That building looked to me like a beef soup cube, then a truck garage, and then a modern barn with a halal slaughterhouse. I attached various bizarre functions to the orange concrete cube. The only thing I couldn't understand was that the Faculty of Architecture was there.
No chance. I couldn't imagine that in that building someone was talking about the aesthetics of construction. What kind of students are they, what kind of professors are they, who agrees to such humiliation? And what kind of wormy philosophy is it, if they don't make fun of everything and anything, they are rightly angry that they lead an academic life in the pantry. The architectural profession, I thought, deserves a magnificent building from which a high style of construction is dictated.
Or some functional unit that heats and cools itself, on whose roof grow boxwood and potatoes and through whose walls water roars from Morača. I fantasized about an eco-building, naively, I thought - there is no theory that architects will be silent in the face of ugliness.
I expected the students to protest, to paint the facade lilac in protest of the fact that there are fittings sticking out of the roof - either they are lightning rods, or something worse than both, mostly a tangle of thick wires gushing into the sky, like on those houses in the suburbs when the landlord stays without money. Such a boss, pardon the digression, says "here I raised the floor, let the sons build further, mine was up to the slab".
And the Faculty of Architecture in Podgorica was built "up to the plate." Why doesn't anyone notice the extent of the ugliness of that little embarrassment of a building, I wondered, lonely in layman's thoughts. I decided to start the research that is the basis of this article, because I could no longer endure the mystery of these real estate agents.
I came to the sensational conclusion that Montenegrin architects, especially professors, are actually the most imaginative strain in the country. Everything is fine with their faculty building, only I wasn't looking at it the right way. I kiss their very clean curds and sprinkle myself with ash, leveling mortar, fine-grained dirt and unworthy go to inform the public about the great discovery.
Gentlemen architects, my deep bow, I came to the truth why your building is the way it is, I found out what you have known for a long time, since 2006 when the faculty was built - that it was only a part of the grandiose palace that was designed to stink at the dawn of independence the Belgrade counterpart.
Guided by my research flair, I reached an important document - an extract from the catalog of an international exhibition in which the "essential" form of the Faculty of Architecture was presented. The part marked in red in the drawing is the faculty building in the so-called "reality". All around, that ring with some kind of atrium, all you see on the sketch is the architectural faculty drawn by Professor Aleksandar Keković, our newspaper, the Belgrade-based Montenegrin, a veleum whose work was not realized in reality, but he did not protest much about it.
Just as Plato has a table and the idea of a table, so in Podgorica there is a Faculty of Architecture and the idea of that faculty. That the Montenegrin University is the core of the Neoplatonic heresy is proven by the emphasis on the Idea, while the masonry form remained in the background. When Montenegrin architects want to see their faculty, they open, for example, the brochure of the exhibition "Montenegro Kontrast Landschaft Architektur Kontext" (Vienna, 2013), which shows how that building looks in the meta-reality of our dreams.
Like Raikkonen, who squints before a race and passes the track in his mind, so the professor of the Faculty of Architecture, let's call him Rajko, before going to work, closes his eyes and goes around the grandiose complex in his mind, chats with some freshmen by the fountain and then climbs the stairs to the office.
Or, a good student of architecture, when he goes abroad, does not show the building in our miserable moment but the project of professor Keković and says - that's where I study, I have no intention, dear colleague, to show you photos of mere walls, we have overcome that, we are dealing With the idea, we have risen above the material, we are especially squeamish about the symbolism of the wall.
It is true that the famous Bogdanović wrote about the walls of Old Var and that this naivety inspired him in the ugly city, but we no longer need walls to preserve our great ideas. So what if we are missing a wall at the college, we have as many of them in our heads as you want - since the holy year 2006, we have been silent, we have not heard each other, we were building things before.
Logically, we leave the faculty for last because we architects know construction best - so why not solve things first where the possibility of error is greater... I guess that's what the wonderful profession thinks in the orange cube of beef soup. The profession that inherited the burnt meadow of Titograd and the words of Bogdan Bogdanović about how Podgorica has been built since ancient times:
"No two walls are the same, no two masonry are the same, no two hands are the same. Somewhere the texture of the wall was small, and over it a thin network of plaster was stretched like an embroidery. Somewhere, on the other hand, the pieces were large and rough, as if they had been torn from the rock , and the plaster was old, blackened, torn, barely visible; as if the right hand was unsuccessfully repairing the left."
This is how our institutions were created, faculties, academies; I guess that's why the official website of the Faculty of Architecture in Podgorica doesn't have a photo of its rain-soaked walls, eight years after gaining independence.
Bonus video:
