The Digitalization of Reality: Penezić & Rogina's Architecture

IT REVOLUTION IN ARCHITETTURA
series edited by Antonino Saggio
EDIL STAMPA
editrice dell’ANCE
SCIENTIFIC BOARD
Luca Galofaro
Anna Giorgi
Domizia Mandolesi
Giuseppe Nannerini
COVER
Dig-It-All Re-Wall-ution Suit
(Mao where did it all go wrong?)
PHOTO CREDITS
Miljenko Bernfest (p. 55 bottom)
Tomislav Cuveljak (p. 4)
Damir Fabijanic (pp. 57, 59 bottom, 60, 61, 64, 65, 74-77, 78 bottom)
Damil Kalogjera (pp. 80, 81)
Mario Kristofic (p. 12 bottom)
Stanko Vrtovec (pp. 18 top, 19 top, 23 bottom, 24 top, 25 bottom,
41, 42, 50 top, 51 bottom, 59 top)
All other photos are by Penezić & Rogina
Edilstampa srl
Via Guattani, 24
00161 Roma
tel. 0684567403
fax 0644232981
www.edilstampa.ance.it
Rome, october 2007

Nigel Whiteley
Penezić & Rogina

Digitalization of reality
Vinko Penezić (right)
and Krešimir Rogina (left)
Projects which are mentioned but not included in this

book, can be seen at www.penezic-rogina.com
The Construction of the New Reality
preface by Antonino Saggio
The work of Penezić & Rogina has marked important stages over
the past twenty years. As thirty-year-olds, they established
themselves at the Shinkenchiku competition, possibly the most
important instance of international competition for new
architecture. In 1984 they won the first prize with a project based
on – we were at the very beginnings – a re-interpretation of the
layer concept used in the Diocletian’s Palace. In a cultural climate
permeated by historicism, and with Aldo Rossi among the judges,
the two Croatian architects demonstrated that history need not
necessarily mean historicism, that it could be reflected on the
contemporary times and combined with the past by way of a logic
that is not academic, and above all, by using new means. In the
following years they presented interesting work, such as the
compound of bathing facilities on the Sava river and they lived
through the War in Croatia. Some projects on redecorations and
interior design reflected such themes, for example, “The Wall”
which asserts a new, digital sensibility, being at the same time a
reinterpretation of the conflicts of the early nineties of the 20th
century. Successively, they have established themselves through
honorable mentions, awards and significant works in Croatia. In
the year 2000 they achieved one of the most significant installation
at the Biennale of Venezia. It is well known that this Biennale,
under the slogan Less Aesthetics More Ethics, constituted a
fundamental initiative towards the field of digital sensibility.
On this occasion Penezić & Rogina created a series of
interconnected ambients which put the visitor into contact with
architecture by way of changeable levels of perception, ranging
from traditional ones to those characteristic of the new sensory
and tactile research. Soon after, they finished “The Dry Garden”
in Zagreb: a space for relaxation and gathering inside a
pharmaceutical research building. The garden spans the digital
sensibility with a treatment of space with transparent screens
which contain water and light that is interactively modified. The
presence of plant elements and furniture recalls a culture of
oriental provenance.
Their masterpiece is the Block 21° edifice, done in Vukovar. In the
6 PREFACE BY ANTONINO SAGGIO
demanding program of residential public construction, Penezić &

Rogina have designed a work of immense concentration and
harrowing presence. They reveal that it is possible to face the crises
in architecture (in this case, the famous “also” can be achieved by
showing numerous victims and an enormous destruction that
Vukovar suffered during the 1991-1995 war).
Today they are in a happy phase. They have just finished a
beautiful nursery school in Zagreb; they have been winning
competitions, and they have many edifices in the works, some of
which are published here. Now, we come to this book and its
conception which is connected to a very particular occasion and a
very particular place. A dozen of professional course participants,
Penezić & Rogina, Nigel Whiteley and myself, spent a week with
Cedric Price in an Istrian village of Grožnjan. This was in August
of 2005. Those familiar with dates and events will notice that
Cedric Price (1934-2003) had already passed away two years
before. But in reality, Price was not dead at all, he was actually
there with us in all the things we were doing and saying: in the
memories of his genius and his humour, in the stories of the places
he had visited and of the things he had said in every nook of
Grožnjan, where he held a seminar with our architects 15 years
ago. The intellectual and personal rapport between Penezić &
Rogina and Cedric Price was very intense. It is a well known fact
that Price was an architect sui generis. In the Sixties, he was
already working at an idea of the decline of architecture as it was
commonly understood. He demanded supremacy of technology,
not in the spectacular dimension of high tech, but rather in that of
the social advancement, of liberation and of creative solutions to
difficult cases. He strongly influenced the thought of many
architects, among them Penezić & Rogina who, having met him at
the end of the eighties, have always turned to him as to a grand
maestro and a friend. Nigel Whiteley is a professor of theory and
architectural history and a scholar of both the international and
British architectural scene, spurned on by the new phenomena of
mass society. He authored some well-known volumes on pop and
architecture and was a natural mediator between the experiences
with Price and the new digital field that has been opening up. I
myself was at Grožnjan because Vinko and Krešimir were friends
of the IT Revolution in Architecture book series; they have been
appreciative of it since its conception, they have promoted and
PENEZIC´ & ROGINA. DIGITALIZATION OF REALITY 7
reviewed it in Croatia; they have always emphasized the positive

effect that the themes, tackled in the book series, have exercised
on the development of the new generations of architects.
At the end of that week, after the seminar had finished, I
remained a Grožnjan to carefully reread a trilogy of books
dedicated to their work (edited by Cip Zagreb) and the essay
Nigel himself had written for it. And I realized that the book you
hold in your hands “absolutely” had to be published. To
understand why I say “absolutely”, the difference of the points of
view between Whiteley and myself has to be explained. This book
series is based on a Kuhnian idea on the affirmation of diverse
scientific revolutions and on the change in the paradigm that they
impose. I am convinced that we are in a historic phase, a phase of
Information, which demands the formulation of an idea of
architecture that is completely different than the one based on the
industrial and mechanical paradigm of Functionalism. The name
itself – information “revolution” – recalls this conviction. The text
by Nigel Whiteley begins from a point of view that is rather
different. Following certain ideas of Reyner Banham (on which he
wrote a seminal book), Nigel believes in the idea of change, but
based on “continuity” rather than on leaps. In fact, he names the
various technological phases the first, second, third and fourth
“age of the machine”. There is, therefore, a quite sensible
distinction here between reflection on the necessity of the change
of paradigm and this, his way of thinking. It is no accident that one
is based on a series of opposing pairs (new objectivity/new
subjectivity is the more known) while that of Nigel has the
formula of “and/and” at its centre. This premise is necessary to
explain how Nigel’s approach might be particularly useful in
tackling the specific case of Penezić & Rogina and in illuminating
their work. In fact, while it is true that cultural commitment can
(and in my opinion must) indicate with clarity the imposition of
the change of paradigm, it is also true that in the reality of working
on projects, especially in the reality of the one doing the
construction, things are not so imperative. The various aspects of
reality are combined not with oppositions, but frequently with
insertions, superimpositions, and nuances. It is from these
insertions and intersections that the changing, evolving, open
architecture derives its power, not always in leaps, but also via
continuous research and continuous examination. This is why
8 PREFACE BY ANTONINO SAGGIO
Nigel’s text is truly illuminating, as is the key provided at the end,

together with Kengo Kuma, when it is noted that the Croatian
architects position reality by means of a process of digitalization
that enables incorporation of elements in an always new working
hypotheses. In the course of the entire book, Nigel Whiteley
explains how different realities, encountered by the Croatian
architects (the reality of the world in “Pop and Change”, the
reality of relations between “Modernism and Continuity” and the
vanguards of the 20th century, the reality that regards “Beyond
Time and Traditional Space” and the reality which launches itself
into “Real Space and Time”) are combined in the process of the
transformation into architecture. Within this context, Penezić &
Rogina can be seen as a part of that group of experimental
architects of IT Revolution in Architecture (such as Kas
Oosterhuis, Makoto Sei Watanabe, Gianni Ranaulo o Patrik
Schumacher who have already published in the book series), on
the other hand, they can be considered as one of the international
architecture studies that are bringing about, with intense
concreteness, force and interest, the new research on the
Information Technology in the construction of reality.
Dig-It-All Re-Wall-ution Suit

(Mao where is all went
wrong?).
Introduction
“Architecture is no longer simply the play of masses in light. It now embraces
the play of digital information in space. Datasupermarket: infoscapes >
mediascapes > e-scapes > are emerging as electronic tents for modern nomads
and hypertextual space surfers. In this self-contained nature, the form is given
by a flow of instantaneous relations. The ever-changing constellations and
configurations of desired data and media produce a total digital experience. A
hypermultimedia ‘building’ offers information and knowledge through a
personalised ambience and ‘natural’ environment. The datascape is neither
analogue (like a library), nor analogue-digital (like a mediateque): it is digital,
highly personalised tactile-corporeal simulacrum – an electronic environment
where bits replace bricks, information replaces mortar, interfaces replace
walls... compromising the ritual (physical anchors - atavistic remains) and the
virtual (cyber-matrix - transformational algorithms) part of the public/social
event. One can change digital constellations and configurations by desiring
media and data, creating an environment ‘constructed’ totally by information
itself updated in the time. The datascapes conditioning mutations are morph
jungles, liquid lounges, chill-out kaleidoscopes, defragmentation oases,
reality-show para-sites, blur malls, electronic shadows, pierced voids...”.
(Penezić & Rogina, 2003)
Penezić & Rogina are IT enthusiasts, but they are not merely
architects who create a digital architecture. They are a partnership
that creates architecture for the digital age. The distinction is an
important one, and accounts for the richness of their buildings
and designs. Those who create a specifically digital architecture
run the risk of working within conventions and assumptions that,
however apparently up-to-date and even cutting edge, can also
delimit and constrain possibilities. But those who are committed
not only to a full engagement with digital architecture but also
refresh the tradition of architecture as we have conventionally
(and unconventionally) recognised it, can achieve a complexity
and multivalence which is, in fact, a deeper and more profound
expression of the realities of the digital age in which we live.
It is important to avoid a new version of technological
determinism that repeats the mistake so frequently made in the
1920s and 30s, of defining innovation, quality and experience
solely in terms of the latest technological turn of events. This
linearism will inevitably reduce the levels of interconnectivity and
interactivity that range through the multiple realities – amongst
them digital and corporeal – that we daily inhabit. One of the
10 NIGEL WHITELEY
strengths of Penezić & Rogina’s architecture is that their

