Contemporary architecture of Serbian Orthodox temples: Improving the institution of the student architectural competition for a temple through pre-defined evaluation criteria

Abstract

Within the topic of architectural design of a contemporary Serbian Orthodox temple, student competitions have been held for a few years at the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Architecture in Nis. The research of the current phenomenon of the contemporary Serbian temple through the innovation of competition practice directly advances the architectural science. The main goal of the work is to improve the institution of the competition through pre-defined evaluation criteria, which belong to the fields of architectural design, history and theory of architecture, but also to the teachings of the Serbian Orthodox Church. This paper documents the student competition for the memorial temple on Delijski Vis in Nis. In accordance with the design principles, the students' works and the results of their evaluations were analyzed. In the first part of the paper, the points awarded by the expert jury were presented. In the second part, the works are analyzed according to design principles. In the third part, in the synthesis of the research, the results of the first and second part of the research were compared by a comparative analysis. In the discussion, based on the discrepancy between the results of the first and second groups, it was concluded that it is necessary to define in advance the categories that the jury would evaluate in the evaluation phase. Candidates should receive the evaluation framework in the competition announcement. Since the members of the jury are not only architects, it is necessary to provide for areas from several disciplines, so that the candidate's answer is more comprehensive. In the conclusion of the work, specific evaluation criteria were proposed, created through the transformation of design principles.