Reconstruction and revitalization of Studio M

Project idea

Studio M by architect Pavle Žilnik, once home to music, radio and television, has recently lost its original and primary function – housing the media. Its parent institution Radio Television Vojvodina is abandoning its premises, forcing the building into closure and abandonment.
The purpose of the whole projecting process was the reveal of the facility’s meaning in the urban matrix of Novi Sad (Serbia) and beyond.
The facility’s multifaceted core and potential is discovered only in the process of manipulating its existing structure. The project of the facility’s revitalization is the goal of the effort to valorize it as well as clearly display that Studio M is the imperative of Novi Sad’s art scene, and that, as such, it must be preserved. The absurdity of the situation Studio M finds itself in originates from the fact that the facility is perfectly functional for the program it was originally projected for, including recording and radio-TV broadcast rooms, a 400-seat concert hall, and the artwork that is its integral component. Studio M’s cultural memory as the epicenter of local and international music and cultural production is of special significance.

Project description

The project of Studio M and RTV facility’s reconstruction and revitalization is made up of a system of intentions, which strives to renew, revivify and maintain the building’s integrity:
• Renew proper social values reflected in the tendency to form spaces that will provide people with a place of meeting, dialogue, idea exchange, discussion, and flourishing of the cultural core.
• Build a house that will be firmly tied to its surroundings and highly sensible to the parameters originating from within it, reflected in the maintaining of the connection to the park and the street front.
• Form flexible spaces subject to change and interpretation. Spaces that have been subject to change have been kept, and new ones with the same characteristics were created beside them.
• Galvanize the spirit of togetherness. This is realized, as with the spatial configuration, so too with the adopted typology – the typology of a social center. This intention is reflected in the application of the collective type of living and doing business (ateliers and offices), production and consumption of cultural content (which by itself generates community), as well as the forming of large and free spaces that suggest gatherings of high numbers of individuals.
• Studio M as ‘the house of art’ – the place of creation and consumption of various types of art.
• The program’s fusion. Harmonious functioning of a vast array of programs, their mutual communication, and the generation of hybrid programs in places of contact represent the authentic properties of this facility. Revitalization goals aren’t oriented towards the comparing the old and new experience, but towards the integration of all the past and future experiences into a single and complete usable space. The newly projected stairway, “Čvorište,” is the carrier of fundamental alterations of the source project. It sprawls across the facility’s vertical, thus representing the center of the programmatic fusion as a metaphorical response to unity – unity of a single space.

Technical information

This complex facility contemporaneously honors the existence of both the historical and contemporary aspects of Studio M. Not only do they represent two extremes existing in parallel within a single building, but they’re also in complete balance. The symbiosis of these seemingly contradicting worlds gives the facility its thoroughgoing authenticity. It founds a system that will build new values on the bedrock of old ones, without the tendency to annul its already present virtues. This system will strive to persevere the history of the facility, but also totalize it by imprinting new meanings necessitated by the contemporary epochal and spatial context. These two worlds create the complete image of reconstruction and revitalization of the building itself, as well as its value system.
The process of storytelling in the facility begins in the underground section where the site-specific concept is created, which linearly permeates the remainder of the facility. Starting with the basement section of the facility, the visitor passes through the filter of its studio and radio history, thereafter coming across the building’s additional creative craftsmanship occurring in present-day. The basement is the site of Studio M and Radio Novi Sad’s narrative and identity, the place of acquaintanceship with the studio, its architectural significance, its creator, and its exploitation, through the tale of its events and users. The basement is horizontal, like the base of the building, like its foundations; legible as a layer of the past. In the aboveground section of the site-specific museum it forks into spatial segments attaching to one another across the vertical of the facility. Each of those segments in and of itself represents one of various types of the museum’s artifacts, as well as the spatial testimony of narrative. Below ground, the narrative floods the visitor, while above it demonstrates its presence in the facility.
The essential segment of the project is a complex structure of multiple meanings named Čvorište. Lined across the perimeter of an irregular glass membrane, it forms free inner space of a six-fold story height. It is placed at the facility’s roadside, in the zone of Studio M and RTV building’s fusion. Čvorište has the function of mental and physical introduction and viewing of the facility’s vertical complexity. It represents ‘a cut through time.’ It is a structure that allows and enables the old values of Studio M to remain accentuated, and, in line with the era, additionally facilitate the founding of new values, which rest on this central assembly. Čvorište is the place to get to know Studio M then and now, and the key to communicating between these two worlds. It represents the main communication that connects all of the floors, from the basement to the roof, carrying the function of binding all the public spaces together. The sectional space boasts its own name due to the nature of its origin. It is located at the border of the two worlds, in the core of their encounter, formed so as to portray the tension of its creation. Due to its transparent dome and central roof part, Čvorište is assigned the role of a light slit that allows for the zenithal entry of light into the underground level, that is this border space. The symbolic light entry from ‘the present-day’ into ‘the past’ is further emphasized by the dark dome that wraps the space of their intersection.
As the user moves through the basement, they are offered information about the facility’s architecture, architect, creation period characteristics. The spatial means employed are reflecting cubes containing the information on their inner walls situated between the bare concrete walls – a symbolic representation of the core of the facility, with no additional layers. The space further flows into the zone with the continual transparent wall representing the chronological line of the events and people whose part was of great importance to the facility and the history of Radio Novi Sad. It is followed by the second chronological line – that of studio M – adding up the key events and musical history. The room with posters awaits right after, paneled with original posters that announced the concert hall events, its floor and ceiling plated with mirrors so as to birth the impression of the infinity and crucial importance of Studio M on the cultural stage of its period.

Documentation

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