undoubted enthusiasm for IT does not blinker them to other types
of reality, but is integrated into their thinking in a fundamental
way rather than as either a particular mode of working or a
stylistic mannerism. In some projects, the digital predominates, in
others it is in the background. In so doing it mirrors life and
facilitates diversity, change and open-endedness. Indeed, what is,
arguably, distinctive about Penezić & Rogina’s work is the way in
which different realities inter-relate or come to the fore in a
shifting, stimulating set of possibilities and experiences.
This essay gives special attention to Penezić & Rogina’s
enthusiasm for IT, but it does not do so at the expense of a wider
understanding of their work and the different approaches that
characterise their work. I have divided their work into four
“Realities”, with each representing something like a value system.
This avoids a simply chronological approach that describes one
project after another, and instead attempts to place a discussion of
their work in the context of socio-cultural and historical values.
The Realities are themselves not simply chronological and they
are certainly not exclusive and self-contained, but overlap and
interrelate in time and in space.
The key point is that we live in a world of multiple Realities, and
one of the problems we have to cope with is how we deal with this
kind of multiplicity both in our personal and professional lives. A
way out is to live by one Reality and thus a singular set of values.
But the simplicity and consistency of this approach is at the
expense of the complexity and pluralism that can make life both
difficult to comprehend – and contradictory – but infinitely rich.
What fascinates me about Penezić & Rogina’s practice is that they
have come to terms with different Realities, and they have found
a way of, architecturally, making them not only co-exist, but
flourish. Penezić & Rogina’s architecture convinces me of a sense
of possibilities in keeping with the Realities in which we live.
(Most of the quotes in this essay come from the trilogy of books
published about their work: Tokyo Works (1999),
NonCompletions (2001), and Reality Check (2003); their website
http://www.penezic-rogina.com; or meetings and correspondence
with the architects).
Reality 1: Pop and Change
From the time of their enrolment in the Faculty of Architecture in
Zagreb in 1977, Penezić & Rogina’s thinking about architecture
began to germinate. But only some of the thinking was derived
from their formal architectural education. Much came from life
and the experience of what it was to be young and optimistic in a
Central European Socialist society increasingly influenced by
Western capitalist and consumerist cultural values. 1977, in
Britain, was the summer of Punk, a raw music of the street without
respect or sentiment. Punk was often interpreted as a kind of neo-
nihilism expressing the “blank generation’s” disillusionment with
bourgeois, consumer society. Yet, in retrospect, we can see that it
is related to the Pop culture of the previous era by its youthfulness
and directness. It had emerged in 1976, ten years after the High
Pop year of 1966, the year, for example, of the stylishness of the
Beatles, the dandyism of the Kinks, and the ebullience of the
Rolling Stones. In 1966, the talk was of “Swinging London”, the
capital of youth culture and consciousness incorporating not only
music, but fashion, graphics, art, furniture, and, interiors such as
boutiques and clubs.
There are three points to note about Penezić & Rogina here. First,
that they are of a generation to whom Pop was a vital and
authentic expression. As Pop became easier to gain access to in
the former Yugoslavia in the 1970s, music from the 1960s and
1970s created an essential ingredient in young people’s lives.
Second, Pop was not just “harmless entertainment” or even, as far
as the establishment was concerned, harmful entertainment, but
represented a way of life, and a set of beliefs and values. Pop was
about immediacy, impact, appearance and fashionableness. It
expressed optimism, energy, dynamism, change and hedonism,
and was the opposite of predictability, standardisation, good
manners, restraint and understatement. Unlike Socialism, with its
promise of modest well-being in the future, Pop’s appeal was the
sense of everything here and now and in abundance. In the
context of the paternalistic Socialism of Central Europe and the
Eastern Bloc, a commitment to Pop culture was, in effect, a
political act, because it represented a belief in a different and
radical version of society. Third, it was international and supra-
political, linked across space and time by age and attitude, rather
12 NIGEL WHITELEY
ONLY THE MOST VITAL STRUCTURES CAN ACCEPT DESTRUCTION AS A CREATIVE ACT
A Style For The Year 2001, Shinkenchiku competition - first place 1984.
Judges: Fumihiko Maki, Hiroshi Hara, Aldo Rossi
A Style for the Year 2001 will not be a style in the literal sense of the word.
There will be a further development on the typological level. Some architectural types
will remain the same and some will develop or change. Advanced technology will be an
obedient servant which will open new possibilities but will not dominate.
The relationship between urbanity and individual buildings will assume new qualities.
A building will be considered as a small town and a town as a big building.
This is also the historical experience of Diocletian’s palace, an emperor’s palace
transformed into a town.
than by place and custom. One of its major spiritual homes was
England, and this in great part accounts for Penezic & Rogina’s
Anglophilia.
Penezić & Rogina started working together on joint entries in
1979, and they graduated from the Zagreb faculty in 1982 and
1983, immediately enrolling in the postgraduate course on
Architectural Theory, under Professor Ranko Radović, in the
School of Architecture at the University of Belgrade. As studies
developed, they became increasingly aware of the architecture
that had grown out of the Pop Reality. In the 1960s, Archigram
and Cedric Price – again, from England – had represented the
range of options to which Pop can give rise. Archigram picked up
on the visual impact of Pop culture and sought an architecture that
was immediate, changeable, expendable, visual and, above all,
technological. Price emphasised the radicalism and anti-
traditionalism of thinking that characterised the era and
developed schemes in which far more was happening than met the
eye. Price’s quest for “well-serviced anonymity” was an equally
valid alternative to Archigram’s witty and seductive “Walking
City”, and equally relied on sophisticated technology.
Of course, not all the Pop architecture that Penezić & Rogina
were scrutinising was English. Like other architects of their
generation, they were also impressed by work by architects such
as Hans Hollein in Vienna, but England remained a primary
focus. The focus was, if anything, intensified in the 1970s with the
development of High Tech, possibly at its strongest in the UK.
The work of Norman Foster, Nick Grimshaw and Richard Rogers
had, arguably, a late-Pop appeal of boldness, industrialism,
directness and, undoubtedly, impact. One of the canonical
monuments of High Tech, Piano and Rogers’ Pompidou Centre in
Paris, opened in 1977, the year that Penezić & Rogina commenced
their training.
During the 1980s, their visceral response to Pop culture was
complemented by a deepening reflection on the nature of
contemporary reality. From Marshall McLuhan’s writings,
Penezić & Rogina gained insight into understanding the effect of
new media on both our modes of operations (for example, instant
communication; global media output and exposure to satellite
TV) and ways of thinking and acting, resulting in a new awareness
of what it is to be alive in the new electronic, proto-digital age.
14 NIGEL WHITELEY
FROM A VISUAL CIVIZATION TO AN AUDIO TACTILE CULTURE

Glass House 2001, Central Glass competition - second place 1990.
Judges: Kisaburo Ito, Takekuni Ikeda, Shoji Hayashi, Kisho Kurokawa,
Takefumi Aida, Kazuhiro Ishii, Masaki Umemoto
Main features of glass, transparency and reflection are meaningless in the World of
Darkness. Configurations of that world within a world are totally different.
Glass House 2001 for a Blind Man is a container of audio-tactile glass elements.
The media which support those characteristics are water and air that flow through these
transformable elements producing different temperatures and sounds. The system is
coordinated by a microprocessor which can transform sensations from the World of
Light and Shadows into the morphology of the World of Darkness.
16 NIGEL WHITELEY
Gilles Lipovetsky’s L’Ere du Vide (1983) was influential in its

exploration of a Post-Modern consciousness in which old notions
of purpose, order and seriousness are replaced by openness,
amorality and hedonism in the absence of an ethical meta-
narrative.
There were more directly architectural texts that confirmed broad
cultural discontinuities. Reyner Banham’s seminal Theory and
Design in the First Machine Age (1960) provoked thought about
the idea of an architecture for the Second Machine Age, and how
it would differ from that of the First. Banham was in no doubt that
a relevant architecture for today had to be based on up-to-date
technology and take account of the desirability of Pop culture’s
goodies. In The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, a key text
of nascent Post-Modern architecture – and another manifestation
of 1977 – Charles Jencks introduced a new paradigm that was
inclusive and permissive, based on the sensibility offered by
collage as a way of bringing together disparate parts within an
untidy whole. By the end of the 1980s, the Pop movement was
being historicised by academics such as Nigel Whiteley, whose
Pop Design: Modernism to Mod (1987) was discovered by Rogina
in 1988.
Thus, between 1977 and 1987, the Pop reality became firmly
established in the thinking of Penezić & Rogina’s practice. Pop,
for them, represented a way of living and feeling that you did not
have to leave outside the atelier. It was about style, up-to-
dateness, even fashionableness, toleration, permissiveness and the
full acceptance of the technological potentialities of the age. It
meant that nothing was ruled out in an a priori manner:
everything was possible. Pop Reality was likely to be inclusive
and eclectic rather than hierarchical and consistent.
In Robert Venturi’s terms, it encouraged us to relish “Complexity
and Contradiction” and savour ambiguities of space, and
discontinuities of time and culture.
A cluster of Penezić & Rogina’s buildings and designs from 1984
onwards directly reveals a Pop Reality. The Mladost swimming
pool and water-polo sports centre in Zagreb (1984-1987) was the
building that brought the young architects national acclaim and no
small amount of controversy. Mladost is a fine example of Post-
55 Modernism in which Jencks’s collage and signification approach is
rolled into Venturi’s enthusiastic acceptance of complexity and
contradiction. A stone-clad base, derived from classical-

Renaissance origins and signifying permanence, seriousness and
cultural continuity, supports a light aluminium casing that seems
influenced by Foster’s and Grimshaw’s replaceable panelling that
signifies change, expendability and expediency. The bright green
lean-to first floor corner and the assertive red handrail pay
homage to James Stirling’s gallery at Stuttgart, and red structural
supports, rising above the upper storey, recall Rogers’s factories
and, beyond them, Russian Constructivist projects from the 1920s.
Mladost is, therefore, wilfully eclectic, a collage of architectural
references across time and space. Here we have discontinuity as a
Pop, Post-Modern Reality. The Mladost building announced the
arrival of a new paradigm of architecture in the former
Yugoslavia. Its Pop Reality guaranteed affection or disaffection,
as much on generational as architectural lines.
Some of the interiors of their Velebit office building (1985-1995)
in Zagreb included ground floor commercial units designed by
them in 1995 and 1996, and are a link between Penezić & Rogina’s
Pop Reality and later digital design. For example, the Elite Café
(subsequently redecorated) offered a glass screen on a busy street
with heavy traffic and functioned as a self-advertisement, an eye-
catching image in urban space. While the outer standing space
was cool and open, the inner sitting room was warmer and 60-61
protectively enclosed, with something of a travel lounge feel. The

Neon Signs shop (subsequently redecorated) utilised easily
rearrangeable steel bars on the walls and the ceiling, constructed
as hangers for different types of illuminated signs, and made most
of the small space at hand. The Fun Café reveals the architects’
assured handling of materials to create an absorbing and stylish
sense of place in a compact, L-shaped room. Confinement and
claustrophobia are avoided, and the consumer can enjoy the range
of materials with their variety of finishes and colours, and the
interplay of surfaces and spaces. The café underlines that Penezić
& Rogina’s Pop Reality is not one of (dis)unity by inclusion, or
impact through bloody-mindedness, but is sophisticated without
being predictable, and stylish without being merely fashionable.
These were also the qualities in the slightly earlier Olymptours
travel agency in Zagreb (1994-1995). The agency, an airline tickets
dealer, required a long and narrow space split into two levels; a
ground floor showroom for customer service; and a basement
18 NIGEL WHITELEY
FE-MALE HABIT-ABILITY
Simplicity/Complexity Shinkenchiku competition - honorable mention 1995.
Judge: Jean Nouvel
Located on a lake shore, in a park, on the outskirts of megalopolis, composed of
modular, load-bearing, absorbent, luminous, reflective, refractive, translucent,
transparent, tactile, inductive, and most of all intelligent glass elements, in a wooden-steel
frame. Parts of the project are being used for Multisensorial Generator project at the
Waldeck-Rousseau square in Saint-Etienne.
20 NIGEL WHITELEY
back office. The original spatiality was left completely

uninterrupted, underlined by the undulation and the mobility of
the integrated furniture on one side of the strip and by the
voluminous presence of a conceptual wooden wall on the other to
create an intriguing space with connotations of sumptuousness
and fantasy, appropriate to a travel agency. The Križek jewellery
shop (1997-1998) in the Zagreb satellite town of Velika Gorica
also relates form to identity by means of furnishings and details
that look as if they have been designed by a Czech Cubist who had
worked on the set of a James Bond movie. Penezić & Rogina, in
fact, designed several stage sets around this time.
The “Kviskoteka” quiz show (1994) on Croatian television
provided an occasion for designing a cool and raw “brain
sweating” environment. The size of the studio prompted several
optical illusions and tricks in order to make the space look bigger
than it really was. The “Wheel of Fortune” game show (versions
in 1994, 1995 and 1998) involved the redesign of a very popular,
commercial television programme, keeping the spirit of flashness
and camp. The Željka Ogresta talk show, originally for television
(1990), followed by theatre versions (1995, 1996 and 2000) was
also flamboyant and slightly over-the-top. One of the most
prestigious commissions was the complete redesign of the national
television network’s central news programme (2000). The small
studio set was just one segment of the project, which also included
a detailed scenario, music, animations, and lighting etc. The key
image-idea, in keeping with the spirit of the age, was that of the
fast flow of global information.
After the big splash arrival of Penezić & Rogina with the Mladost
swimming pool complex, and even the Velebit office building,
some may think the smaller designs for shops, cafes and sets
represent a loss of status in the architectural world, or a collapse of
energy. But this is far from true.
The smaller work was an opportunity to experiment, to get
designs moving quickly, rather than being tied down by works
dragging on over several years. The experimentation allowed
them to develop ideas about and expertise in the handling of
space, planning, materials and surfaces, and meant that, when
digitalisation became possible, there was a creative bank of ideas
on which they could draw. It also enabled them to communicate
with the users of their designs in a direct and concise manner,
paralleling the way an advert can communicate as effectively, in

