The Landscape of Time

Abstract

This article takes Hotel Podgorica (1967) as its point of departure to examine how a single building engages landscape not as neutral setting but as an active field of relations. Designed by Svetlana Kana Radević, a central figure in Yugoslav and Montenegrin architecture, the project emerged in a postwar moment and is read as a vehicle for imagining a new city and a new country at once. The argument turns on the question of context, understood not only as the immediate site but as the wider urban and national landscape. Through a reading of the hotel’s spatial organisation, form and materiality, and its negotiation between city, river and topography, the article suggests that architecture can begin to inhabit landscape rather than merely overlook it. In this perspective, the relationship between landscape and architecture becomes a way of rethinking “nature” as an active participant, and Radević’s work appears as a critical instance of what would later to be called critical regionalism.