2012 he completed the postgraduate program MAS in Housing at ETH Zurich. Currently based in Zurich, he works for Metron and collaborates with several Swiss-based architects on drawing, exhibiting and publishing projects. emma jones is an Australian architectural graduate, researcher, and writer. She holds a Masters degree in Architecture with honours from the University of Sydney, a Masters in architectural theory from the Architectural Association (AA) London, and is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Zurich.

She has taught at the AA, where she also acted as an invited studio critic, and has worked for architecture practices in both Sydney and London.

She recently participated in an artists’ residency in China, resulting in her co-curation of the Sydney exhibition Chongqing|Sydney. Currently the commissioning architecture editor for the London based independent publication E.R.O.S., she has also contributed articles to numerous publications, including San Rocco, The Architectural Review and Frieze.

paniz musawi natanzi is a political scientist based in London. She holds a BA in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin’s Otto Suhr Institute and a MSc in Comparative Political Thought from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She also studied Political Science at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, where she was active in ‘nasawiyya – a feminist collective’.

She has published in several newspapers and magazines, such as taz. die tageszeitung, the French revue l’imparfaite among others and has a forthcoming book chapter, published by Hurst & Co and Columbia University Press. She is currently doing a research degree MPhil/PhD at the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS, where she is also a Graduate Teaching Assistant. guillaume othenin-girard architect based in Zurich and Lausanne. He was educated at ETH Zurich, Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York City and Istanbul Technical University. He has worked in Switzerland and in the United States and has taught at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne as studio director in the ALICE laboratory. He currently collaborates with Swiss and UK architects and artists. He has lectured, given workshops and been visiting critic at various schools around Europe. noelle paulson received Master of Arts and PhD degrees in Nineteenth-Century European Art History from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, in 2004 and 2009 respectively. As an independent art historian and researcher, she has published essays for museums in the U.S., Canada, The Netherlands, Italy, and Switzerland. She also works as administrative coordinator for the Block Research Group (BRG), Institute of Technology in Architecture, ETH Zürich. luka piškorec studied architecture at the University of Zagreb and has worked in architectural offices in Croatia and Switzerland. In 2011 he received his Master of Science in Architecture from ETH Zurich. Since 2011 he has been working as research assistant at Gramazio Kohler Research at ETH Zürich. In April 2015 he joined the NCCR Digital Fabrication, where he will be teaching at the Master of Advanced Studies (MAS) program in Digital Fabrication.

philip shelley studied at the University of Cambridge and ETH Zurich, graduating with an independent diploma project. He has previously worked in the offices of Long & Kentish in London, Bolles & Wilson in Münster, and Bearth & Deplazes in Zurich; collaborating with Marcel Baumgartner in Zurich since 2011. He has served as guest critic at several schools of architecture and practices as a translator and editor of writing on architecture, alongside publishing his own. darko šeparović is an architect and writer. He grew up in Vela Luka on the island Korčula and graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb. He received the literary award “Na vrh jezika” for the script “Autopilot.” saša šimpraga is a writer and activist. He is the author of the book Zagreb, Public Space and founder of the volunteer platform 1POSTOZAGRAD (1percentforthecity), dedicated to city improvements and common spaces. He also founded “50 Poems for Snow,” a no-budget poetry festival taking place each year outdoors and in the dark on the first night of heavy snowfall in Zagreb. nemanja zimonjić architect based in Zurich and Lausanne. He was educated at the ETH Zurich, where he graduated in 2013 with an independent diploma project, and at the Faculty of Architecture University of Belgrade. He has worked with Prof. Branislav Mitrović in Belgrade and has been awarded the Grand Prix of the Serbian Salon for Architecture in 2011. In 2013 he joined Prof. Tom Emerson’s Chair at ETH Zurich as teaching and research assistant.

He currently collaborates with several Swiss- and UK-based architects and artists on various design, exhibition, publishing and building projects. alen žunić is an architect and researcher. He earned his MArch at the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb 2013 (summa cum laude) and his post-graduate MDesS at Harvard University GSD and MIT with a major in theory and philosophy of architecture in 2015. The recipient of numerous prizes, he has published more than 180 articles on modern and contemporary architecture, including several books, such as Architectural Dialogues I-III, [Con] Text of Architecture, and Zagreb Architecture Guide – An Anthology of 100 Buildings. He has also participated in numerous international conferences and attended architectural workshops at ETH Zurich, AA Visiting School of Architecture, and others.

re:public This publication is based on the student workshop “Zagreb Rooms” held from the 21st till 26th of July 2014 and is published on the occasion of the Re:public exhibition in the French Pavilion, Zagreb, June 2015. editors Marija Blagojević, Josip Jerković, Marta Lozo, Tamara Marić, Guillaume Othenin-Girard, Noelle Paulson, Luka Piškorec, Philip Shelley, Nemanja Zimonjić texts Emma Jones, Ivan Himanen, Michael Hirschbichler, Paniz Musawi, Darko Šeparović, Saša Šimpraga, Alen Žunić drawings Irvin L Ahatović, Irena Bakić, Eugen Čanić, Nikola Kašić, Mia Kos, Roman Krajcarz, Marina Krčalić, Tamara Lukić, Matija Romić, Dora Sipina, Ivana Slavnić, Frane Stančić, Ivana Stančić, Mirna Udovčić layout Goran Jovanović text editing Noelle Paulson, Antonia Jurić english translation of the bloodLINE text Antonia Jurić All rights reserved acknowledgements This project is the result of collaborative work at many levels and would not have been possible without the contributions made by everyone involved. We would like to thank all of them for their assistance and collaboration. Special thanks to the Student Centre Zagreb, Ivanišin Kabashi Architects and the Croatian Architecture Museum.

We would like to thank the Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb, for the collaboration and support of the Re:public project. We are especially grateful to the dean, prof. Boris Koružnjak, without whose contribution this project would not have been possible.

Editors do not necessarily agree with the views expressed by authors in the matter published herein.

zagreb june 2015