Bogdan Bogdanović

Bogdan Bogdanović (; 20 August 1922 – 18 June 2010) was a Serbian and Yugoslav architect, urbanist and essayist. Bogdanović fought in World War II as a partisan, and embarked on an academic architectural career at the University of Belgrade's Faculty of Architecture after the end of the war. He became renowned from the 1950s onward for designing a number of monuments and memorials commemorating victims and resistance fighters of World War II in Yugoslavia; his concrete sculpture titled Stone Flower near the site of Jasenovac concentration camp attracted particular attention. In the following year he sent Milošević an anti-nationalist letter over 60 pages long, including a Stalino-dictionary, an appendix satirising the recipient's nationalist rhetoric, and the famous Lamentation for Serbia, which discussed the theme of Serbia "being tired" (of its leaders). The Central Committee replied, "You can send the letter, in which you criticise the work of the eighth meeting and which has not reached us, to the Central Committee if you consider it necessary". The letter, in combination with other remarks about Milošević, led to attempts of breaking into Bogdanović's apartment, death threats, and his exclusion from the Central Committee. This, however, did not prevent him from renewing his anti-nationalist statements when the Yugoslav wars started at the beginning of the 1990s, once more turning Bogdanović into a target for violent attacks and a defamation campaign run by the Serbian state media. about the "village school"

At the University of Belgrade, Bogdanović held the lecture course The development of housing schemes (later called History of town), starting in 1962. As professor and dean, he tried to reform the teaching of architecture and introduce grassroots democracy at the university, but the party forced him to abdicate before he could put his plans into practice. Fourteen years later, when henchmen of Milošević raided the school in the aftermath of Bogdanović's letter, much of the collected material – the documentation of the lessons, drawings, audio- and videotapes, optical devices – was destroyed.

Bogdanović wrote numerous articles about urbanism, especially about its mythic and symbolic aspects, some of which appeared in international journals such as El País, Die Zeit,

Memorials

In 1951, Bogdan Bogdanović won a competition for the design of a memorial to the Jewish victims of fascism, to be built on the Sephardic cemetery in Belgrade. Somewhat incongruously, it is known as the Flower of Stone.

Examples of these monuments are: Memorial area with mausoleum for the warriors, Čačak, 1980 Garavice memorial park and with cenotaph dedicated to the 12,000 civil Nazi victims, Bihać, 1981 Mausoleum dedicated to the first who died in the anti-Fascist uprisings, Popina (near Vrnjačka Banja), 1981 Guardian of Freedom, Klis (near Split), 1987 (demolished in 1996)

Settlements

Bogdanović refused to participate in the planning of national housing estates which looked like "coffins of concrete" to him and had "only two types of windows".

Other works of architecture Other works of architecture include the reconstruction of the villa of Queen Natalija (Smederevo, 1961), Adonis' altar (Labin, 1974) Gold Medal for Meritorious Service to the Province of Vienna (2003) International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens (for Jasenovac Memorial Site, 2007)