Castles in the sky

I was born and raised in the city of Belgrade. From the 1950’s till the beginning of 1990’s it was the capital city of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. From the 1950’s until the 1980’s Yugoslavia experienced a financial and thus architectural boom. The president Josip Broz Tito financed construction of WWII Memorials to demonstrate the strength of the socialist republic throughout the Balkans. These giant memorials, along with most of the architecture of Belgrade from that time, were built in brutalist style. Brutalism signified power, progress and a forward moving country. However, when I was born a new war had already begun and my playground was not typical. I played collecting shards of broken glass and running around neglected and decaying concrete buildings, once symbols of the future. They were abandoned because of war and poverty. Sharp lines, tall wide glass windows, naked concrete, and repeated modular elements represent pieces of these structures that together form the concrete castles of my imagination. I moved to the US for school and decided to leave everything behind. I left my friends and my culture, but I cannot forget the brutalist towers. Today I create buildings that belong to a fictional city. They are not big in scale but they pull you in and by doing so they become monumental. I look to my past, my peoples’ past and try to create an object that memorializes what is still in decay.