Bogdan Bogdanović | |
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Богдан Богдановић | |
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| Born | (1922-08-20)20 August 1922 |
| Died | 18 June 2010(2010-06-18) (aged 87) |
| Alma mater | University of Belgrade |
| Occupation | Architect |
| Awards | Herder Prize (1997) |
| Buildings | |
Bogdan Bogdanović (Serbian Cyrillic:Богдан Богдановић; 20 August 1922 – 18 June 2010) was a Serbian and Yugoslavarchitect,urbanist andessayist. He taughtarchitecture at theUniversity of Belgrade Faculty of Architecture, where he also served as dean. Bogdanović wrote numerous articles abouturbanism, especially about its mythic and symbolic aspects, some of which appeared in international journals such asEl País,Die Zeit,[1] and others. He was also involved in politics, as aYugoslav Partisan inWorld War II, later asmayor of Belgrade. WhenSlobodan Milošević rose to power andnationalism gained ground in Yugoslavia, Bogdanović became adissident.[2][3]
Bogdanović is best known for designing monuments and memorials commemorating victims and resistance fighters of World War II built all overYugoslavia from the early 1950s to the 1980s. In particular, the monumentalconcrete sculpture titledStone Flower near the site ofJasenovac concentration camp gained international attention.[4][5]
Bogdanović was born into a family ofleftistintellectuals. His fatherMilan Bogdanović was a literary critic, long-time president of theAssociation of Writers and director of theNational Theatre.[6]
Beginning in 1940, Bogdan studied architecture at the University of Belgrade. He participated in World War II ("a bit" in his words[6]) as apartisan, becoming a member of the Communist Party, and was seriously wounded in easternBosnia. Despite his injuries, he continued his academic career after the war, graduating in 1950, becoming a teaching assistant at the department for urbanism (from 1953), then adocent in 1960, extraordinary professor and president of the Yugoslav Union of Architects in 1964, dean of theFaculty of Architecture and a corresponding member of theSerbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) in 1970, and full professor in 1973. In 1981 he resigned from SANU, and he was conferredemeritus status in 1987.[7]
Being an ardent leftist, Bogdanović opposed the increasing nationalism espoused by state leaders since the early 1980s.[8] Nonetheless, he becameMayor of Belgrade in 1982 on the initiative ofIvan Stambolić, then chairman of theLeague of Communists of Serbia. Bogdanović served one term in office, until 1986. During this time, he organised an international competition for the complete redevelopment ofNew Belgrade, a planned area on the left bank of theSava river. All submissions to this competition have since disappeared.[7]
After his term of office, he was appointed bySlobodan Milošević as a member of theCentral Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the party's supreme governing body. He accepted the post under the condition that he would not be required to attend committee meetings because he "had more important things to do".[9] In the following year he sent Milošević an anti-nationalist letter over 60 pages long, including aStalino-dictionary, an appendix satirising the recipient's nationalist rhetoric, and the famousLamentation for Serbia, which discussed the theme of Serbia "being tired" (of its leaders). The Central Committee replied, "You can send the letter, in which you criticise the work of the eighth meeting and which has not reached us, to the Central Committee if you consider it necessary".[10] The letter, in combination with other remarks about Milošević, led to attempts of breaking into Bogdanović's apartment, death threats, and his exclusion from the Central Committee.[6][11] This, however, did not prevent him from renewing his anti-nationalist statements when theYugoslav wars started at the beginning of the 1990s, once more turning Bogdanović into a target for violent attacks and a defamation campaign run by the Serbian state media.[7]
In 1993, Bogdanović went into self-imposedexile toParis with his wife Ksenija. However, since the Yugoslavémigré circle there had strong nationalistic tendencies,[8] the couple moved on to settle inVienna upon invitation of his friend, the writer and translatorMilo Dor.[2][3]
Bogdanović died in a hospital in Vienna on 18 June 2010, following aheart attack.[12] He was cremated in Vienna, and his urn was sent to Belgrade. Although the city offered a grave for him in theAlley of the Greats at theBelgrade New Cemetery, upon his wife's request, and the approval of the Jewish community, Bogdanović's remains have been placed in theSephardic cemetery where his monument to the Jewish victims of fascism and fallen soldiers stands.[13]
Our motto was as simple as it was complicated: The beauty and the meaning of an architectonic sign can only be apprehended and explained in the all-encompassing sense of a wholeness expanded to a novel. It appears to me that the wise and noble starting point of our beautiful and placid erstwhile games, today, on this side of hate and cruelty, can hardly be imagined.
