With the first Design District Zagreb festival just around the corner, architects, urban planners, designers and landscape architects from the neighborhood have rolled up their sleeves and started working on spacial interventions you’ll be able to experience during the festival.
Interventions are made in deserted and run down places around Martićeva and adjacent streets, as well as used spaces that were not utilized to their full potential. The first of those interventions was presented yesterday, June 14th, at the top of the Wooden building, one of Zagreb’s architectural bastions made by Drago Ibler.
Design District has teamed up with IKEA Croatia to reconstruct the rooftop of the famed building and re purpose it as an urban garden. The garden will be visitable during Design District, after which it will be left in the care of the tenants from Wooden building. This is the first of two urban gardens that will open its doors during the festival.
Design District Zagreb starts June 16th and lasts until June 19th.
Other spacial interventions will include:
DESERTED SPACES
Location: Vlaška street 87 (old military hospital)
Authors: Marija Ančić and Irena Frantal
Abandonment is a pressing topic of a modern society – leaving the neighboorhod, city, country… A conscious turning away from the spaces we occupied. Marija Ancic will be painting, and Irena Frantal writing on giant blank papers posted in the old abandoned hospital, making words and drawings a new tapestry for the run down walls. The tapestry will be filled during the festival by both artists and visitors, and will be turned into a art book at the end of the festival, with plaster, wall crumbs and all.
TEXTILE MANIPULATION
Location: Petrova 1, open air
Author: Martina Franić
Franić will manipulate with textile in space to create interesting visual and tactile experiences of said space. A textile spacial intervention is ideal for both interior and exterior spaces, with or without light interventions. With adjustable dimensions, made from durable technical materials, the instalation expresses the contrast between fine manual work and its imanent form, creating a constant tension that dictates the specific dynamics of the work and space it is made in.
ENDLESS MOVEMENTS
Location: Tomašićeva 3
Embossment structures of paper and carton sculptures made by Vanda Jarković will be transferred to the outside walls of local bars. The structures evokes arrays of endless interweaving of the concrete and the abstract, which represents a specific approach to interior design. The design manifests itself from accidental interactions of the sculpture, projections on it and space it is in.
CINEMA IN THE HOOD
Location: Corner of Vojnovićeva i Brešćenskog streets
Authors: Superstudio and Avvantura
Zagreb used to be home to a large network of cinemas – every neighborhood had its own, and only a few of these remain today. Cinemas as places of cultural cohesion of local communities are no longer. With a desire to change this for a while, Design District has set up a temporary Cinema in the Hood on the intersection of Vojnovićeva and Brešćenskog streets, on a lawn in front of an empty wall perfect for film projection. The program was devised in cooperation with Zadar’s Avvantura Festival – a series of feature films, documentaries and animated films concerning the subject of urban life.
Projections will be shown during the runtime of the festival, each day starting from 9 pm.
RE: AGAIN/ANEW/RETURN
Location: Vlaška street 87 (old military hospital)
Authors: Re: rated
The project RE: Again/Anew/Return is a product of a site specific design studio formed at the 3rd student workshop of architectural constructions and sustainable building held at Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb. The research of the studio was focused on the old military hospital in Vlaška street. The hospital complex is unseen on the city vistas, and therefor often forgotten, but with its location it gravitates to the urban zone around Martićeva street, complementing and rounding it up.
Tours will be given inside the complex, presenting four interventions (Actor, Prop, Backdrop, Gesture) that highlight its potentials trough intact and invasive maneuvers in it, trying to develop patterns for a participatory relationship between citizens and the old hospital.
PICTURE OF SOUND IN THE CITY
Location: Vlaška street 87
Curator: Evelina Turković
Picture of the Sound is a unique radio show in Croatian media space. Since 2009 contemporary visual artists under the editorial leadership of the curator Evelina Turković have been creating original work in the medium of sound, intended for radio broadcast. Picture of the Sound functions as a space of exhibition and production on air, giving this growing branch of contemporary art continuous media visibility. Several gallery exhibition-projects were realized as well, and as part of the Design District Zagreb festival, audio exhibits made by various artists will fill a space which is not primarily exhibitional. Visitors to the exhibition can freely explore the labyrinth of rooms of the entire building and, by following signs, discover the rooms in which a unique audio experience awaits them.
TEMPORARY DESIGN MUSEUM
Location: Ratkajev prolaz – Tomašićeva – Bulićeva
Curator: Koraljka Vlajo
Design: NJI3
Despite continuous promotion of the profession through several decades, the public still can’t recognize the classics of domestic and foreign design, nor their authors. Only a small part of Croatian design history is exhibited in museums. That’s why, during the festival, Design Museum is going out on the streets!
In collaboration with the curator Koraljka Vlajo, the empty street display windows of Martićeva and nearby streets will be used as squats for classics of Croatian industrial and graphic design. The city’s display windows are a fantastic means of communication with the new public for the Museum: it allows the exhibit to come out of an institution and onto the streets. In a way, this project returns design where it belongs: posters will once again find themselves on the streets for which they were made, while product designs will come back to the place they were first seen over forty years ago – shop display windows.
LAY-BY
Location: Martićeva street and Ratkajev prolaz
Authors: Grupa
Lay-by is a small urban equipment system intended for short respites in public space, designed especially for Design District Zagreb. The system is comprised of two sitting or lying modules, complete with another element — a plant — which can be combined in open spaces into various configurations. That allows it to make up independent units or be grouped with other module systems. Lay-by is made of firm OSB boards, partially wrapped in a thin layer of recycled material.
NUMEN/FOR USE: NET
Location: 100. brigade Hrvatske vojske park
Authors: Numen/For Use
For the first time in Zagreb, design collective Numen/For use (CRO/AUS) unleashes Net, one of their more famous and monumental site-specific installations, or temporary architectures. Net has previously been set up in Yokohama, Linz, Berlin, Moscow and elsewhere. Numen/Fhttps://justzagreb.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=8678&action=editor Use’s installation portfolio also includes the Tube, String, Tape, Tuft, N-light, and Field projects, actualized throughout Europe and the rest of the world. The installation in 100. brigade Hrvatske vojske park is open to visitors during the entire festival.
ROMANTIQUE NOIR
Location: Tomašićeva street 3
Author: Dora Filipović
Filipović’s objects are based on wired, symmetrically bent constructions and surfaces made of treads that adopt to a certain space. Installations have no specific purpose, they are light, breathable, and can have both a decorative and an utilitarian purpose in any given space. They are made by knitting, stitching and tying, and are used as light decorations in the context of the festival.
ANIMAL FRIENDLY CITY
Location: Bulićeva street
Authors: Penezić and Rogina / Fiktiv
Design District’s neighborhood was always an animal friendly space, so to make the streets an even friendlier space for pets, architects Vinko Penezić and Krešiir Rogina, with assistance from design studio Fiktiv, have decided to build a residential pet area in the district. Alongside Bulićeva street different housings will be placed for dogs, bugs, bats, birds, cats, hedgehogs and other city dwelling animals, with the entire project logistics, signalization and care for architectural specifics. The housings are constructed from recycled materials.
