The Centre for Architecture Belgrade is an independent organisation, acting as the national centre for sustainable development in the field of architecture, urban planning, habitation and related areas.

As part of the project Belgrade Brutalism, Gallery Kolektiv and Centre for Architecture organized a discussion panel entitled

IMS SYSTEM AND CENTRE FOR HOUSING - TECHNOLOGY, RESEARCH AND DESIGN SKILLS.

We took part in the discussion held at the 37th Salon of Architecture at the Museum of Applied Arts in Belgrade, organized by Do.co.mo.mo. Serbia:

INDUSTRIAL(?) MODERN HOUSING

apartment concepts and their realization in industrialized building conditions.

Almaški kraj is a specific part of the centre of Novi Sad, characteristic not onlz for its rich heritage, but also for the demonstrated resolution of its residents to preserve their neighbourhood. The Centre for Architecture Belgrade has been supporting the activities of NGO Almašani almost from their beginning.

During the last 10 years, Almašani have established themselves as one of the few important citizen initiatives, dedicated to protection of tangible and intangible heritage of the Almaški kraj. CAB is a long-standing partner in their activities, providing innovative urban design solutions, professional studies and researches for the area.

NGO Almašani has announced an ambitious programme of activities for 2015, with the Centre for Architecture as an active partner.

Women in Architecture: Contemporary Architecture in Serbia Since 1900.

This book by the Centre for Architecture Belgrade showcases the work and experiences of women architects in Serbia since the beginning of the 20th century until today.

The Centre for Architecture Belgrade realized the Women in Architecture project during 2013. This book, as its result, showcases the work and experiences of women architects in Serbia since the beginning of the 20th century until today.

The 160 pages showcase illustrated texts and interviews on the most important female authors and their projects. The whole publication is bilingual, in Serbian and English language.

Asking questions on the position and role of women in architectural practice (now and in the past), we hope to enrich our profession in Serbia, and present to the global community the local architecture through the lens of its female authors.

The Centre for Architecture Belgrade owes special gratitude to our colleague Milena Zindović, for her great effort and enthousiasm in realization of our ideas.

We hereby thank the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia, who financially supported the publication of this book.

To get your copy of this book, please contact the Centre for Architecture directly at books@cab.rs.

Branka Prpa et al., eds., To Live in Belgrade 1-6: Documents of Belgrade City Administration (Belgrade: Historical Archives of Belgrade, 2003-2008).

The heading of this text might have been just as well How I read the 3,000 pages that weren’t written to be read at all or Manual for urbanization of small oriental towns or The things they did not teach us in history classes or... let’s try that way:

How I read the 3,000 pages that weren’t written to be read at all

Unlike other publications presented here previously, this one happened by chance – or at least unplanned. Somebody telephoned me and said that the Historical Archives of Belgrade posted an information on their Facebook page, that said something like: “We hereby invite this gentleman to contact us, for he will, as the one-thousandth liker of our page, receive a gift.” Maybe it did not say liker, but something more decent; never mind. In communication with the kind officials of the Historical Archives, I have learned that they actually do wish to give me one of the books they published. From the list of available publications, I have recognized and selected, rather nasty, the books that I am writing about now. Books, since – unlike other offered items, this was a set of six hard-cover thick books. Still, until I picked up two full bags from the porter, I did not quite believe they would give me all six of them.

So I became the lucky winner. And I actually won selected documents from the archives of Belgrade City Administration, from the period 1837 to 1940. This collection of documents represents a radical example of the popular approach to history not as a listing of dates of great battles, but as the history of everyday life. Recently, several outstanding researches dealing with everyday life in Belgrade have been published – to mention only the books Cobblestone and Asphalt by Dubravka Stojanović [1] and Bazaars and Boulevards by Nataša Mišković [2] – but the stuff that I got was something else – the original material.

Documents were edited and prepared in a brutally modest way, just like contemporary bureaucrats mass-produce them today using MS Word. But it is exactly their rough appearance, with archive numbers and formal sections without real meaning, that makes these books romantic. One can imagine big-moustached clerks writing these documents – beginning with ornamented handwriting, that turns by the end into an illegible line bending between spilled ink dots. The contents of these documents, just like their appearance, varies from precise lists and grotesque apologetic pleads to higher instances, to quickly or lazily scribbled reports on how there was nothing to report. Scribes, policemen, pleaders, strict administrators, engineers- dreamers and worried doctors managed to fill the rigid form of the official correspondence with all the liveliness of Belgrade as it was then, its problems, smells, changes.

I have read the complete contents of all six volumes from beginning to the end without skipping pages (like a madman reads the phone book, as Bogdan Tirnanić would say). I went through the pages hastily, with a suspicious-looking smile, like a high-school boy looking at porn – enchanted with the stuff he sees and impatient to learn something even more interesting on next pages.

