A market interpretation of a masterpiece

The last one for now lex specialis, which in the meantime was transformed by voting from a proposal into a valid document, for acting on it, was in its essence filled with some illogicalities and even nebulae.

Certainly, the first of them is the intersection of the topic of the urgency of the procedure for the realization of the project and the project itself, which, apart from a few renders that were circulating on the Internet, no one in the public, wider and professional for that matter, had seen until today. Urgency for the unknown? U to the Assembly there was also a few amendment thirds, forgetting the famous sentence, whether it was from an essay by Borges, "the book was wrong from the title".

The question of how it is that we did not know that our MPs, namely the populist and progressive ones, are so well versed in professional topics, falls before the knowledge that everything in the country of Serbia is subject to procedures that are in conflict with the essence. Especially here when it comes to lex specialis, one of two in just ten days in the same place. The very Proposal of the lex specialist on "accelerating the implementation of the Project..." as a rape of common sense collapsed, procedurally, unfortunately, no, but absolutely yes, in Article 9, which stated that "appropriate material (memorial-mark) will be erected within the Project, which would ensure the preservation of cultural heritage in a more effective way". From this, one can only understand the unreasonable reduction of the General Staff as a cultural heritage not primarily to the domain of architecture and urban planning, but (only) to a memorial to the events of 1999. This failure is supplemented by the ambiguity of what may or may not be a memorial, with the irreparable attribution that it is erected by the one who produced the destruction and death.

Some other things from the Law, such as the provisions of Article 7, show that it is more about construction procedural steps shamefully richly written, because someone is in a hurry to start the construction as soon as possible, after the previous destruction of Dobrović.

FIND SOMETHING FOR HIM ALREADY

A small part of the responsibility, let's admit it, for the area of ​​government manipulation, read Milenko Jovanova as Aleksandar Vučić's ginjol, lies in the non-hierarchical goals and reasons that the lay opposition and civil Belgrade can distribute. Briefly stated, some projects are much older than the SNS authorities and have their basis in the engineering and planning logics of previous decades, and not only the last three, which are the regular focus of contempt. The tunnel that connects the Sava and Danube sides of Belgrade, the more propulsive Sava bridge at the place of that "teacher Zarić", the main railway station in Prokop, the occupation of the space of the former marshalling station by urban blocks (certainly not this kind of Belgrade on the water as it is!) date back and were founded much earlier and should not be generally challenged because, in its messy ways, this government is implementing them. The second pole of restraint, for the sake of the pure efficiency of criticism of the government's moves, is to separate the reasons for building roads, for example, from the background of the same through corruption-financial heavy tricks but also through contractor's technical failures. The tragedy with the canopy in Novi Sad marred that topic forever. From that reservoir of long-ago decisions and unfinished performances, the government often draws counterarguments to challenge citizen uprisings. That's how it happened that the students, with their clarity and energy, set things in motion in society simply based on appealing to the incompetence of the President of the Republic to decide on many things beyond his competence and knowledge, especially in construction. And in urbanism.

photo: sanu

The well-known Žbirov-police manner "find something for him already" so that someone would be at least suspected or accused, if only to buy time, in the case of the General Staff in the Serbian Parliament was conducted, as the famous urban planner Branko Bojović would say, "colossally stupid". The exegesis of Milenko Jovanov, the head of the parliamentary group of the majority pack, scratched the bottom of the bottom by reaching the supreme topics of our culture under the roofs of the parliament, overbanalizing what is fact, what is interpretation, what is the manner of communication to the point of absurdity after absurdity. The proposal for the Law on Special Procedures for the Implementation of the Project for the Revitalization and Development of the Location in Belgrade between Kneza Miloša, Masarikova, Birčaninova and Resavska Streets, as the matter was officially called, is defended by stories that it is a ruined ruin, that Dobrović made it by assembling (!?) on an enlarged scale two of his earlier buildings, one that includes the red part of the building and the other the white part, informing us that there can be no work on the reconstruction of the General Staff because it is a quarry in Kosjerić, closed in 1971, that Dobrović built on the site where the Military Academy building (from 1840, note BK) was much smaller than the latter, where the legendary generals of the Serbian army studied military science, and on the other hand, Nemanja's lower military ministry arch. Ilkića - both died in the bombings in the Second World War and remained in the conditions that can be seen in the photo-documentation by institutions.

