Dobrović in Dubrovnik (JOVIS Verlag)

PREVIOUS SPREADS: Villa Vesna, roof terrace with a view over the bay of Lopud; Villa Svid, balcony facing the sea; Villa Adonis, open porch under the solid volume; all photographs by Wolfgang Thaler, 2010.

DOBROVIC in DU BR OVNIK

A Venture in Modern Architecture Krunoslav Ivani sin ˇ Wolfgang Thaler Ljiljana Blagojevic

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors are grateful to the Archive of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade, the Architecture Department of the Museum of Science and Technology in Belgrade, the Gallery Petar Dobrović by courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Belgrade, the State Archives in Dubrovnik, and the Institute of Art History in Zagreb for granting us the rights to publish valuable documentation, photographs, and archival material from their collections.

We are thankful to Dubravko Bačić and Miloš Jurišić who gave us permission to publish documentation from their private collections, to Fedora Pallavicini for opening Villa Rusalka, to Vlasta Pulić Glavović and Vjekoslava Franušić Glavović for the illustration materials on the Grand Hotel Lopud from their family archive, and to Hela Vukadin and Tamara Bjažić for their help in archival research. Special thanks are owed to Marija Milinković for sharing with us her findings to which she dedicated much time and energy and for her collegial support in bringing together source material that is published in this book.

As authors, we are honored to have the book endorsed by the esteemed academics Andrija Mutnjaković, academic at the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts; Đorđe Zloković, academic at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts; and Christopher Long, Distinguished Teaching Professor and Director of the Architectural History Program and the Ph.D. Program at the School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin.

At Jovis Verlag, we are grateful to Jochen Visscher and Philipp Sperrle for their belief in the proposal and to Mara Taylor for her subtle and precise text editing.

Authors thank the graphic designers Philip Popoff and Bojan Vutov for their patience and their collaborative approach to the book’s design and layout, reflecting the complexity of the notions expressed by the three co-authors.

The last thanks go to Vladimir Macura and Maroje Mrduljaš for their initial impulse to bring us together, which not only made this book evolve into a collaborative undertaking but also made our different standpoints cast a more complex play of light on the book’s multifaceted subject.

CONTENT

Krunoslav Ivanišin: Reading Nikola Dobrović, Looking at His Architecture Wolfgang Thaler: Dobrović in Dubrovnik, 2010

Ljiljana Blagojević: A Lifetime of a Mediterranean Modern APPENDIX: Dobrović on Dubrovnik, 1966

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Grand Hotel Lopud, the original project submitted for approval to the authorities, 1934: ground floor plan with situation plan; first floor plan; sections and elevations, signed by the designer Ing. Nikola Dobrović and the authorized civil engineer Ing. Jaroslav Dubsky, Zagreb, with the bearing concrete structure rendered solid black. One floor was added to the central wing. The “second phase” shaded with red lines–the lateral wing in the upper left corner of the plans–was not constructed until the nineteen-seventies; it was demolished recently as it legally does not constitute an integral part of the protected cultural monument.

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On the Grand Hotel construction site, 1936: Courtesy of the Architecture Department, Museum of Science and Technology, Belgrade.

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READING NIKOLA DOBROVIC, LOOKING AT HIS ARCHITECTURE Krunoslav Ivanišin

Spatial art stands high above all other art forms.

Any architect or architecture enthusiast can easily believe this.1

The Old and the New Dubrovnik Nikola Dobrović was born on February 12, 1897 in the Hungarian city of Pécs, then part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. He completed his studies in 1923 at the Department for Architecture of the High Technical School in Prague, the capital of the new Republic of Czechoslovakia. After gaining experience in prominent Prague architectural offices and in his own private practice, he moved to Dubrovnik in the early nineteen-thirties with the radical, programmatic mission of bringing modern architecture to this small but historically very important ancient city on the Dalmatian coast.

