Blok Beograd

Blok Beograd is a book project about the brutalistic architecture from Belgrade Serbia. The book 128 pages and 70 photographs.Here a generell description of the project. Novi Beograd is considered one of Serbia’s most ambitious large-scale urban development projects in the post-war era. On an area of approximately 4,000 hectares, the redesign of this Belgrade district provided an opportunity for developing an overarching concept for this still undeveloped terrain. In other words, a constructed urban morphology which isn’t constrained by an already existing naturally developed urban core. The district was to be designed in a modern way, which is why Brutalism, that had been emerging since the 1950s, was chosen for both the representative government buildings and the residential homes. Thus, the architectural cityscape of Novi Beograd, as well as the individual buildings and neighborhoods in other Belgrade districts, are characterized by rough, gray concrete walls, that push themselves like massive walls in front of one’s eyes and rise seemingly endless into the air. Sebastian Bühler brings these buildings into the focus of his camera. His photographs show the rare bird‘s-eye view of these structures. This not only makes it possible to depict the brutalist buildings in their entirety, but it also documents their idiosyncratic characters, that oscillate between organized constructed urban planning and organically shaped structures. Unique patterns emerge, when looking down on these architectures and their urban arrangements, their lines and outgrowths meandering through the landscape. It seems as if the individual components of these building complexes grow from several small sized blocks into a fused Unit, which is far away from just looking like a massive, block of raw concrete. The geometric arrangement of the mostly rectangular shapes varies between harmonious symmetry and interlocking, impenetrable nesting. They almost appear to grow organically out of the sparse, faded green areas. Through their morphological cha- racter, the buildings do not only blend into the landscape, but also interact with it. This goes so far, that the variety of forms and the ‚blossoming‘ of these concrete giants almost seem more natural than the by paths and artificial boundaries constricted nature.The photographs, however, not only document the diversity of brutalist buildings between form and function, built mass and nature. By juxtaposing individual photographs of one motif by day and night, Sebastian Bühler draws a field of tension that highlights the scenic embedding of the concrete buildings in their urban environment in different lighting. While the properties of the material and the shape of the buildings create an impressive interaction with the landscape in daylight, light-dark contrasts increasingly dominate at night. In the shadows of the city, the lines and colors of the individual building complexes dis- appear into darkness, and in this dim light only the electric lighting shows the concrete giants as a unified something. The resulting spongy contours of the dark rooftops stand in contrast to the brightly lit streets. Whether one sees this as a romanticized metropolitan image at night or as an organic unit of concrete buildings with their surroundings in daylight, the view from above reveals in both cases a unique perspective that invites you to immerse yourself in the brutalist architecture of Belgrade. Eva Schuster