Morality Over Career

The sad news of Bogdan Bogdanović’s death in Vienna deserves to be marked
not only because he was an architect, the author of numerous books, a professor of architecture and former mayor of Belgrade, but also because he was an uncompromising intellectual who cherished values such as morality and human integrity far more than his own personal and careerist convenience.

Bogdanović was born (1922) and educated in Belgrade. Since 1970 he has been the Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and only two years later, after an attempt to modernize the educational system, he was forced to abandon his reforms and submit his resignation. He also handed in his resignation from the membership of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art (SASA) in 1981, a year upon writing a necrology for Tito in the name of SASA. Although at that time not many people dared to withdraw from such an important institution, this move did not hurt his career so badly and from 1982 until 1986 he served as the Mayor of Belgrade. “I wasn’t happy with the existing system, I wasn’t familiar with its structure. All organized crime of today already existed in its infancy and already infiltrated political bodies” he said later about this period. In the late eighties, he wrote an open letter to Slobodan Milošević, it was in fact an anti-Miloševic treatise written in several dozen pages, and then continued to oppose his regime, which is why he was banned from the architectural studio and alternative school he founded and led for a small group of students in Mali Popović. After serious threats, including threats on his life, in 1993 he left Belgrade and had since lived in Vienna, where he passed away. He visited Belgrade for the first time only after Milošević was arrested.

*Bogdan Bogdanović

As far as his professional career was concerned, he was known for memorial monuments where he combined elements of architecture and symbols developing powerful and original spatial concepts. The most famous among these is the monument named The Stone Flower in Jasenovac created in 1966. It was Bogdanović’s favorite piece from a series of commemorative sculptures laid out throughout the former Yugoslavia – in Bela Crkva, Belgrade, Prilep, Mostar and Kruševac, dedicated to the victims of the Second World War, respectively. However, when he began his work as an architect he did not intend to be engaged in monuments, it was actually a coincidence that determined his professional career.

He was awarded several times for his work, among other, for the Memorial Grave dedicated to the victims of fascism in Sremska Mitrovica and the Monument in Jasenovac.

He also published a series of books on architecture and urbanism (his first book was titled “Little Urbanism”), and in Vienna he continued his affluent writing activities. He published “City and Death”, “Architecture of Memories,” “Town and the Future” and his memoirs entitled “The Doomed Architect”. Some of these titles can also be found in Croatian bookstores.

* Renovated Stone Flower, Jasenovac

* Memorial to the Jewish Victims of Fascism and Fallen Soldiers, Belgrade, 1952

* Partisan Necropolis, Mostar, 1965

* Memorial Park ”Popina”, 1978.

* Partisan Necropolis, Prilep, 1962

Click here to read an interesting interview with Bogdan Bogdanović where he talks about his work, his beginnings, his relationship towards urbanism and, later, towards politics, the disintegration of Yugoslavia and that which ensued.

Photos: Marko Krojač