Library, Kosovo

The fact that the National Library by Andrija Mutnjakovic (b. 1929) still looks the way it did a quarter of a century ago is a miracle in the circumstances. Compared with the 1982 photograph that hangs in the architect's studio in Zagreb, there are at most a few more apartment buildings in the background. The library, with its 73 small domes, was supposed to be the focal point of a complex of university buildings, but in an area where daily life during the 1980s came more and more to resemble a civil war, nothing came of these plans. Mutnjakovic's masterwork stands in a sandy, litter-strewn expanse where stray dogs sleep in the tall grass. The surroundings merely serve to strengthen the overwhelming effect of the building, an architectural oasis in a concrete wasteland.

When Mutnjakovic was commissioned to design a library for the Yugoslavian province, the tension between Albanian and Serbian Kosovars was already palpable. Looking for a unifying symbol, he came up with the cube and the dome, common features of the Ottoman and Byzantine architectural styles that define the appearance of the region. When they looked at their library, Kosovars would be able to recognize both the Turkish baths in Prizren and the Orthodox patriarchate in Pec. From above, the library looks like a motley cluster of cubes, varying in size and height, rather like a village. The domes supply even, natural light to the reading rooms. The cube shape contributes to the compactness and the sense of protection, which is further reinforced by the aluminium net of hexagons that is draped over the building.

At the opening in 1982, reactions from Serbian politicians were downright hostile, Mutnjakovic recalls. A quarter of a century and a civil war later, the rumour that the domes refer to the 'plis', the traditional egg-shaped Albanian head covering, is still doing the rounds, but now in the other camp and with a positive spin. Equally persistent is the misapprehension that the library was originally designed as a palace for a Kuwaiti sheik. It recently turned up in a new travel guide for the area. Whereas Mutnjakovic's building was actually intended as an 'authentic national architectural expression' – as the architect put it in the original building plan. His regionalism was a reaction to the impersonality of the International Style and an attempt to combine functionalism with regional traditions.

'Rural architecture with modern means,' is how he describes it now, a lesson he learned from Yugoslav predecessors like Nikola Dobrovic (1891-1969), whose concrete coastal villas have Dalmatian roots, and his immediate teacher, Drago Ibler (1894-1964), CIAM member and founder of the Zemlja (The Land) movement. In the 'Sandzjak' area, in the south of Serbia, where there was a comparable clash between Christian and Islamic cultures, Yugoslavian architects tried the same approach of using architecture as an agent of unification. Mutnjakovic's library was never able to fulfil that function. The ethnic tensions between Serbs (who were in charge) and the Albanians (who were numerically in the majority) ended in war. By the time NATO intervened in 1999, Mutnjakovic's library had become the commando headquarters of the Serbian army. Albanian students had already been denied entrance to the building years earlier. The library's best time is still to come. In postwar Kosovo, where Albanian Kosovars call the shots, the building would have little competition in any race to become the new icon of the nation-in-the-making.