STRATEGIES OF NEW SERBIAN CHURCH ARCHITECTURE (1990-2012) AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON DIRECT ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

In new Serbian Church architecture, developed in the mainstream (1990-2012), three main conceptual strategies are evidently prevalent: the mimetic-monumentalist strategy (the most common and most popular), a more free middle line (supported by the liberal intelectual public, and by formalist constraints of distanced builders as well) and, lastly, a radically innovative strategy, distant from tradition and the conventional language of sacral architecture. Within the first strategy, the ideological precondition of the Church authority for nationally recognizable temples is consistantly respected, while the same request is being somewhat neglected within the second and third strategy, in favour of more original postmodern interpretations. Although due attention is declaratively paid to the urban integration of new churches in the immediate environment, the very practice is burdened by improvisations and ignorance, and even by impermissible disinterest for the basic urban planning principles. Author’s paroxysm of monologically focused builders, encouraged by the clergy’s megalomania, mainly results in urbanistically inappropriate and degradative solutions. Insufficient care is dedicated to landscape positioning of new temples and to the terms of perceiving them from important communicational and visual checkpoints. Hence the few critics of such the situation have justafiably concluded that the importance of temples in visual representation of a city is not understood in contemporary Serbian architecture. With the passage of time and by establishing the adequate historical distance, the conclusions regarding the influence of contemporary Orthodox architectural strategies on the environmental development in Serbia, will be considerably more complete. Multidisciplinary considerations of individual examples of that civilizational complex process will also, in more detail, highlight its general and controversial course.