Like everything around Dobrović, the context of his first appearance in Dubrovnik was highly unusual. It was documented in detail by the municipal conservator Kosta Strajnić, a key personality in the modernization of Dubrovnik’s demanding cultural scene and, more importantly, of Dubrovnik’s architecturally highly charged physical space. Already well known as the author of the first monographs on the architect Josip Plečnik and the sculptor Ivan Meštrović, Strajnić described in his newspaper articles, which were later collected in a booklet dramatically entitled Dubrovnik without a Mask, Futile Efforts and Bitter Disappointments,2 how he had invited the young architect to explain to the authorities what modern architecture actually was. Namely, Nikola Dobrović was the youngest member of an informal group, which included the painters Jovan Bijelić and Petar Dobrović—the architect’s older brother—the architects Josip Plečnik and Edo Šen, and the sculptor Ivan Meštrović, that stood up in defense of Strajnić at his trial. The trial was initiated for his sharp criticism of the architect of a newly built hotel in the suburb immediately east of the socalled old Dubrovnik. When Strajnić publicly evaluated this project as being of poor artistic merit, unsuited in its historicist and out-of-date approach to the greatness of Dubrovnik, its architect brought legal action against him. Despite the elaborate intervention of the above-mentioned group of distinguished personalities who were part of the Yugoslav cultural scene, Strajnić was found guilty and sentenced to fourteen days in prison, but the Higher Court in Split overruled this decision.

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Villa Adonis, project, 1939: cross section.

Villa Adonis, 1939–1940: construction site.

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STRUCTURE AND FORM Architecture is nothing else but a logical expression of spatial disposition and applied structural elements. The structure, by its harmony of forms, the rhythm of lines and wall surfaces, fits the purpose, and its appearance will decoratively improve the surroundings.12

Cross Section The cross section of Villa Adonis resembles a physical manifesto of Functionalism that has been adapted to the Mediterranean climate and to the sloping terrain. Its solid volume rises above an open porch on four reinforced concrete columns to the south-facing front. Its back leans against a garden terrace, which remains from the time when the walled city’s immediate surroundings were intended for agriculture and enjoyment of the cultivated landscape. The reinforced concrete frame structure enables the horizontal continuation of the windows in the southern façade, while the roof is flat and intended for use; through a continuum of vertical and horizontal axes, the structure as a whole creates a remarkable experience of space. Le Corbusier’s five points of new architecture are easily recognizable here.13 Moreover, on many levels Villa Adonis’s form and function resonate with today’s concerns about sustainability—by activating the flat roof terrace as compensation for the occupied natural ground; by imbuing, but not merging architecture with nature at the open ground level; by adding value to the cross section of Villa Adonis—thus ranking Dobrović’s architecture technologically innovative even from our contemporary perspective.14 The sun-shading with cantilever volumes and eaves is characteristic of modern architecture in Mediterranean, sub-tropical, and tropical regions, and as such it does not represent an extravagance. The same stark functionality can be found in many of the structure’s other elements: its transversal natural ventilation, which regulates the temperature of the residential space during hot summer months; the mechanical ventilation of the sanitary facilities that are situated at the apartment’s very center through small openings in the reinforced concrete slabs; and the installation of a central heating system that blows hot air from the central fire-box into all the rooms through a system of fiber-cement pipes.

However, two technical aspects of this cross section in particular represent Dobrović’s original contribution to the instruments of technologically reflective architecture:

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Villa in Srebreno, project, 1937; photograph from the period: Courtesy of the Architecture Department, Museum of Science and Technology, Belgrade.

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CONTEXT AND MATERIALITY All architects active in this city throughout history seem to belong to the same school of architecture and appear to be peers.20

Volume For Dobrović, architectural heritage was nothing like a frozen past. To the contrary, he saw it as a timeless confirmation of his own architectural efforts. No wonder then that his logical analysis of the medieval city walls as “adapted to the terrain, to the existing structures, to the landscape, and the sea” sounds like an inspired description of his own works: “the sharp transitions from light to shade make the solid stereometric volumes and sections seem grim, sharp, and foreboding. However, dull weather will soften the sudden transitions from light to shade and create a tonal unity of space.”21

This invocation of the city walls’ utilitarian architecture as a confirmation of the principles of modern architecture that Dobrović believed and practiced can be seen as synonymous to young Le Corbusier’s reference to the “skillful, accurate and magnificent interplay of the volumes in the bright light”22 of the Acropolis in Athens. One might interject, however, that the Dobrović quote above comes from a newspaper article published only one year before he died and that this article could be a mere ornamental justification of a body of work concluded long ago. That this is not the case, after all, is best proven by young Dobrović’s programmatic writings from the period before his Dubrovnik projects: The moment has arrived for the Committee for Art and Monuments to explain to Dubrovnik’s architects how to understand the principles of genius loci. ... Like in earlier times, architects need to make use of the most contemporary means, materials, and constructions and to follow the same spirit and the rules of urban and architectural principles that guided all the old masters of this city.

It is only in this way that it will be possible to create an artistic ambience specific to Dubrovnik.23

For an ambitious young architect, nineteen-twenties Prague, where Dobrović also built a number of projects, must have been a stimulating context. Probably it was the combination of the political-national emancipatory moment and the outstanding level of technological sophistication that enabled architects who were prone to experimentation to shape an emerging democratic and cosmopolitan orientation. They outlined a new architectural layer that would merge with the existing urban structure into an exemplary unified Heideggerian place.

As Dobrović had promised, the principles of modern, functionalist architecture he mastered through his studies and his early practice were to be altered and developed in Dubrovnik, partly under the influence of the demanding social milieu and not without opposition from it. This conscious adaptation to context is evident from the gradual changes in his approach to materiality manifested in the formal expression of his built works.

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Grand Hotel Lopud, front and back pages of the touristic leaflet from the period showing modern architecture in relation to the natural and cultural phenomena attracting tourists to the remote island, probably 1937: Design by Gorjup, printed at Mariborska tiskarna, Maribor, Slovenia.

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SPATIAL ART, SOCIAL PARADIGMS, AND THE IDEAL CITY I am writing for those colleagues who are convinced that there are still many places in Dalmatia where in the shortest time, using new construction methods, settlements far more perfect and more poetic than Dubrovnik could be built. To those I dedicate these lines, who are convinced that our time would be too poor if it didn't know how to create unique works, in respect to technique and art, with all the natural and artificial material we have at our disposal today.31

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Student Union Hostel, Dubrovnik–Lapad, 1938–1939

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Nikola Dobrović, Dubrovnik. Postanak.

Razvitak. Sadašnjost. Budućnost [Dubrovnik. Origin. Development. Present.

Future], Handwritten manuscript, 1943: Courtesy of the Archive of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

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A LIFETIME OF A MEDITERRANEAN MODERN Ljiljana Blagojevic

This book brings together two venerable names to read and behold, that of a city—Dubrovnik—and that of a person—Dobrović. In the book’s opening, Krunoslav Ivanišin writes about the projects and buildings that the architect Nikola Dobrović (1897, Pécs–1967, Belgrade) designed in the period between 1929 and 1941 for various locations in the city of Dubrovnik and its surroundings including the island of Lopud in the nearby Elaphiti archipelago. Ivanišin is a descendent of Dobrović’s clients Mary and Krunoslav Stulli, who appointed the architect in 1939 to design Villa Adonis for them in Dubrovnik. More to the point, he is an accomplished architect himself, here in the role of an author writing an insightful architectural exegesis of the contemporary potentialities of this subject. The central part of the book consists of something like a sentimental journey undertaken by Wolfgang Thaler, a Vienna-based photographer with an eye for modern architecture. Thaler takes photographs in his wanderings through the Dubrovnik area in search of Dobrović and captures the buildings and sites he encounters as they stand today. His photographs give a complementary, astute visual analysis of the subject in its present state. The book spans over eighty-five years of modern architecture in the Dubrovnik area, from its painful and contested inception, to its golden-age glory, subsequent decline, and, ultimately, to its marginalization, denial, and dilapidation. It tells a story of a lifespan, a lifetime of a Mediterranean modern.1

As much as the sequence of events, projects, and images immediately grab the reader’s senses, the arresting story of Dobrović and Dubrovnik—as any a good story would—lingers and eventually stays in one’s memory, resonant and disturbing. It seems to me that what this book does is that it lets modern architecture be comprehended simultaneously in its past as well as in its present. Its visual and narrative stories and histories reveal both the worldly outlook and inner worlds of the modern project. The photographs and text neither relay a purity of nor an abstract a-temporal beauty of pristine white modern forms set in a lush Mediterranean background. Quite the opposite, through the close-ups on age spots and scars and the narrative outlining conflicts, traumas, stresses, and worries, the past haunts and the present horrifies. Yet, there is beauty there, the proverbial beauty in the eye of the beholder or reader and, perhaps too, an accidental wanderer.

