Gorgona Tower, Zagreb
The new masterplan offered the possibility of building the highest tower in Zagreb ever. (It was hard to resist the opportunity).
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But what would a genuine Zagreb tower be? We obviously couldn’t and wouldn’t compete in technical perfection with the more advanced economies. We were also disgusted by the world-wide proliferation of ever more extravagant formalism (kissing towers, green towers, wobbly towers, etc).
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Instead, we appropriated a piece of art by Croatian painter Josip Vanista, a member of the 1960s avant-guard group Gorgona. Vanista had photographed an empty shelf in an anonymous Zagreb shop window and reproduced it manifold in a publication. Apparently the shelf appealed to him for its unique layman’s ingenuity that produced a quirky design.
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In a third transposition, we decided to turn it into a building with a single axis of dissymmetry facing the south, i.e., the access from the sea. As you might remember from Part Two of my presentation, the site marks the intersection between two dominating axes – east-west (Balkan-Europe) and north-south (towards the Adriatic Sea). The anthropomorphic welcoming gesture in the manner of Colossus (Rhodes) is deliberate. Quite mysteriously, the entire non-generic programme (non-office - restaurants, meeting rooms, fitness, etc.) fitted into the protruding ‘shelves’. It is a giant objet trouvé (ready made).
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