its own terms, as a full length movie. It would, however, be
misleading to characterise Penezić & Rogina solely or even
principally by their involvement in Pop Reality. Equally
important has been their commitment to more established
architectural values with their different Realities.
Reality 2: Modernism and Continuity
Jencks’s The Language of Post-Modern Architecture had
coincided with the beginning of Penezić & Rogina’s architectural
education. During their third year, Jencks was publishing Late-
Modern Architecture, a book that presents the Modern Movement
as alive and well and even not averse to performing the occasional
party piece. The Velebit office building, because of its abstract but
sleekly styled exterior form and colouring, can be categorised as
Late Modern. Jencksian Late Modernism tends to mannerist
excess, as if an earlier Modernism has reappeared in a caricatured
and made-over form. Included in Jencks’s canon was
contemporary Japanese architecture. When viewed within the
context of the 1970s and 1980s, architects such as Kisho
Kurokawa, Arata Isozaki, and Kazumasa Yamashita seemed to
having the best of both worlds – the Realities of Pop and
Modernism. Their work could be interpreted as serious (the
Modernist tradition) but also as fun (the Pop sensibility). It was
more than both traditions, rather than a diminution of either.
More could be more.
14-15 Penezić & Rogina first visited Japan in 1990 to collect the prize for
their “Glass House 2001 for a Blind Man”, and they soaked up not
only the innovative and uncompromising work of the 1970s and
1980s, but also traditional Japanese architecture with its values of
sensitivity, understatement and timelessness. This led to a Reality
in great contrast to the one provided by Pop. Zen became another
way of thinking about architecture in relationship to life –
emptiness could be poignant rather than an absence of sensory
stimulus; and quietness and contemplation were valid alternatives
to Pop’s manic energy. Indeed, less could be more. Probably
related to Zen – and a direct influence on Penezić & Rogina – was
the writing of Khalil Ghibran and his quiet faith in inner calm
amidst turbulence.
Japan provided one version of Modernism. There were three
others that had a clear impact on Penezić & Rogina’s architecture.
First, was canonical Modernism, especially the formal
inventiveness of Le Corbusier whose work they saw in Paris while
still students. Other trips to Germany, Spain, the Netherlands,
Austria and Italy consolidated a belief that European Modernist
architecture could still be relevant in the late twentieth century so
ARCHITECTURE AS NATURE
The Possibilities Of Non-Movement Shinkenchiku competition project
second place 1996. Judge: Kazuyo Sejima
Nature doesn’t move, it just is. Through its constant changes, modulated flow and eternal
flux. Its erosions, declines and reincarnations are in collision with speed that is
equivalent to oblivion. Nature is a self-repairing generative force, an evolution that melts,
transforms, adapts, erodes and reproduces through spontaneous autocatalysis. The life
itself: birth, aging, dying, reproducing, coexistence. Nature doesn’t move because it has
never stopped.
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long as forms were not being deified, but used permissively –

albeit thoughtfully – in relation to the job in hand. Sparseness and
whiteness could still be meaningful, and did not have to fall into
the categories of nostalgia, pastiche or essentialist purity.
A second Modernism was the version offered by Finnish
architecture. A trip to Finland in 1994 brought Penezić & Rogina
into contact with Alvar Aalto’s work, typical of which, according
to Sigfried Giedion in Space, Time and Architecture, was “…the
use of many materials and the lyricism which results from their
juxtaposition”. Aalto showed that Modernism need not evoke a
machine aesthetic, but could be more human-centred by close
attention to planning and scale, and by the incorporation of
natural materials alongside more conventional “mechanistic”
ones. Most importantly, Finnish Modernism showed that
architecture need not be in opposition to nature, but should work
harmoniously with it. Light, shade, reflection and shadow become
subtle but telling components. Penezić & Rogina also drew a
parallel between Finnish and Croatian Modernism: in both cases
the Modernism grew out of independently-minded small nations
who looked warily to the east at their neighbours.
It was inevitable that Croatian identity would play a part in
Penezić & Rogina’s Reality. The Mladost swimming pool complex
may have signified a generational rejection of national
architectural orthodoxy, but it did not represent a rejection of
many of the concomitant social values. The Pop Reality may have
represented discontinuity, but their Modernist Reality is
characterised by a commitment to significant continuity across
twentieth century time and national space. Part of the reason for
this continuity is the surprising endurance of architectural
Modernism in the former Yugoslavia. Modernism remained the
officially sanctioned mode of architecture during political regimes
of contrasting ideologies. The first wave of Modernist architecture
was built in the 1930s under the Right, and the post-War Socialist
regime under Tito did not change architectural tack, despite the
usual assumption that some form of Soviet-influenced Socialist
Realism would be adopted. Modernism enjoyed 50 years of state
patronage. Within this architectural tradition, diversity was
tolerated in the relatively liberal and outward-looking Yugoslavia,
but the tradition was held together by a belief in the public good.
Penezić & Rogina’s Modernist Reality is thus shaped by a
NO SCALE -
NO TYPOLOGY -
NO STYLE
An Architecture
Which Is Kind To
The Earth
Central Glass
competition project -
honorable mention
1999.
Judges: Kisho
Kurokawa, Kiyoshi
Sakurai, Tetsuo
Naito, Yoshiaki
Ogura, Toyo Ito,
Kazuhiro Ishii,
Riken Yamamoto,
Tomoyuki Inokuchi,
Shozo Baba
Omnipresent
patterns of
uncertainty will
resemble the
anticipatory, non
routine environment
of aquatic scaping
and semantic fields.
The viscosity of fluid
open systems will
permit holistic
organizations of
plexing and pliant
subsystems where
natural multiplicity,
diversity and variety
substitute movement.
Architecture should
introduce a new unity
of schizophrenically
secularized
contemporary
perception.
Selfsimilar natural
scaping with no scale,
no typology and no
style should therefore
substitute
monumental
building.
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particular architectural context that is part of a tradition that

emphasises collectivity, citizenship and social responsibility, but
which allows a degree of individual expression and difference.
Some of Penezić & Rogina’s best Modernist work has been
evident in their religious buildings. The first - the New Parish
Church of St Michael in Dubrovnik (1987 and ongoing) - was
strongly anchored to their Modernist Reality. The contrast with
the existing buildings in terms of siting (perpendicular to the old
church and the fraternity house), style (Modernist as opposed to
Romanesque), materials (new concrete rather than weathered
stone), and orderliness (appearing more formal and
monumental), would seem to indicate an uneasy juxtaposition
but, in reality, there is a sophisticated complementarity. The new
and the old meet to the benefit of both: scale is sensitively
handled, and maintained by the measured height of the new
building; and a satisfying rhythm is built up as the visitor moves
through the sequence of open, semi-open and closed spaces to the
interior of the new church that has a lightness, purity and
intimacy. The Dubrovnik church showed that Pop Reality was
only one option, not the hallmark of the Penezić & Rogina
architectural practice.
Penezić & Rogina went on to build a second church at Dugave in
Zagreb (1989 and ongoing). The locality was very different from
the Dubrovnik one. Here, the church was on a “green field” site at
the edge of an expanding part of the city, and the design reflects
the different context. The Modernism of the church is more urban
and less timeless. It could be said to proclaim its existence and,
architecturally, it evokes the Modernism of 1927 Weissenhof and
1977 Pompidou. Take the large cross away and it could be a
building that is part residential, part industrial. But, from the town
centre side, warmer, less industrial materials are in greater
evidence and welcome the visitor into an uplifting space that
makes an effective use of light to give a sense of calmness and
peace.
Another religious project comprised a Parish Centre and
Monastery in Trnje, Zagreb. Work started in 1994: the Centre was
partly completed in 1998, and the Monastery a year later. The
59 project also involved substantially remodelling a church adjoining
the Monastery. It was the perfect post-Finland project. Trnje is an
old part of Zagreb that pre-dates ordered planning. Taking the
physical and historical contexts as their starting point, Penezić &

Rogina acknowledged the original layout of roads and the
existence of trees as a generator of their plan and layout. A
“Finish” Modernist aesthetic not only combines a variety of
forms, materials and surfaces, but allows architecture and nature
to interweave and interplay. The view from the library of the
screen of pine trees is quite beautiful. Each tree is related to a
window along the façade of the old road, and it is these resonances
of place and history that give the Trnje work such a sensitive yet
compelling presence. Currently, there is an upgrading of the
monastery and parish centre occurring. Because a long period of
time had elapsed since this competition and, also, because of new
demands, the devising of a new project to complete the complex
was necessary. In this version, the extension of the monastery
along with the secondary facilities of the parish centre are treated
as a relatively anonymous “binding tissue” through which the
existing structures are integrated while forming the base from
which the body of the church rises. The church itself is like a
sacred lantern, a cone-shaped vertically intertwined membrane
that emanates diffused light into the interior and is discreetly
illuminated at night.
A current religious project is for the interior design of an existing
church in Velika Gorica near Zagreb. The commission resulted
from their winning first prize in 2005 in a limited competition. The
Brutalist interior of the existing church is unwelcoming,
unpopular, and unsuited to its religious and spiritual function. The
space needed a fundamental redesign in order to give it, in the 88
architects’ words, “a contemplative and sacred character”. Their

proposal consists of a domed translucent membrane constructed
out of cast polycarbonate. It is structurally independent of the
existing structure. This form integrates the dispersed internal
space of the church and excludes elements that interfere with the
feelings of concentration and peace. The effect of intensity,
dispersion and supplementation of natural and artificial lighting
through the “veil”, all contribute to the desired sense of
sacredness.
The Modernist legacy and, in particular, the Finish influence in
Penezić & Rogina’s work is strongly apparent in their social
housing in Nova Gradiška (1997-2003), an hour-and-a-half’s drive
from Zagreb. As a result of the war of the early 1990s in the
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TRANSPARENCY OF THE HYPERREAL

