Seismic Zagreb - and The Question of ‘Herstel’

"To distinguish a place, we tend to think in terms of a local condition, prompting a system of shared beliefs that we interpret as identity. The ‘local’ quickly becomes a byword for a kind of uniqueness, a sum total of qualities that we want to protect or emphasize when facing delicate situations of preservation, restoration or reconstruction.

The local regularly manifests itself in relationship to its opposite — the ‘foreign’. Counter-intuitively perhaps, the import of the foreign element can intensify the local condition by making it suddenly visible to the locals.The appropriation of the foreign changes the local by enabling the creation of something new — the novelty, thereafter, is absorbed and becomes part of the local."

In collaboration with Igor Sladoljev.

This article is originally published in Inflection: Journal of the Melbourne School of Design, Volume 08 (2021).

To read the full article, please purchase a digital flipbook or order a print copy of Inflection here.