However, the interpretational inaccuracies from history that the lawyer Jovanov presented on behalf of the proponent of the special law remain in the realm of "he doesn't know but he claims". Along with slandering Nikola Dobrović, Jovanov generally fouled the protection service and experts employed in institutes for the protection of immovable cultural heritage, probably because they said "no" when his puppet master told them to say "yes" to removing the protection. With bursts of ignorance and lack of education, Jovanov "succeeded" in trying to appeal to the authority of Prof. Aleksandar Kadijevića, one of his torn comments on Dobrović's proposal for landscaping and construction in Tašmajdan, a park, returned like a boomerang to the failure of the exam in the subject of fragmentary citation. As he did so, as expected, researching the quote from the context of Kadijević's original text, the aforementioned professor of the Faculty of Philosophy, undoubtedly our most respected historian of modern and contemporary architecture, announced his distancing very quickly, as did his colleagues from the Department of Art History of the same institution. In response to all this, the Assembly could not help but expect a remark about Dobrović's attitude towards Momir Korunović, an architect whose worldview was at least one light year away from Dobrović's, but the current government is ready to rebuild his dysfunctional Post Office near the former railway station from scratch, in fact to repeat its shell, while at the same time wanting to destroy Dobrović's General Staff.

DOBROVIĆ AND BRAŠOVAN

One of the main disgusts that Jovanov tried to stir up with his story was about the relationship between Dobrović and Brašovan, ten years older. At one time, when I was starting to gather material about Nikola Dobrović, I spoke with the then already very old architect Jovan Krunić, known for the fact that he worked for some time in Le Corbusier's studio. By asking him about Dobrović, whose collaborator he was for some time after the war, I got an interesting picture of Dragisa Brašovan. Krunić mentioned that before the Second World War he worked at the Railway and had a salary of 2.000 dinars at that time, and that then it was said that "the people of Brašov spend that much every day". Brašovan's authorship was expensive, to hire him as the author of the project. That's why Dobrović, when he came to Belgrade from Prague after graduating in 1924, as a student and believer of the modernist school in Czechoslovakia, did not find a place here because, among other things, cards were largely distributed to Russian immigrant architects and professionals, with their more classical understanding of the language of architecture. There is a testimony about this from Ivanka Dobrović, Nikola's widow, and for the Serbian history of art to be intrigued, Olga's own sister, the wife of the second great Dobrović, the painter Petar, Nikola's older brother.

photo: b. kovačević

It is easy to conclude that the time after 1944 or 1945 found two architects on opposite sides of the social spectrum. Brašovan was, volens-nolens, a representative of the "reaction", and Dobrović, clearly a left-wing and Yugoslav-leaning, sign of the new order. With the fact that it must be noted that Brašovan was not desirable at the beginning of the new order, while Dobrović seemed like a man to whom all doors were opened, which was not really the reality. That's why he ended up in Belgrade only with, after the name that was adopted for the entire complex, the General Staff. Before parting with us, Brašov left Belgrade and this world with 23 works in the capital, indeed with a dominant pre-war half.

But, it would seem that casus belli between the two of them, two SANU academics, was created when once, in a rather strange decision, that institution decided to start producing monographic studies about both of them. Nikola Dobrović was appointed as the writer of the book about Brašovan, and Ljiljana Babić, Dobrović's faculty assistant (!) as the author of the study about Dobrović. She certainly wrote more or less what Nikola thought about himself, and in the text Dobrović reproached Brašovan for things that are not written on such an occasion as the result of the writer's a priori stylistic inhibitions against the architecture that is being written about. It is important to note that the Brašovan himself reached his milder or stronger modern expression, although never pronounced, through the evolution of his career. On the other hand, Dobrović's architecture has more elements of what was later called pre-postmodernity, and even baroque influences, regardless of who swears by what.

