Arhitektura i Urbanizam (Jan 2019)
"Hilton" hotel: Innovative spatial and technological intervention in the Belgrade's urban fabric
Abstract
During its decade-long realization, the design of the "HILTON" Hotel in Belgrade has undergone all professional and investment procedures of the turbulent Serbian architectural field. Each of the events in the process of its creation has brought an additional layer and interpretation, but more importantly, it has become a public act. This is exactly what essentially makes a quality of this realization: visibility of the building's changeability, both as a process and as its spatiality. The building defines the strength of the city block and at the same time brings a new interpretation of the street through a new/traditional loading into the urban matrix. Moving away from the constants of the existing context, in order to delicately redefine it, this building, like a movement in an interspace, both is and is not: a corner building, a massive repetition of the uniform openings and space. The street is integrated by the envelop into the inner space in order to connect the public contents, thus achieving a new layerness and depth of the public space, but also creating a clean space for the repetitive programme of the hotel accentuating the structural elements which move away from the typological patterns. The vertical degradation characterized by the tree-like support of the usual, becomes a memory of the building. The innovative technological concepts are in a dialogue with it by sophisticatedly sublimating all characteristics of the building in its architectural variability: between the (re)definition of the context and the technological intervention.
