The architect Ante Rožić is a truly Mediterranean architect who is closely connected to nature and the environment, in which he still lives and works today. All his projects have been built in the Dalmatia area, or more specifically, in the town of Makarska. In that specific area, the inhabitants have always seen him as their local architect.

From the 1960s onward, this environment, marked by the calm sea horizon and the monumental vertical of Mount Biokovo, strongly influenced his professional development and his response to the architectural and urban design issues placed before him time and time again.

Faced with ever new challenges, Ante Rožić has developed his own architectural language, creating a distinctive and unique architecture that speaks the dialect of the locality in which he works.

By using markedly simple, traditional architectural factors, such as light, the distribution of light through space, spatial distribution of volume, placement of volume in space, and self-restraint in expression and material, he is able to unite the local natural and built phenomena, and to interpret them in a contemporary manner, thus achieving a consistent spatial whole.

ORIS: In an issue of the magazine Čovjek i Prostor (Man and Space) from 1974, Andrija Mutnjaković characterizes you as a passionate researcher of regional interpretations of contemporary architecture. You came to Makarska as a young architect after you graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in 1959.

Rožić: I came because the architect Moravec invited me. So I came to Investprojekt, which was then called Suradnik, and I worked there until I had to do my military service. One day we went to Brela, we stayed there for ten days, Matija Salaj, Drago Moravec and I. There we studied the area of ​​Brela in terms of town planning. Then I went into the army and came back, again to Makarska. We went around Brela, studied what we could do for the tourist development of the area, just the way it should be done, and back then it was actually possible. Today, investors would plague us with efficiency and maximum utilization of plot area, etc. Then, architects were allowed a certain freedom that is now difficult to achieve. It appealed to me, and so I stayed in Makarska. But I come from Sveti Juraj, 8 km south of Senj.