This body of research attempts to investigate the role of shopping typologies and their reciprocal relation with (ex-) Yugoslav Croatia, through (three) exemplary cases (the neighborhood department store, the city department store and the shopping center) by looking at three themes such as: their creation of centrality, the continuation of the public and the composition of program. The three main cases are Nama Trnsko, robna kuca RI, and Koteks and Gripe sports- and shopping center.

It describes how the various types of shopping-buildings had either an installing or introductory role for the public/city/neighborhood around them; and/or an enhancing or supporting role, enhancing existing movement/centrality within the center/public.

The main discussed themes in existing discourse (within as well as outside of HR) are housing and education, but ideologically the shopping typologies functioned as another trajectory towards modernity. On the architectural level, the types adopted certain ‘traditional’ or typical department store elements, such as the arcade and open plan. Increasingly implementing regional elements. On an urban scale, it would (literally) take the center position in new neighborhoods but (sometimes simultaneously) enhancing circulation flows in the area is not uncommon, as well as offering a mixed program that goes beyond shopping alone.

As a final evaluation, the research shows the typologies have certainly evolved since then. The public character or role of the typologies has partially evaporated, and as urban entities they have become (partially) isolated. Often, what was once a single department store, has now split up into several smaller shops within the original building or have gone (partially) out of use. The shift from socialist to neo-liberal economy (accompanied by a violent transition) has altered the role of the typologies. The question arises, did the typologies as a trajectory to emancipation succeed? Have the fantastic visions of modernist
architects and urbanists given society the physical structure to emancipation?

The context in which (landscape) architects and urban designers work today poses new challenges for which conventional planning and design tools seem to be unfit. We have to recognise that every place is a complex and layered phenomenon, a physical platform of lived space. Complex locations like Sarajevo and its mountain, its bobsleigh track, with a particular geological, political, social and cultural history, demand analysis and design approaches that take into account the experience on the ground, the lived space, the different layers and meanings of a site, the experience of movement and time. Furthermore, the central position of the designer
in the transformation process needs to be questioned by demands for participation and even co-creation with the different urban actors, which require specific tools that take into account the multiple stories embodied in a place. Top-down design and planning has increasingly made way for a complex process that involves many actors, creating a need to redefine the question of what design is. Rather than a linear, rational character of traditional planning, a shift towards more open design approaches should be made, which take into account experiential responses to the sites at hand, and which allow more relational ways of doing.

My aim is that through the cinematic narrative and the use of film as a method, I open up the possibilities for a new reading of the void, beyond the existing interpretation, a new understanding of the bobsleigh track as an open space. Open space as a space for opportunity, imagination, un-programmed and free for uses not yet conceived, accepting changes in the mode of life. The space is to be shaped by the users. Forms should emerge spontaneously as an effect of human activity and are not defined beforehand in its manifestation. Within this open construct, the bobsleigh track is accessible and interpretable in various ways, thus preserving the void. By showing a multiplicity of viewpoints the void is preserved, maintaining its temporary appro- priation by different users, and giving it a place in the larger urban landscape. The user has to reflect and engage in a personal dialogue with the urban landscape. This is not a pre-determined role, but an active and open-ended part. More than simply leading to a final representation, this could be used to develop an architectural strategy as a structure in which time has room to breathe, and to let aging, growth and even decay unfold.

This book is the result of the research conducted in the P1 phase of the graduation studio ‘Positions in Practice’ of the chair Methods and Analysis in the department for architecture and the built environment, TU Delft.

Positions in Practice : Constructing the Commons in the Latin American Metropolis, Graduation Studio (Msc 3 | Msc 4), Valparaíso, Chile, Fall 2017 - Spring 2018.
The MSc3/MSc4 Graduation Studio “Positions in Practice” of the Department of Architecture TU Delft (fall, 2017) focused on the urban and architectural context of Valparaíso, as a laboratory for the definition of disciplinary positions and the performance of these positions in practice.

The framework of this work is situated between the typological issue about the epistemological definition of art spaces, and their role as consequence within the city, and a personal interest in the kind of attention art demands in space for a specific engagement. It is in the place where art is displayed that the knowledge about it is produced.

Within the art system, a distortion in the value of art has been staged by the increasing significance of the role of private collectors in investing in contemporary art and legitimating their collections trough the echoes of certain art spaces’ typologies. As consequence, private collectors become the accepted ‘manager of consciousness,’ and the former distance between collectors and museum is confused, and the museum academic capacity is being replaced. Here, the question of how a private collection is presented to the world became particularly urgent.

In response to this context, the construction of two specific narratives embedded in two contemporary art spaces for two private art collections has been delineated not in a deconstruction of values, but contextualised in-culture within the realm of architecture and its position towards the system.

Seeking a condition of nearness to the art world has been necessary in order to trace the encounters, or relationships which would construct the notion of place for contemporary art, and the values of the prelude to it. A certain alertness and respect towards the other and the world can be achieved in the art gallery that is otherwise often elusive, since what the art gallery as site does that ‘real life’ does not is that it forces the issues of attention – towards the space, the place and the other. Especially in this context, “considerations of where implies more than an ontology of position.”

The fiction of the art space started from the definition of the collection as first assemble to relate art to places and spaces, since the structure and identity of it became fundamental. A section through two collections and their collectors tries to trace the ways and rules which define the different spatial implications of art, in order to relate different specificities to the word, to find them a place within the world.

The role of architecture has been a negotiation between narratives, the one of the existing place which I found as connected to the specificity of the two collections I was dealing with, and the one of the artwork within the collection itself. And in measuring the one with the other, a staged uncertainty would lead to a certain awareness of the place one is in, and how does it relate with the collection itself, and with the world. I believe architecture has to offer a framework that should elicit reactions – it cannot be, as consequence, neutral.

I do think that the role of architecture in relation with art it is not so different from the one of storytelling in “establishing the rights of intensity” of encounters. Since eventually, everything become visible through relationships.

How to construct the commons with the power of play? How to reactivate leftover public spaces in central Bogota by architectural interventions that stimulate playful actions?

I shift my focus from buildings to the ground surfaces, and redesign them into a constellation of “2.5D architectural composition”. “2.5D” refers to an abstract composition of the ground surface, including composing different ground materials on the planer dimension (2D), and create minor vertical level difference by sinking, elevating, folding and undulating (0.5D).

These compositions become abstract playgrounds. They should be unconventional as the playful quality is achieved by manipulating the ground surface rather than adding playful objects. Yet, they are humble as the minor level difference and usage of familiar materials enable them to merge into the local context.

I expect that these “2.5D playgrounds” will bring Bogota citizens together, stimulate their playful actions, and enable them to recognize the scattered playgrounds in the city as a constellation of “playful commons”.

This graduation project is the result of the ambition of generating a public intervention in an extremely complex and challenging environment, translating in a space of mediation between different - social and morphological - realities, able to embrace urban fact in all its facets and contradictions.

Experiments of Analysis and Intervention MSc3/MSc4 Graduation Studio - Spring 2017.

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