At the University of Belgrade, Bogdanović held the lecture courseThe development of housing schemes (later calledHistory of town), starting in 1962. As professor and dean, he tried to reform the teaching of architecture and introducegrassroots democracy at the university, but the party forced him to abdicate before he could put his plans into practice.[7]
In 1976, he began to teach in an abandoned village school inMali Popović near Belgrade to realise an alternative project, namely his "village school for the philosophy of architecture".[2][3] The course was calledSymbolic forms in allusion toErnst Cassirer, had no fixed timetable and employed the invention of newwriting systems, the interpretation of non-existent texts, as well as methods akin tofree association andgematria.[15] Fourteen years later, when henchmen of Milošević raided the school in the aftermath of Bogdanović's letter, much of the collected material – the documentation of the lessons, drawings, audio- and videotapes, optical devices – was destroyed.[16]
The architectonic and literary work of Bogdanović is characterised by an abundance ofornaments. It is influenced byRomanticism andVictorian architecture,surrealism,metaphysics,Jewish symbolism andKabbalah. Bogdanović has opposed the architectural theories ofAdolf Loos developed in the essayOrnament and Crime, and argued for the "semantic dignity of the ornamental sign".[17]
In 1951, Bogdan Bogdanović won a competition for the design of a memorial to the Jewish victims of fascism, to be built on theSephardic cemetery in Belgrade.[6][18] Although not religious himself, this contact with Jewishesotericism strongly influenced his further work.[8] From then on until 1981, he was assigned byJosip Broz Tito to devise more than 20 monuments and memorial places against fascism and militarism,[4] which were erected in all republics of Yugoslavia. To work ascenotaphs for all victims of fascism, regardless of nationality and religion, they lack any symbols of communism or other ideologies. Instead, they rely on archaic, mythological forms, sharply contrasting with the principles ofSocialist realism. This contrast also served Tito's wish to emphasise his country's independence from theSoviet Union.
All of the memorials are built of stone, shaped by local untrainedchisellers whom Bogdanović preferred to ones with formal education, who were inflexible in his opinion. The notable exception, theJasenovac monument, consists ofprestressed concrete, theformwork for which was constructed by shipwrights.[19] Somewhat incongruously, it is known as theFlower of Stone.
Examples of these monuments are:[20]
Urbanity is one of the highest abstractions of the human spirit. To me, to be an urban man means to be neither a Serb nor a Croat, and instead to behave as though these distinctions no longer matter, as if they stopped at the gates of the city.[22]
Bogdanović refused to participate in the planning of national housing estates which looked like "coffins of concrete" to him and had "only two types of windows".[23] Consequently, he built only a single settlement: a housing estate for the hydrotechnical institute "Jaroslav Černi" at the foot of the mountainAvala near Belgrade, finished in 1953. The houses are mostly built of stone; and with their surrealistic, old-fashioned style, heavily framed windows and oversized chimneys, they are deliberately set apart from the international style[citation needed] that dominated in post-WW2 Yugoslavia.[24][25]
Other settlements were planned in great detail, but never really intended to be built. Among those is a town in northernMontenegro, designed for local clients,[23] and a mythological "town at the bottom of the lake (Biograd)" which Bogdanović designed for his own pleasure.[26]
Other works of architecture include the reconstruction of the villa ofQueen Natalija (Smederevo, 1961),Adonis' altar (Labin, 1974)[20] and the Tomb of Dušan Petrović-Šane (Aranđelovac, 1980).
Books and essays inSerbo-Croatian include:[7][27]
Six of his books were published inGerman byZsolnay andWieser:
Of the essays written by Bogdanović, the following is available in English:
Bogdanović was a founder member of theInternational Academy of Architecture which was established in 1987 and a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Architecture (from 1994), a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (from 1998), and a member of the Collegium Europaeum Jenense (University of Jena; from 2000).[2][7] In 2002 he was elected an honorary member of theAcademy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina.[28]
Awards and prizes include:[2][7]
