Materiality and Architecture by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-317-55586-5
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

FIGURE 6.5 Interior of the Museum of Young Bosnia, photograph

The second room of the museum, located at the back, was much smaller than the first and more closely aligned with the scale of a domestic interior. Based on the traditional Bosnian home, it had a long sitting area, or sećija, in one corner, giving a distinct feeling of domesticity. Adjacent to the sećija was a stove and wash basin reminiscent of banjica, a wet area common in traditional interiors. The centre of the room was occupied by a low dining table (sinija), which in the traditional house provided for the Muslim’s practice of sitting close to the ground while eating. The wall shelves featured traditional pots and small domestic objects, and the floors were covered with a handmade Bosnian carpet (ćilim). The use of select domestic objects in furnishing the museum gave “a connection between past and present” and, according to Neidhardt, ensured a “strong sense of connection to contemporary reality.”38

The populist character of the house and its connections to daily life made it important in the context of socialist society and culture. The transfiguration of the traditional home into a prototype for public buildings was a welcome addition to discussions of the new society and its character. Detached from their initial significance, objects of the domestic interior were reconstructed to generate new and modern forms, types and meanings. In the conceptual framework of the museum, the objects’ “negative” values of the past were left behind, and transformed instead into “positive” values that disregarded religious convention and cultural expectation in order to support the development of socialism. Presented in a new way, the physical objects of the traditionally private and secluded interiors and the associated cultural practices were now open to the public. Not only that Neidhardt’s design made the domestic interior accessible to all, but more significantly, it established a symbolic allegiance between private space and public agenda. The museum, a room-like monument in Neidhardt’s terms, came to symbolise the revolutionary aspects of Yugoslav politics. The ideological transformation of the meanings associated with the traditional domestic interior was even more significant for the museum’s role in promoting the agenda of the Young Bosnian movement and its pro-Yugoslav connotations.

Neidhardt and Grabrijan made use of the flexibilities emerging in the KPJ attempts to define its own take on Marxist theories. In moving away from what they portrayed as a Soviet-style dogmatic understanding of the Marxist agenda, the KPJ began to promote (admittedly reluctantly) “dialectical” aspects of Marxism as a means of encouraging diversity. To frame his approach in a dialectical sense as being built on oppositional but balanced relationships between old and new, past and present, Neidhardt argued that his separation of “positive” and “negative” of material culture allowed for materialisation of Marxist agenda. In the design of the Museum of Bosnia, much like in the Marindvor project, Neidhardt presented the hidden and assumed values of architecture as being as important as architecture’s formal expression. Both projects rested on the audience’s trust in socialist values and its acceptance of progress as a driving force of society.

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