Balkan revival

Optimists will detect evidence of a growing self-awareness among architects in the Balkan countries. One indication of this, apart from the architecture itself, is the growing number of architectural events. For example, Sofia recently hosted the first edition of an annual Sofia Architecture Week (SAW). Even though it lasted only two days, with international guests of the likes of Anne Lacaton, Rudy Ricciotti and Enrique Sobejano, plus local heroes like Peter Torniov and George Katov, it was a real happening. The SAW is comparable to Belgrade's successful Architecture Week, which began in 2006 and marked a turning point in Serbia after a period of isolation. Among the large Balkan countries, only Greece and Albania are not promoting themselves architecturally at the moment. Croatia, with the annual Zagreb architecture salons, already boasts a decades-long tradition, and since 2000 this has been reinforced by once every three years inviting a foreign expert to make a selection from recent Croatian architectural production. There is also an architecture festival in Dubrovnik.

When it comes to the smaller Balkan states, like Montenegro or Macedonia, one might wonder whether they have sufficient cultural mass to support any kind of architectural event, but no one should be too surprised if before too long a Sarajevo Architecture Week or Podgorica Architecture Day is announced. Slovenia and Romania are not strictly speaking Balkan countries, but here, too, there are periodical architecture events. The Slovenian city of Piran has been hosting the Days of Architecture since 1983, and this year Ljubljana held its fourth architecture biennale. In Romania the Biennale of Architecture in Bucharest
(BAB) is currently into its eighth edition.

All these events, with a bit of luck, have a threefold effect. They are a way of bringing the national architecture to public attention, of relating that work to what is being built elsewhere, and of letting foreign guests enrich local debates with international perspectives. As such, they are events that can contribute to what is of crucial importance to architectural culture: the acceleration of the interchange of ideas. That is something that is needed everywhere, and nowhere more than in the Balkans.