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Recovering the Historical Construction and Materials of Erik Gunnar Asplund’s Stockholm Public Library
Full text linkThis work presents the first detailed study of the construction and materials of the Stockholm Public Library. As the building undergoes a rare period of maintenance and renovation, the floors and walls of the library are examined from three perspectives. First, using available but limited archival documents and plans; second, with non-destructive ground-penetrating radar measurements; and finally, through on-site surveys during local interventions for the maintenance and renovation process. The ensuing results emphasize the complementary nature of this combined research approach in recovering lost or forgotten construction details and further reveal several important findings. In the case of the unique wall finishing of the library’s rotunda, multiple layers of lime mortar, each varying in thickness and coarseness, were used to build up and craft the relief-like interior wall surface. With the use of in-situ aerated concrete and prefabricated Solomite panels in the library’s 1931–32 floor construction, a material connection between Asplund and the broader modern movement in architecture is further highlighted. At first glance, these construction-related findings seem to reinforce the common architectural narrative of the library as a transitional project between neoclassicism and modernism. At the same time, however, the library’s separate periods of construction of 1925–28 and 1931–32 and their distinct materials can be seen as a continuity of construction culture, with the innovative use of local raw materials related to the Swedish landscape
From Hospital to Criminal Justice Complex: Notes on architectural flexibility through the Santa Casa de Misericórdia de São Paulo
Full text linkThis article analyses the conversion of a big hospital and teaching complex, designed between 1968 and 1978 and commissioned by Santa Casa de Misericórdia de São Paulo to a team of architects led by Fábio Moura Penteado, into the biggest criminal justice complex in Latin America, since it was acquired by the State of São Paulo in the mid-1990s and opened in 1999. The architectural characteristics and the superlative scale of the complex constitute a privileged object to analyze the potentialities and limits of architectural flexibility, as well as how this concept is related to the modern project culture, specifically with the general strategies developed by the so-called Escola Paulista
The Way towards Regional Modernities - Joint Works of Dušan Grabrijan and Juraj Neidhardt
Full text linkThe richness and multiplicity of themes addressed in the different contributions made it very difficult to create the optimal order for this issue: every grouping of contributions would undervalue at least one of the aspects of the individual papers. Finally this Journal is structured in three main blocks where the first focusses on the joint origins and joint works of Dušan Grabrjan and Juraj Neidhardt. It includes contributions by Bogo Zupančič, Lejla Džumhur with Aida Idrizbegović-Zgonić and Dijana Alić. The second block of papers has the main focus on Plečnik and Dušan Grabrjan’s work and contains contributions by Miloš Kosec, Mirjana Lozanovska with Viktorija Bogdanova and Aleksa Korolija. The third block of papers focusses on Juraj Neidhardt and is authored by Darja Radović-Mahečić, Aleksandar Bede with Dragana Konstantinović and Slobodan Jović and by Nevena Novaković. As guest-editors, we contributed with a paper on the origins of modernity and the synthesis of the arts with the region in the second and third block
The Role of City Partnerships in the Reconstruction of Ukraine
Full text linkIn 2015, there were around 80 city partnerships between Germany and Ukraine. In addition to the major partnerships between Berlin, Munich, and Leipzig with Kyiv or Berlin and Nuremberg with Kharkiv1, these were mostly partnerships between smaller municipalities with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants. Many of these partnerships were very old and had their basis in the old structures between the Soviet Union and the former Germand Democratic Republic (GDR). Only a few new partnerships were formed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Ukraine’s independence in 1991. Others resulted from the old peace movement in the West, which organized active support after the Chornobyl accident with vacation stays for Ukrainian children in Germany in conjunction with direct humanitarian and medical support
Being a Ukrainian Architect during Wartime by Ievgeniia Gubkina: and other books, exhibitions and research
No full textIntermediary Spaces: The Small-Scale Urbanism of Jože Plečnik
Full text linkThe thesis of this article is two-fold. Firstly, Plečnik’s wartime and post-war projects deserve more research attention than they have received to date. A certain level of under-appreciation of Plečnik’s late work is probably a result of a lower number of realizations and perhaps also of insufficient research of this period compared to Plečnik’s career before that.1 Secondly, the article attempts to prove that in the last fifteen years of Plečnik’s life, the urbanistic character of his work was significantly upgraded. The focus lies on the changed urbanistic character of his wartime and post-war realized as well as unrealized projects. In them, the dissolution of the distinction between the interior and exterior of the buildings as well as between public, semi-public, and private programs was intensified, articulating a wide range of intermediary spaces that position many of his later works somewhere between architecture and urbanism. Plečnik’s strategy of small-scale urbanism had a substantial influence on his disciples, including modernist architects such as Edvard Ravnikar and Dušan Grabrijan, who developed a distinct interplay between the principles of international style and original solutions based on local traditions
