Rather than reach my first stop in Montenegro, Nikšić, at about 5pm as planned, I didn’t get there til after 8:30, when the sun was almost down. I was so upset as there was so little light left, and when I finally parked, my Canon’s battery was at 0%, so I was just left with my phone.
My panic subsided when finally turned a corner and saw what I had rushed to see: the totally fantastic Dom Revolucije, the enormous social forum that has stood half-completed for more than 30 years in the center of the county’s second largest city. The cloudless sky’s crepuscular glow coated the raw concrete in a soft pink, which, unexpectedly aided by the sodium orange streetlamps, provided these pastel-tinged, low-light images.
In the mid-1970s, Slovenian architect Marko Mušić proposed perhaps one of the largest and most ambitious civic works in all of Yugoslavia, a huge public palace, that was to be a war memorial, a municipal and cultural space, and a commercial arcade. Construction began in 1976 and dragged to a halt before the break-up of Yugoslavia. The sprawling skeleton has remained a half-built hulk in the city’s main square since then, and increasingly a famous urbex attraction, especially after it was a main feature of Montenegro’s Venice Biennale pavilion in 2014.
Had it been finished it would have been like nothing else architecturally or programmatically. Although incomplete, it is an incredible place: massive raw concrete spaces for auditoria and galleries, partially enclosed in spans of ruddy space-frames holding up slopes of indigo-tinted glazing panels—at least those that have not been smashed by local trespassers. I didn’t try to venture inside: it was dark, the building is notoriously dangerous, and there’s plenty about what the interior’s like easily available on urbex and other travel blogs. More importantly, after more than 30 years since work was halted, the place is in the process of being finished by what is reported to be a team of talented architects who aim to respect the original design.