A new survey of an old theme – the encounter of the architectural old and new – might well start with the definition of the points of departure, i.e., the platform, that is, concerning which a consensus has already, it would seem, been reached. “Everything is architecture” and “Every architecture is interpolation” seem to be the familiar and ambitious conceptual markers that render this theme and discussion of it infinitely demanding. Every new spatial gesture, in other words, is an inscription into an already existing text, a loaded spatial palimpsest – be it natural landscape, cultural landscape, cultural setting, urban structure or architecture – which inevitably turns every such new layer into a sort of specific “answer”. The complexity of this dialogue, then – the intricacy of the question and the difficulty of the answer – give systematic rise to series of theoretical considerations. Within the scale of architecture and urban structure, then, numerous categories of possible answers have been developed and defined, finely filling the spectrum stretched between the poles of the facsimile and the new. Depending on concrete historical cases, and their specific historical values, meanings, and demands, one is invited to choose, with scientific argument and exactitude, among the methods of preservation, adaptation and reconstruction; the strategies of facsimile, adjustment, enhancement or contrast; and from the whole range of other well documented and researched practices. Generally speaking, however, on the issue of the new that enters the framework of the existing old, after only few initial conflicts and reversals, a convincing agreement has been attained: the incoming new should answer the issue of the existing old – legitimately and distinctly, clearly and self-consciously – in its own language, in the language of its own age. 

Once on the terrain of questions and answers – especially the encounter of two historically distant languages – there inevitably arises the problem of true understanding: Was the question properly heard and understood?, and: Was the answer sufficiently pertinent and clear? This sets off a further series of characteristics desirable from a dialogue so peculiarly transhistorical and transcultural: that the link between the old and the new is truly established; that a productive reciprocal discussion is successfully initiated; that such an imaginary debate is well moderated and its logic properly sustained; that no side in this debate remains too quiet, taciturn or on the other hand indecently vociferous; that the standpoints are clearly expressed and correctly grasped; and that, finally, out of this whole intense colloquy, there finally emerges an unexpected and composite quality unattainable to monology. Translated into the language of architecture, this would presuppose: registration and adjustment of different scales and dimensions; consideration and alignment of different volumes and heights; coordination of different contours and proportions; recognition of and respect for the overall architectural and urban character; choice of suitable architectural and structural elements; harmonization of horizontal and vertical rhythms, and adjustment of density and counterpoint of elements; synchronization of colors and materials; and the whole range of other factors down to the widely accepted Scarpia distinction between the old and new layers.

This whole experience from the culture of dialogue points, in other words, to the necessity of careful listening: to the necessity of a phase of creative analysis that precedes the phase of actual creation, which in turn determines the elements and rules of the actual design process. Once the design process actually starts, in other words, the creator is no longer be “free”, but bound by the outcomes of his own previous analysis. The complexity of this binding analytical “phase of creation before actual creation”, together with the variety and specificity of its outcomes and results, undermines – to a certain degree – the possibility of there existing a general, universal theory with precisely defined categories of possible modes of intervention and predefined sets of possible techniques and tools. The analytical phase here actually suggests that – however self-evident it might sound – in such delicate tasks there simply cannot exist any “universal rules”, or any instant ready-made recipes; that each case is poignantly different; and that each demands accordingly different modes of approach and inquiry.

Severely shaken already in this first, analytical phase, the authority of theory receives further blow from that other phase – the phase of full-grown actual creation. Its experiences, namely, incontrovertibly show that, with all due respect for commendable theoretical endeavors, the success in this design activity ultimately depends on sensitivity, talent, creative potential and the designer’s intuition of the given architect; that the creative process simply cannot be replaced by any a priori rules and protocols; that established rules cannot guarantee the success of interpolation; and that sometimes even their very transgressions lead to the most successful and harmonious results. With the arrival of notoriously slippery yet convincingly successful “design intuition”, we are thus ultimately pushed out from the solid terrain of theory and left without the foothold of a sound, unfailing inquiry.  

