Bogdan Bogdanović (architect)

Bogdanović wrote numerous articles about urbanism, especially about its mythic and symbolic aspects, some of which appeared in international journals such as El País, Die Zeit,[1] and others.

[2][3] Bogdanović is best known for designing monuments and memorials commemorating victims and resistance fighters of World War II built all over Yugoslavia from the early 1950s to the 1980s.

[7] After his term of office, he was appointed by Slobodan Milošević as a member of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the party's supreme governing body.

[10] The letter, in combination with other remarks about Milošević, led to attempts of breaking into Bogdanović's apartment, death threats, and his exclusion from the Central Committee.

[6][11] This, however, did not prevent him from renewing his anti-nationalist statements when the Yugoslav wars started at the beginning of the 1990s, once more turning Bogdanović into a target for violent attacks and a defamation campaign run by the Serbian state media.

However, since the Yugoslav émigré circle there had strong nationalistic tendencies,[8] the couple moved on to settle in Vienna upon invitation of his friend, the writer and translator Milo Dor.

It appears to me that the wise and noble starting point of our beautiful and placid erstwhile games, today, on this side of hate and cruelty, can hardly be imagined.

As professor and dean, he tried to reform the teaching of architecture and introduce grassroots democracy at the university, but the party forced him to abdicate before he could put his plans into practice.

[2][3] The course was called Symbolic forms in allusion to Ernst Cassirer, had no fixed timetable and employed the invention of new writing systems, the interpretation of non-existent texts, as well as methods akin to free association and gematria.

[15] Fourteen years later, when henchmen of Milošević raided the school in the aftermath of Bogdanović's letter, much of the collected material – the documentation of the lessons, drawings, audio- and videotapes, optical devices – was destroyed.

[26] Other works of architecture include the reconstruction of the villa of Queen Natalija (Smederevo, 1961), Adonis' altar (Labin, 1974)[20] and the Tomb of Dušan Petrović-Šane (Aranđelovac, 1980).