Audio-tactile presentation of the architects’ concepts (for the blind) at the Venice
Biennale, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and the City Museum in
Skopje, Macedonia, 2000-2002
The presentation centred on P&R’s Tokyo works, questioning the relation between the
physical and the virtual in architecture. The first room featured a visual, the second an
audio-tactile presentation of the same concepts. A shower of transparent plastic tubes
marked the physical shift between the two worlds. The “Horizontal Totem”, a high-tech,
interactive and hypersensitive console, was the only exhibit in the room. Its segments
provided audio-tactile descriptions of the concepts presented by classic, visual means in
the first room. Visitors could thus experience architectural ideas in a completely
unconventional way, and it was no coincidence that the blind approached the exhibit most
spontaneously, with immanent understanding. It provided a pattern for a new sensibility.
former Yugoslavia, there has been a sharp increase in the building 57

of social housing in Croatia. Penezić & Rogina’s block of
apartments develops further their Modernist Reality to the extent
that different facades offer different aesthetics through the use of
a variety of materials. A stone-panelled end wall acts as a
partition, visually acknowledging planning regulations, between
the block and the neighbouring building. The block’s street façade
combines concrete and wood, part-Weissenhof, part-Aalto and
has the appeal of well-designed, up-market (but certainly not
ostentatious or un-social) apartments. The façade avoids
blandness by the interrupted rhythm, derived from the slightly
different heights of veranda and bedroom windows. The “private”
side of the block, looking out on to communal land is, with its
walkways, more open and varied.
The most remarkable façade is the one that faces a side road. The
main block of this façade is entirely wood-panelled and has a great
impact on our visual and tactile senses. Adjacent is the delight of a
copper-panelled commemorative room, essentially free-standing,
and providing a place for reflection on recent national events at a
local level. In less visually sensitive hands the juxtaposition of
wood and copper could be crude. But here the configuration of
the materials and forms in space is visually stunning. The Pop
experimentation with materials, surfaces and spaces in projects
such as the Fun café is being utilised to great effect.
Finally within the Modernist Reality, a wall is worth commenting
on. At the Olymptours travel agency (1994-1995) the main wall on
the ground floor comprises blocks of wood and looks like a large
Constructivist-inspired relief. In many ways this is exactly what it
is, but it is not just aesthetic and, in a Croatian context, is a carrier
of meaning. Penezić & Rogina have written that the wall was
“Designed during the heaviest attacks of the Yugoslav army on
our native Croatia, the structure combined global references with
distinctly local resources. Historically, it can be associated with the
ancient Croatian Glagolitic script, the Early Croatian interlacing-
ribbon pattern, and the traditional system of building dry walls in
the Adriatic area. At the same time, it is a tribute to the legacy of
Croatian abstract art, which had offered strong resistance to the
Yugoslav communist government”. In Zagreb in the 1950s and
1960s there was a strong geometric abstraction tendency among
artists such as Julije Knifer, part of the Gorgona Group, and Ivan
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Picelj of EXAT 51. At the time, these paintings signified both an

independence of spirit from state orthodoxy, as well as an
identification with internationalism (the post-War Constructivist
movement).
A second “Constructivist” wall exists in the entrance to the
Velebit office building, completed at the same time at
Olymptours. To evoke references to this art in the period
immediately following the war of the early 1990s was
understandable and, arguably, appropriate.
The references to Croatian Constructivism are part of a wider set
of references to Croatian Modernism and, indeed, Modernism in
general in Penezić & Rogina’s work. The Reality of Modernism
enabled the architects to work with, rather than just in tradition.
Modernism was utilised not as a style, nor just as an aesthetic of
moderation and restraint, but as an ethic of continuity and social
responsibility, and as a way of achieving a cultural embeddedness.
Realities 1 and 2
My argument is that Reality 1 (Pop and Change) and Reality 2
(Modernism and Continuity) form a continuum – with both
continuities and discontinuities in space and time – within which
there is an inclusiveness in Penezić & Rogina’s practice. The
inclusiveness ranges from Pop to Modernism, and draws into it
national identity and a Zen-like spirituality. Sometimes, the
inclusiveness occurs in one building – the Mladost swimming pool
is conventional Post-Modernism in its collage approach – but,
more significantly, the inclusiveness can be seen when one takes
the totality of buildings from Penezić & Rogina’s Pop and
Modernist Realities.
It is important to establish that the diversity is completely
different from the practice of a nineteenth century architect like
John Nash who could design in any style the client wanted –
classical, gothic, Egyptian, Indo-Chinese etc. Penezić & Rogina’s
inclusiveness is premised upon an acceptance of different clusters
of values and upholds the notion of “both/and” as developed by
the Independent Group in London in the 1950s, as I have argued
in Pop Design: Modernism to Mod.
The “both/and” approach accepts the equal relevance of different,
even opposing, value systems, but practises each value system
critically and with respect. No single building can, therefore,

become a paradigm for the architects: there is a range of solutions
which testify to a sense of possibilities and a tolerance of values
that range from continuity, embeddedness, seriousness,
citizenship, slowness and the natural, to change, fashionableness,
fun, consumerism, immediacy and the synthetic. Architecture thus
expresses life.
Reality 3: Beyond time and space
Penezić & Rogina’s Pop Reality had largely derived from the
characteristics of society and culture in the later 1970s and 1980s.
Although this reality, manifested in their stage sets, continued
into the 1990s, the new Reality – Hyperreality – increasingly
affected Penezić & Rogina’s thinking. In my view, Pop Reality is a
direct representation of the Second Machine Age. Reyner
Banham wrote his seminal Theory and Design in the First Machine
Age (1960) from the perspective of the first phase of the Second
Machine Age – an age when the affluent consumer society arrived
with abundance replacing scarcity, and epitomised by Pop culture.
In the Second Machine Age, technology became naturalised, a
normal part or everyday life. Technology also became stylish and
object-oriented, whether at the scale of industrial products
produced by such design-conscious companies as Olivetti and
Braun, or of buildings with impact and appeal, from much of
James Stirling’s work, to High Tech and even Frank Gehry’s
flamboyant celebrations of sculptural technology. The Pop
Reality, as part of the Second Machine Age, is, fundamentally, a
solid-state universe.
I have argued in “Webbed Feat”, an article in Art Review, that
Third Machine Age technology is essentially personal and about
mobility. Its symbol is the personal stereo because that is all about
one individual creating their own private world, which effectively
excludes other members of the human race. The designer trophy-
hunter of the Second Machine Age became the privatised,
liberated, electronic nomad of the Third. If the habitué of the
Second was, in design terms, all dressed up but had nowhere to go
(lots of goodies, but confined to the home with them), the nomad
of the Third is all dressed down but with somewhere to go. He or
she may be festooned with gadgets – personal stereos,
camcorders, Game Boys, palm-tops, electronic notebooks and
digital cameras – but they are lightweight, small and – virtually –
invisible because they are often not on display, but tucked into a
pocket or worn under a coat.
What makes the Fourth Machine Age different is its inter-ness…
inter-connectivity, inter-relationship, interface. Third Machine
Age products may have provided personal pleasure but they
largely separated us off from the rest of our world. Fourth
Machine Age products re-socialise us with information networks

or virtual communities across time and space. Satellite TV pointed
in that direction because its scale was global, but it was all one way
– we were the passive recipients of other people’s outpourings.
True Fourth Age technology allows us to interact all over the
place and in a range of ways. The PC symbolises the early part of
the Age because we don’t just use it as an expanded First Machine
Age typewriter and abacus, but as a way of being interactive
through emails, web sites, business, games and shopping.
However the domestic PC is positively Second Machine Age in its
cumbersome immobility. Far more in keeping with the spirit of
the Fourth is the palm-top and what is probably the ultimate
symbol of the Age, the internetted, fully webbed mobile phone.
Virtual Reality, beyond previous notions of time and space, is a
Reality that Penezić & Rogina, like the majority of the readers of
this essay, inhabit on a daily basis. As well as experiencing the
technology of the Fourth Machine Age, Penezić & Rogina also
explored the underlying socio-cultural ideas of the new Reality.
Jean Baudrillard’s writings about hyperreality and simulacra were
an obvious influence. More directly influential was William J.
Mitchell’s City of Bits (1995) which analyses the impact of
digitalisation on architecture and explores the intersection of
physical and cyber space. Rogina has paralleled City of Bits to Le
Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture (1923) in terms of it being a key
text for a generation. Antonino Saggio’s series of books on The IT
Revolution in Architecture from the turn of the millennium,
consolidated their thinking about the condition of the Fourth
Machine Age, while Charles Jencks’s The Architecture of the
Jumping Universe: A Polemic: How Complexity Science is
Changing Architecture and Culture (1995) opened up the new
aesthetic possibilities of fractals and systems of patterning which
seem related, on one level, to the Croatian abstraction of the
1950s and 1960s, mediated by Penezić & Rogina in their
Olymptours and Velebit walls. Other aesthetic and conceptual
influences came from several Japanese architects and thinkers
including Takefumi Aida (Penezić & Rogina liken him to a
Zenistic Cedric Price!), Ryoji Suzuki (for his playful investigations
with materials), or Itsuko Hasegawa (what they describe as her
“unpretentious lightness”).
A number of projects by Penezić & Rogina belong in this Reality.
40 NIGEL WHITELEY
The Shinkenchiku competition in Tokyo – “A Style for the Year

2001”, judged by Fumihiko Maki, Hiroshi Hara and Aldo Rossi –
in which they won first prize in 1984, was the first in a sequence of
experimental works that continue up to the present day. “A Style
12 for the Year 2001” took as its premise Penezić & Rogina’s idea
that “the relationship between urbanity and individual buildings
will assume new qualities. A building will be considered as a small
town and a town as a big building. This is also the historical
experience of Diocletian’s palace – an emperor’s palace
transformed into a town”. The historical reference pointed not to
a continuity or preoccupation with style, but posited a “further
development on the typological level”. Within this, there would
be “historical experience, continuity and discontinuities, duality,
dynamism, development, typological level [and] urban
relationships”. Advanced technology was integral to the project,
but would be an “obedient servant” that would “open new
possibilities” rather than dominate as if a new Machine Aesthetic.
Their entry for the “Glass House 2001” competition (1990, judged
by Kisaburo Ito, Takekuni Ikeda, Shoji Hayashi, Kisho
Kurokawa, Takefumi Aida, Kazuhiro Ishii, and Masaki
Umemoto) earned them second place. The competition brief
asked for “a new kind of residence created by means of a total
14-15 glass design geared to the new age”. Penezić & Rogina offered a
Glass House for a Blind Man. The conventional visual virtues of
glass – transparency and reflection – were meaningless in this new
context, and so were replaced by an audio-tactile environment
featuring water and air that flow through “an almost archaic
system of hollow glass elements, similar to the Ancient Roman
hypocaustus” in the house, triggering different temperatures and
sounds. Once again, a High Tech approach was integral, with the
IT system transforming “sensations from the World of Light and
Shadows into the morphology of the World of Darkness”. The
architects also believed that their proposal revealed the
“misconceptions of exclusive approaches, since contained audio
tactile glass elements do not exclude visual and formal
characteristics”. Their aim was to create not recognisable, formal
architecture, but “environments responsive to the impulses of
their immediate surroundings as well as their users. The
immediate surroundings are the three natures: natural,
technological and phenomenological”. Here architecture is part of
REALITY-SHOW PARA-SITE HOUSE

