engleski

Transformations of Rondo Square in Mostar in the First Half of the 20th Century: Urban Planning and Architecture

This paper will focus on the transformation of one of the most important public areas in Mostar throughout the first half of the 20th century – the central square on the west coast of the river Neretva. It was designed in 1897 as a roundabout by engineer and important turn- of-the-century Mostar’s public figure Miloš Komadina. The square continued to be linked to six originally planned and additionally built alleys in the periods when Mostar formed part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. During both these periods, Mostar lacked serious urban- planning interventions, especially in relation to the formerly defined basis of territorial spread and the contemporary demographic decline. However, some interesting ideas were drafted on paper. These ideas and their possibilities of realization should be reconsidered in the light of the then social and political relations in the city through a contextual analysis of the development of the city’s centre on the west coast of the Neretva River as was defined by the Austro-Hungarian authorities. Urban regulation plans created in the 1920s and 1930s have been kept at the local Technical Department’s archive. They were mostly carried out by the experienced building technician Miroslav Loose and built on the east coast of the river while Rondo square continued its life without representative public building to outshine Austro-Hungarian villas along the alleys of plane trees. There was an initiative to build a Catholic cathedral on the parcel that belonged to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Mostar-Duvno. According to available records, Bishop Petar Čule discussed his plans with Ivan Meštrović in the early 1940s. Their agreement was interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War. The Rondo area was, however, successfully defined as central by Reuf Kadić’s Dom kulture in 1959. During the second part of the 1990s, after the war that divided Mostar into two towns, the institution and the building were renamed into Hrvatski dom Herceg Stjepan Kosača. The Rondo area today serves as a connection between two main traffic routes in the city with four additional branches that link it to different commercial and residential districts. In spite of its importance in the urban planning basis, the last two decades of the square’s history show a systematic negligence of one of the most important visual hallmarks in Mostar’s collective memory. The aim of this paper is to explore previously indicated dilemmas in the context of their contemporary ideological, political and interpersonal divisions preceded by and planted in the earlier periods of interlinked political and architectural history of the town.

Mostar ; urban planning ; architecture ; Rondo

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