In each issue of the magazine there is a 12-page article (“Views of the City”) about an architecture-relevant city – this time Sofia is the city of choice.
Part of the city portrait are two short interviews with well-known architects from Sofia – Antonina Ilieva (PONY architects) and Georgi Katov (I/O Architects), who are discussing the city and its future prospects.
What characterises Sofia and distinguishes the city?
Sofia is a city of historical complexity, of many green spaces and beautifully located at the foot of a mountain. I find its most distinguishing feature to be its geographical location that defines both its history and its natural atmosphere. The defining presence of the Vitosha Mountain to the south of Sofia serves as a dislocated semantic core, at the same time visually accessible from every point in the city, and universally recognized as a favourite sports and recreation destination by city dwellers. Its presence in the city skyline contains a promise for a tactile and exciting topography, a natural feel of the surrounding surfaces, and endemic mountainous vegetation, yet remains unfulfilled in the general flatness and anonymity of the city streets the way they have been developing over the last 50 years. This very lack, I believe, hides an uncovered potential and a re-starting point for a holistic identity of Sofia uniting the amalgamation of architecture from antiquity, the Middle ages Bulgarian kingdom, Ottoman and post-Ottoman new Bulgarian kingdom times, Bulgarian modernism, socialist republic times, and the present.
What role do material, colour, structure and surface play in the architecture of Sofia and is there a particularly characteristic feature of the city?
Since Sofia dates back to antiquity, its material palette is a result of centuries of changes in building tradition and aesthetics layered on top of each other (sometimes even literally). Over time local building tradition has established itself almost entirely on the monolithic side, the visually accessible textures and expressions travel from natural stone, through historically diverse plaster facades in different stages of ornamentality, material mixing and complexity of application; through brick facades and large-scale renderings of decorative concrete finishes; all the way to the eclectic, primarily market driven streetscape of metallic and glass facades of the last 20 years, and a certain revival of brick facades. The colour palette of the cityscape is neither planned, nor historically consistent, with certain areas color-coded by Sofia’s history. A case in point is the large central area of the city where streets are warmed up by the distinctive yellow cobblestones (or “golden cobblestones”) marking early 1900s efforts to define Sofia’s new identity as capital after Bulgaria’s Liberation from the Ottoman Empire in 1878.
What is the relationship between historical and contemporary architecture and what role does the preservation of the city and its existing buildings play with regard to renewal and transformation?
Sofia’s centuries-long history creates a set of different Sofias existing in different temporal planes, oftentimes manifested in its spatial structure, where ruins from the ancient city of Serdica not only form a considerable, albeit not immediately visible, underground layer of the city centre, but also predetermine the main axes of the city’s later development and growth. While the center of Sofia holds a lot of interesting preserved historical buildings, like the red-brick Rotunda of St. George (oldest preserved building in Sofia, dating back to the 4th century), their beauty, their architectural lessons and their craftsmanship are only recently starting to get assimilated into contemporary architectural thought not merely as artefacts of the past, but identities of the place. The subjective views on the aesthetics from socialist-era modernism in Bulgaria are also being rethought and the newer generation of architects in Sofia try to look for identity and sustainability in the city as is. Projects such as the new Manastirski Livadi school proposal or the SMD-MI house try to embrace local landscape conviviality and maintain a level-headed understanding of local identity of contemporary buildings while also enabling sustainable innovation by offering a comment on traditional materials or contemporary graphic identity or both.
What are the issues and challenges in Sofia with regard to the sustainability of the city?
Outside its natural setting, general greenness, blended historicity and calm atmosphere, Sofia is also a city of fragmented development, in transition, and marked by lack of updated expertise in city governing. In the early 2000-s, moving on from the inertia mindset from the previous political regime, politics and policy-making for the public spaces were subject to pessimism and shunned by architects and citizens alike, so they were left to administration solely and the missing holistic understanding of the city from that period still affects us today. As social, political and economic changes took hold, professional and citizen participation in city governing shifted from passive to reactionist, and in the last 5-7 years – from reactionist to proactive. While most architects hopefully understand that a good city is both pragmatic and poetic, this sensibility is yet to become a public consensus in Sofia. The culture of architectural competitions is recently picking up in both Sofia and Bulgaria and this in itself brings about a more optimistic outlook.
