FAILED ARCHITECTURE

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FA-mobile: Belgrade from April 2 - 6

Savamala streetscape, Belgrade

Failed Architecture is coming to Belgrade, from April 2 - 6, for a workshop focusing on the Savamala neighbourhood, in collaboration with KC Grad. Please join us for a week of urban exploring and co-creation.

The makeup and dynamics of our cities are continuously subject to changing demographics, market forces, political volatility, aesthetic preferences, technological advancements and other variables. Within cities, this creates differences between areas and neighbourhoods. Some areas are more popular than others for particular population groups, businesses and (hence) for flows of capital, causing a variety of local development paths and differing spatial articulations as a result of the aforementioned variables. Next to the changing makeup of the built environment, this can cause social frictions and morphing identities.

The local expression of urban dynamics will be the subject-matter of the first FA-mobile edition, which will take place in Belgrade, April 2-6. It is a cooperation with Grad (European centre for culture and debate) and will concern itself with the Savamala neighbourhood.

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Architectural failure as a matter of politics

The third edition of our series of FA-discussions on Wednesday, June 15 at De Verdieping, a cultural project space located in an abandoned printing plant in Amsterdam, covered three different examples of fiercely debated architecture; buildings that were or are doomed to fail due to their location in the built environment, their time of conception and usability.

Maybe the most famous Dutch example of how opinion-forming on architecture works is the ‘Zwarte Madonna’, a former 350-appartmentblock in the inner city of The Hague. The building by architect Carel Weeber was heavily criticized during its life span (1985-2007). As several government departments in 2001 made a decision for the extension of their office blocks in the direct vicinity, the curtains fell for the black lady. However, public opinion altered after this decision. Some inhabitants resisted moving out, delaying the demolition process for almost six years. Attempts from their side to ‘pimp’ the building failed. According to one critic, painting the Zwarte Madonna would be equal to ‘putting lipstick on a gorilla’.