But, more than the theoretical grounding of particular methods and protocols of this noble contextual endeavor, what has been attacked lately is its very foundation, much more substantially, and calling into question its very point and purpose.. The changed view of the city, dictated by the new contemporary circumstances, which perceives the city more as a dynamic “space of flows” – space of unstoppable flows of capital, currencies, information, commodities, and the other components of the free market economy – with marked indifference towards the issues of place, incorporation and urban character, challenges as truly relevant all our previous contextual preoccupations.1 The issues of physical context, interpolation, visual and physical agreement and harmonization, will appear in this new perspective – which claims to have access to the very essence of contemporary condition – as helplessly marginal and insignificant. What will now prove interesting and intriguing is to understand the city no longer as a tissue, as a compact and coherent, finely orchestrated urban fabric, but rather as a “mere coexistence” – as “a series of relationships between objects that are almost never articulated in visual and formal ways, no longer ‘caught’ in architectural connections”, which points at once to urban relationships that are based no longer on visual continuities but more on “disassociation, disconnection, and complementarities, contrasts, ruptures...”.2

Rather than despairing over the unsettling consequences of this new artificial post-urban condition, which radically undermines all our experiences of traditional, historical cities, and even refraining from – for the moment at least – any criticism or reproach of its alarming projections, it seems more productive to rethink what these new insights might mean for our understanding of those suddenly inflated categories such as “urban character” and “urban identity”. How these new findings might eventually broaden and transform our interpretation of currently endangered categories? In other words, other than in the usual, formal and morphological sense – in the dimensions of urban and architectural forms, structure and relationships – could the identity of a city and its various urban settings reveal itself in some other, new, equally important and vital aspects and appearances? And how can we here – in this revision of the concept of identity – eventually profit from the knowledge gained in the practice of dialogue? Especially the dialogue between the old and the new?

Even if at first it may not be entirely clear what here, in our effort to rescue the endangered singular identity, it might mean to introduce the Other, it is useful to recall that – contrary to our usual understanding of the concept of identity as something solid, firm, self-defining and self-identical, which stems from the depths of a separate singular entity – the true identity is formed, and is incessantly constructed anew as an unstable and dynamic category, only in the encounter with the Other, in the clash with the opposite – i.e., through dialogue, difference, contact and exchange. The Other and different, distinct and even opposite thus become valuable platforms indispensable for vigorous reflexive processes of self-construction and self-consciousness. So, just as the real new – in our previous transhistorical interview – could be truly formed only through creative reflection from the plane of the existing and old, so this same reflexive logic of dialogue, which proved itself operative in the sphere of form, might – in the moment of undermined relevance of contextual issues – be eventually pulled deeper from the plane of morphological acrobatics and used in some other, more promising level.

In other words, and still remaining on the terrain of dialogue: Could such productive exchange be transposed from the issues of form to the issues of, for instance, content? – which at once redirects our discussion from the question of “how” to the question of “what”. So, if the key to the identity of a city, or its specific urban setting, might indeed not lie (exclusively) in the realm of form, then maybe the search for its additional vital aspects might productively proceed within the sphere of urban practices, programs, urban rituals? That is, precisely those categories that occupy and fill those architectural forms, that “give them life”, and concerning the subsistence of which one then ought to think in the effort to preserve the dissolving category of urban identity.

Be it as it may, even with the “topic of conversation” so drastically changed, the very form of dialogue should be retained, in view of the benefit of the final outcomes. Because, just as the conversational exchange was beneficial for the construction of the appropriate new form (which reaches its best only upon the challenge of the “already present”), so these creative juxtapositions (including those between the old and the new) are crucial for the crystallization of things even at the level of content. Allowed here are even – all for the purpose of generating some new, robust and enduring generation of modes of identity – those “transgressive” encounters: those between form and content. But more than things that a certain form would like to tell us about the content it receives, what interests us here is what a certain form does apropos of the content which it houses and accommodates. How a certain architectural form enables certain uses and practices. How a form of space induces and encourages the desired forms of life.

