Croatian architecture now

The gaunt cranes of the Uljanik shipyard, located on a small island right opposite Pula’s town centre, have always been one of the Istrian town’s visual trademarks –almost as skyline-defining as the arched bulk of the first-century Roman Amphitheatre nearby.

In 2014, lighting designer Dean Skira conceived a bold son-et-lumière light show that would bathe the cranes in a wash of changing colour, creating a stately kinetic show that produces dramatic reflections in the water below. The performance takes place after nightfall, on the hour and lasts about 15 minutes.

Uljanik is still a working shipyard, and there’s something stately and dignified about this tribute to shipbuilders past and present.   

New-York educated, Pula-based Skira numerous projects for commercial clients in Croatia, Slovenia and Italy. Among other projects, he has designed the interior and exterior lighting for the Hotel Bellevue in Mali Lošinj, for Hotel Lone in Rovinj (see below) and the Hotel Maestral in Novigrad.

Croatia has seen plenty in the way of new hotels over the past 20 years but few have enjoyed the kind of media fanfare generated by Rovinj’s Hotel Lone. Opened in summer 2011, this seven-layer wedding-cake-cum-ocean-liner of a building is a headline-grabber whichever way you look at it as a state-of-the-art spa retreat, a bold piece of architecture or an exemplary exercise in interior design.

The Lone is also remarkable in that it was conceived right from the outset as a specifically Croatian showpiece: the building itself was entrusted to award-winning Zagreb architects 3LHD, who then engaged a team of local designers and artists to handle the interior details. Numen/For Use provided their characteristically sleek-but-solid furniture; fashion designers I-GLE got to grips with the staff uniforms and wall hangings, and contemporary artists Ivana Franke and Silvio Vujičić were commissioned to produce site-specific works.

Zagreb agency Bruketa&Žinić designed a logo for the hotel which assumes different shapes on different documents – thereby subverting the whole idea of a logo as something permanent and instantly recognisable. As a hip who’s who of contemporary Croatia, the country couldn’t have asked for a better advertisement.

Located in a thoroughly renovated former department store, this bold exercise in contemporary Croatian design muscled its way into the media limelight almost immediately upon opening in August 2010. The work of designer Damir Gamulin Gamba and Studio Up architects Lea Pelivan and Toma Plejić, Goli & Bosi features minimalist lemon-yellow public spaces and pristine white sleeping units. Texts describing important events and personalities from Split history are laid out on the floors, the typography and layout betraying futurist and constructivist influences. Gamulin’s elegant pictograms point the way to showers, toilets and lockers. All in all, it’s a bold exercise in how not to run with the crowd, and has become something of a one-off contemporary classic as a result.

Opened in May 2013, this is one of the most stunning sacral buildings in south-eastern Europe, and a signpost towards the social architecture of the future. The central concept of grey-plated curvy surfaces was outlined by Dušan Džamonija (1928-2009), the abstract sculptor whose rough-textured, rust-coloured orbs and hemispheres can be seen in parks and sculpture collections throughout Croatia – Darko Vlahović and Branko Vučinović were the architects who wrestled with its fulfilment.

Both arrestingly brutalist and swoon-inducingly organic at the same time, the mosque takes the form of a fractured dome constructed of several interlocking segments, as if an enormous chocolate orange has been taken apart and reassembled in the wrong order. The free-standing minaret looks like a constructivist prong spiraled with the gills of a fish; the plateau in front of the mosque offers a splendid panorama of the Adriatic. ‘Most beautiful mosque in Europe’ is what the media said when it opened, and they’re probably right. It’s certainly a fitting final tribute to Džamonija, who died before seeing its completion.