Abstract (eng)
Bogdan Bogdanović (born 1922) is one of the most distinguished architects of memorials and architecture theoreticians in Ex-Yugoslavia. In 2005 he brought his papers to the collection of the Architekturzentrum Wien. In doing so, he made a living donation of over 12,500 sketches, plans and architectural fantasies on paper as well as extensive photographic documentation accessible to a broad circle of researchers. This generous gift has also provided an opportunity to host the most extensive retrospective by the architect held to date in the spring of 2009 in Architekturzentrum’s “Alte Halle”. The key focus in the exhibition was on the memorial architecture: long-term experiments where linear chronologies, sometimes even the execution itself, played a subordinate role. For Bogdanović also made drawings of the relevant building after its completion, creating, as he aptly put it, graphic novels; a similar approach is taken in his housing developments, some of which were utopian in character.
One should bear in mind the fact that following Tito's break with Stalin (in 1948) Yugoslavian society became increasingly liberal and advancements were made towards the West. To separate itself from the Eastern Bloc, the young socialist state was searching for a new visual identity. What form should the commemoration take of those who fell in World War II and the victims of fascism? There was a need for more than a Socialist realist approach or abstract sculpture, whose last hour had also come in the states of the Warsaw Pact. Bogdan Bogdanović decided on a transcivilisational architectural language free of ideology. By the beginning of the 1980s nineteen commemorative sites had been completed, scattered throughout the former Yugoslavia. The untiring draughtsman developed new formal solutions for each of these locations in a dialogue with the local specifics. Seeing himself as an architect of the Old School, he placed great value on the interaction with the stonemasons. It is, above all, up to the visitors to read the histories in Bogdanović's cenotaphs, tumuli, gateways and iconic urban representations. Being imprinted by the surrealism, the architect himself seldom interpreted these locations, which are inviting places to linger and for contemplation. Everybody provides their own exegesis, everybody's memories are equally valid.
Both of the realised housing projects at the outskirts of Belgrade – a housing estate (1953) and an adaptation of a Villa (1961) – bear testimony to Bogdanović's search for a formula of his own in the period of a modernist recidivism in the architecture sector. Both in the recourse to traditional, apparently obsolete building materials as well as in his preference for the ornament, his approach is reminiscent of that of Jože Plečnik. Bogdanović made no secret of his admiration for the Slovenian architect.
Led by the notion that the oldest architectural writings are of a conceptual and not a physical nature, in 1973 Bogdanović launched in his function as professor of the Architecture Faculty in Belgrade a course on 'symbolic forms'. The aim was not to create a canon of the symbols, i.e. a catalogue of empty insignia, students were encouraged to engage in developing independent imagery of their own that would clearly correspond with archetypes from a shared human consciousness.
Bogdanović’s first book, Small Urbanism, was compiled from a newspaper column. Like Gordon Cullen in Townscapes, he promoted the perspective of the individual as the scale for all urban interventions. Also, and above all, Bogdanović excelled as a surrealist exegete of the classical curriculum. Among his most stimulating texts are The Circle with Four Corners, a neo-Pythagorean treatise, and The Book of Capitals — the latter being captivating, with its considerable portion of neologisms and its illustrations. The ego-documents of this kind, records as well as the interviews with the architect enabled the autor to compile the first catalogue raisonné of Bogdanović’s architectural and illustration projects also included in the present dissertation.