8/17/2019 Lesson 6 in Traditional Serbian Rural Architecture.odt - NeoOffice Writer

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Lesson 6 in Traditional Serbian Rural Architecture: How does "new"rural architecture looks like?

In the past 5 lessons of “Traditional Serbian Rural Architecture” I wrote aboutthe two basic styles of rural houses “brvnare” and “bondruke”, about thedifferent rural styles of the areasof Serbia, about the South Serbian Village,about the SerbianHomestead and about Serbian traditional interiors.(picture from "srpskekuce")Now I ask myself how to translate old rural architecture into new ruralarchitecture. If I'm planning to renovate an old rural house in Serbia, how will

the “new” or renovated rural house looks like?From the two extremes like to rebuild a building exactly like it was (with wallsof mud and straw) or to build something completely new that has noconnection with what it was before (as some of the "gastarbajterske kuce" Iwrote about on Balkan-Crew) lot of ideas come to my mind.

That's what people would probably expect: a crazy Migrant-worker-Villa. Unfortunately, often when somebody

renovates or build a house in a village, he wants to show off and impress with a huge dimension and with expensive

looking stuff. The only thing we knew was: we do not want that! (picture from skyscrapercity)

8/17/2019 Lesson 6 in Traditional Serbian Rural Architecture.odt - NeoOffice Writer

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So I collected my thoughts about traditional Serbian rural architecture:Rural Buildings and architecture is related to lifestyle, mentality, socialstructure of the people of the surroundings. If in the past houses were built with just what the area offered, today we havea waste choice of materials and products. If in the past, several generationswere living in form of a “zadruga” (clan) in the same building, now there is

rather one generation with occasionally a parent or so in the house. If in thepast several men organized the outdoor and several women were organizingthe household, now it's rather one couple doing the whole. Even if thementality stayed, the lifestyle and social structures changed from the past, thearchitecture can not be exactly the same today as it used to be.It's important not to erase the history from an existing house. History hasinfluenced Serbian tradition a few times, often in a violent way. So it itsnational style should be preserved. It would be wrong to create a neutral style(a globalized style) or to build a new house that could stand anywhere in theworld (sometimes this neutral style can be the greatest threat of identity of 

people).

 A fantastic old house from Tihomir's blog

Modern technologies give new possibilities of the use of materials or

gives new construction solution. 

So it was a wish to work with new but natural materials, to fulfill perfectly allthe functions that the house has to accomplish, without using experimentaland artificial materials, that nobody knows how long they're going to last.However all the new structures should blend well with the old and with thefound surrounding. The trick is to find the balance between the new design andthe old structure.

8/17/2019 Lesson 6 in Traditional Serbian Rural Architecture.odt - NeoOffice Writer

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Where a newer building blend well with the traditional forms (picture from flickr )

The characteristics of rural architecture can be preserved by copyingthe external characteristics of the existing surrounding buildings. However, the new building must represent the interests, the needs and thehabits of the future users. We can see it as a newer content put in antraditional form.Architecture is always a dialogue with the surrounding. If we pay attention towhat we discover in the surrounding, we easily find answers to the questionswhich style or which architectural language works better when we start to workon an existing house.

 A building that blends with the surrounding (picture from flickr )

 

What's always been there blends better with the surrounding than a completenew language of forms and patterns. Keeping those ideas in mind I started to jot down sketches for the house

transformation........