Since the collapse of the concrete canopy over the main entrance to the Railway Station building in Novi Sad - in which 14 people died and three were seriously injured - the (expert) public has been speculating about the causes of the tragedy. The key question is - why did that canopy fall?
Let's go in order...
A public call for the design of a passenger railway station in Novi Sad was issued by the City Council of that city back in 1960 - after it was agreed that the city of Novi Sad would bear half of the construction costs, and that the other half would be borne by the federal/state coffers - which was not common practice at that time - then, as a rule, the construction of stations on the main railway corridors was financed entirely from the state treasury.
And since none of the submitted design proposals met the conditions given in the aforementioned public call - the task of designing the new railway station was directly assigned to the Design Company "Architekt" from Novi Sad. An experienced architect was appointed as the main designer Imre Farkaš (1924 - 2003), who already had behind him a whole series of diverse and very successful realizations - and his first collaborator was a young architect Milan Matovic (1936 - 2002) - who in the coming period will leave a deep mark on the architecture of Novo Sad.
In the story of the post-war modernization of Novi Sad - about the transformation of a small town into a big city (more than 300.000 people live in the inner city zone of Novi Sad today) - the new railway station has an important role.
Everything was preceded by two essential urban planning decisions - the first was to move the entire industrial zone, which included the existing railway station, from the southern city zone - the zone along the Danube - to the other end of the city, to the north, along the Danube-Tisa canal -Danube - and the second decision was to connect the north and south of the city with a wide boulevard - which was built in stages, from the early sixties to the late seventies of the last century - and which until recently bore the name Boulevard on October 23 - to be renamed Boulevard of Liberation - or simply: Boulevard. In the context of those two decisions, the new railway station had an important role - to close the key city axis from the north side - that is, to open the Boulevard to the south - and to, as a unique architectural paradigm and a kind of symbol of the new times, worthily represent Novi Sad and the efforts directed in the direction of the general modernization of the city - which happened - the building of the new railway station significantly influenced the visual identity of the city - determining, in an aesthetic sense, the direction of the city's development in the next two and a half decades - and at the same time placed Novi Sad on the map of Yugoslav modernist architecture .
The new railway station in Novi Sad was designed for three years - and in an extremely encouraging atmosphere - at the peak of the so-called of the period of reconstruction and construction of the war-ravaged country - and Farkaš and Matović managed to respond simultaneously to the complex program, which was supported by the City Council, and to expert proposals concerning the vision of the development of the Yugoslav Railways (JŽ) - and, what is special important, the characteristic "sawtooth" roof construction of the new railway station - this is the so-called corrugated construction - it reminded the citizens of Novi Sad of the roofs of traditional Vojvodina houses - that is, the Vojvodina shore - which resulted in the citizens immediately accepting the new building - and completely identifying with it.
The railway station was built by the Novi Sad construction company "Neimar". The construction was completed on time - in one year and six months. The official opening of the new railway station was held on May 31, 1964. On that day, two trains left the station - one south, towards Belgrade, and the other north, towards Subotica.
And as Imre Farkaš was offended by the decision of the so-called management city structures to so-called The October award for the year 1964 - an annual award that the City of Novi Sad awards to deserving citizens - awarded to others (and not to him) - he emigrated to Canada in 1966 - where he continued to build a career as an excellent architect for the next 30 years.
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Why, then, did the canopy of the Novi Sad Railway Station fall?
At the moment, no information is available on the basis of which one could accurately judge the causes of the fall of the canopy - which means that the necessary analyzes and expert reports were not carried out - so all the experts who publicly made assumptions about the possible causes of the tragedy - were strictly led to consider that they emphasize that they are speculating - that they are making assumptions - and that, at this moment, it is not possible to make final judgments.
Former dean of the Novi Sad Faculty of Technical Sciences (FTN), professor emeritus Radomir Folić - an expert in concrete structures - pointed out some of the obstacles that stand in the way of "disclosing the cause of the fall of the canopy" - especially emphasizing that during the reconstruction of the station building - which began in October 2021 and lasted, with a short break in the spring of 2022 ., until July of this year - there was no examination of the condition of the structure - which is a step that necessarily precedes all other steps in the reconstruction process.
"From the project, it is unknown how the stability of the building itself was determined," said Folić, "considering that the documentation does not include a report on the assessment of the state of the structure."
Goran Vojvodic, a professor from the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Belgrade, said that the roof structure and the canopy of the station building, through weights or tensioners, were a unique and stable structural system, and that "that canopy precisely with its materialization and its enormous, relatively speaking, weight - represented counterweight to the roof structure, so that it could survive in that large span and extremely small thickness, otherwise it would get what is called a belly" - and then he stated: "From these photos, what is available in the media, it can be conclude everything".
Juraj Pojatina, a civil engineer from the Croatian Center for Earthquake Engineering, claims that at the moment no one knows why the canopy fell.
"We can comment on how it fell", says Pojatina, "it is a reinforced concrete construction, a heavy construction, which, in principle, is not used for this kind of roofing. It was additionally suspended from the roof supports. What we can see from the photos is the failure of the upper connection node for the roof".
To the question: "Is it possible for something like this to happen here (In Croatia - op.a.)?” - Pojatina answers: "Yes, it is possible, because we have a large fund of public buildings from that era - there was a lot of construction in the sixties." The problem is in non-maintenance".
Bonus video:
