Izvorni znanstveni članak
ALVAR AALTO - COMPETITION PROJECT FOR HOSPITAL IN ZAGREB 1930-31
Darija Radović Mahečić
Sažetak
Several well-known foreign architects visited Zagreb in the period between the two world wars. In 1922 Adolf Loos participated in the competition for the Hotel Esplanade, Peter Behrens re-designed the corner building on the main square in Zagreb (Juritiševa 1) in 1927-28 and the Italian Marcello Piacentini built a new highrise on the same square (Jelavić square 3). The French pavilion at the old Zagreb Fair grounds in Savska cesta was constructed in 1936 by Robert Camelot and a French architect, quite popular at the time, Bernard Lafaille. The long awaited "masterplan" of Zagreb was the subject of another international competition in 1930-31. Among the fifteen members of the jury there were Germans and Czechs, while the competitors included the wellknown town planner Paul Bonnatz from Stuttgart. However, most of the European colleagues versed in the history of modern architecture are today aware of the international competition for a memorial and a clinical hospital at Šalata published in 1930 and concluded in 1931. This awareness unfortunately does not indicate any special interest in modem Croatian architecture or knowledge about the exceptional but unrealized project of Ernest Weissmann who was awarded one of the first prizes. It derives from the fact that a only a few years later one of the competitors who then remained without a prize gained a vast reputation: it was Alvar Aalto (1898-1976). Thanks to their publication in the book Problems of Contemporary Architecture (1932) some of the projects for that competition are known to us today, e.g. those of Stjepan Planić, Mijo Hečimović, Zdenko Strižić and Ernest Weissmann each represented with a couple of illustrations. Under the code of the Zagreb competition the Alvar Aalto Foundation in Helsinki has as many as 259 drawings and plans. The competition stipulated that the buildings of each of the two planned hospitals should function as separate units, while sharing the administrative building, the institutes of radiology, radio and hydrotherapy, as well as household and utility buildings: boiler room, washing rooms, kitchen as well as living quarters for doctors and nurses, etc. Reading Aalto's description of his own competition project filed under the code name SUD, we realize that it shares many elements with the proposals of Croatian architects. Some of them are:
- The physical and psychic well-being of patients derived from their access to light, fresh air and the surrounding grounds.
- Functioning of the interior and optimum placement of technical departmenmts
- Outside functions and communication; good connections between pavilions (tunnels) and a possibility of their extension in the future.
His main objective was "to create a complex enclosed by a park in which individual buildings are both connected and separate, constituting one unique natural crown placed on the hill overlooking the city". Alto also planned to erect a score of separate buildings on the hillside assuring both their exposure to the sun and the necessary inner cohesion of the entire complex. In his plan the location where patients checked in, the out-door clinics and hospital wards are incorporated into one large central hospital building enclosing pleasant garden grounds. In Aalto's plan the memorial hospital is situated to the south, and the pavilions of the clinical hospital provided with spatious clinical arnphitheatres lie to the north of the central building. The two-story patients' pavilions are scattered in the greenery. Aalto made a clear distinction between the zones to be used by patients from those inhabited by the hospital personnel, each with their own recreational zones and living quarters. Like Hečimović, Aalto insists on the exclusively southern orientation of the patients' rooms. One of the most outstanding aspects of this project is related to Aalto's technically original system of windows. He designed windows which intensified the access of light into the depth of the room by letting the windows climb partly onto the ceiling area. He shows special care for the vertical and horizontal communication of the inmates achieved through an original system of "bridges" and undeground passages. It is interesting to read some of the interpretations of Aalto's youthful Zagreb competition project within the framework of his entire oeuvre, especially as he was one of the greatest individualists of modem architecture. In the monographs dedicated to Aalto the project for the 1930-31 Zagreb competition is usually just listed in the more extensive bibliographies, but only rarely analyzed and illustrated. One should be aware, of course, that after the 1920s his studio produced more than three hundred buildings and projects. It is interesting to note, however, that his project for the Zagreb hospital is singled out as the first of his projects in which Alto outlined the amphitheatrical arrangement which later became one of his trademarks. Analyzing this project, those versed in his entire output find that it is one of the most inventive projects of the period just preceding his rise to fame, anticipating a series of themes and solutions which developed and reached their culmination in his subsequent projects.
Ključne riječi
Hrčak ID:
151197
URI
Datum izdavanja:
15.12.1995.
Posjeta: 1.169 *