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locked it in places (the Water Barracks’ rear facade); i.e. he
both introduced light and muted it, or blocked its sharper variations
(the administrative building’s west facade). This contradictory
playing with light was unquestionably meant to facilitate
reading of meanings within architecture.
But what do these three ways of developing the SNG site
concept in a single, contradictory unity, and what role in this
does clustering play? We presume the clustering mediates
a basic theme within architecture, that theme being the exhibiting
of art in diverse forms, expressed through clusters
of agoras, stoas and amphitheatres, or odea and pavilions.
In his text, Dedeček wrote that his solution’s content was
not meant to exhibit an architectural interior, but exclusively
to exhibit Slovakia’s art, though he certainly had in mind international
art as well. In this he gave voice to the unstated
dogma that echoes in the minds of artists and art historians
still: the architecture should be a neutral frame for visual art.
Furthermore, while Vladimír Dedeček was interested in architectural
asceticism, he decidedly was not limiting exhibiting to
the classic fine/visual arts. The bridging is a cluster fulfilling
the function of a “raised curtain”, making possible the exposition
of art on an outdoor stage and simultaneously in a historical
architecture; it also links the gallery’s exhibit spaces
with the “most exhibited” part of the city of which the SNG
was becoming part: the Danube riverfront. The amphitheatres
(with cinema) and the individual stoas are also exhibit spaces.
In some of his renderings, Dedeček himself drew sculptures
in the stoa space opening onto Riečna ulica and toward the
Hotel Devín. The theme of exhibiting, exposition and installation
thus penetrated the whole area’s outdoor and indoor
spaces, even those not primarily intended for exhibition. This
theme is likewise a test of the diversity of architectural forms
to exhibit art and architecture. In Dedeček’s words, flexibility
and variability were to be the fundamental axiom of the SNG
site’s spatial solution. Therefore, indisputably this was not
a question of mere halls and moving panels, but of the variable
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