sng_2016-05-12_high-single-crop_k3

“Doch gerade durch diese brachiale Verkleidung wirkt die
große Struktur und stellt ein Meisterwerk dar, das längst
über die Moderne hinausgewachsen ist.” / “And by this very
instrumentality of this brachial encasement, the large structure
impresses, and represents a masterpiece that has far outgrown
the modern”. 29
In 2005 the Dutch architect Willem Jan Neutellings,
together with members of the Academy of Fine Arts architecture
department, symbolically founded the Slovak Institute
for the Preservation of Communist Monumental Architecture
Heritage. Dedeček’s completion of the SNG site is one
of three initial pieces he includes. He thereby symbolically
places this construction in the context of European communist
monumental architecture.
Sign/Symbolic : Any place the gallery’s Danube is discussed
as bridging or a bridge, it is being treated as an ostensible indication
of a bridge, or a bridge/building, and simultaneously as
an elementary sign (based on the external similarities to bridge
structure, and on the causal link of the structure with building
form). Indeed “bridging” is a technical term, which has come to
stand for the whole gallery site and expresses one of its main
architectural themes.
The current gallery director Alexandra Kusá gave an interview
in association with “various symbols” with a visitor (with a cameraman
of a film about the gallery) who still sees the SNG bridging,
now temporarily painted gray, as a “red monstrosity”. 30 This “red
monstrosity” stands for the bridging because of the period’s
ideas of something huge, amorphous and frightful, which might
serve as an allegorical epithet for the regime with no human face.
After the bridging was put into use, the side surfaces (“crosscut
edges”) were red with an “indented” bevelled facade (to be
precise, the lower edges of the indentation, as seen from below).
The facing surfaces were white, as in many of Dedeček’s educational
buildings before and after. The roof was partly glassed.
Thus the bridging could become a “red monstrosity” mainly for
40