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gallery, a public space of multiple focal points, with focal points<br />

linked and even crisscrossed. Any effort by the gallery’s administrators<br />

or renovators to “enclose” the gallery as designed, to<br />

fill its “gallery squares” with indoor exhibit spaces, would run<br />

counter to the gallery’s concept of a distributed and crisscrossing<br />

plan; to use Aldo van Eyck’s phrase, counter to the “labyrinthine<br />

clarity” of its indoor and outdoor walkways, spaces and<br />

interstitial spaces.<br />

Seen in this light, the group of gallery buildings and their<br />

public spaces constitute a <strong>high</strong> point in Dedeček’s program to<br />

dislocate the urban mono-block (in urbanist and architectural<br />

terms) into a cluster that he had begun to formulate and prove<br />

as a counterpart to tried and true compositional approaches<br />

in primary and secondary schools, and continued in later university<br />

areas. The opened raster of SNG spaces is one – and<br />

the meandering pavilions of the Comenius University Natural<br />

Science faculty in Bratislava-Mlynská dolina another – of these<br />

interpretations: another of Dedeček’s solutions to his self-assigned<br />

task of rethinking relations between urban architectural<br />

openness and closedness. Ultimately, the interconnection of<br />

gallery and public space in the SNG project was not to change,<br />

from its earliest proposed alternatives through a fragmentary<br />

realization, despite the turbulent metamorphosis of the whole.<br />

A group of experts of the culture and information ministry gave<br />

approval to the introductory project as prepared (the first alternative<br />

for the area and the second alternative for the southern<br />

wing) in 1967: Professors Emil Belluš and Vladimír Karfík, the<br />

architect and urban planner Štefan Svetko, the construction engineer<br />

Jozef Harvančík and the architect Anton Cimmerman (Jozef<br />

Lacko excused himself). 18 Of their decision, Vladimír Dedeček<br />

wrote: “In scale and material we accommodated primarily to<br />

the principles applied in realizing Hotel Devín. The technical<br />

and financial council of the culture ministry, which included<br />

[H]otel Devín’s architect Prof. Belluš, opposed this as some-<br />

18 / see p. 29 /<br />

27

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