Manual for urbanization of small oriental towns

Among the documents included in this selection, besides notes on happy or morbid trivial situations, there is a substantial amount of data on people and events that essentially influenced the development of Belgrade and the transformation of its parts, streets and the way of life into something we can recognize. Those are the most valuable and for us the most interesting parts.

Changes can be tracked on multiple levels through time – from language changes, with gradual replacement of Turkish words with new ones, that we know or at least understand, to notes on actual realizations of these new ideas, represented by new words (tramway, public lighting, pavement, photography and telegraph slowly take the place of once so important terms, like seymen, gümrük or haraç).

One can learn a lot from these texts about the ways of dealing with various problems that the citizens and city administration faced during the construction and maintenance of infrastructure systems, tracing and paving of streets, reconstruction of whole quarters, establishing communal order. While we find some of described situations funny, it is astonishing to understand how in fact not much has changed. Therefore, notes on experiences of policemen and engineers from the beginning of the XIX century can be useful as directions for prevention or overcoming of contemporary challenges in planning and managing of public spaces.

The things they did not teach us in history classes

Books like these draw our attention to the fact that they taught us a lot in school, but we actually did not learn anything, at least not anything that really means something, or can be implemented. A hundred years old documents of city administration sometimes contain actual useful data, but they tell us much more about the spirit of that time and the spirit of the city, as well as about the values that some Belgradians of the past tried to reach or protect, and hoped that we shall protect, too.

[1] Dubravka Stojanović, Cobblestone and Asphalt: Urbanization and Europeanization of Belgrade1890-1914 (in Serbian: Kaldrma i asfalt: Urbanizacija i evropeizacija Beograda 1890-1914.) (Belgrade: Society for social history, 2009).

[2] Nataša Mišković, Bazaars and Boulevards: The World of Life in 19th Century Belgrade (in Serbian: Bazari i bulevari: Svet života u Beogradu 19. veka (Belgrade: Belgrade City Museum, 2009).

Text: Goran Petrović.
Illustrations from CAB archives.

Centre for Architecture Belgrade supports the initiative of BINA festival under the title KNOCK ON WOOD. We believe this pavilion will be a place that will trigger many creative initiatives in the future, a place for students to meet, discuss, create and act.

During this year's 9th Belgrade International Week of Architecture a special program KNOCK ON WOOD took place. Through the student workshops and lecture series with participants from Norway, Denmark and Finland we have addressed the potentials and challenges of building with wood. The last part of this program is a construction of a temporary wooden pavilion located at the courtyard of the University of Arts in Belgrade - BINA KABINA 2014.

The pavilion was designed by Norwegian architecture office Brendeland & Kristoffersen with the assistance of architecture students from Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade and Faculty for Art and Design (FUD), Megatrend University.

This temporary structure will serve as a workshop, a classroom, a place to study, exhibit, lecture and make all kind of projects opened to all students interested.

BINA, Asscoation of Belgrade Architects, Faculty of Architecture and University of Arts joined forces to make this pavilion happen.

The pavilion is currently under the construction and the opening is planned in September 2014.

So far the BINA team gathered 80% of funds needed for its construction. Hereby we would like to ask you to help build this pavilion and collect the remaining funds needed. By being a part of this project you will help spread the design and creativity discourse further.

Lets make this project happen together!

Please read about KNOCK ON WOOD here:

http://www.ulule.com/knock-on-wood/

Summer school of architecture takes place in Kotor again this year, traditionally in a prison where, probably, we all belong. Architecture Prison Summer School 2014 deals with the research of possibilities for transformation of spaces around Hotel Fjord as the trigger for urban reconstruction of a part of Kotor. Mentors will work on this task with students from different European architecture schools. The team of offices behind the concept of GH Fjord Study and Program for APSS 2013 and APSS 2014 has been appointed for a curatorial team for Montenegin national pavilion in Venice Biennale. Exhibition Treasures in Disguise – Montenegro pavilion is curated by Dijana Vučinić (DVARP), Boštjan Vuga (SADAR+VUGA), Simon Hartmann (HHF), Ilka and Andreas Ruby (Ruby Press) and Nebojša Adžić (SACG). The Montenegro Pavilion at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale presents four examples of late-modernist architecture that were built in Montenegro between 1960 and 1986. When these buildings were first constructed, they radiated their builders’ enthusiasm and confidence about the new society they were building. Only a few decades later, these buildings embody the complete opposite: poorly used and maintained, they are a testament to the failure of modernism. Nobody seems to be able to recognize any value in them; hence, their fate seems sealed: decay and demolition. One of these buildings is Hotel Fjord. APSS will discuss these issues and start a debate among people from Montenegro and professionals from all over the world. Joining of these initiatives – the design study for Hotel Fjord, the Summer School, the Montenegro Pavilion, all aims to initiate a powerful development impulse for the whole city of Kotor.