Interdisciplinary character of urbanism as a profession is out of question. According to it, they are almost synonyms. But it is disputable, when different people, considering themselves so „Renaissance”, dare make so complicated documents, and they think it is not necessary to contact local authorities, sociologists, development forecasters, and not even architects, because they can do that on their own. Even if they do contact them, it is enough for one small town, and the „copy-paste“ method will solve the problem to the others. Although urbanism anticipates all the rest, I would say a few words about a component of architectural limits and definitions within those plans.
Since Le Courbusier with his colleagues introduced an international style and cleared the architecture from redundant details, he has made forms that are actually universally applicable, but they might be most suitable to the Mediterranean (surface, light, terrace). That idea of orthogonality and minimalism was taken as a postulate by „Zagreb school“. There are a lot of bright examples of such way of building in Dalmatia (Šegvić, Perković, Kovačić).
Our urbanists are in fact nostalgic. They do not think progressively, they would rather stop the time and apply details they used to apply two hundred years ago, so they would put lean roofs on the skyscrapers. They have lost sense for proportion. It is important to do the best you can in a particular moment.
Plans often forbid big glass walls. Is a window 100*140cm with wooden shutters the best thing we can do, enabling us to see only a part of the island of Šolta or to make a sliding wall with „low-E“ glass and covered with AB part of the roof sticking out, with aluminium profile with a cut thermo bridge framing the horizon, so that the whole island of Šolta is inside and you can feel the sea in the deepest part of the flat? Plans often require lean roof. Is the lean roof with roof windows of half-round tile the best we can do (our investors can hardly wait for it and they sell each millimetre under such a roof) which can be blown away with every stronger northern wind, or to make a flat roof with flexible polymerised bitumen more-layer isolations and inversive flat roof which is less striking in space and makes the environment airy? Not to talk about of possibility of living on such a terrace, because mild climate simply pulls you to it.
Traditional details belong to the past, in conservative settlements, which witness the history like museums and which we should be proud of, because our ancestors were town builders who made houses that have been standing for hundreds of years, and towns according to man’s measure. What we must take from them is the way of thinking. They were following the organic architecture, because they were building on the stone, and they had only it and they were building walls with emphasized structure, which was compact from the floor to the roof in its structure. Concrete is a more abstract material, giving enormous freedom, but we will learn from our ancestors that we must build walls and combining them make spaces which are a frame of life of the Mediterranean man and which are compact in their abstraction. We shall take a wall like a verse and a yard like a refrain, a garden like a fioritura, and we shall add a big glass like a pause in the wall, because a pause is also a part of music. Here is an example.
An acknowledged architect from Split Frano Gotovac (1928-1991) was a person of strong personality and energy. He started acting at the end of the 50-s of the last century, in the period when the devastation of space was in its expansion, and when he felt the danger of architecture „written“ by plan makers. Warning the publicity intensively, anticipating the danger the consequences of which we are aware today, he tried to direct the stream in a positive direction, with his examples. He named one of those houses, a holiday house of the Pederin family (1970) close to hotel Lav near Split, an ugly duckling, because if differs a lot from its nearby sisters, but in spite of their much larger number, the duckling became a swan and exceeded them with its whiteness.
Frano Gotovac spent a short period of his creative life in Omiš, where he built a few multi block of flats of different typology. One of them is a one-storey block of flats on the right bank of the Cetina river, opposite the old town. As a follower of modern architecture he solves the object with a flat roof with a characteristic domination of chimneys as a symbol of gathering, so important mark of Dalmatia. He takes a typical colour of houses of the old town on the opposite side, where 150 years old light yellow and dark red houses dominate. He left the balcony on the first floor without a sun shade, so with time the tenants intervened and improvised shelters. New time has changed tenants’ requests and now there is a need for an additional storey. General zoning plan requires a lean roof, without exception. Imagine having to put a lean roof on the hotel Marjan! Thorn between that what I have to do according to the Plan and that what I have to do according to the feeling, I listen to my instinct at the end, and with help of Association of Architects of Split I get a consent that the object, in spite of regulation from the Plan, can be performed with a flat roof. Plans should recognize exceptions, put responsibility for forming to architects, and with it make the procedures for getting permissions shorter.
But, situations when a lean roof is a good solution do exist, but colleagues town planners, please give us freedom to estimate that and to build settlements of swans of the 21.century!
