The damaging decade of nationalism and crisis in Serbia during the ’90s resulted in the total neglect of both official and unofficial institutions for the youth, now yielding dangerous outcomes. STADIUM CULTURE is an ongoing project to renovate and expand an existing open handball stadium located in Novi Sad to become an electronic youth center and event place. The main challenge in this project is to initiate the force of youth culture in a city that had plenty of state support during both the Serbian&Yugoslav Kingdoms before the WWII and the Socialist era after WWII. Commissioned by kuda.org - Centre for New Media based in Novi Sad, we propose a hybrid program for the dilapidated Handball Stadium from Socialist era based on the difference between the two central agents for youth activity: sports and electronic media. The two activities in post-socialism define loose ends of political spectrum in today’s emerging democratic society. The new Handball Stadium is planed to create an identity that engages some positive elements of the socialist past while defining urban future on the new role of urban recreation and culture. The stadium needs to materialize the city’s situation of being in a complex transitional moment ascending to the EU, but still at its outer edge. From the beginning of the 20th century both Western and Russian building types were modified to create community athletic space for youth and workers of Novi Sad. Later during the reign of the late Tito between WWII until the early 1980s a number of institutions supporting culture were initiated. Compared to the number of youth organizations in Novi Sad at the time of Tito’s death in 1980 (48), today’s figure (3) demonstrates a devastating score. The few that struggle to remain are the scouts and ecological initiatives. A logical but unfortunate outcome of this situation is the recent shift of young people towards political extremisms. The Handball Stadium is meant to become a public space bringing young people together virtually, as well as in person, to participate in the social and political impact of new technologies and in sports, play, and friendly competition. Architecture takes clues from a flow of alliances that a Center for New Media in the city had and has to make in order to pursue this project towards the construction and it combines the innovations of long lost modern architecture with emerging identity politics of the electronic media.
View Original