UrbanFestival 11 will focus itself on the public spaces on the margins of public interest, as well as the problematisation of the growth of the city in height as a process which can, and should, generate new public spaces, but that is a regular tool of corporate and private capital for seizing the city by generating exclusive spaces intended for commercial or marketing facilities, but closed to the wider public.

During May and June artists will realise individual projects, while the festival program in October will, through a series of discursive, presentational and performative units open a public discussion about the specific aspects of themes as well as the works produced.
We want to direct attention both to the skyscrapers built before the 1990s which have greatly defined city urbanism and the way in which citizens perceive and use the city, and which have today in large part lost their public character, as well as the skyscrapers built in the last ten years that are, as previously mentioned, a result of the capitulation of urban planning and political and legal support to large capital. The paradigmatic example of the former group is the Ilica skyscraper, which, aside from losing all of its architectural and artistic values of modernism in the renovation conducted without regard for any instructions and opinions of the profession, no longer offers the public a possibility of a view from the vista on the 16th floor. Even though the space was open for a long period of time to the public, the restaurant that operated on the top floor, according to the already new and implemented projects and logic of private investment, was open only to selected guests, and after its closure the space is completely inaccessible. It is unacceptable that private interests deny the public access to what is inalienably theirs – cultural heritage, memory, space, a view… An equally bad example of such a relationship towards public space and property is the Hoto Tower project built in 2004 in Savska, which, with its private access ramp, takes away from the pedestrian space. Moreover, whilst in the process of being built, the Hoto Tower requested additional permission to increase its original construction plan by almost half of the planned storeys, through which it exceeded its allowed construction space several times over. Like most Zagreb skyscrapers, the Hoto Tower also has a roof terrace, although it is intended solely for exclusive events like banquets or elite parties.

 

APOTHEOSIS OF THE SKYSCRAPER by Srećko Horvat. Essay on tower and skyscrapers building as a symptomatic indication of the state of our society. First published in Oris, magazine for architecture and culture, nr. 31, 2005, 16-31. An extended version published in Znakovi postmodernog grada. Semiologija urbanizma / Signs of the Postmodern City. Semiotics of Urbanism, Naklada Jesenski i Turk, Zagreb, 2007.