Unconcealed Camouflage

architects Marjeta Černe & Bor Ivačič
project Renewal of Hall 10 in the BTC City Shopping Centre, Ljubljana, Slovenia
written by Matevž Čelik

 

Many of the postulates found in the famous treatise Generic city by Koolhaas may be used to annotate the Ljubljana phenomenon of the BTC City. This shopping centre, which has developed more or less spontaneously (from a town planning standpoint) covering 250,000 m2 of warehouses used for the distribution of products that used to arrive in Yugoslavia from Western Europe, is probably the most generic part of Slovenia and one of the most flamboyant showcases of the Slovenian transitional economy. If we speculate a little, the Generic City appears to be an incomplete technical report in relation to the project of BTC City. Still, we could easily add a few more “psalms” - in one of them, for example, we could describe a generic city as a corporation, its stocks being high and the brokers in financial centres all over the world fighting for them.