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façade above the orsan (Croatian)—a boathouse that protrudes from the main volume of the house in the front. The capital letters of the name are carved individually on every other square stone panel, arranged symmetrically above the lintel to the large orsan doors. The name Svid is a variant of Sventovit or Svantovit, in Czech and Slovak who is the supreme deity in Slav mythology— god of all gods, deity of war and victory, fertility and abundance—his symbolic color red.56 Often, his name is erroneously identified with the Christian saint St. Vito (St. Vitus), whose name is often incorporated in toponyms in Dalmatia as Sutvid, Sveti Vid (Saint Vid). It is believed that some Christian churches have been constructed over older temples to Svantovit, such as the famous gothic cathedral in Prague Katedrála svatého Víta.

Finally, the pergolas or sky walkways in the garden of Opus X, villa of Mimi and Dr. Edgar Wolf, are named Parnassos—Olympos—Kosmos in that order from bottom to top. The terraces literally lift bodies into midair between the garden planted with cypresses and the view to the sea. In Greek mythology, Parnassos (Παρνασσός, Greek) denotes the mount above Delphi, home of the muses. Olympos (Όλυμπος, Greek) is the highest Greek mountain, home of the gods and Kosmos (Kόσμος, Greek) means cosmos as order, ornament, universe, or the world, that is, the home of humankind.57 The names situate the spatial experience of architecture between the gods, muses, and humankind.

It is clear that names Dobrović gave to his architecture in the Dubrovnik area are not connected to the owners’ names, nor are they names commonly given to seaside villas alluding to the promise of pleasure and leisure under the glowing Mediterranean sun. Neither are these names given as naïve or innocent metaphors. Rather, I read them as a form of retrieving the suppressed memories of Mediterranean myth and the pagan past through the poetic abstraction of modern architecture’s permanence and transience in its cosmos of uncertainty. The opening sentence of Contemporary Architecture 5 speaks of the κόσμος of mind; the home of the architect Nikola Dobrović, whose name, as Ivanišin and Thaler show us in this book, remains spelled out large on the façade of the Hotel Grand Lopud:

In its orbit around the cosmos of the mind, contemporary architectural thought encircles the globe as the spiritual satellite, creating a special climate across all Earth’s parallels.58 In this day and age, having finally acknowledged climate changes around the globe, we behold the photographs in this book as documents of the remains of modernism’s cosmos—the cosmos we might have known, the better part of which melted into air as a consequence of human cruelty, violence, and conflict.

Its modern architecture, battered and maligned, stands still in silence by the sea, the debris of history.

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Lopud. View to the sea with the Villa Vesna in the foreground.

Courtesy of the Architecture Department, Museum of Science and Technology, Belgrade.

Endnotes Research by Ljiljana Blagojević was realized as a part of the project “Studying climate change and its influence on the environment: impacts, adaptation and mitigation” (43007) financed by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Serbia within the framework of integrated and interdisciplinary research for the period 2011–14.

2 For previous writing on Dobrović by the present author, see: Ljiljana Blagojević, Modernism in Serbia: The Elusive Margins of Belgrade Architecture, 1919–1941 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Ljiljana Blagojević, Novi Beograd: osporeni modernizam [New Belgrade: Contested Modernism] (Belgrade: Zavod za udžbenike, Arhitektonski fakultet and Zavod za zaštitu spomenika kulture grada, 2007) [Cyrillic]; Ljiljana Blagojević, “Arhitektura Beograda u veku Jugoslavije” [Belgrade Architecture in the Yugoslav Century], in: Istorija umetnosti u Srbiji XX vek, Tom 3 [History of Art in Serbia, 20th Century. Volume 3], ed. Miško Šuvaković (Belgrade, Orion Art, 2014), 323–352.