Of course, for all things that do not have a petrified legacy, witnesses are important, no matter how valid the old one may be testis unus testis nullus. Nevertheless, the very important Serbian architect Milan Pališaški, who is continuously close to Brašovan's family, testified to me that Dobrović visited Brašovan in his last days in the hospital, probably in the wish that their relationship, two Transdanubian Serbs, be reconciled during their lives, but Brašovan then just waved his hand. In whichever of the two possible directions the interpretation of the gesture is - as "no!" or as "it doesn't matter". Over time, it became a less important sequence because the history of Serbian architecture nailed two conflicting figures to the top of our architecture, along with Milan Zloković, so it is not difficult for them there that they are not alone individually. And it falls to us that lawyer Milenko Jovanov, one of the SNS club of lawyers who make Belgrade, explains who Nikola Dobrović is and why the General Staff should come.

IT IS NOT SUTJESKA

In the vehement pouring out of some kind of noisy accusations against the General Staff and Nikola Dobrović himself in the direction of "making the public aware of who and what it is about", a good part of the narrative in the Assembly was devoted to the communist semantics that (is) the complex of symmetrical motive over Nemanjin. The motif of cascading floors, which Dobrović used on both sides of that street, was seen in his architecture even before communist times, in Prague at his Student Dormitory of King Alexander (sic!), although it is even more expressive in Belgrade, and has nothing to do with any offensives or the Sutjeska canyon. In the brilliant textual explanation of the winning competition entry from 1954, published in the book on the architecture of the General Staff in 2001, neither Sutjeska nor the canyon nor some sort of seven offensives are mentioned anywhere. In one of his rather speculative texts from 1962, with the inhibitions of do-theorizing and re-theorizing of his project, Sutjeska is mentioned along with one of the illustrations, probably "recognized" by some military-political figures in the meantime in architectural terms. Architects love, just about everyone and always, when someone from among the clients likes something, even if it wasn't generated by the author just like that. The special misery of what was heard in the Assembly, and which even President Vučić was not ready to open before as controversial, is the loaded symbolism of a well-known, even exploited, battle in northeastern Herzegovina in 1943.

In the calendar of all the events, it is surprising, the general public should be reminded that recently, in 2022, under the auspices of SANU, the 125th anniversary of the birth of academician architect Nikola Dobrović, builder, professor of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Belgrade, author of numerous buildings (although only one realized in the capital, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, precisely the DSNO ensemble, i.e. in later decades called the Ministry of Defense and Generalstab, in the colloquial abbreviated name for both buildings - Generalstab), author of the most famous project for Belgrade in the 20th century - the legendary Terazije Terrace, author of about fifteen books and numerous articles on architecture and cities, undoubtedly the dominant figure of Serbian and Yugoslav architectural culture, not only design. An international scientific conference on Nikola Dobrović was also held as part of the meeting, with studies about him subsequently published in one of the five books (two versions are in English) that were part of the overall project marking the anniversary. The relationship between the Yugoslav and Serbian heritage is a topic that a number of people are constantly itching for.

Today, but not really since yesterday, everyone who is even remotely intelligent must ask themselves how it is that in the same country, in the same society, in the space of a little more than a year and a half from the closing of the exhibition at SAN to the first direct "threats" of demolition under the euphemistic name of "removal of protection" and inventing criteria that the General Staff has "lost the properties" of a cultural asset, a process can be started by simply lying that "ruins" lie in Knez Miloš.

photo: b. kovačević

The current appearance of the complex is as if "caught in a gap", because part of the (smaller) building A, a demolished structure, which was irreparably lost from the vertical-horizontal structure due to the bombing, was re-concreted, but without continuing the work. On the other side, on building B (larger, with a tower), across the entire length of the tract towards Kneza Miloša Street, there is a large canvas that seems to close the building so that no traces of NATO can be seen, but, in fact, it rather prevents passers-by from seeing the extent of the construction there. When summarizing all the happenings around the General Staff, it is clear that the final outcome is about staying and renewing the superior modernist trail "at least" from the time of socialism, or will the neo-colonial burying of the historical heart of the state of Serbia with ready-made absolutely too bulky volumes win. Shouldn't we make Zeta please Father-in-law so that he might pat us on the head.

Somewhere at the end, I can't resist expressing my own satisfaction that I photographed the General Staff, back in 1992, in great colors on a sunny Belgrade day. Those dozen and a half shots of the entire building, "unbombed", are one of the most important things I have done as an architect. I cannot say whether the scenes go in the direction of showing what the General Staff irretrievably was, if these spineless ignoramuses insist on destruction, or in the direction that it should be again, as if restored, resurrected.