Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Miroslav Catinelli
Croatian, Yugoslav; 20th-century
Zagreb, Croatia: Siget Ulice 18
70%
Super Andrija. 1975
Catinelli's behemoth was built to house some 1,500 souls; there are shops on the first floor, making it a sort of self-contained village. To judge the complex aesthetically is to move beyond the immediate sense of smallness and alienation you get when you walk up to it, and to consider whether there are ways the building either elaborates or contradicts its own enormity through some elements of its design — whether it manages to abstract through its style the oppressive fact of its hugeness, and to present this hugeness as something worthy of contemplation for how it is, not just for what it phenomenologically does. The answer is, yes, Super Andrija manages, here and there, to offer up a challenge to its own raw presence, though not as much as might have made it a masterpiece. The vertical structural supports at each of its extreme four corners have a slight taper outwards as they move down the building's sides, presenting a slow bit of movement and finesse to an otherwise lithic construction; the facade, chunked into six segments divided unevenly into four sections, has to it a plodding rhythm, to which the windows and floor divisions introduce a frantic sense of differentiation; the mostly open ground floor makes the dozen-plus storeys above it appear almost to hover or to loom (this is a classic modernist move). By turns these features double down on the massiveness and distract you from it. There's a withholding beauty at play here. (TFS, 2025)