The architect Milan Lojanica’s Belgrade realm and visions - from a graduation project to Julino brdo and Gocław, 1962-1972

Abstract

Attempting to highlight the specificity of the architect Milan Lojanica?s design approach, clearly distinct in his first professional decennary 1962-1972, the focus of this paper is on his firstly designed and developed, and afterwards awarded architectural masterpiece, which he realized with his associates, architects Cagic and Jovanovic - i.e. the urban suprastructure of Julino brdo/Jula?s hill (1967-1970). As fifty years has passed from its first drawings, and the project documentation consists of exceptionally rare fragments only, one of the main goals of the research was the attempt to reconstruct the complete creative process - including its particular modality of construction/materialization. Although in its results merely a brief recapitulation of Lojanica?s innovative beginnings, the discourse still may provide a source-material for the genre of textbooks - from student to technical practice - regarding the rarest and almost forgotten discipline of experimental urban (mass)housing, with artistic/spiritual/serene touch of a refined prefabricated system. Nonetheless, the opus of the eminent author, the respected creative endeavor of Milan Lojanica, future professor of architecture and the SASA academic, arises from its earliest stages and then permanently confirms itself as an entirety in its continuity. Therefore, the small-scale Julino brdo/Jula?s hill settlement case study is reanalyzed/rethought within Lojanica?s antecedent thematic preoccupations, and additionally within the most challenging subsequent one - the Goc?aw project (1972), Poland (Polska), throughout its emerging, unrivaled, innovatively envisioned - town/city of hundred-thousand-inhabitants.