Summer, sunshine, holidays: this is what a lot of people associate with Split. But the city on the Dalmatian coast attracts visitors not only because of its beaches, but also because of its architecture – Diocletian’s Palace, for example. The Roman emperor Diocletian had this magnificent edifice built during the period from 295 to 305 AD as a place for him to spend his declining years. However, history had other plans and it did not stay this way for long: over the centuries, Diocletian’s retirement home gradually evolved into a city.

Nowadays, the port city naturally encompasses far more than just Diocletian’s Palace: the city outskirts, for example, contain fragments of a planned city which go back to the days of socialist Yugoslavia. A walk through Split shows that the city has a wide variety of buildings to admire and impressions to absorb – cityscapes. And students at TU Wien were required to familiarise themselves with these by creating their own designs as part of a course offered by the Research Unit of Building Construction and Design 1.

From medieval extensions to the palace on the edge of the new town to plots of land on the waterfront – Thomas Hasler, Ines Nizic, Mladen Jadric, Ivica Brnic and Lorenzo de Chiffre invited the students to draft their designs at six different locations. These sketches gave rise to exciting designs for different city buildings: a thermal spa, a market hall, a cinema arts centre, an archive and a library.

The results are not merely designs, but rather reflections on the fundamental connection between concepts of space and form and their tangible architectural manifestations.

The publication is available as an ebook and in printed form, opens an external URL in a new window.

The volume appeared in the series of publications by the Faculty of Architecture and Planning, opens an external URL in a new window.

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