Viewed in that way, the focus of this whole inquiry suddenly shifts from the initial concentration on the surface, down to architecture’s entire inclusive spatial frame, which in turn reveals architecture as a responsible “frame of life”, and the architect himself as a planner of life’s various programs and scenarios.

Thinking on the ultimate effect of his spatial decisions, the architect then – in his investigation of the many faces of identity – necessarily raises the third consequential question. After the dialogically investigated question “how” (with the purpose of reaching the most adequate form), and the similarly explored question “what” (in the effort of promoting the desired content), there appears the inevitable and decisive question – “why”. “Why”, that is, examines not only in what way a certain spatial form instigates a certain activity, but asks itself which content, and why, should that actually be? Which form of life? In other words: In which way do we think that, today, it would be good to live? To which activities today is it useful to direct? Which values to promote? And then, how could an architectural frame enable and produce all that?

Interesting thing apropos of the last question, especially within the sphere of the addressed theme, is the useful insight that the answers to these questions – questions of the orientation and direction of life entrusted to architecture – could be properly grasped precisely through the multiply profitable dialogue between the old and the new. Because historical examples could also be viewed in terms of their ambitions in the direction of life of their own time. The analysis would in that case ask the following questions: Which potentials of its three-dimensional medium did the historical structure use? To which aim, within the demands of its own age, did it activate and devote them? And, to what extent was it thereby successful, and which effects did it actually achieve?

The success of an interpolated new “answer” to a “question” posed by the historical context, when interpreted in this way, would be measured not by the established balance and harmony of formal elements, but by equally strong ambitions and engagement in the task of orienting their respective social surroundings. The success of each architectural frame, in other words, would be – to borrow the criterion from Nietzsche – “measured according to the value for life”3 of its respective historical setting; and the success of their transhistorical dialogue – according to the equivalently accomplished effects as responsible “frames of life”.

That the new could indeed have a model in the old, even considering that specific question, in other words, that the architecture of the past did indeed trust in such consequential potentials of its complex spatial medium and practiced it precisely in that way – might recall here at least two well-known examples from recent architectural history. When speaking of the task of architecture, Loos declared: “The primary problem of architecture should be to express the three-dimensional character of architecture clearly, in such a way that the inhabitants of a building should be able to live the cultural life of their generation successfully.”4 Thus it is a concern for the successful life of his generation that guided him in production of his new architecture and in his effort to “create buildings in which a modern way of living could naturally develop”.5 In the service of his own social utopias and utopian aspirations of his socially sensitive time – and again convinced that it is precisely architecture that is the most suitable vehicle to that ambitious goal – Le Corbusier, on the other hand, with his cry “Architecture or Revolution” defined both the diagnosis of the (social) problem and the indication of its possible (architectural) cure, turning precisely to his spatial medium in the effort to prevent the predicted social turmoil.6

Recent architectural production does not seem to have equally convincing answers to such challenges of historical examples or proofs of faith in the potentials of the medium of architecture,. Either because of a sense of resignation over the failures of certain historical cases, or because of the complexity and perplexity of the current moment, on this level of dialogue the expected balance and equivalence does not seem to have been achieved. The dominant trends of recent architectural production manifest, on the contrary, striking indifference to the question of “why” of contemporary life. As if this turbulent “space of flows”, which so faithfully represents the present urban, social, economic and cultural condition, has become, on the one hand, too demanding, and on the other hand so irresistibly attractive and fascinating, that it suffices for architecture to just plunge into it and operate within it purely pragmatically, proving itself an effective and relevant social practice, without pondering for a moment about the direction or consequences of these flows. As if the dynamic phenomena of late capitalism and the exciting processes of free-market globalism represent such an irresistible challenge and fixation that architecture gets completely immersed in, if not absolutely consumed by, the mere operative subsistence in their capricious mutations and demands. What evidently fails to occur is a sign of some more engaged effort that would aspire not only objectively to observe the current situation and opportunistically survive in it, but also to critically intervene in it and redirect its flows to its own advantage: to approach, at least asymptotically, some projected social goal. In the new “space of flows” the architecture has, as it seems, “gone with the flow”.

