The Stranded View

arhitect Idis Turato
project Hotel Navis, Opatija, Croatia
written by Ivan Dorotić

 

Driving from the intensive urban-industrial chaos of the elongated Rijeka to the picturesque archipelago of the Opatija Riviera captured by tourism, after a long visual break and drive through the lush vegetation that hides some of the magnificent Kvarner villas and beaches, you come to the Preluk Bay, a place and moment where, for the first time, the road and the eye closely touch the sea and the coast. A cove of a peculiar environment is a place where the Adriatic Sea cuts deepest into the Kvarner Bay, a location whose history and present array diverse situations and contents relevant for the context of Rijeka, from a former quarry, carting track, circus tents, fishing clubs, fairgrounds, and concerts to this single point along Croatian mainland where the wind and the sea favor the sails of windsurfers. A unique scenery and location on our coast were given an architectural loge for watching from front rows, the Navis Hotel – a structure built on the foundations of Milde Sorte, a former disco club. Cut into the idyllic landscape of the surrounding rock and corresponding pine forest, as a stranded passenger ship built of contrasting black and white balconies, the Navis is an atypical hotel, an architecture stacked for some different tourism, contemporary hedonism and decadence.