invited architectural competition, 1st prize

location: Novi Sad, Serbia
client: Fundacija Balašević

project: 2021

Bevk Perović project team:
Matija Bevk
Vasa J. Perović
Blaž Goričan
Valentin Tribušon Ovsenik
Kaja Stopar
Mitja Usenik
Samo Bojnec
Rok Primažič

The new building, Đorđe Balašević’s ‘Atelier of Dreams’, is not a ‘classical’ house or a building – neither in funcionality nor in appearance – it is a ‘hybrid’ which, together with its immediate surroundings, establishes a ‘territory’ of poet’s memorial within the newly planted university park.

This ‘new’ stucture, new territory, new ‘hybrid’ has at the same time the character of a pavilion, a house, a museum, a park, a garden, a monument and a platform. It is a platform, in the broad sense of the word, on which the programmes, atmospheres and spirit of Balašević’s opus interchange.

The ground floor is conceived as a ‘flexible’ part of the Atelier of Dreams setting – four closed exhibition rooms/structural columns of the building define a series of open spaces in which different ‘situations’ of Balasevic’s opus interchange on a 5x5m module.

In the center of the building, a tribune – a two-storey concert auditorium, hidden in the middle of the building – is both a space for film or concert screenings, and a space for transition to the “upper world” of the Dream Studio.

On the first floor, ten memorial rooms are organized as ten ‘scenes’ of Balašević poetry, hidden behind glass, which spread like dioramas in front of the visitor’s eyes. The eleventh ‘room’ is an open, concrete ‘tent’ on the roof of the building.

The roof is a metaphorical picture of the relationship between Balašević and the world, Balašević and cosmos. A series of elements – the roof of the Vojvodina house (which covers one of the rooms on the lower floor), a small concert tribune (which points towards the city center), ‘tent’ of two concrete slabs (eleventh room), stairs leading to the sky (overlooking Petrovaradin fortress, a symbol of the city of Novi Sad), a large ‘chimney’ (that lets light into the room below), a shallow water surface – a ‘pond’, etc., all establish a quiet, solid landscape of the relationship between the poet and the world, the poet and the sky.

Đorđe Balašević’s ‘Atelier of Dreams’ is neither a house, a museum, a hotel, a public building, or a monument – it is a platform on which it is possible to build a dynamic profile of a vital institution, dedicated to Novi Sad’s greatest poet.