Surround Datahome. Shinkenchiku competition project - honorable mention (second
place) 2001. Judge: Winy Maas
A project introduced the idea of corporeality in close relation to electronics through the
possibility of implanting dwelling urban acupuncture units into the dense and defined
present-day environment. Units were created through the folding of a single integrated
element and fabulated more upon the principles of Internet than classical urbanistic
science. As the billboards of everyday they instantly display the happenings inside the
totally transparent interior thus destroying the last bourgeois sanctuary, that of privacy,
since “there is no intimate act that is not accessible through the Internet”. A project was
renamed Absolute Internet for the occasion of Kurt W. Forster’s Metamorph exhibition
at Venice Biennale 2004.
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a continuum of experiences and information that, if projected into

the Fourth (Digital) Machine Age, would be based on virtual
experiences and information technologies.
The information technology of the Fourth Machine Age also gave
a new and transformative dimension to one of Penezić & Rogina’s
previous concerns. The abstract relief walls of the Olymptours
travel agency and the Velebit office building, constructed at the
time of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, had derived from a
general Croatian Constructivist source that signified cultural and
political independence, as well as a commitment to
internationalism. As Penezić & Rogina put it, these walls were
designed “at the very start of an inward-looking (pessimistic)
‘mind games’ period, in an attempt to find cerebral patterns or
coordinates that could substitute pop iconography that was now
inappropriate for our specific national circumstances. The war was
happening – we could no longer be kids”. The walls aesthetically
came out of the Reality 2 (Modernism and Continuity), but they
also expressed something of the independence and attitude of
Reality 1 (Pop and Change). During the 1990s, the walls
transformation into Reality 3 took place. IT enabled these walls to
change from the heroic and static to the open and dynamic. The
new IT walls moved away from nationalism to globalism of
Hyperreality, from cultural roots to unbounded possibilities, and
acted as a kind of matrix for their some of their digital projects,
especially Architecture in the Digital Era”. Penezić & Rogina
were, at the time, discovering the appeal of Japanese and Chinese
systems of aesthetics and ways of thinking, referring to the East as
“a kind of wonderland”. The IT wall owed something to the
popular Chinese game Tangram, but it was the process of
“fragmentation, pixelisation and fractalisation” that transformed
the situation and went well beyond walls, to providing nothing less
than a new generating matrix for a succession of (unbuilt) projects
in the 1990s including the “Ecumenism – Meditation Space”
(1991-1997), “Social Events” (1993), and “Cubicula Populi -
Multifunctional Pavilion” (1991-1997), illustrated in
NonCompletions.
However, the greatest impact of the new IT matrix was to be seen
in the thinking underlying the Tokyo projects. The 1995
Shinkenchiku competition on the theme of “Simplicity/
Complexity” placed more centrally the IT thinking of the Fourth
Machine Age. The brief declared the aim of “integrating a

growing complexity into much simpler forms. We want
performance which does not show off its means. Modernity today
deals with the aesthetics of the miracle. Integration,
miniaturization, automation change the sense of forms and spaces
opening new fields to architecture”.
Penezić & Rogina’s submission, in part wall-influenced, was
composed of “modular, load-bearing, absorbent, luminous,
reflective, refractive, translucent, transparent, tactile, inductive, 18-19
and most of all intelligent glass elements, in a wooden-steel
frame” and received an honourable mention. Jean Nouvel, the
judge, saw their proposal as “a testimony to the revolution of
domestic character in architecture”, and perceptively noted that
the technological inventiveness, such as the stained glass
responding to the different hours of the day, could have major
implications at an urban scale.
The transformative potential of the IT revolution underpinned
the premise of the next Shinkenchiku competition (1996, judge
Kazuyo Sejima), “The Possibilities of Non-Movement”, in which
Penezić & Rogina attained second place. The brief stated how
“Today our lives are becoming freer from physical restrictions as
well as time constraints through the various networks brought
about by new media. We can see that everything has become
informationalized, speed has become increasingly faster, and 23-25
various forms of interchange becoming possible. However,
architecture does not move. Architecture’s static aspect could be
seen to constantly hinder this movement”. It went on to ask the
question: “It is not possible to give birth to a stationary
architecture that relies on this environment brought about by the
various media, instead of one that ignores this environment?”
Penezić & Rogina’s solution looked toward nature as an
architectural paradigm, but it was not the view of nature
associated with a previous set of architectural values in the First
and Second Machine Ages – hidden geometric orders – but a
nature that is continuous, alive, adaptable and inclusive. They
presented a comparison of conventional architecture and the new
way of thinking about nature:
“frozen music - cacophonic creativity; differentiated sameness - non-

monotonous repetition; predictability - randomness; fragmentation -
wholeness; linearity - dendritic scaling; isolated adding - network;
DATASUPERMARKET
Architecture In The Digital Era, project/exhibition 2003
An exhibition dealing with P&R’s project datasupermarket:
infoscapes > mediascapes > e-scapes>>> was launched in
Canvas Gallery as the first step in a long term international
project. Datasupermarket is neither analogue (like a traditional
library), nor analogue-digital (like a mediatheque), but a digital
environment totally constructed by information itself updated in
real time. Hyper-multimedia “buildings” offer information and
knowledge through a personalised ambience and “natural”
environments, harmonising the schizophrenic division of a
physical and hyperrealities.
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measurability - irreducible diversity; typological definition - continuous

evolution; stereometry - fractals; segregation - simultaneity; finite - depth;
geometric exactitude - arbitrary figuration; hierarchy - autofocusing; settled
confusion - productive chaos; volumetric - fluid; complicity - complexity;
reducible homogeneity - heterogeneous variety; rigid geometry - topology;
deterministic - self-organizing; clocklike universe - reality; self-service -
survival; program - generic code; design - supple scaping; pure forms - hybrids;
life à la carte - living life; passive movement - active non-movement”.
Contemporary, electronic technology was far closer to this

condition of nature, than it was to traditional architectural culture.
Nature represented, in Penezić & Rogina’s thinking, “the Edge
Condition” that is “in between” and becoming, “configurations
and constellations”, “ritual and virtual”, “traces and imprints”,
rather than fixed, static or monumental.
This outlook was developed further in the Central Glass
competition “An Architecture which is Kind to the Earth” (1999;
judges Kisho Kurokawa, Kiyoshi Sakurai, Tetsuo Naito, Yoshiaki
Ogura, Toyo Ito, Kazuhiro Ishii, Riken Yamamoto, Tomoyuki
Inokuchi, Shozo Baba). The brief encouraged architects to think
beyond short-term solutions in order to address the deeper
relationship between humankind and the global environment.
Penezić & Rogina’s response was the premise that
“Kind to the Earth is neither Architecture in Nature nor Architecture against

27-29
Nature but Architecture as Nature”.
They argued that “The traditional sense of architecture becomes

obsolescent through its typological differentiation and
fragmentation and should be replaced by unity and wholeness of
the decomposed continuity, making places for life itself. Through
patterns of uncertainty – multiplicity, diversity and variety –
architecture as building should be overwhelmed by a number of
dynamic and adaptable developments and activities”. The
thinking that contrasted architecture and nature in “The
Possibilities of Non-Movement” was continued in this project:
“program - generic code; complicity - complexity; homogeneity - variety;

confusion - chaos; segregation - continuity; determinism - self-organization;
distinction - simultaneity; natural sciences - geocosmology; earth - gaia;
geometry - topology; stereometry - fractals; pure forms - hybrids; volume -
flux; ruins - aging; design - supple scaping; construction - evolution”.
The vocabulary used by the architects, within this Reality, was no

longer architectural and, in the visualisation of the project they
turned their back on conventional architectural materials in
favour of “dismantleable foam steel along with sensitive liquid
glass”. Concept drawings developed from schemes of “man-made
geometry”, through “divine pattern”, “inflection envelope”,
“bifurcation forest”, “fluctuation labyrinth”, “diversification
islands”, “diffusion rain”, “distortion sparks” and “evolution
imprints”, to “modulation net”.
In the last decade of the twentieth century, Penezić & Rogina had
collapsed any conventional distinction between nature and
technology. In an age fundamentally shaped by IT thinking, they
concluded that: “Architecture should introduce a new unity of
schizophrenically secularised contemporary perception.
Selfsimilar natural scaping with no scale, no typology and no style
should therefore substitute monumental building. The ritual part
will be dedicated to the atavistic tactile corporeal while the virtual
part should feed the inventive fluid spiritual”. They were fully
committed to thinking that countered hierarchies and
conventions. Their “Millennium Lament”, entitled “Transparency
of the Hyperreal” (1999), summarised their ethos:
“The electronic environment finally extended our very nerves outside our
corporate spaces. By carrying the whole world on the skin, our being, always
somewhere else, is filled with emptiness. Different kinds of movement were
invented to bring it back.
The paradigm of the contemporary man is an individualistic non-historical-
TV-viewer-narcissus who daily hyperinvests into his unbearable lightness of
emptiness. This syncretic, contradictory, actively indifferent character is
hedonistically oriented towards the momentary, no longer bothered by the
difficulty of work but by the difficulties of leisure.
In our permissive liberal societies, through the media and gadgets of the third
machine age, we daily create worlds of virtual reality, which are an undisputed
fact and represent a reality realer-than-the-real. Interpretation equals fact in
this global hypersupermarket where preprocessed and prepackaged liquid
goods approach everyone like sirens that seduce, satisfy and immediately
disappear. Here, everything is consumed, without an interphase, at the very
moment of its creation.
Today there exist at least three natures: natural, technological and
phenomenological, but consumers hardly refer to more than one. Along with
developing ecology of artificial environment, architecture should finally
introduce itself as a medium of transmittance of the phenomenological
reality.
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DYNAMIC INFILL
The Mali Maj Hotel in Porec, project 1992
The project is to reconstruct and complete the unfinished building of the SM recreational
centre in order to convert it into a fully equipped three-star hotel. Like an archeological
vestige, the orthogonal structure of the original skeleton facing east and west is treated as
the generator of all spatial determinants to which nothing can be subordinated, and
finally disappears among new interpolations.
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The consumerist religion of life à la carte has to change to living life. A life that
is fulfilled by living itself. The civilization of visual flamboyance should give
place to a more sensible (audio-tactile) culture, where movement, speed and
measuring will become irrelevant. They should be replaced by real
communication, true compassion and non declarative ecological
consciousness.
Omnipresent patterns of uncertainty will resemble the anticipatory, non
routine environment of aquatic scaping and semantic fields. The viscosity of
fluid open systems will permit holistic organizations of plexing and pliant
subsystems where natural multiplicity, diversity and variety substitute
movement.
Referring to contemporary medicine which deals with undiscovered
possibilities of the human body and mind, architects should enter the hidden
chambers of the microcosm of everyday life. Whatever they come up with it
still has to have a body, but its soul has to change from the transcendental
sphere to reality. Both the virtual and the ritual part of environmental events
in synthesis should substitute the common in-between-heaven-and-earth-
physical-structure-buried-with-equipment.
Technology is still the answer, but what is the question? As for the ritual part,
it is further development of new building materials like foam metals or liquid
glass, but mainly a new relationship with the traditional ones. The role of the
virtual part will be rendering perceptible the qualities of unperceivable -
hearing the images of darkness and touching the sounds of silence...
Architecture should introduce a new unity of schizophrenically secularized
contemporary perception. Selfsimilar natural scaping with no scale, no
typology and no style should therefore substitute monumental building. The
ritual part will be dedicated to the atavistic tactile corporal while the virtual
part should feed the inventive fluid spiritual”.
The statement was reworked to become part of their “Surround

Datahome” entry to the 2001 Shinkenchiku competition (a
further honourable mention). What all the Tokyo projects have in
common is a rejection of the monumentalism and objectness of
Second Machine Age architecture, and a wholehearted
acceptance of the technological and conceptual conditions of the
Third and Fourth Machine Ages. However, as their
“Transparency of the Hyperreal” statement makes clear, the new
condition is not just “more of the same” in terms of technological
goodies and material excess, in continuing contrast to the rural
idyll of nature, but a changed relationship between the person, the
41-43 immediate environment, and the wider world. That is why
architecture needs to reorient itself toward being “a medium of
transmittance of the phenomenological reality”. Conventional
thinking about architecture, with its assumed hierarchies, would
have to be replaced by a more holistic approach that embraces the

de-differentiation of categories and, most importantly, shifts the
paradigm of architecture away from “hard” technology and
monumentalism, toward phenomenological experience and
interfaces with the “three natures”. Architecture would be
defined more in terms of the multisensorial qualitative experience
it offered, rather than by conventional modes of styles and
structures, hence the statement that “Architecture should
introduce a new unity of schizophrenically secularized
contemporary perception. Selfsimilar natural scaping with no
scale, no typology and no style should therefore substitute
monumental building”. Architecture would have to be more of a
synthesis: “The ritual part will be dedicated to the atavistic tactile
corporal while the virtual part should feed the inventive fluid
spiritual”. This was nothing less than a new philosophy of
architecture – an architecture for the digital age – and it gave rise
to a new sensibility and aesthetic.
In 2000 Penezić & Rogina received the accolade of being invited
to take part in the Venice Biennale’s international exhibition of
architecture on the theme of City: Less Aesthetics, More Ethics.
The presentation acted as a container for five of their Tokyo
competition projects spanning 1984 and 1999, and was shown at
the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and the City
Museum in Skopje, Macedonia, as well as the Biennale. It had
three interconnected parts:
1. a physical, visual and audio-tactile presentation in the real space
of a gallery;
2. a virtual, cyberspace presentation in real time on the Internet;
3. a promotional presentation titled Architecture - Medium - 32-34
Message in the real medium of marketing.

