Archinect - News

The Nonument Group: digitally preserving architectural treasures before they're lost

2019-08-01T16:25:00-04:00

Working with an international team of researchers and artists, Tomšič and Bricelj Baraga study, map and archive fading sites and Brutalist-style structures. They’re building a database of about 120 case studies across Europe and in former Soviet states and will be releasing a book this year.

"Using a surveying and data-collection process known as photogrammetry and a series of high-powered computer workstations, a team led by Georgios Artopoulos will create a digital model of the monument for use with virtual reality headsets or smartphones," writes the Guardian's Nate Berg about the efforts of the Nonument Group to map and document the rapidly deteriorating and severely vandalized Monument House of the Bulgarian Communist Party (also known as the Buzludzha Monument) — one of many "hidden, abandoned, unwanted or otherwise forgotten" contemporary heritage sites the group aims to digitally preserve before they're gone forever.

The badly damaged interior of the Buzludzha Monument Auditorium. Photo: Stanislav Traykov/Wikimedia Commons

Toward a Concrete Utopia reviewed

2019-03-11T15:03:00-04:00

The North American layman tends to consider the Eastern bloc as a homogenous chunk of misery. It falls to the curators then to differentiate the USSR from Yugoslavia, and they are not off to a good start. Simultaneously, they are obliged to titillate concrete-loving Instagrammers with images of Brutalist hulks. Only once these two aims are achieved can they pose the salient question: does Yugoslav architecture merit more study than a social media scroll?

In his piece for The Observer, George Grylls reviews MoMA's highly publicized exhibition, Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980, which recently came to a close in New York.

Miodrag Živković, Monument to the Battle of Sutjeska, 1965-71, Tjentište, Bosnia and Herzegovina. View of the western exposure. Photo: Valentin Jeck, commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2017.

"In truth, the exhibition has been teasing us for its big finale," Grylls writes. "And just when you were about to ask for your money back, you get what you came for – spomeniki, lumbering onto stage like the Rolling Stones dutifully returning for an obligatory encore."

Displaying relics of Soviet architecture on your desk has never been easier

2019-01-24T15:59:00-05:00

Authored and published by Zupagrafika, and now featured in our Downtown LA retail store and online at Archinect Outpost, these miniature versions of brutalist structures from former Eastern Bloc countries can now rest easily on your desk or bookshelf.

House of Soviets (Kaliningrad, Russia). Authored and Published by Zupagrafika.

The Brutal East cutouts are authored and published by Zupagrafika, an independent design studio established in 2012 by a Hispano-Polish duo David Navarro and Martyna Sobecka in Poznań, Poland. The studio has a special affinity with Polish Poster School, post-war modernist architecture and paper.

Representing structures from Belgrade, Chisinau, Kaliningrad, Prague, St. Petersburg, Vilnius and Wrocław, these cutouts are faithfully illustrated with the ravages of time and hints of graffiti. The Brutal East kit comes with seven cutouts, each of which requires a ruler, and box cutter and white glue to construct.

Novosmolenskaya Housing Complex (St. Petersburg, ...

Concrete Utopia

2018-11-14T09:22:00-05:00

In the construction of the new Yugoslavia, modernist thinking and design were deployed to guide the country’s rapid urbanization and industrialization as well as to unify the ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse population.

In columnist Belmont Freeman's latest article for Places, he examines the exhibition “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980,” now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and finds a rigorous and revealing survey of Yugoslavia’s extraordinary built legacy that until now has been neglected by mainstream architectural historians.

Montenegro’s Venice Biennale exhibition seeks renewal of the country’s architectural heritage

2014-05-30T17:38:00-04:00

Montenegro's "Treasures in Disguise" exhibition for the 2014 Venice Biennale looks to the country's former Yugoslavic past to provoke discussion of bringing renewal and examining the future possibilities of Montenegran architecture. The exhibition focuses on four historic buildings constructed between 1960 and 1986 that are perceived as cultural models of late modernism architecture. Built with optimistic intentions, the buildings were neglected and have been left to decay ever since.

Check out the projects in their current and original states.

(Pictured above) Dom Revolucije
Architect: Marko Mušić

Kayak Club “Galeb”
Architect: Vukota Tupa Vukotić

Hotel Fjord
Architect: Zlatko Ugljen

Spomen Dom
Architect: Marko Mušić

To learn more, head over to Bustler.

Abandoned Monuments of the Socialist Republic

2012-11-07T12:39:00-05:00

These structures were commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito in the 1960s and 70s to commemorate sites where WWII battles took place, or where concentration camps stood (like Jasenovac and Niš). They were designed by different sculptors (Dušan Džamonja, Vojin Bakić, Miodrag Živković, Jordan and Iskra Grabul, to name a few) and architects (Bogdan Bogdanović, Gradimir Medaković…), conveying powerful visual impact to show the confidence and strength of the Socialist Republic.