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The backdrop of Serbian statehoods: Morphing faces of the National Assembly in Belgrade

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Tanja Damljanović Conley
Tanja Damljanović Conley*
Affiliation:
Architecture Program, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
*
∗Email: tanja.conley@earthlink.net
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Abstract

The mixture of neo-Renaissance and neo-Classical forms of the National Assembly in Belgrade was to become a visual paradigm of the democratic course and national sovereignty of the Kingdom of Serbia, affirming the status of this newly born nation-state in nineteenth-century Europe. Yet, the interpretation of political messages associated with the building's nineteenth-century architectural features is still in progress. The aim of this paper is to explore how the image of the National Assembly developed into the visual repository of different ideological connotations depending on the character of public events being organized, in the building or in the space in front of it either to support state ideologies or to fight against them. In addition to ideological settings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this research will focus on political meetings and public gatherings of the post-WWII state constructs, from the socialist federation of Marshal Tito to the more recent emanations of Serbian statehood. Along with analyzing the architectural forms of the building serving in different political contexts, this discussion will illuminate the appropriation of space in front of the building by examining the overall staging of public events which have become embedded in the contrasting layers of a collective memory associated with the same image: the National Assembly as the backdrop.

Keywords

collective memoryarchitectural iconographypublic events and architectureMarshal Tito and Historicism
Type
Special Section: Belgrade and Beyond: Reading the Nation through Serbian Cityscapes
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 64 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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