A MODEL FOR SAVAMALA CALL for participants

Our team is looking for architects, designers and other creatives to participate in a series of events during the initial phase of our project called A model for Savamala in Belgrade (April-June 2013). The team of participants will be involved in 3 separate workshops, organized on a regular basis within three months period, starting from April the 1st. The focus on the first two workshops (1st-5th April and 13th-17th May) will be on simple but labor-intensive fieldwork: a buildup of all relevant information on the area, both on-site and in partnership with related institutions.Third workshop (3rd-7th June) will be formed around the model making master-class where we will host an internationally renowned model-making studio from Amsterdam, Studio KU+. Head of the office, Kaita Shinagawa (Japan), will come to Belgrade and give us a series of short lectures on a model making followed by practical work in our Savamala context. This workshop will be open for the general public and will represent the official start of building the Savamala model. Were looking for participants with the background in architecture, design, art, history, social science or just individuals with the affinity for investigative research and documentation. If you are creative and full of unusual ideas, please drop us a line! You can send a short letter of motivation and a bio, no later then the 10th of March, to maja@failedarchitecture.com A Model for Savamala is a part of the Urban Incubator, a project of Excellence by Goethe Institute in Belgrade.
About the project: In a context of the imminent substantial transformation of Savamala we believe it is crucial to make the area understandable. It will be of a great advantage for the areas development if we have an as clear as possible idea on what Savamala is made of, its activities, what are the interests involved and what ambitions do the different stakeholders in the area aspire to. For this reason we would like to make the area of Savamala transparent through the means of architectural representation, relating to the sociological, economical and political facts. For the Urban Incubator open call we are proposing a 3D physical model of Savamala. In its basic architectural form, the model will reflect the history and current state of affairs in the area as well as its potential upcoming developments. It will represent the exiting urban morphology and typology, it will make clear what the property structure is, it will indicate the intensity of commercial activities and will show where do the inhabitants of Savamala live. Most of this data is, to our knowledge, already available but it has never been visualised and put in relation to each other. In this sense the ambition is to make a model that represents the current condition of Savamala: to visualise and make comprehensible what we are dealing with when talking about this area. To target the public awareness of it and (together with citizens, visitors, developers, politicians and investors) try to illustrate the potential this area has. Maja Popovic & Boba Stanic, Belgrade 2013.