Interview: Bojan Radonić & Goran Rako

architects Bojan Radonić & Goran Rako
interviewed by Ante Nikša Bilić, Sanja Filep, Tadej Glažar, Vera Grimmer, Andrija Rusan

 

ORIS: Beginning with the competitions from the one for the Berlin Parliament building, the Housing settlement in Den Bosch, the Croatian Government building to the kindergarten in Zagreb and the hospital in Nova Bila all of your projects offer an analogous structural and methodological approach. One could say that the projects represent a relevant answer to the challenge of ecological issue, one that is more relevant than houses with verandas, wood houses etc. You use mimicry to imitate the landscape in order to return to the ground, in a different yet adequate form, that which has been taken from the environment through building.

 

Radonić: With time architects become well-defined and, despite efforts to prevent this from happening, we ,also, have adopted several viewpoints of which two are  recognisable. We believe that wood-cutters should also plant trees, that fishermen should breed fish and that architects should behave in the same manner. Mario Botta once said that every square metre we plan is a square metre on this planet. In this respect I agree with him completely and we also start from this supposition. The second feature is the striving towards low-tech. If we can choose, we will always strive towards that.

 

Rako: Our credo is not to make “ecological architecture”, but to begin each project from the beginning, ab ovo. It has happened several times that a green roof seemed the best solution. We, too, came to the conclusion that harmony with nature has become our trademark, so that, at times, we avoided it on purpose. However, we did not choose such an approach just because we wanted to. For example, the Den Bosch project was a task, which was called “Living in a Park”. The Berlin Parliament building of some 300,000 square metres was being built in a park. If we were to make a project for a building on Zrinjevac, we would probably do the same thing.