ZOT_Define the Uncertain
Architecture Competition
w/ Fortunati-Carraro
2019
Challenging the unknown in search of answers.
This project was inspired by the popular fairy tale “How Quest Sought the Truth” taken from the book “Croatian Tales of Long Ago” written by Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić in 1922. This tale, in which the ancient Slavonic mythology prevails, narrates of humans and monsters.
Once upon a time, three brothers, Bluster, Careful and Quest, were told by a spirit forest, All-Rosy, what they had to do to be lucky: “stay in the glade, and don’t leave your grandfather until he leaves you; and do not go into the world, until you have repaid your grandfather for all his love to you.” But Rampogusto, the king of the forest Goblins, had seen and heard everything and since he had always hated old Witting, he bethought himself how he could do to turn the grandsons against him.
He picked three of his hobgoblin and told them to jump each on one of the brothers and erase what All-Rosy told them to do.
So, Bluster and Careful recalled to be told to become rich and warrior men while Quest, who got rid of his hobgoblin, just did not recall anymore the words of the forest spirit. Careful and Bluster went off after they listened to the goblins but Quest, instead, stayed with his grandfather, puzzling over whatever it was that All-Rosy might have told him, but, he could not remember it at all, so that one day he departed, telling his grandfather he was coming back once he remembered the truth. In the middle of the forest he will meet again All-Rosy, who reminds him of everything and sending him back home, but, on the way back, Quest slips into a river and drowns to death.
The two other brothers will eventually find his body and Witting, once told that Quest was dead, sacrifices himself in order to save his grandson’s soul and send it to the Castle of All-Rosy, while Careful and Bluster went on living in the glade as valiant and true men. The characters find themselves in circumstances in which magical events happen and lead them to risk all and abandon their certainties. At the end of the story, the characters are conducted to their answers and everything becomes clear after a necessary learning process. The tower, similarly as the unexpected events in the tale, will surprise Zagreb citizens with its nebulous and undefined shape. As in the story, the new building will bring the visitors to choose between three different activities and sensations, as the three brothers experienced. These choices aim to push the audience towards an experience that,
at first, manifests itself as a distant and blurred shape, but, if faced, it shows its features gradually and gives sense to the journey. The experience will continuously shift between the reality of the building and the fiction of the fairy tale, connecting imagination with reality.
When the spectator decides to go closer and accept the challenge of pushing himself toward the unknown, the architecture will present him its core and its answers.
In that precise moment, all the uncertainties will be defined.