“Anything goes” thus becomes the new binding maxim, which leaves the age on the slippery terrain of paralyzing relativism. Contrary to paralysis, however, some of the newest architectural practices demonstrate signs of a surprising, enhanced vitality: they enter that disparate, value-neutral field with unprecedented enthusiasm, encouraged by the newly gained freedom from having to take any ideological positions or forming any value-judgements or ethical standpoints. Already excused from the duty of meeting any contextual demands and thus liberated from numerous formerly binding ties, the architecture of this post-utopian pragmatism devotes itself, with new vigor and fanaticism to the observation and study of external forces, which – seen through the lenses of new professional efficacy – ought to be just merely accepted and as such happily accommodated.

What is thus being enacted is a systematic survey of actual reality by means of a whole set of welcome analytical devices – diagrams, graphs, charts and maps – all indispensable tools for the organization of immense quantities of assembled data, believed to represent the very quintessence of new complex processes. Through systematic further idealization of such fabricated diagrams, however, instead of arriving at the quintessence of reality, the new pragmatic realists are reaching only the shortcut to unexpected, absurd new form. Under the motto of “extreme realism” – with a pseudo-scientific, “unsentimental” and “courageous” derivation of architectural form directly from the form of a diagram – they gain entry into the enticing realms of hyper-realistic, extreme new décor. With deliberate withdrawal of any individual creative agency – together with the authorial absolution that such withdrawal grants – what is happening here is the demise of the design process as we knew it, and its replacement by a series of surrogate operations.

Lulled into the image of its own professional efficacy, performativity and instrumentality, the new architecture thus tends to think of itself less than it actually deserves, distancing itself essentially from its resolute Tafurian predecessor, which persistently refused to accept the terms of reality as they were just given and presented. Departing itself from the essence of perceived reality, and itself being poignantly aware of its own limitations and insufficiencies, the critical architecture still possessed the faith and resolve to try to participate actively and responsibly in that complex and demanding field: autonomously to project the new architectural form; to address, through that form, the demands of the broader urban context; and to use that same agency – the architectural and urban frame – to induce a transformation of the entire social environment, convinced that it can offer something better at the level of the whole community.7

Another thing worth mentioning to those eager sober realists – while reminding them of the unused potentials of their spatial discipline – is the all too often forgotten fact that the same reality to which they so courageously surrender, is in fact a lot less real than it is usually assumed; that reality is not something firm, fixed, stable and unchanging, something that preexists us and in which we are but to enter and readily accept, but that it is a complex and sensitive dynamic entity that we ourselves help construct and build. Construct and build and, if needed, criticize, correct and change.

In any case, the new time has not greatly profited by refusing to provide an equally potent reply at this level of our hypothetical transhistorical dialogue. Not that a certain form of vigorous dialogue was not practiced here. On the contrary, it is with unprecedented vigor and interest that the new architecture communicated with its own, new age. Only it is not completely clear whether this new age was properly heard and understood – in all its needs and demands – or whether some of its truthful manifestations were swiftly turned into a new aesthetic category. Because, what has evidently failed to occur was any discussion of the acute disorientation of the present age, in terms of its goals, directions and sense. And so the corresponding impetus of the historical experience was also overlooked, an experience that – confronted with the similarly chaotic state of its own historical moment – still had a courage to take a risk and say: “This would be a good way to live!”. And then to offer an adequate architectural frame that would enable and instigate just that.

...

What is still of interest to us in these multiform dialogical relations, is the question of what this whole experience might mean for our specific, Croatian spectrum of problems and challenges. In other words: How does Croatian architectural culture use the potentials of the culture of dialogue?

