11/ Mirogoj, Radman Vrbanek © MMVII Competition 2nd prize

Mirogoj Cemetary, Zagreb

The Historicist Arcade from the second half of the 19th ct. is a bold metropolitan vision of the city with the population of just 24,000 at the time of its creation. It poetically marks a metaphysical border line between the living and the dead.
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In the meantime the Mirogoj cemetery had been expanded. The workshop with heavy earth-moving and stone-cutting machinery was inappropriately exposed. What is more, it obfuscated the Arcade. The proposed strategy was to segregate the productive part (services) from the representative part (admin), mirroring the very difference between metabolism and politics of a city captured by the dyad urbs and polis.
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The existing office building is ‘wrapped’ in glass. The interstitial space between the opaque original and the new transparent boundary becomes an extra office space. Such augmentation offers a compromise between keeping the listed 19th ct. building intact and its radical upgrading. Once the main pedestrian entrance is sorted out within the new symbiosis, the rest of the complex can be consistently hidden from view to make way for the more appropriate hortus contemplatio at the ground level. This area is designated for the bereaved families engaged in funeral arrangements. The workshop takes the form of a sunken hypostyle hall, with each of the three bays fitted with a crane in the spirit of Cedric Price. The space is fitted with cargo containers for maximum flexibility.
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The determination to refrain from building (visibly) was not appreciated by the jury. We came second (yet again). The consolation was found in an essay published subsequently by Sanford Kwinter: “All successful monuments that address serious themes have in common this particular approach: they evacuate information from a landscape rather than introduce more into it, they project a disjunctive synapse into the urban-historical continuum, a kind of interruptus that makes way, however modestly, for the action upon us of the sublime. For better and for worse, this always has the effect of desecularising a space, or removing it from the banal world of immediate economic activity, and delivering it to a different economy, to that of geological, biological, or astronomical time." (from S. Kwinter: Far From Equilibrium, Essays on Technology and Design Culture, 2008)