Bogdan Bogdanović

Bogdan Bogdanović (Serbian Cyrillic: Богдан Богдановић; 20 August 1922 – 18 June 2010) was a Serbian and Yugoslav architect, urbanist and essayist. Bogdanović fought in World War II as a partisan, and embarked on an academic architectural career at the University of Belgrade's Faculty of Architecture after the end of the war. He became renowned from the 1950s onward for designing a number of monuments and memorials commemorating victims and resistance fighters of World War II in Yugoslavia; his concrete sculpture titled Stone Flower near the site of Jasenovac concentration camp attracted particular attention.

Bogdanović was also known for his essays on urbanism and architecture, and was active in Yugoslav Communist Party politics, serving as Mayor of Belgrade from 1982 to 1986. He was dismayed by the rise of nationalism in Yugoslavia, and went into self-imposed exile in 1993, dying in Vienna in 2010.

Life

Bogdanović was born into a family of leftist intellectuals. His father Milan Bogdanović was a literary critic, long-time president of the Association of Writers and director of the National Theatre.

Beginning in 1940, Bogdan studied architecture at the University of Belgrade. He participated in World War II ("a bit" in his words) as a partisan, becoming a member of the Communist Party, and was seriously wounded in eastern Bosnia. Despite his injuries, he continued his academic career after the war, graduating in 1950, becoming a teaching assistant at the department for urbanism (from 1953), then a docent in 1960, extraordinary professor and president of the Yugoslav Union of Architects in 1964, dean of the Faculty of Architecture and a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) in 1970, and full professor in 1973. In 1981 he resigned from SANU, and he was conferred emeritus status in 1987.

Being an ardent leftist, Bogdanović opposed the increasing nationalism espoused by state leaders since the early 1980s. Nonetheless, he became Mayor of Belgrade in 1982 on the initiative of Ivan Stambolić, then chairman of the League of Communists of Serbia. Bogdanović served one term in office, until 1986. During this time, he organised an international competition for the complete redevelopment of New Belgrade, a planned area on the left bank of the Sava river. All submissions to this competition have since disappeared.

After his term of office, he was appointed by Slobodan Milošević as a member of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the party's supreme governing body. He accepted the post under the condition that he would not be required to attend committee meetings because he "had more important things to do". In the following year he sent Milošević an anti-nationalist letter over 60 pages long, including a Stalino-dictionary, an appendix satirising the recipient's nationalist rhetoric, and the famous Lamentation for Serbia, which discussed the theme of Serbia "being tired" (of its leaders). The Central Committee replied, "You can send the letter, in which you criticise the work of the eighth meeting and which has not reached us, to the Central Committee if you consider it necessary". The letter, in combination with other remarks about Milošević, led to attempts of breaking into Bogdanović's apartment, death threats, and his exclusion from the Central Committee. This, however, did not prevent him from renewing his anti-nationalist statements when the Yugoslav wars started at the beginning of the 1990s, once more turning Bogdanović into a target for violent attacks and a defamation campaign run by the Serbian state media.

In 1993, Bogdanović went into self-imposed exile to Paris with his wife Ksenija. However, since the Yugoslav émigré circle there had strong nationalistic tendencies, the couple moved on to settle in Vienna upon invitation of his friend, the writer and translator Milo Dor.

Bogdanović died in a hospital in Vienna on 18 June 2010, following a heart attack. He was cremated in Vienna, and his urn was sent to Belgrade. Although the city offered a grave for him in the Alley of the Greats at the Belgrade New Cemetery, upon his wife's request, and the approval of the Jewish community, Bogdanović's remains have been placed in the Sephardic cemetery where his monument to the Jewish victims of fascism and fallen soldiers stands.

Teaching and writing

At the University of Belgrade, Bogdanović held the lecture course The development of housing schemes (later called History of town), starting in 1962. As professor and dean, he tried to reform the teaching of architecture and introduce grassroots democracy at the university, but the party forced him to abdicate before he could put his plans into practice.

In 1976, he began to teach in an abandoned village school in Mali Popović near Belgrade to realise an alternative project, namely his "village school for the philosophy of architecture". The course was called Symbolic forms in allusion to Ernst Cassirer, had no fixed timetable and employed the invention of new writing systems, the interpretation of non-existent texts, as well as methods akin to free association and gematria. Fourteen years later, when henchmen of Milošević raided the school in the aftermath of Bogdanović's letter, much of the collected material – the documentation of the lessons, drawings, audio- and videotapes, optical devices – was destroyed.

Bogdanović wrote numerous articles about urbanism, especially about its mythic and symbolic aspects, some of which appeared in international journals such as El País, Die Zeit, and others.

Works

The architectonic and literary work of Bogdanović is characterised by an abundance of ornaments. It is influenced by Romanticism and Victorian architecture, surrealism, metaphysics, Jewish symbolism and Kabbalah. Bogdanović has opposed the architectural theories of Adolf Loos developed in the essay Ornament and Crime, and argued for the "semantic dignity of the ornamental sign".

Memorials

In 1951, Bogdan Bogdanović won a competition for the design of a memorial to the Jewish victims of fascism, to be built on the Sephardic cemetery in Belgrade. Although not religious himself, this contact with Jewish esotericism strongly influenced his further work.……

原文较长，这里只摘了前面一部分，摘自英文维基百科「Bogdan Bogdanović (architect)」（暂时没有中文条目，下面是英文原文），按 CC BY-SA 4.0 使用，去掉了参考文献、外部链接等尾部小节和表格，其余文字未作改动。