uRED Architecture

The barren, rocky slope of the mountain of Velebit that divides the Adriatic coast from the war-torn mountains of Croatia is the site for the refuge.

Legend has it that the slopes overlooking the azure Adriatic Sea were once lush with oak tree forests that were cut and used as piles on which the palaces of Venice were erected. This early ecological catastrophe left the mountain vulnerable to the bura, a violent northern wind that left the mountain naked and deserted but with a savagely beautiful museum of tectonic forms that bathe in the sun.

Beyond the mountains, people have lived through tumultuous times of war and peace, followed again by war.

The shelter, provided by the United Nations, is a simple structure that can house a single occupant. Its inhabitable container is not wide enough for two people to bypass each other. The container is suspended from a stainless steel mast that is rooted in the stone below and rotates on ball bearings like a weather vane, so as not to compete with the bura’s fury. The container is split into two halves: one fixed and another that opens onto the platform, a terrace with a spectacular panorama. The back wall is a plate of mirror-polished stainless steel while the front wall terrace is glazed. The two planes are connected by a hydraulic hinge, fueled by the pressurized oil that is kept in the mast.

The shelter does not offer any utilities-- no water, electricity, satellite links, computers. For, the prospective occupants have either been uprooted from their homes -- just like the Velebit trees--in which case nothing can replace them, or they were the ones who in their dogmatic arrogance deprived the others of the basic appliances of our civilization. Therefore, they themselves do not deserve them.

The refuge does offer a space of solitude and introspection. By the mutual will of the occupant and the wind, the kinetic geometry of the structure covers the whole hostile three-dimensional world. The experience beyond that is left undetermined. The object of scrutiny behind microscopic glass becomes the observer. In the visual duel of the mirror and glass, the images become projections and self-projections, reflections and self-reflections. They are unstable and fragile, just like the thin glass pane separating man from the abyss. Yet the images in the mirror are revealing the real self, the real reality.

Down below, at the sea, the shelter appears as a flag, perhaps even a battle flag. However, it is a flag that changes its colors, from turquoise blue, indigo blue, and gray, to crimson red at sunset.

A war is fought within.