The architects argued that the dichotomy of the gallery space
required a specific display. The first room featured a visual, the
second an audio-tactile presentation of the same exhibits. A
shower of transparent plastic tubes marked the physical shift
between the two worlds. Their number, density and the
unavoidable, rustling physical contact when visitors passed
through them served as a reminder of corporality and a
favourable introduction to audio-tactility. The visual presentation
consisted of panels 130 cm high, forming an unbroken series of
very strong and clear messages. Optically assertive, it contrasted
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with the semi-darkness and emptiness of the second room,

displaying the most interesting part of the presentation, a
horizontal totem. This high-tech interactive and hypersensitive
console 8.5 meters long was the only thing in the room. Its five
segments provided audio-tactile descriptions of the exhibits
presented by conventional, visual means in the first room. The
surface of the black horizontal totem was covered with relief-
textured golden boards with inscriptions in Braille. Their tactility
attracted visitors, who could touch the surface to activate
individual segments which had their aural counterparts in the
musical segments composed by Javor Jeić. Visitors could thus
experience architectural ideas in a completely unconventional
way and it was no coincidence, Penezić & Rogina remarked, that
children and the blind approached the exhibit most spontaneously
and with immanent understanding. It should be noted that the
totem was for all – the blind were identified as a paradigm of a
possible audio-tactile culture, which might supersede our visually-
dominant civilization. Thus, the totem provided a pattern for a
new sensibility.
The second, equally important part of the presentation was virtual
and took place in cyberspace and in the real time of the internet.
As a sort of on-line pavilion, this medium was connected to the
gallery space via an internet venue, the web page for the architects
was designed by Andrej Filetin and Igor Milat, and linked directly
to the official Biennale page and other web sites. Penezić &
Rogina sought to turn the gallery “into the ritual part of an
enviromental event, while turning the Internet medium into the
virtual part of an enviromental event, implying a synthesis of future
architecture”. The third parallel aspect of the exhibition titled
Architecture - Medium - Message was promotional and presented
via the “real” medium of marketing. It demonstrated how
postmodern society de-differentiates and homogenises various
activities, with the media treating architecture like entertainment,
popular culture, sport or politics. The three-minute film by Alceo
Marti provided the project with a presentation in this medium.
The “Seven Lamps” installation at the Mine Museum in Saint
Etienne (2002) was a key work in exploring the interplay between
physical and virtual realities, and between an architecture of
presence and absence. The title recalled Ruskin’s mid-nineteenth
century Seven Lamps of Architecture, but the “solid state” lamps
THE SAVA BATHS

Mladost Swimming Pool, 1984-1987
P&R’s first major commission, won in a public
competition. The Mladost (Youth) public
sports park near the river Sava required an
indoor and an outdoor Olympic swimming
pool.
The idea of elevating the indoor pool onto a
podium came from the old Sava Baths wooden
facility, destined for demolition along with a
couple of dilapidated Modernist buildings in
the area.
Most of the services were dispatched to the
stone-clad ground-floor pediment, so that the
“representative” bigger spaces could interrelate
embedded in the superimposed aluminium
container.
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of Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory and Obedience

were recast in overlapping and continuous forms as Memory
(between spirituality and nomadism), Distortion (between visual
and audio-tactile), Choice (between residency and display),
Change (between residence and nomadism), Time (between
display and everydayness), Play (between everydayness and
ludism), and Place (between ludism and spirituality). The
installation, in a former elevator entrance to the mine housed in
an industrial heritage facility converted into a museum, combined
horizontal, floor-hugging platforms with changing wall
projections. The content drew attention to ambiguity of meaning
and the inclusiveness of possibilities from conventional
architectonic discourses to virtual realities beyond scale, typology
and style. The installation was particularly resonant in the context
of the building’s industrial connotations of a bygone technological
age, and acted as a foil to the contemporary technological
concepts.
The “Seven Lamps” was a temporary intervention relating to a
specific interior. A more permanent installation was the “Dry
Garden” interior for the atrium of the Pliva Pharmaceutical
Research Centre in Zagreb (2001-2002). Penezić & Rogina have
designed an almost Zen-like space for socialising and
contemplative relaxation for the scientists and workers in the
Centre. There are four multifunctional elements that comprise
the “Dry Garden”: a meandering, apparently floating teak
platform that acts as either seating or a walkway; integrated glass
prisms with encased water flows and interactive light sources;
“intelligent” bamboo groves; and large screens with variable but
66-71 constantly changing light clouds. There is an interesting parallel to
be drawn between Penezić & Rogina’s “Garden” in the context of
a Second Machine Age – albeit advanced – technological building,
and their “Seven Lamps” installation within a First Machine Age
industrial building. In both cases, there is a successful
complementarity of hardware and software, of conventional
reality and hyperreality.
Reality 3 “Beyond Time and Space” has become a central part of
Penezić & Rogina’s current thinking. “Architecture in the Digital
Era” (2003), for example, makes the point that “Architecture is
no longer simply the play of masses in light. It now embraces the
play of digital information in space”. Architecture has to
CITY CORNER
Social housing for war victims in Nova Gradiška,
1997-2003
Located in the very heart of a small western
Slavonian town, the building has unusual edge
conditions. Physically, there is a community health
centre with a low extension and an ample front
garden to the north of the site alongside a typical
provincial housing unit with an open side staircase
to the east. Mentally, there is a powerful memory of
the original building, destroyed in the Yugoslav
army’s air bombing, in which several people died.
The main volume with the bulk of flats, accessible
from the gallery, has two extensions/annexes: one
bigger, with maisonettes overlooking the courtyard,
and a smaller one, a copper-clad memorial with a
huge skylight on the small front square.
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accommodate “ever-changing constellations and configurations

of desired data and media” but still presents a physical point of
contact (the ritualistic red phone boxes in this project) that opens
out to the Virtual world. That point of contact can range from the
46-47 size of a city, through information technology, to – even – the
garments you are wearing. For the Dressing Ourselves exhibition
at the Milan Triennale in 2005, Penezić & Rogina unveiled their
Dig-It-All Re-Wall-ution Suit (Mao where did it all go wrong?).
For the exhibition, Alessandro Guerriero invited important or
influential figures from the world of architecture, design, music
and art who reflect upon contemporary culture and the
importance of clothes within it. Thirty participants were asked to
design an item of clothing that would become a kind of self-
portrait of themselves and of their society. The sketches they
made were the starting point for a collection of clothes-cum-works
of art displayed on glass resin sculptures representing the creators
in real scale. Penezić & Rogina’s contribution was a ready-made
superimposition of a traditional worker’s suit from the era of the
Chinese Revolution, combined with the iconography of the cult-
movie Matrix on a mannequin that represented the young Mao.
The message of the clothing – about globalisation in the post-
political, post-historical society – was clear.
Less obvious was the point Penezić & Rogina were making about
architecture in the digital age. At a significant level, the suit made
the point that boundaries were nowadays constantly breeched.
Categories of “architecture”, “design”, “art”, and “fashion” had
become increasingly porous. What separated them into different
categories was now often far less important than their potential as
relatively undifferentiated interfaces between the person,
technology and environment, whether real or virtual. This
thinking had roots in the 1960s’ theories of one of Penezić &
Rogina’s heroes, the architectural historian and theorist, Reyner
Banham. Banham developed a radical approach to a
technological architecture which would go well beyond
architectural lore and conventions towards a rethinking of
architecture in terms of “fit environments for human activities”, a
phrase he employed throughout the 1960s. In the post-Modern,
expanded field, architecture should be only one of the possible
solutions to the broader, more-inclusive thinking about creating
“fit environments”. In the digital age, this potentiality could be
ORGANIC CONTINUITY
Trnje Parish Centre and Monastery,
1994-1999 (partly constructed)
The complex, a commission won in a
public competition, was situated at a
location where both functions had co-
existed for years within an old and
granular, suburban organic structure.
The main issue to be tackled in the project
was preserving the scale and the identity of
the space, which has emerged as an oasis
within a new city centre development.
The Parish Centre part with future public
halls, a library and a bookshop was built
first, temporarily incorporating all
functions. The main Monastery facility
could subsequently be executed in such a
way that the old church may become its
inner chapel. The church and the parish
priest’s residence, along with the
Monastery extension, are yet to be built.
The originally proposed assemblage of
wood, brick, plaster and copper used in the
Parish Centre was slightly changed in the
Monastery project, with wood being
replaced by aluminium as nuns found its
maintenance difficult.
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INTERIORS
Fun Café, Elite Café, Neon signs shop,
1995-1996
(subsequently redecorated)
Fun Café. The minuscule L-shaped
space suggested a division into two
separate compartments, standing and
sitting, fast and slow, cool and warm.
The latter was intended for lovers and
students from nearby colleges.
Elite Café. The glass screen on a busy
street with heavy traffic functioned as a
self-advertisement, an eye-catching
image in urban space. While the outer
standing space was cool and open, the
inner sitting room was warmer and
ensconced, with something of a travel
lounge feel.
Neon signs shop. Easily rearrangeable
steel bars on the walls and the ceiling,
constructed as hangers for different
types of illuminated signs, made most
of the small space at hand.
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realised because of the availability and adaptability of information

technology. The Dig-It-All suit, Dry Garden, and the Tokyo
projects can all be seen as “fit environments for human activities”
in Penezić & Rogina’s own expanded field of architecture.
In effect, Reality 3 (Beyond Time and Space), had subsumed and
exponentially developed Reality 1 (Pop and Change) in Penezić &
Rogina’s approach. However, just as Reality 1 was
counterbalanced by Reality 2 (Modernism and Continuity), so
Reality 3 sits alongside Reality 4, a Reality most definitely
determined by real time and space.
Reality 4: Real time and space
Cyberspace may have become a daily Reality for many people,
but it has not, of course, replaced other forms of Reality, but
displaced them. Another Reality that cannot be ignored is the
aftermath of a brutal war. In Croatia’s war for independence, the
Baroque town of Vukovar became the Croatian Stalingrad, a
symbol of resistance. The siege by the Yugoslav army left it almost
completely destroyed. In the very centre of the town, facing the
ruins of a massive department store, near the historic Eltz
mansion between the main street and the river, Penezić & Rogina
have built a 24-apartment social housing block – Block 21A – for
war victims (1998-2002). The block has won the Vladimir Nazor
Award for architecture and urbanism in 2001 but, more
importantly, it has won the hearts and minds of the residents of
Vukovar.
Block 21A is Penezić & Rogina’s most monumental building, but 74-79
its monumentalism is well founded and in no way architecturally

pompous. It is a monument in the sense that it memorialises
history by its architectural presence at a certain time and in a
particular space/place. Block 21A speaks of pride, optimism,
defiance, humanity and everyday life. It speaks socially through
an architectural language that works at both conscious and
unconscious levels.
The north face is the one most likely to be photographed because
it is the most impactful. The long, horizontal slab of reflective
glass at times appears as a floating plane with lines inscribed upon
it, rather like a great Minimal artwork. Its apparent flatness is
nicely counterbalanced by the images and scenes of the town
reflected in it, and by the windows to the apartments which, in
certain lights, reveal that their glass is darker and not reflective,
or, when open, show that the plane shields depth behind. The slab
is seemingly held in place at both ends by, to the town end, a
slanting red block and, to the river, a stone-panelled slab. Both
these elements are set slightly behind the horizontal glass plane.
The red block comprises office space and its colour was chosen to
add vitality and a sense of life to the townscape. The street façade
is a “standard” urban office block of reflective glass that reflects
the bustle of street life and contributes to the much sought-after
normalcy of the town. A dominant yellow sign for a bank is, in the
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THE WALL
1991
Designed during the heaviest attacks of the Yugoslav army on P&R’s native Croatia, the
structure combined global references with distinctly local sources.
Historically, it can be associated with the ancient Croatian Glagolitic script, the Early
Croatian interlacing-ribbon pattern, and the traditional system of building dry walls in
the Adriatic area.
At the same time, it is a tribute to the legacy of Croatian abstract art, which had offered
strong resistance to the Yugoslav communist government.
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“DRY” GARDEN
Interior design for the Atrium
of the Pliva Pharmaceutical
Research Centre in Zagreb,
2001-2002
The new Research Centre
building required a space for
contemplation and daily
relaxation for scientists, which
could also serve as the
pharmaceutical company’s
main locale for various ad hoc
gatherings. There are four
multifunctional elements
fabulating the concept of a
“dry” garden: a floating,
meandering platform made of
teak wood people can sit on,
walk along or look at; integrated
glass prisms with vertical water
flows and interactive light
sources; intelligent bamboo
groves; textile screens for
different types of light
“calligraphy”. Adjusting the
huge abstract space to a human
scale, with the possibility of
creating a suppler, more
intimate atmosphere, was highly
appreciated.
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present context, a welcome symbol of that prized normalcy.

