Incompletion, whether intentional or not, has always been an important topic in architecture and urbanism. Stopping a specific spatial situation in the process from idea to realization implies its prolongation; it provides an incomplete space with an opportunity to house an event that will preserve it from oblivion. House Z, a summer house in the middle of a field in Milna on the island of Brač, is not planned outside its topographic or symbolical context so, without it, it can never really be completed. Architects Ana Krstulović and Nikola Popić have put it in close relation, not only with an orchard, an olive grove and a vineyard that surround the house on a surface larger than 5 ha, but also with the sun, wind and views over the idyllic island environment that spans all the way up to the horizon on all sides, with a small stone field house, located next to the entrance to the plot, as the only architectural form. The mentioned contextual quality of the house is easily legible; it is designed on a rather bare base elevated from the terrain. The surface of the base is approx. 1,000 m2 and includes 220 m2 of closed (glazed) space, 320 m2 of open and covered space and 420 m2 of open and uncovered space, so a division into interior and exterior is almost impossible. Vertical and horizontal surfaces in raw concrete are there to protect the users, but also to subtly structure the exposed space into sequences without walls or a roof. Through its specific shaping, material and structural solutions, this house provides shelter from nature and offers a framework for country life. It also contains its own performative potential, clearly visible and recorded on a summer day when a group of young artists visited the temporarily stopped construction site of House Z.
Generally speaking, the aesthetics of the incomplete is plainly visible mostly in adaptations of heritage buildings, when the construction sounding and removal of layers expose and evaluate a significant material witness of an earlier period, or when a specific process is stopped due to an unfortunate set of circumstances,. It rarely happens, however, that attention is given to a temporary stage in the realisation process of a structure that will soon be replaced by the next one. This country house’s point of incompletion, further developed with a multimedia performative experiment by Mišo Komenda (designer and musician), Dora Popić (architect and circus artist), Darko Škrobonja (multimedia artist) and Ana Krstulović, co-author of the architectural project, is precisely where architecture reaches the capacity of establishing a strong relation with a human being, but a relation that still does not imply residence.