Beyond the passage: Analytical probe into the emancipatory potential of space

Abstract

“Around 1910”, writes Henri Lefebvre, “a certain space was shattered”, pointing to the series of shifts in the Western culture, crucial for the evolution of modern thinking. This was also the time when the first glass-roof covered passage was designed and constructed (1910-12) in Belgrade’s main shopping street. The country’s capital, in the field of influence of powerful empires, was eager to catch up with the modern world. Some thirty years later (1941), the radically new transposition of the same theme was conceived through the unrealized project for the Hall of Matica srpska in Novi Sad. These conceptions, created in different but correlative geographical and historical conditions, are taken up in this paper as the subject for an analysis that examines the hidden emancipatory potential of this hybrid typology and the peculiar expressions of its protean capacity that gives us hints about the contemporary comprehension of public space articulation.