The stone-panelled river end block is heavy and impenetrable and
gives little away about the life that goes on behind it. It is perfectly
polite and architecturally well-mannered, but it is far from
welcoming and open. It is not without significance that across the
river is the source of the wartime destruction.
The final façade, the south facing, is in contrast to the others.
Within two end panels are two further panels whose faces are
broken up by slit windows recalling something between
Ronchamp’s arbitrarily placed windows, and geometrically
determined Croatian Constructivist art. The inner panels both
frame and shield the stairs and external walkways that link floors
and give access to apartment entrances. The scale is human and
the quality of design is exceptionally high, creating very desirable
apartments. There’s an openness, lightness and airiness to this
markedly three-dimensional face of the building that makes it
inviting and pleasurable. The range of materials – stone panelling,
concrete, translucent glass and metal - has the effect of breaking
down the scale so it is the opposite of monumental, and
demonstrates Penezić & Rogina’s expertise in manipulating a
variety of surfaces, textures, materials and light in space. On the
ground floor, accessible from the north and south sides, are small
shop units which, when filled, will add to the life of the building.
The apartments themselves are compact and sensitively designed.
Translucent strip windows at waist height in the kitchen and
bathroom give both light and privacy, while higher windows,
above head height, allow light to flood in whilst maintaining
privacy. The darkened windows on the north-facing façade can be
opened to reveal the traditional multi-purpose loggia or veranda.
Residents are appreciative of the flexibility of being able to keep
this space open or closed, depending on such factors as weather,
privacy and functional needs. Space can flow from out to in and
vice-versa, or be contained according to the resident’s choice. The
architecture accommodates life.
Block 21A achieves a magnificent synthesis of architecture in
Real Time and Space. It works functionally; it works socially; and
it works architectonically. It also works symbolically, in a subtle
but insistent way. The pride, optimism, defiance, humanity and
everyday life of which it speaks are communicated by the different
moods and messages of the facades as one moves around them.
The values, like the facades, are not simply sequential and linear,
but inter-relate and inform one another. There can be no doubt
that the building is an entirely authentic and accomplished
response to time and space/place. It belongs in Vukovar in the
period after the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, and has been
designed as a result of the architects knowing and experiencing
that time and space. This is most certainly not a multi-fit building
designed for anywhere. One of the greatest compliments that can
be paid to it is that, however good it looks in architectural journal
illustrations, it looks even better when you visit and experience it
because then you can then understand why it looks as it does, as
well as how it relates to the time of its building, the geographical
location and its place in Croatia’s history. It is a new beginning in
Vukovar’s life.
Penezić & Rogina have continued their interest in urban
interventions. Their “Elevated Park” is for the office and retail
complex NEXE at their headquarters in Našice, a city in Eastern
Slavonia in Croatia. The site is part of a protected historic and
urban area of the city in which there is abundant greenery. Their 92
concept – awarded first prize in an open competition – was to

provide a “green” envelope that merges with the surrounding
yards, and a roof that is conceived as an elevated park on whose
modulated configuration people can relax and enjoy city views.
The spatial concept of the complex is based on the extension of
urban space, but in a way that combines the normally dualistic
terms of “nature” and “the city”. The resultant “urban pockets”
help to generate the interior of the building. The concept of the
“distorted” and irregular building block with atriums conjures up
the spatial quality of the office floors. These floors have a constant
two-sided orientation that enables the maximum flexibility of the
internal organization. “Elevated Park” with its continually
changing vistas, uncertain (but resolved) forms, and visual
ambiguities could, in many ways, hardly be more different from
Block 21A with its clear delineation and assertive facades, but
both schemes show Penezić & Rogina’s ability to create
imaginative architecture that is embedded in a particular place
and context. It is an undoubted strength that, taken away from
their physical and historical contexts, these schemes would lose
much of their resonance.
A final significant project in terms of urban intervention is the
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VUKOWAR REFLECTIONS
Social housing for war victims in Vukovar, 1998-2002
In Croatia’s war for independence, the Baroque town of Vukovar became the Croatian
Stalingrad, a symbol of resistance. The siege by the Yugoslav army left it almost
completely destroyed. In the very centre of the town, facing the ruins of a massive
department store, near the historic Eltz mansion between the main street and the river,
a social housing facility with 24 apartments for war victims was to be designed.
Between the big screen oriented towards public space – reflecting dynamic urban
changes like a live ornament – and the elevated walkways – places of social contact
overlooking the courtyard of the future block – new life is emerging.
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DIGITALIZED REALITY
Day care Jarun, Zagreb 2002-2006
The building has an interesting relationship with the surrounding context.
This is reflected in the volume articulation and in the geometry of the plan but also in the
colour pattern of the façade which has been accepted by the neighbourhood and recently
been emulated.
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redesign of the Waldeck-Rousseau Square in Saint-Etienne,

France, that commenced in 2004. Downtown Saint-Etienne today
consists mostly of spaces that have become cluttered and
84-85 claustrophobic: narrow streets like canyons; open spaces that are
crowded with street furniture and “things”; major vistas have been
lost; and the quality of public space neglected. The Waldeck-
Rousseau Square is typical – it is at present a visual and
organisational mess, a mixture of inward looking activities and
sub-utilitarian structures that ignore the space itself. Penezić &
Rogina have aimed to introduce new connections, unexpected
public sequences, greater fluidity and continuity of space, and to
provide the area with a metropolitan character through human
scale. Their keywords are “re-programming – re-construction –
re-integration” and they have resulted in what the architects term
“cleaning and opening; spatiality and enabling; and activity and
change”, as well as the superimposition of a contemporary matrix
onto a historical one.
The area will be transformed into an environment offering a
greater range of individual and collective activities and
possibilities – indeed, a fit environment for contemporary human
activities. This is to be attained not with the implementation of
small additions, but with the help of light, integrated and
changeable structures – including a “Multisensorial Generator” –
that facilitate everydayness and change.
Squares have featured in Penezić & Rogina’s work before. The
1993 scheme for the Jakomini Square in Graz, Austria focused,
too, on the importance of “place” by means of “dematerialized
glass volumes [that] connect the two worlds materialized by
sunken gardens (Earth) and lightweight transparent sheds
(Heavens). They are extensions of the constant tension between
permanence and change, continuity and modification, between
structure and fluctuation, forgetting and recalling”.
The scheme attempted a kind of “studied incoherence” in order to
intensify the “visual pleasure of individual episodes only to regain
coherence in the mental act of reconstruction”. Simple, neat order
was to be avoided because it was banal. Closer to the St. Etienne
project was the design for Leopold Square in Arlon, Belgium
(1996) that counterpoised an open, multifunctional pavilion with
one of the city’s palaces.
The square had the dual role of entrance to the palace, and a place
for popular gatherings. “Cleaning and opening” etc. would also

have been a tactic there. Penezić & Rogina had developed the
multifunctional pavilion idea, the precursor of the St. Etienne
“Multisensorial Generator”, as early as 1991. Their “Cubicula
Populi” could be transformed into innumerable spaces and
platforms, frames and canopies for all kind of performances.
There would also be an “electronic screen capacity in which each
panel transforms the stage into a huge multivision device used in
and between performances”.
The St Etienne “Multisensorial Generator” is a building or, more
accurately – and recalling Cedric Price’s own description of his
Fun Palace – a facility for the digital age located in real space and
a particular place. The Generator is the central physical element
in the new Waldeck-Rousseau Square, the focus of the openness
and “emptiness” of the place/space resulting from the “cleaning
and opening” and “integrating” of the existing dispersed and
currently-existing chaotic elements. It plays the role of public
interface in-between two eminent buildings: the Ecole des Beaux-
Arts on the hill, and the church of Saint-Louis across the street. It
generates and initiates most of the happenings on the square
which thus becomes a metropolitan place of meeting and
exchange with a preserved and enhanced local identity. Identity
also operates at various socio-cultural levels. Including references
to Waldeck Rousseau and the Ecole des Beux-Arts; and the
transformation of the town from miners’ settlement to a
metropolis of design. There are architectural and typological
references, too, from Abbé Laugier’s “Primitive Hut”, through
Facteur Cheval’s Ideal Palace, to the industrial heritage of mining
in the area, and Le Corbusier – La Tourette and Firminy are in the
same region – whose “Modulor” was used as the basic
constructional grid of the Generator.
Constructed of steel with fabric filling, it straggles outdoor
sculpture and public pavilion – described by Penezić & Rogina as
“a stage for different events, kaleidoscope [and] music box.…”
Whether a person is inhabiting it or just walking through it, this
multisensorial and interactive facility responds to their presence,
and provides visual, sound, odour and tactile sensations. It recalls
the digital characteristics described by Penezić & Rogina in the
quote that started this essay, in particular, that it is a
“hypermultimedia ‘building’ [that] offers information and
84 NIGEL WHITELEY
MULTISENSORIAL GENERATOR
Re:programming - re:construction - re:integration of the Waldeck-Rousseau square
in Saint-Etienne, project 2004 - in progress
Downtown Saint-Etienne today consists mostly of claustrophobic spaces that need to
breath-narrow streets like canyons, open spaces that are crowded with “things”,
discontinuity of public space and neglected major vistas. This project introduces new
connections, unexpected public sequences, fluidity and continuity of space, and gives the
area a metropolitan character through human scale.
The place itself is at present a mess, a mixture of inward looking activities that ignore the
space itself. By cleansing and opening, as well as by the superimposition of a
contemporary matrix onto a historical one, the area will be available for a greater range
of individual and collective endeavours, attained not with the implementation of small
additions but with the help of light, integrated and changeable structures for the
spectacles of everydayness.
86 NIGEL WHITELEY
knowledge through a personalised ambience and ‘natural’

environment. The datascape is neither analogue (like a library),
nor analogue-digital (like a mediateque): it is digital, highly
personalised tactile-corporeal simulacrum – an electronic
environment where bits replace bricks, information replaces
mortar, interfaces replace walls... compromising the ritual
(physical anchors - atavistic remains) and the virtual (cyber-
matrix - transformational algorithms) part of the public/social
event”. The Generator looks over its shoulder to the experimental
pavilions seen at Expos and world fairs, back to the avant garde
Constructivist visions like that of Gustav Klutsis’s 1922 design for
a Screen-Tribune-Kiosk for the Fifth Anniversary of the October
Revolution, or the Vesnin Brothers’ Newspaper Building of 1923.
In fact, the Constructivists embraced contemporary technology to
create an architecture for their time, and Penezić & Rogina do
something similar in the digital age. They are, as I stated at the
beginning of this essay, IT enthusiasts, but they are not merely
architects who create a digital architecture. They are a partnership
that creates architecture for the digital age.
Realities 3 and 4
The “both/and” philosophy of Penezić & Rogina’s architecture
cannot be better illustrated than by the juxtaposition of Realities 3
(Beyond Time and Space), and 4 (Real Time and Space). In my
view there is continuity between the pair of Realities 1 (Pop and
Change), and 2 (Modernism and Continuity), and the pair 3 and 4,
but there are differences. Whereas 1 and 2 could be defined in
terms of points on a continuum, 3 and 4 show greater synthesis
and inter-relationship at the socio-cultural, aesthetic, and
technological levels. Realities 3 and 4 represent a new level of
achievement in the architecture of Penezić & Rogina and show a
command of both space-time’s continuities and discontinuities.
The St Etienne scheme is a synthesis of Realities 3 and 4 – a multi-
sensorial digital facility within real space, bringing together for
their mutual benefit, some of the different Realities that we daily
experience. Similarly, the “Dry Garden” offers the potentialities
for relaxation and contemplation of a combination of new
electronic technology and real space.
There are some syntheses across the Realities in Penezić &
Rogina’s work, but the Realities also remain separate at times,