As a specific niche in the stream of global events, partially still removed from its most destructive currents but to which it is opening up with conspicuous interest, Croatia in fact possesses a unique opportunity to profit from its interesting position on the periphery. The Croatian architectural scene, on the other hand, while flirting with the global tendencies, all too often borrows the swiftly appropriated new forms – architectural signifiers of the new global processes – before the global signified has actually arrived in these parts, as if it wants to accelerate and advocate its arrival. Better than such indiscriminate openings and unjustified takeovers, what is offered here is the wise art of negotiation, and the indeed promising possibility that Croatia has, – precisely because of its distance and deferral – to turn its position of (apparent) loss and delay into a position of advantage and gain.

So if our whole discussion so far has been devoted to investigation of the advantages of dialogue, particularly the advantages of successful and balanced historical discourse, then the arguments of these new negotiations and the platform on which the Croatian architectural scene might justifiably rely in generation of its new answers, is precisely its strong architectural history and tradition.

The Croatian architectural legacy, then, is offered for use in several directions and ways. For instance, the experience of historical cities. The very fact that vital and vigorous historical cities exist, with their finely woven spatio-temporal fabric and synchronized layers of centuries-old urban and architectural culture, forbids us to submit them to those indifferent post-urban streams and allow their dissolution to the apathetic “space of flows”. Disconnection, ruptures, discontinuities, fragmentation, disruptions and arrogant, disregarding monologues are essentially foreign and extraneous to the local culture of urban connections, adjustments, harmonization, continuities, and permanence. And it is precisely this urban tradition that obliges its posterity and invites them to rely on it and its inherited fine mechanisms – mechanisms creating controlled and contextually considerate forms, promoting desired programs and scenarios precisely through those forms, which in turn gives rise to the responsible creation of new urban layers. It is this very process, then, and the logic of behavior inherited from history (and not some beautiful museum-like collection of preserved urban forms) that becomes the desired dynamic platform on which to ground the construction of the endangered category of urban identity. Urban identity is concealed, in other words, in the modes of conduct and not in specific isolated forms. And then, it is precisely its difference from that neutral, indeterminate and indifferent “space of flows” (and not its hasty acceptance) that guarantees the survival of the concept of identity within the homogenizing field of global circumstances. And this, furthermore, legitimizes precisely architecture and urban culture as one of those truly reliable vehicles of cultural and national identity, whose supposed dissolution continues to provoke incessant laments and controversies.

And yet, one thing that really encourages, in terms of certain knowledge and acquired good manners, is the realization that the Croatian architectural scene already possesses not just a valuable and inspiring history with which to enact those fruitful transhistorical dialogues but also a whole tradition of conducting such productive conferences, and an already established culture of learning from its layers and processes. Croatian architecture, in other words, possesses an established series of reliable protocols in evolving such demanding transhistorical talks, which are confirmed in a series of convincing and successful interpolation examples.

Apropos of protocols, Šegvić succinctly advised as to the main lines of their progress and development. He proposed a triad: “cultural heritage”, “indigenous ambience” and “contemporary condition and demands”. Two modes of learning from history could be distinguished here, both as tokens of true belonging to the present reality. “Cultural heritage” would suggest, namely, a diachronic line of learning, and Šegvić would depict it convincingly with the claim: “History is the only qualified method of studying architecture.”8 He would then proceed to explain its logic, relying on personal insight and example: “And here is now the secret that I was told by Albini, and he by Kova~ić, and he in turn got it from Felbinger and before, and which I am going to give to you, and you later to someone else.”9 In that way, when the coordinates of progress, the lines and logic of development, as well as – of course – the inevitable factors of their necessary modification are distilled from history, history becomes a creative and living category, which establishes succession and continuity up until the present day. And this at the same time reveals some of the most avant-garde examples as ultimate outcomes of a continuing tradition, and not as some accidental cases of unrelated revolutionary shifts. It is precisely such vital “threads of tradition” and “sustainable sequences” that Šegvić was sublimating from history, for the use and benefit of the Croatian contemporary architectural scene.

