Archinect - News

'I knew I had to do something': A Bulgarian architect on preserving a monument to her country's ugly past

2022-05-24T12:00:00-04:00

What do you do with a building that was built to glorify an oppressive Communist system but, ravaged by rain and snow and stripped bare by thieves, is now a wreck? Should it be torn down in the spirit of reckoning with history — just as the statues of Confederate generals have been toppled in the United States and monuments to Soviet hegemony have been demolished across Ukraine, particularly since Russia invaded in February?

After receiving two rounds of funding totaling $245,000 from the Getty Foundation in back-to-back years, the ever-popular photographer’s subject is struggling to raise the millions needed to restore it to the former 'glory' seen in what its designer Georgi Stoilov called “morally and materially superior times.”

Bulgarian Architect Dora Ivanova, who is leading a new push to conserve the Buzludzha Monument, says she “does not want to glorify the past” but rather intends to use its grimy edifice as an educational tool that fills a void in her native country’s national conversation about its less-than-sterling communist history.

“We don’t want a museum freezing everything as it was,” she told the New York Times, “but a place for discussion about the past. The idea is to overcome this silence — the shame of talking about what happened.”

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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

Bulgaria's Buzludzha Monument opens its doors for the first time in eight years, with restoration plans underway

2018-05-23T15:00:00-04:00

Officially called the “House-Monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party”, the building fell into disrepair following the collapse of the country's socialist government in 1989, but remains a popular landmark and tourist attraction. The trip comes before an expected visit by European and Bulgarian experts at the end of 2018, who will report on the building’s structural integrity with the view of opening it officially to tourists.

Architecture shapes hyperreal photographic narratives in art collection "Schude"

2015-08-28T00:20:00-04:00

Photographer Ryan Schude's narrative panoramas are as informed by the artist's humor as they are by the structures in which they often take place. Consider "The Saturn," a typical Southern California dingbat that is transformed into a tableau of subjects wondering where they went wrong. There's the man whose belongings are being unceremoniously tossed out of a window by an enraged lover to the woman staring out of her kitchen window to the mildly distressed dingbat itself. At least, that's one reading. Look closer: other stories begin to emerge.

Beginning as an editorial portraitist for a magazine, Schude "wanted to figure out how to do more than just show a documentary aspect of [a subject's] personality. I wanted to tell a story that would be more interesting than the person themselves, and take that concept and apply it to a much bigger scene with actual actors and create another story, depending on the location." The narrative within "The Saturn" evolved as he sought a location....

11,000 year lease: the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities

2015-08-06T09:35:00-04:00

What makes a city habitable for centuries, even millennia? This list of the twelve longest-inhabited cities compiled by the Mother Nature Network, which includes several in ISIS-plagued Syria, one in China, and one in India, unsurprisingly points toward temperate climate, relatively stable water supply, and a certain intangible tenacity on the part of its human inhabitants (perhaps due to the existence of sacred religious sites). Here's the full list and number of years of estimated continuous occupation:

12. Varanasi, India (3,000 Years)

11. Luoyang, China (4,000 Years)

10. Jerusalem (4-5,000 Years)

9. Rayy, Iran (5-6,000 Years)

8. Sidon, Lebanon (6,000 Years)

7. Byblos, Lebanon (5,000 Years)

6. Plovdiv, Bulgaria (6,000 Years)

5. Argos, Greece (7,000 Years)

4. Athens, Greece (7,000 Years)

3. Aleppo, Syria (8,000 Years)

2. Jericho, West Bank (11,000 Years)

1. Damascus, Syria (11,000 Years)

MARS wins Walltopia competition in Sofia, Bulgaria

2013-12-02T14:45:00-05:00

For anyone returning from the Thanksgiving holiday, perhaps a fitness-inspired project could help ward off a little of that holiday indulgence. MARS Architects recently won the competition to design the headquarters for leading sports activity brand Walltopia in Sofia, Bulgaria. Chosen out of 369 entries from 63 countries by the Foster + Partners-led jury, MARS' proposal is an 8,800 sq.m hybrid structure whose program is cleverly "folded" by an interweaving climbing atrium.

Images courtesy of MARS Architects.

Timothy Allen's photographic exploration of a Bulgarian ruin

2012-11-12T11:54:00-05:00

The argument for preserving old buildings is a very strong one that I wholeheartedly support myself. However. On the rare occasions that I get to visit a forgotten building as magnificent as this one, I can’t help day dreaming about some of the incredible monumental relics I know back home and quietly wishing that a few more of them had been left to grow old and perish naturally rather than being unceremoniously hooked up to the proverbial life support machine of modern tourism...

Photographer, Timothy Allen, explores the ruins at the Buzludzha monument in Bulgaria.