following their own trajectories. A parallel point is made by
Kengo Kuma in a short essay about the architects’ work written
for their “Architecture in the Digital Era” exhibit in 2003, and
reprinted in Reality Check: “What is characteristic about the way
Penezi´c & Rogina have responded to IT is that their
discontinuities have become even more pronounced, and that
their works have become even more fragmented”. Kuma views
this in a very positive light, because
“Ordinary architects and designers try to respond to IT by using designs that

embody an even greater element of continuity. This trend is particularly
manifest with American architects [who] start with a rough and discontinuous
item, forcibly smooth it out, and cover it with a continuous curved surface. IT
has made things like this possible. A complex, rough surface that is made with
numerous undulations is the faddish ‘new form’ of American design”.
This is obviously beneficial in terms of branding and marketing,

but is deficient in terms of variety and heterogeneity. Kuma
argues that Penezić & Rogina are
“…doggedly pursuing discontinuity. They continue to break up-even

atomize-objects that were previously connected. Even before IT prevailed,
they had this tendency to fragment items. I get the impression that this
tendency is escalating, not waning, because of IT. Their particles’ edges are
becoming ever sharper and more strongly delineated, in stark contrast to the
smoothing technique used in contemporary American designs”.
For Kuma, Penezić & Rogina have a profound understanding of

the IT age and its implications: “If the basis of IT is digitization-
breaking down the world into fine particles, calculating them and
analyzing them - then the process of breaking things down into
particles which characterizes Penezić & Rogina‘s work perhaps
more accurately represents their grasp of what IT essentially is”.
Kuma sees political implications here: “The current American-
style trend looks new from the outside. However, it is new only as
a fashion in terms of form. Hidden in the background is a 19th
century-style hegemony that believes the world must be made, by
the use of force, into a single domain. On the other hand, Penezić
& Rogina’s fragmented designs symbolize a strong will to de that
the worries about IT creating a homogenized world are
groundless”.
88 NIGEL WHITELEY
SACRED VEIL
Interior design of an
existing church in
Velika Gorica near
Zagreb, limited
competition, first prize
2005 - in progress
The interior of the
existing church is
burdened by the force
of “aggressive”
elements which detract a
person’s attention by
defocusing and
dispersion. This space
therefore needed to be
given a contemplative
and sacred character.
The proposal is all-
encompassing and
consists of a domed
translucent membrane
constructed out of cast
polycarbonate and is
structurally independent
of the existing structure.
This form integrates the
dispersed internal space
of the church and
excludes elements which
interfere with the feeling
of concentration and
peace. The effect of
intensity, dispersion and
supplementation of
natural and artificial
lighting through the
“veil”, all contribute to
the desired sense of
sacredness.
Penezić & Rogina are committed to IT, but not an homogenised

architecture of IT. They are enthusiasts rather than evangelists –
IT will always be a means rather than an end for them. As they put
it in their “Millennium Lament”: “architects should enter the
hidden chambers of the microcosm of everyday life. Whatever
they come up with it still has to have a body, but its soul has to
change from the transcendental sphere to reality. Both the virtual
and the ritual part of environmental events in synthesis should
substitute the common in-between-heaven-and-earth-physical-
structure-buried-with-equipment”.
They have achieved this level of accomplishment because of their
enthusiasm for both IT and the potential of new technologies, and
“making architecture” with its concomitant demands about the
quality of space, materials, organisation, function and image.
Earlier phases of influence and absorption in their output are
being superseded by a maturity and richness that is characterised
by an authenticity, integrity, inventiveness and creative
intelligence which promises much for the future.
90 NIGEL WHITELEY
SEVEN LAMPS
Biennal of Saint-Etienne 2002
The installation is located inside a monument of industrial archeology which has been
converted into a museum. It is a space rich in history and memories that the installation
respected, celebrating the mechanical age, but which added a new layer of digitalization.
The exhibit is characterized by floating platforms and electronic projections. The content
of the show does not present analytically the different works of the architects but it recalls
their theoretical search on the different aspects of digitalization of the world. The
installation becomes an affirmation of the contemporary, digital times. It recalls and
updates John Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture.
INTERACTIVE RECONFIGURATION
Handball centre in Zagreb, open competition, commendation 2006
According to the contemporary hybrid typologies, a building is no more seen as a
machine for creating a handball spectacle, but a reconfiguration in the continuous,
temporary adaptation continually moving from monumental and representative qualities
of architecture to presentational qualities of the program. A detachment is being made
from the monomorphic to polymorphic form, from classic object against a background,
to a complex unity of structure and surroundings.
92 NIGEL WHITELEY
ELEVATED PARK ^
Office and retail complex in NEXE in Nasice,
open competition first prize, 2005 - in progress
^
The location of the facility is in the very centre of Nasice, a city that lies in Eastern
Slavonia. The site is part of a protected historic and urban area of the city in which there
is abundant greenery. The project provides a “green” envelope which merges with the
surrounding yards and a roof which is conceived as an elevated park on whose
modulated configuration people can relax and enjoy city views. The spatial concept of
the complex is based on the extension of urban space via the interpolation of urban
“pockets” which therein generate the interior of the building. The concept of the
“distorted” building block with atriums brings with it the spatial quality of the office
floors. These office floors have a constant two-side orientation which enables flexibility
of internal organization without limits.
FOLDER
Office building ZM in Zagreb, limited competition entry 2004
The location of the site along a main city avenue, at the location of a future intersection,
generated the conception of a dominant spatial anchor. The triangular site suggested
either a block or a solitary building as appropriate.
The project proposes a hybrid of these two principles, a kind of “folder” which at the
urban level brings about an intermingling of public and private spheres while also
providing the workspaces with maximum natural lighting and deep views. The indented,
meandering spatial disposition of the perimeter opens up to a central plaza which links
dominant routes to pedestrians, while the yin-yang transposition of dematerialized
masses generates a powerful spatial symbol.
94 NIGEL WHITELEY
MULTILAYERED FOLDER
Stanograd multifunctional facility in Zagreb, invited competition first prize 2007
The location of the site along the main city street Ilica, close to an intersection, generated
the conception of a dominant spatial anchor, 21st century’s iconic interpolation into the
layers of the complex historical development. The shape of the site suggested either a
courtyard cluster or a continuously configured structure as appropriate. The project
proposes a hybrid of these two principles, a kind of “folder” which at the urban level
brings about an intermingling of public and private spheres (dwellings, offices, hotel,
entertainment, leisure, retail) while also providing the spaces with maximum natural
lighting and deep views. The indented, meandering spatial disposition of the perimeter
opens up to a central plaza which links dominant routes to pedestrians, while the
transposition of dematerialized masses generates a powerful spatial symbol.
Index
The Construction of the New Reality, by Antonino Saggio 5
Introduction 9
Reality 1: Pop and Change 11
Reality 2: Modernism and Continuity 22
Realities 1 and 2 36
Reality 3: Beyond time and space 38
Reality 4: Real time and space 63
Realities 3 and 4 86
The Information Technology Revolution in Architecture
The
ITRevolution
is a series reflecting on the effects the virtual dimension
is having on architects and architecture in general. Each
volume will examine a single topic, highlighting the
in Architecture essential aspects and exploring their relevance for the
architects of today
Series edited by Antonino Saggio
New titles in this series
Diller + Scofidio
Il teatro della dissolvenza
Antonello Marotta
ISBN 88-7864-010-7
Gamezone
Playground tra scenari virtuali e realtà
Alberto Iacovoni
ISBN 88-7864-011-5
Strati Mobili
Video contestuali nell’arte e nell’architettura
Alexandro Ladaga & Silvia Manteiga
ISBN 88-7864-016-6
Takis Zenetos
Visioni digitali, architetture costruite
Dimitris Papalexopoulos, Eleni Kalafati
ISBN 88-7864-012-3
Arie italiane
Motivi dell’architettura italiana recente
Antonello Marotta, Paola Ruotolo
ISBN 88-7864-022-0
Stanze ribelli
Immaginando lo spazio hacker
Alexander Levi, Amanda Schachter
ISBN 978-88-7864-028-3
Penezic & Rogina

Digitalizzazione della realtà
Nigel Whiteley
ISBN 978-88-7864-030-6 - ISBN 978-88-7864-039-9
Italian and English

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IT REVOLUTION IN ARCHITETTURA

series edited by Antonino Saggio

Rome, october 2007

Penezić & Rogina

Projects which are mentioned but not included in this

demanding program of residential public construction, Penezić &

reviewed it in Croatia; they have always emphasized the positive

Nigel’s text is truly illuminating, as is the key provided at the end,

Dig-It-All Re-Wall-ution Suit

strengths of Penezić & Rogina’s architecture is that their

FROM A VISUAL CIVIZATION TO AN AUDIO TACTILE CULTURE

Gilles Lipovetsky’s L’Ere du Vide (1983) was influential in its

contradiction. A stone-clad base, derived from classical-

protectively enclosed, with something of a travel lounge feel. The

back office. The original spatiality was left completely

paralleling the way an advert can communicate as effectively, in

long as forms were not being deified, but used permissively –

particular architectural context that is part of a tradition that

physical and historical contexts as their starting point, Penezić &

architects’ words, “a contemplative and sacred character”. Their

TRANSPARENCY OF THE HYPERREAL

former Yugoslavia, there has been a sharp increase in the building 57

Picelj of EXAT 51. At the time, these paintings signified both an

critically and with respect. No single building can, therefore,

Machine Age products re-socialise us with information networks

The Shinkenchiku competition in Tokyo – “A Style for the Year

REALITY-SHOW PARA-SITE HOUSE

a continuum of experiences and information that, if projected into

Machine Age. The brief declared the aim of “integrating a

“frozen music - cacophonic creativity; differentiated sameness - non-

measurability - irreducible diversity; typological definition - continuous

Contemporary, electronic technology was far closer to this

“Kind to the Earth is neither Architecture in Nature nor Architecture against

They argued that “The traditional sense of architecture becomes

“program - generic code; complicity - complexity; homogeneity - variety;

The vocabulary used by the architects, within this Reality, was no

The statement was reworked to become part of their “Surround

have to be replaced by a more holistic approach that embraces the

Message in the real medium of marketing.

with the semi-darkness and emptiness of the second room,

THE SAVA BATHS

of Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory and Obedience

accommodate “ever-changing constellations and configurations

realised because of the availability and adaptability of information

its monumentalism is well founded and in no way architecturally

present context, a welcome symbol of that prized normalcy.

concept – awarded first prize in an open competition – was to

redesign of the Waldeck-Rousseau Square in Saint-Etienne,

for popular gatherings. “Cleaning and opening” etc. would also

knowledge through a personalised ambience and ‘natural’

Rogina’s work, but the Realities also remain separate at times,

“Ordinary architects and designers try to respond to IT by using designs that

This is obviously beneficial in terms of branding and marketing,

“…doggedly pursuing discontinuity. They continue to break up-even

For Kuma, Penezić & Rogina have a profound understanding of

Penezić & Rogina are committed to IT, but not an homogenised

The Construction of the New Reality, by Antonino Saggio 5

Reality 1: Pop and Change 11

Reality 2: Modernism and Continuity 22

Reality 3: Beyond time and space 38

Reality 4: Real time and space 63

New titles in this series

Penezic & Rogina