[PHOTOS] California-Based Architect Presents New Modern Croatian Government HQ

The Bowl (photo: Božidar Šimunović)

A Croatian architect living in California wants to see Croatia build ‘new, modern and representative’ government headquarters, and has written an open letter to Prime Minister-designate Tihomir Orešković detailing it…

Architect Božidar Šimunović, who is originally from Zagreb but has also worked in Canada and Austria, has designed ‘The Bowl’, a building he suggests is built along Zagreb’s Sava river and becomes the Croatian government’s HQ. He suggests in his open letter to the powers at be that money for the Croatian project, which is called The Pearl of Croatia, could be raised from donations from the Diaspora around the world.

“For the new Government building I propose the cosmopolitan and iconic architecture of ‘The Bowl’, so we can show the world what us intelligent Croats can achieve,” Šimunović writes.

Šimunović says that the “The Bowl” project is not foreseen just as a building, but it is foreseen primarily as a culturological phenomenon with the semiotic accent on a cosmopolitan culture.

Proposed new HQ solution for the Croatian government (photo: Božidar Šimunović)

“In the concrete project in the city of Zagreb it is de facto the idea of complementing the urbanistic panorama of Zagreb with one more original branded architectural iconic puzzle,” he says.

Šimunović hopes that his bowl design project can also be used for other purposes in other cities in Croatia and around the world.

“The Bowl can be a very luxurious hotel, for example; in Dubrovnik or Monaco or Sydney or Miami or Dubai and so on,” he said, before explaining a bit about the architecture of The Bowl which was first presented a few years ago.

Božidar suggest building The Bowl along the Sava river (photo: Božidar Šimunović)

“The Architecture is de facto free from kitsch, although the facade surface is non-monotonous, that is it’s visually dissected with the simply rhythmic horizontal loggia breaks and with the slipped rounded windows, and with the glass cupola – the cover of the central fan-light gallery. Vertical main high-walled carriers on the facade visually divide the corpus to vertical slices. This design is, semiotically so said, also maritime – a blue horizontal slips in the white pad – and it associates of sailing through the space and time. Architecture ‘The Bowl’, metaphorically said, is friendly alien interpolated into a real environment. Architecture ‘The Bowl’ is an architectonic hymn; Ode to the Joy. And it will bowl the World in which we are living. Perfect dream will become the sober reality,” he explained.