sng_2016-05-12_high-single-crop_k3
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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