architect DInko Kovačić
project The TDR Commercial and Distribution Centre, Split, Croatia
written by Ante Nikša Bilić

 

Architects create illusions, however constrained they are by the user’s knowledge, by function and by crowded programmes of insatiable transitional capital. The constraints are in some way the scaffolding of the whole event or, better still, decision. Supported by many geometric meanings and available tools of architectural vocabulary (depending on the time, space, existence and sensibility) the effects of the decision are quite the contrary.

 

This is clearly confirmed in this building. It is irrelevant to its double meaning whether the building is treated as a penguin skin or a lapidary bastion. How does one set up the diagonals of the present time when warehouse culture is so normal? Still, we are clever enough to identify a gallery (although today pictures have lost their sense of illusion), and rush about the periphery in search of a new Jesus Christ residing in corporate identity. We bow before the automatic door of the distribution centre and the portico of the corporation, like geese from the convent of the sisters of mercy. We are, after all, migrating birds.