Evocations of Byzantium in Zenitist Avant-Garde Architecture

The Byzantine legacy in modern architecture can be divided between a historicist, neo-Byzantine architectural style and an active investigation of the potentials of the Byzantine for a modern, explicitly nontraditional, architecture. References to Byzantium in avantgarde Eastern European architecture of the 1920s employed a modernist interpretation of the Byzantine concept of space that evoked a mode of “medieval” experience and creative practice rather than direct historical quotation. The avant-garde movement of Zenitism, a prominent visionary avant-garde movement in the Balkans, provides a case study in the ways immaterial aspects of Byzantine architecture infiltrated modernism and moved it beyond an academic, reiterative formalism. By examining the visionary architectural design for the Zeniteum, the Zenitist center, in this article, I aim to identify how references to Byzantium were integrated in early twentieth-century Serbian avant-garde architecture and to address broader questions about interwar modernism. In the 1920s, architects, architectural historians, and promoters of architecture came to understand the Byzantine concept of space in ways that architects were able to use in distinctly non-Byzantine architecture. I will trace the ways Zenitism engaged the Byzantine architectural construct of total design, in which structure joins spirituality, and related philosophical concepts of meaning and form derived from both Byzantine and avant-garde architecture. This reassessment of Zenitism, an Eastern European architectural movement often placed on the margins of the history of modern architecture, has broad implications for our understanding of the relationship between tradition and modernism

The Relational Spiritual Geopolitics of Constantinople, the Capital of the Byzantine Empire

Strategically located on a peninsula on the European side of the narrow Bosphorus strait that connects the Mediterranean and the Black Seas (by way also of the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles), Constantinople; the capital city of the medieval Roman Empire that we know as the Byzantine Empire (324-1453), was the largest and most thriving urban center in the Old World.1 The city was founded by the first Roman Emperor who embraced Christianity, Constantine I (d. 337), as the eponymous capital outside historically dominant urban centers and as the alternative to the city of Rome. This chapter outlines the physical production of the geopolitical landscape of Constantinople. By highlighting the critical elements of Constantinopolitan spatial configuration this essay questions how the geopolitical landscape of Constantinople was then emulated at alternative sites of authority, in related capital cities of emerging medieval states that adopted Byzantine cultural values and its Orthodox version of Christianity in medieval Bulgaria, Rus and Serbia