This blog just like everything one does must have a purpose. If educational, in order to be effective in an ocean of resources, posts and social media, it needs to clearly state its mission.
To get there, first of all, this blog is still on probation. Not just by the contemporan reader (that actually goes without saying), but by myself. I am giving this project a chance to take off and thus allow it to take a big portion of my energy and passion. I am also learning while posting, I am growing alongside this blog. Some of these things are part of my knowledge spiral (Explore -> Understand -> Create -> Explore -> …) and as they start making sense, I will add the conclusions here. Given the vast coverage, this will take years before it gets coherent and starts making a point. The blog will go live with a delay that will allow it to add enough flesh to the bones, rather than starting from a blank website.
Goal: Create a big picture and a coherent story of the Balkans architecture. Track architectural influences in both the vernacular architecture, as well as in the civil architecture of the big cities. As such, the posts will focus on the following framework of categories that will eventually coalesce into a (not the) holistic view of Balkans architecture history:
- Building examples
- Analyze various building types across Balkans.
- Show photos of architectural details.
- Draw analogies, follow influences of a specific building.
- Building types
- Different from the previous point, in the sense that instead of picking a specific example, we pick an archetype that manifests across multiple buildings in a packed region.
- We analyze the archetype and then we show different examples.
- Architects
- Follow on the footsteps of the relevant architects.
- Understand their mindset, their drama, their achievements, their disappointments.
- Compilations of architectural details
- Compilation of certain elements that are common across multiple buildings or regions (e.g. rooftiles, handrails, finials, windows etc.)
- Show commonalities, particularities, explain.
- Architectural currents
- Follow one or several architecural types and show its history.
- Go through the typical life of a current: avantgarde, mature phase, decay and follow its struggle from embryo (anchored in national history and identity) through manierism and the expression crisis.
- Influences
- Track certain sources of influence across multiple building types or building examples.
- Overview
- Every now and then, we will lay back and see the big picture through diagrams and examples.
- This corresponds to the ”Understanding” stage of the knowledge spiral.
sahnisi 