Letters from Paris and Architect Dušan Grabrijan's Archive
Full text linkThe article presents the archive of architect Dušan Grabrijan at the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) in Ljubljana. It describes one of the key moments in the modernization of Slovenian (and Yugoslavian) architecture and society in the 1930s, namely the “invasion” of Le Corbusier’s studio at 35 Rue de Sèvres in Paris by Jože Plečnik’s students. The article primarily focuses on Grabrijan’s correspondence with architects Juraj Neidhardt and Milan Sever, who wrote to Grabrijan in Sarajevo from Paris. Four letters sent to Grabrijan from Paris are just a fraction of the extremely varied and extensive archive, testifying to the influence that the studio in Paris had on the architectural developments in Slovenia. Grabrijan’s archive is one of MAO’s largest. It comprises various materials, from sketches, letters, lecture notes, and official documents to different photographs and similar. The materials from the 1920s relate to Grabrijan’s study of architecture in Plečnik’s seminar at the Technical Faculty in Ljubljana and at École national supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris (ENSBA Paris). Materials from his Sarajevo period date back to 1930-1945, when Grabrijan served as professor at Secondary Technical School (STS) and was fascinated by Bosnian architecture, observing parallels with modernist architecture. The last period offers an insight into the years between 1945 and 1952 when Grabrijan was a professor at the Department of Architecture at the Technical Faculty in Ljubljana. After Grabrijan’s death in 1952, the archive was kept by his wife, who organized the publication of his books and their translations into foreign languages. These documents shed light on extensive architectural connections between Paris, Sarajevo, Ljubljana as well as Zagreb and Belgrade; the authors comment on architectural developments in their circles and on architects with whom they interacted
Synthesis of the Arts with the Region: Juraj Neidhardt’s Sculptural Architecture of the 1960s within Regional Planning of Tourism
Full text linkSome of Juraj Neidhardt’s most emblematic projects are situated in pristine, non-urban settings. From the Ski House in the pine forests of the Bosnian hills to the Hotel Agava immersed in the Mediterranean shrubbery of the Adriatic Coast, his designs in the landscape were key for him to define his architecture as seeking proximity to and harmony with nature. The design strategy that Neidhardt utilized to realize this ambition was, however, far from constant. While in the 1950s, he relied solely on the “unwritten laws” of the vernacular models to define techniques of new design integration into the specific regional environment, in the 1960s, he produced a series of striking artistic compositions of natural and architectural visual elements, which he described with the notion of “phantasy in tourism.”This paper analyzes Neidhardt’s writings and several projects of the 1950s and 1960s in order to situate his 1960s architecture excursus into the visual arts within the post-war discourse of the “synthesis of the arts.” Under the influence of his and Dušan Grabrijan’s geography-informed understanding of the unity between art, life, and the regional environment and his research in the regional planning of tourism (both presented in the book Architecture of Bosnia and the Way towards Modernity (Grabrijan & Neidhardt, 1957), Neidhardt developed an original architectural language that synthesized not only architecture and sculpture but also the specific regional landscape into one harmonious visual whole. This aesthetic synthesis, however, communicated a deeper synthesis between architecture, geographic region, and modern state economy, facilitated by the emerging regional planning as the ultimate absorption of the total environment into the comprehensive kind of modernism
A Listed Public Heritage or Shopping Mall? Latent Conflicts at the Lagoa Rowing Stadium
No full textThe recognition of 20th-century architecture in Brazil is still a field restricted to specialists, which makes the remaining assets of this collection susceptible to defacement or even destruction. The designation of the Lagoa Rowing Stadium as a historic landmark by the city of Rio de Janeiro gives us the possibility of reflecting on the existing dispute between the public interest, protected by the listing in 2005, versus the financial voracity of private groups toward the asset in question. Grotesque defacement was undertaken starting in 2003 with the approval of the State and city administrations, including the intent to turn the sports complex into a business complex, thereby distorting the original proposal from the 1950s
Heritage in Danger: Built Work of Juraj Neidhardt
Full text linkAlmost the entirety of Juraj Neidhardt’s built work was created in the decades of his late career. Although several emblematic projects—notably the ‘Sextuplet’ collective workers’ housing type—were designed before World War II, Neidhardt’s work as modernist heritage is historically firmly situated in the socialist Yugoslav era. The proper evaluation, listing, and conservation of modern architectural heritage is a relatively new subfield of heritage conservation in many countries around the world. In the majority of ex-Yugoslav states, the institutionalization of these endeavors has been complicated by the political and historical controversy surrounding the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the opposing interpretations of the social, cultural, and historical values of modernist Yugoslav heritage