3 For further reading, see the following selection of broader overviews of Dobrović’s work, in chronological order: Theo van Doesburg, “Yugoslavia: Rivaling Influences – Nikola Dobrovich and the Serbian Tradition,” in On European Architecture: Complete Essays from Het Bouwbedrijf 1924–1931 (Boston: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1990), 289–295; Kosta Strajnić, “Savremena arhitektura Jugoslovena: Nikola Dobrović i njegovo značenje” [Contemporary Architecture by Yugoslavs: Nikola Dobrović and His Significance], Arhitektura 4 (1932): 108–113; Ljiljana Babić, “Arhitekt Nikola Dobrović (12. II 1897–11. I 1967),” Arhitektura urbanizam 43 (1967): 22–31; Ranko Radović, “Nikola Dobrović ili o povećanju s vremenom” [Nikola Dobrović or On Aggrandizement With Time], Urbanizam Beograda 52 (1979): 18–29; Miloš R. Perović, ed. Urbanizam Beograda – Special Issue: Dobrović 58 (1980); Marina Oreb-Mojaš, “Graditeljska ostvarenja Nikole Dobrovića na dubrovačkom području” [Built Work by Nikola Dobrović in the Dubrovnik Area], Arhitektura urbanizam 93 (1984): 4–10; Tanja Damljanović, “Prilog proučavanju praškog perioda Nikole Dobrovića” [A Contribution to Research of Nikola Dobrović’s Prague Period], Sapoštenja XXVII-XXVIII (1995–1996): 237–251; Miloš R. Perović and Spasoje Krunić, eds.

Nikola Dobrović: eseji, projekti, kritike [Nikola Dobrović: Essays, Projects, Criticism] (Belgrade: Arhitektonski fakultet Univerziteta u Beogradu and Muzej arhitekture, 1998); Bojan Kovačević, Arhitektura zgrade Generalštaba. Monografska studija dela Nikole Dobrovića [Architecture of the Military Headquarters Building. A Monographic Study of the Work by Nikola Dobrović] (Belgrade: NIC Vojska, 2001); Marta Vukotić Lazar, Beogradsko razdoblje arhitekte Nikole Dobrovića [Belgrade Period of the Architect Nikola Dobrović] (Belgrade: Plato, 2002); Marija Milinković, “Kritička 1

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APPENDIX:

DOBROVIC ON DUBROVNIK, 1966 This text was originally published as “Dubrovnik kao gradotvoračko svedočanstvo” in the Belgrade journal NIN from May 15, 1966, and reprinted in Miloš R. Perović’s selection of Nikola Dobrović’s texts from 1980. The first English translation as “Dubrovnik as Testimony to the Creation of Cities” by Andy Jelčić was published in Vanda IvankovićKontić’s collected volume Landscape and Architecture issued by the Municipality of Dubrovnik to document the first Festival of Architecture held in August 2004.

The version published here was compiled by Krunoslav Ivanišin. It is illustrated with a series of postcards from the nineteen-twenties.

Dubrovnik as a Testimony to Urban Formation A Franciscan monk who was performing the matins in the monastic church on April 6, 1667 claimed that the earthquake lasted no longer than the words Passio Domini nostri Jesu Christi secundum. However, it was long enough to turn the city into a great pile of ruins.1 Stones came tumbling down the St. Serge Mountain, the ground opened, the cisterns and wells dried up, and the dust from the ruins obscured the sun. This stroke of fate that happened to Dubrovnik was cast into historical oblivion only by the larger disaster that overtook Lisbon in 1755.2 The government solved the imminent problem of reconstruction with an extra­ ordinary exertion of its own powers, assisted by Pope Clement IX and Abbot Stjepan Gradić, who was the consul of the Republic of Dubrovnik at the Papal Curia.3 The pope sent the architect Giulio Cerutti4 to aid the government. The young patrician Marojica Kaboga distinguished himself for his outstanding energy in imposing order at the time. His contemporaries named him Dubrovnik’s second founder.5 Until the earthquake, the architecture of Dubrovnik had had mainly a Romanesque and Gothic Mediterranean character, with only a small number of Renaissance pal­ aces and smaller churches. The reconstruction, which was guided by the same urban regulations that ruled before the earthquake, belongs to the high Italian Baroque era, which in Dubrovnik took on a much smaller and a more temperate guise.

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DUBROVNIK IN A VIEW FROM THE SRĐ (ST. SERGE) MOUNTAIN, THE ISLAND OF LOKRUM IS IN THE BACK

THE WALLS OF DUBROVNIK FACING THE SEA; THE CLIFF WHERE THE REFUGEES FROM EPIDAURUM FIRST SETTLED

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