Screen Presence
Synthy sounds that wouldn’t be out of place in a ’70s giallo film menace a sunny Montenegrin coast. The morning tide laps the shore as an elegant, middle-aged woman scrawls strange glyphs into the sand with the aid of a tree branch. We see her stride up and down the beach in a white skirt suit and matching white heels. We see her stare intently at the horizon. Then she’s crouched down, legs crossed, finally ready to address the camera through giant blobular eyeglasses—a measured affectation that hints at her métier. She is an architect, and as a flashing chyron discloses, her name is Svetlana Kana Radević.
Anna Kats, a curator and PhD student at the Institute of Fine Arts, began her keynote at the Womxn in Design and Architecture Conference with a description of this very montage, which opens an hourlong 1980 documentary dedicated to Radević. The fact of its length and its production by a state broadcaster accorded a certain prominence to its subject, Montenegro’s first woman builder. (In translation, the title, Man Has But One Life, curiously elides the issue of gender.) Then why such an unconventional setting, to which the filmmakers return over the course of the film? “Whilst most in the architectural profession would sooner give interviews in the office, in the studio, or on the construction site,” Radević, Kats noted, “appears to have chosen an idiosyncratic staging.” But the portrayal, rather than merely highlighting her eccentricities, served to enhance Radević’s image as “a singular visionary,” perhaps even on par with a figure like Le Corbusier, whom she labeled (not unfoundedly) a “counterrevolutionary.”
She would be happy to know that this mythos endures, Kats quipped. Recent years have seen a reappreciation of Radević in her homeland, where she has become a brand name. A postage stamp bearing a likeness of “Kana”—it neatly conforms her signature eyewear to the contours of her oval face, or perhaps it’s the other way around—was put into circulation in 2021. Her achievements are discussed on morning talk shows. Commentators cast her career within a protofeminist frame. The focus of a stand-alone exhibition at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, she was also a central figure in a 2018 survey on Yugoslavian architecture mounted by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
Kats, who was co-curator of the former show and pivotal to the latter, recapitulated the story of her interest in Radević to a packed Princeton auditorium. While on a research trip for the MoMA show, she discovered the architect’s papers in a cousin’s home in the Montenegrin beach town of Petrovac-na-Moru. As she recalled in a tribute for The Architectural Review:
They are assembled in the loosest sense of the word: no archivists or librarians have ordered their motley contents or developed an organizational logic for the abundance of correspondence, photographs, slides, visa forms, other bureaucratic paperwork, and diverse ephemera that are neatly bundled into sacks and stored in low-light quarters.
The dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the disheveled state of her intellectual property resulted in Radević’s slide into obscurity — a historiographical injustice for an architect who not only overcame gender bias to rise to her country’s cultural firmament, but also studied under Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania and worked for Kisho Kurokawa in Tokyo.
Kats’s presentation, however, diverged from the standard monographic treatment by fastening onto a wider perspective, one encompassing “professional networks, institutional frameworks, and political economies.” There is something meaningful in the way Radević elected to travel abroad at the moment her career was taking off in Montenegro. Similarly, her decision to continue practicing in Podgorica rather than relocate to the territorial capital of Belgrade or even Philadelphia, as a friend from Penn expected she would, “contravenes the dichotomies of center and periphery that inform the canon of architectural history.” Her commitment to Yugoslavia’s “self-managed” socialist model shines through in her choice (she was a card-carrying Communist), though Kats suggested that she would have adjusted to working under a capitalist market economy.
The keynote was given a compelling texture by the photographs Kats projected at the front of the room. In addition to scans of architectural drawings, there were many candid snapshots, including one depicting a surprise birthday party Radević and her peers threw for Kahn, who inspects the cake. During the Q&A, an older man in the audience spoke up and identified himself in the photo. “I was friends with Svetlana,” he said, addressing Kats. Surprised and delighted, she assailed him with questions, much to his enjoyment. But she saved the most pressing one for last: “Do you remember what kind of cake that was?”