14-14

The endeavor of the 14-14 is to outline the ‘range’ of what it means to record architectural output in a unit of time within a national domain. In order to achieve this it was essential to curate the exhibition in two sections so their respective fundamental natures would supply context to each other. The inner, day lit space of the Serbian pavilion is a vault of a hundred acclaimed architecture projects made between 1914 - 2014, while the perimeter is concerned with a particular project – Museum of the Revolution in Belgrade by Croatian architect Vjenceslav Richter.

The project was initiated in 1961 in New Belgrade through a national competition charged with the task of expressing the socialist ideal, one that constitutes the ‘revolution’ of the international workers movement. At the time, Museums of the Revolution were sprouting across Yugoslavia and this one was supposed to be the centerpiece, a monumental modernist structure with the location carefully chosen in keeping with the vision for the New Belgrade. After a decade and several attempts to better the scheme through engineering and planning concerns the construction started but was short-lived. //Only the underground level was cast and it is still there - a black box recording political vicissitudes, causes and effects distilled to this day. The fate of the Museum of the Revolution is symptomatic of the ‘when and where’, providing context to 1914 - 2014 project shortlist exhibited in the central room.

Using film as a medium director Srđan Keča traces the aftermath, leftover archeology of Richter’s museum through several narratives, which are displayed in the perimeter of the pavilion as three separate projections. The first two are set against each other better to convey the duality of the space. As living quarters for a gypsy community the Museum’s foundations are inhabited, while at the same time, the place is utterly invisible. This habitation, whether it is a cave, a ‘primitive hut’ or a memory of the museum, shown alongside the tranquility of the park, nearly became the site for one of the most significant institutions of Yugoslavia. The third projection, shown separately on the opposite end of the pavilion shows an installation constructed by 14 - 14 team to mark the site where the project was first intended to be built, some three hundred meters as the crow flies, from the definitive site where the construction began.

In his A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites, Robert Smithson asserts: ‘(…) to understand this language of sites is to appreciate the metaphor between the syntactical construct and the complexity of ideas, letting the former function as a three dimensional picture, which doesn’t look like a picture.’ 2 This ‘three dimensional picture’ of the Museum of the Revolution is made out of weaved cord. Helium is used to stress the strings until they become lines that flutter, bend, stress and tangle, but ultimately trace the volume evocative of the Richter’s iconographic design for the roof of the Museum. As the medium of construction shifted from the reinforced concrete to the strings and helium, the form changed as well, fitting with Smithson’s ideas of the abstract representation of the actual site, or as he puts it: ‘It is by this dimensional metaphor that one site can represent another site (…)’ 3 It can be said that the Museum of the Revolution adds to the genius loci of its intended location, even though there has been nine alternatives including the definitive one. The ephemeral nature of the // 14 -14 string structure makes its presence in the park known about as much as what is left of the Museum itself. completely agreeing with Jane Jacobs in saying: ‘You can neither lie to a neighborhood park, nor reason with it.’ 3 Ultimately, the bond between the notion of revolution and modernity is a strong one while considering the extent to which ‘national identity has seemingly been sacrificed to modernity’.