WHAT IS A MUSEUM? IS THE MUSEUM JUST A BUILDING, OR IS IT ACTUALLY A SYMBOL?

A museum is an object intended to testify to the time that the visitor did not live in. The time when the actualisation was actualised. The museum is a carousel ride on which we perceive a different scene, and live another one’s life. A place that tells stories of the events that led to this very moment and this very location. The value of the museum is in raising awareness of the emotions that history awakens in us. The museum is ultimately the best exponent of critical regionalism in the most basic and purest definition. The museum is evidence of past times.

Like every Story, composed of the Beginning, the Middle, and the End, the museum is a symbolic drawing that imitates a similar canonical pattern.

In the base of the museum, but also in its final denotation, the cross of Christ (Constantine) is imprinted. This symbol is a formative modality of the overall appearance and function of the design.

Since any reduction of the symbol to an architectural form is an insult and over-simplification, the symbol is in this case decomposed and redefined by the morphology of the architectural vocabulary.

The museum, like any story, begins as a “status quo”. The old, but still preserved building of the library, which communicates its historicity. The newly formed sentence (base-line) begins and adapts to the given status quo, and receives the initial insinuation and direction from it. Freed from all semantics, this sentence (line) experiences exponential growth.

Growth transforms and divides in the middle of the story when there is a conflict (semantic opposites). Conflict is the simplest confrontation of two opposing lines (ideas). At this moment, we are in the centre of the plot of the eidetic story, since it is a place in time where the “decision” is made.

The story ends with a half-circle (principle), which in its halfness indicates the incompleteness of the present and suggests fantasized anticipations as basic building blocks of the future.

The formal manifestation of the museum relies directly on the “suggestive-unfinished work of art” as opposed to the “harmonious completion”, given that, although long, the history of Nis is completely unfinished and untold. Dominant “mountain” motifs that are woven through the entire design of the museum, remind of the hills and mountains that have been our basic landmarks for a long time throughout our local history. A direct explication of this motif is necessary for understanding Nis in its Spirit of Deep Time.

The shape-giving symbol design lines, fullness and gaps. Gaps in which ontological existence is meant to be fulfilled. Although our symbol is decomposed, the basic values ​​of its lines remain poly-semantic because there is a world of potential and a space for tailoring new ideas. The gaps take on the role of a descriptive tool, and in them are placed the previous “testimonies” of our historicity. These “positive gaps” have their visual-formal progression in the binary scheme from the beginning to the end and function as morphemes of the newly formed sentence.