Dissonance as a concept of preserving the architectural heritage: Case study of the Belgrade Fairground

Belgrade Fairground, built in the 1930s, was the first urban complex designed according to modern principles and the first physical structure built in Belgrade on the left bank of the Sava. During its existence, the complex has undergone radical changes - from a fairground, through a concentration camp during World War II, an art colony in the post-war period, to its current state as a marginalized urban segment inhabited by the homeless, with uncontrolled commercial development . These transformations over time have resulted in the creation of numerous layers of identity, which, from a contemporary point of view, the space itself should testify to. The paper examines the transformations that have taken place in the space, and refers to the mutually opposed events that to some extent have hindered the recovery and development of the former Belgrade Fairground. The paper, in the form of a case study, analyzes the space by exploring the application of dissonance in preserving and revitalizing the architectural heritage, since the concept of dissonance is important for articulating opposing meanings and emphasizing the plurality of values. In order to shed light upon all the characteristic phases of the complex's existence, its morphological transformations and then its functional transformations were analyzed, followed by a presentation of how its social relationship with the Belgrade Fairground has been transformed. Accordingly, the ultimate goal was to find a way to manifest the diversity of the fairground's value and its re-perception as belonging to the urban space.

Ferenczy Károly kettős portréja Schönherr Antalról és Schönherr Gyuláról (1902)

In the autumn of 1902 Károly Ferenczy (1862–1917) painted a double portrait of Gyula Schönherr (1864–1908) and his father Antal Schönherr (†1905) in Nagybánya (today Baia Mare, Romania). Antal Schönherr was the police chief of the town, but his son had long been living in Budapest and pursued a serious career as a historian. After the onset of his career in the Archives of the Hungarian National Museum, he edited the periodical Turul rallying heraldic research, the periodical of book historical research Magyar Könyvszemle, the volumes of the Millennial Hungarian History, and he became the secretary of the National Inspectorate of Museums and Libraries set up in 1897. In 1896, at the age of 32, he became corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He supported the art colony of Nagybánya from its foundation. Károly Ferenczy was a friend of the Schönherr family in Nagybánya; he painted the double portrait as a present to Gyula Schönherr. Gyula Schönherr’s unpublished letters to his family reveal the process of portraiture (with references to the creative methods of the painter), the display and reception of the portrait in Budapest and its subsequent fate, the further contacts between Ferenczy and his painter friends and the Schönherr family. After Gyula Schönherr’s death the painting remained with the family, who donated it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1926, since when it has been in public collections.

The role of art colonies in local development through the example of Cered Art Colony

The current study's topic is the summary of the roles of art colonies in the local example. The theoretical basis of the study was given by the international scientific literature of art colonies and the role of culture in the life of settlements. The matter of research is relevant as an investigation based on a case study has not been made yet on this topic; moreover, it consists of important results for the professionals. On this basis, it can be determined that which factors affect positively the human and natural environment through an art colony. A further advantage of the study can conclude to the possible development ways of culture in the life of villages. The current research, regarding the future, is an ideal starting point to know the role of art in local (and regional) development. The main results of the case study are the tangible effects of the colony on the (natural and human) environment.

‘Something Stood Up in my Soul’: D. H. Lawrence in Taos

D.H. Lawrence, like many of the artists affiliated with Taos’ modern little art colony, was invited there by Mabel Dodge Luhan to ‘see and feel and wonder’ the ‘essence’ of Taos and ultimately put it ‘between the covers of a book.’ Although Lawrence was leery of the highbrow’s fascination with Taos’ unique peoples and places, he nonetheless formally incorporated elements of the ‘Taos mystique’ into the work he produced while living there. In the novelette St. Mawr, which sympathetically portrays the wanderings of a cosmopolitan American woman who flees the ghastly modern metropolis of London, Lawrence details her discovery of ‘something else’ in the vital and otherworldly wilds of New Mexico. Although his protagonist is certain that she has found a final resting place in the gorgeous country in and around Taos, Lawrence’s inconclusive ending intimates that even at the far peripheries of the modern world-system, she can’t and won’t escape its soul-sucking reaches.

Introduction: Modernism beyond the Metropolis

This introductory chapter offers a meditation on the spaces and places of modernist activity, positing that the metropolis is incidental, rather than essential, to the production of social and aesthetic modernism. In de-centring the metropolis, this chapter proposes that rural, peripheral spaces—those Raymond Williams memorably dismissed as ‘hinterlands’—should not only be recognized as essential to the development of modernist practices, but also may productively be recognized as part of a broad, modernist impulse toward ‘little’ and small-scale production in general. Working from Wallerstein’s conceptualisation of the networked, capitalist, modern world-system, this chapter makes the case for a more careful, site-specific examination of sub- or extra-urban places in which modernist practices emerged and coalesced and argues for seeing the modern little art colony as a representative modernist space. This chapter also offers a brief historical background to the development of the little art colony in the US, pointing to its nineteenth-century European antecedents as well as US-based utopian colonies (most notably that at Brook Farm), where the social practices associated with modernism fused with new and experimental arts-based practices.

Race, Place and Cultural Production in Carmel-by-the-Sea

Carmel-by-the-Sea, a newly developed artist’s village located on the central California coast, claimed for itself the title of the first year-round little art colony in the nation, one that boasted an elaborate infrastructure including an experimental community theatre, communist study groups, dada-inspired balls, ‘straight’ photography, music festivals, and literary work of all stripes. This chapter describes the strange blend of intellectuals, bohemians, socialists, and businessmen that made the Carmel colony exemplary and excavates the history of land development for the high-end tourism and real estate economy on the Monterey Peninsula at the end of the nineteenth century. As local newspaper articles, real estate brochures, and guidebooks reveal, this small village used emergent real estate development and cutting-edge marketing techniques to position itself as what Richard Florida might call a ‘creative city.’ These helped to promote the area to a predominantly white middle and upper class with the time and money to spend on tourism and leisure activities. This chapter fleshes out this economic history—one that importantly includes the racially targeted displacements of Chinese fishermen to make way for the artists and tourists—and connects it to a remarkable scene of modernist primitivism in Jack London’s 1913 novel, Valley of the Moon.

Building the Beloved Community in Provincetown

The ‘beloved community’ formed in Provincetown, Massachusetts in tandem with the high period of Greenwich Village’s bohemian ‘little renaissance.’ Once a prosperous whaling port, the village of Provincetown had been undergoing economic decline and a marked ethnic shift in the decades preceding its development as an art colony. By the turn of the century, its Catholic, Portuguese population overtook its ‘native’ Yankee one; at this time, the village amplified its reputation as home to two successful summer art schools and boosted its image within a booming regional tourist economy as a quaint, Cape Cod fishing village. A coterie of moderns from Greenwich Village discovered Provincetown’s relatively underdeveloped beaches and wharves and by the teens had made it their home base, at least during the summer season. This chapter core of this coterie lived out their bohemian identities by drinking copiously, dressing wildly, bathing naked, and forming the performing group that would come to be known as the Provincetown Players. This endeavour brought together individuals with a wide range of talents (as well as those with very little talent but a desire to participate in the fun) for theatrical events that served to consolidate—physically, in the space of the theatre, as well as ideologically, through the content of their plays—a distinctly modern and modernist ‘beloved community’ of friends, lovers, and associates at a distance from the metropolis.