“Indigenous ambience”, on the other hand, would indicate that other, synchronic line of learning and development. It points to the need for interpolation, adjustment, harmonization; to respect for the existing historical frame and consideration of the registered urban character. Again, a historically (and locally) determined lesson: the lesson of Split, Dubrovnik, Zadar; the lesson of the compact “house-city” – where decisions in one scale necessarily induce implications in the other, and where the two scales need necessarily be considered simultaneously. “The architecture of Dubrovnik” – just as that of any other compact Adriatic, Mediterranean city – “comes out of the concrete urban formation”; “formal decisions and principles come as consequences of the specific urban context” – are insights from which Šegvić’s dervies his well-known compound “urban-architectural method”.10 As inherited and historically granted, and not just given and arbitrarily postulated, this method proves itself a legitimate bearer of identity. Of truly accepted and lived identity, what is more, testified to by many cases of exquisite examples: among others the interwar Zagreb– , the postwar Zadar– , and even (at its best) the contemporary Croatian culture of interpolation.

And finally, to render this whole diachronically and synchronically founded architectural procedure really relevant and appropriate, it is the “contemporary demands” that should be taken into account. Only when, historically informed, it devotes itself to issues of the current reality; and only when, contextually formed, it dedicates itself to planning the forms of life, does this whole architectural procedure become truly consequential and relevant. With the additional duty of conferring on such architecturally motivated forms of life an indication of possible direction and sense.

In order not to leave this last, notoriously abstract demand utterly speculative and undefined, let us just indicate a couple of potentially credible ways of action and approach. For instance, in view of preferred contents and programs, in the current realm of the “super-private” and the homogenized field of mutually indifferent hyper-individual differences, it is useful to remember Šegvić’s belief in the essential “social and poetic meaning of architecture”, and his recommendation to think and practice architecture primarily as social space: as a space of gathering, interaction. social integration, promotion of collective interests, and effecting supra-individual projections and aims.11

With respect to some of the preferred effects of such truly engaged architectural frames, on the other hand – another useful reminder: in a time of an assertive culture industry and the ultimate hyper-production of popular culture, when the contemporaries are condemned to the act of passive consumption, those concerned for the real passion and fulfillment of their generation might value another of Šegvić’s commentaries – that respecting the unselfishness of sharing fantasy. Speaking of Crnković’s gesture in the case of his House with six identical rooms, he remarked that the architect there, by developing a fixed but neutral spatial frame, in fact developed: “... an unfettered scheme of life, which enables its inhabitant to participate in the creative process. The architect here becomes an invisible author of the substance of life, bestowing on its user his own life: his own creation.”12 In its very idea, a thought remarkably close to another, similarly altruistic remark that would appear in the architectural scene three years later, as one of the guiding principles of OMA’s work: “Astonishingly absurd, astonishingly beautiful. Beyond all exploitation, there is also altruism at work: OMA – machine to fabricate fantasy – is structured for others to have the eurekas.”13 By allowing others to make the discoveries and in that way to sustain their own fantasies, a considerate architecture takes care that – despite the sedating, anesthetizing age – its inhabitants should successfully survive in all their fullness and unity.

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The permanently intriguing encounter of the old and the new has thus instigated a discussion on the layers of dialogue. And suggested: the question of “what” is important, as it addresses the problem of that sensitive vital core that fills and occupies the architectural space, and to which all our architectural efforts are ultimately devoted. The question of “how” is of no less consequence, as it examines the problem of the form of the space that will enable and accommodate this desired life. The answers to both of these questions could be properly checked, if not entirely generated, through creative juxtapositions and productive exchanges with experiences and challenges of history. In this fruitful historical conference, all possible lines of dialogue, and all directions of exchange, are open and allowed, all with the purpose of reaching the most appropriate results.

A special appeal, however, is directed to the question of the “why” of contemporary life – a question which, because of its demands and the risks that it implies, tends to remain systematically ignored. It seems, however, that it is precisely the question of the aim and direction of all these enormous creative and intellectual endeavors, that remains the real obligation of this time, which – precisely because of its general resignation and passive surrender to the streams of events – renders critique and resistance more relevant than ever.