Architecture of Nostalgia: Hyperproduction of Memory
Ruins of the National Library of Serbia at Kosančićev venac, Belgrade
Master Final Project
mentors: Full Professor Milan Vujović, Assistant Arch Snežana Zlatković
September, 2020
University of Belgrade, Faculty of Architecture
University of Belgrade, Faculty of Architecture
Nostalgia is longing for the present; longing for the correlative, the mediated, the re- experienced, the visible and the invisible. Invisible cities are, according to Italo Calvino, non-existent places of infinite possibilities, which reject the conventions of form and narrative in order to point out the ideas of memory and place. They are materialized by negating the definition of time as irreversible and are understood as utilizable content, a medium of identification, recovery, the future and moral promise. Technology, functioning as universal language, is capable of nullifying the premises of nostalgia and creating a hypertextual constellation of time and space. Therefore, the architecture of nostalgia is a spatial link in the process of cyber- archaeology, which localizes and encodes the collected past in the archive- abyss- and transmits and materializes it through a vertical system. A space is created that depends on data entry, their physical and digital forms, a transient space that evokes and is constantly upgraded/ decomposed. The remains of burned National Library of Serbia are perceived as a context of longing and a point of intertemporal and intermaterial accumulation and coexistence.
