The main export of the Croatian island of Brac is itself. The white stone hewn from its quarries has been shipped all over the world and used in an extraordinary range of monuments - from the now ruined remains of Diocletian's villa in Split to the interior walls of the White House in Washington DC.
The quarries themselves create remarkable, sculptural gashes in the island's body. As in Malta, Italy, and across the Mediterranean and Adriatic regions, they are works of negative architecture - fissures from which man has withdrawn the material to stamp his physical presence on the landscape. The missing stone slabs also echo the blocky, irregular forms of the local buildings, tight, shaded streets, complex networks of piazzas and lanes, the volumes of churches and civic buildings and the memories of all the cultures from the Romans, Illyrians, Venetians and Hungarians, to the German second-homers, who have colonised the islands.
The flourishing of tourism has led to rashes of disparate villas, each of which stands as its own island, regarding the surrounding sea and guarding its own position, its views and its splendid isolation.
Brac is succumbing to the tide that follows its warm blue seas, a culturally disconnected and disinterested mass of local and foreign investors erecting buildings that do nothing to promote continuity or subtlety or to contribute to contemporary architectural debate.
However, the design of a new development by London-based 6a architects represents a significant shift in attitude. In contrast to Brac's bland villas and hotels, the proposed apartment complex, which would be located near the sea at Bijaka, near the town of Milna on the Dalmatian coast, creates an ambitious new civic realm, a place rather than a series of floating rooms to let.
The blocks arrange themselves around a slightly irregular central piazza sloping gently down towards the sea. The urban quality of the scheme, so unusual amid the doggedly suburban nature of holiday development, is enhanced by shaded, colonnaded walkways around the perimeter of the piazza.
The slope of the site is also intended to lend itself to its use as a natural amphitheatre. The developer is a film producer and, supported by the mayor, he wants to use the site for an international film festival, with a screen to be set up against the sea and with infrastructure, offices, screening rooms, conference facilities and so on, provided in the surrounding buildings. The idea is to create a sustainable future for the scheme that reaches beyond the predictable, theme-obsessed and fickle world of mass tourism.
There is also something filmic about the façades that surround and define the public space. The buildings are wrapped in a thin layer of local stone, which is perforated in an abstract pattern using holes of two different sizes in a reflection of a device that can be found in the historic architecture of the island. The pattern, derived from freehand sketches of the view towards the island from the sea, runs panoramically across the walls and across thin stone shutters on the windows, stamped, almost like a newsprint, dot-matrix photo, on to the buildings.
A series of undulating bands - suggesting the views to the surrounding islands, the contours of the site, the waves in the sea and the strata in the rock itself - bonds the building to the landscape but also imposes itself inside; lightis filtered through an abstracted view in what seems a play on the selective vision of the lens and the rolling pan of a long shot.
The simple motif of the holes fulfils a number of functions. In addition to letting just the right amount of light through and allowing air to circulate and ventilate the 80 apartments, it effectively brands the buildings, giving a unifying yet varying architectural treatment; each interior benefits from a unique composition of piercings, avoiding the problem of identikit apartments feeling like anonymous hotel rooms.
The patterning of the façades reflects the architects' interest in surface decoration, a passion that can also be seen in their unusual collaboration with fashion brand Eley Kishimoto in developing a range of richly screen-printed panels applied to basic plywood sheets (the fruits of which can be witnessed in a striking temporary tower now looming over Old Street in east London). This blend of the everyday and the exquisite has characterised 6a's architecture and product design.
Frane Lociz, Brac's mayor, is considering making the land between the site and the sea a park so that the piazza would be leftopen to the water. There is also a possibility olive groves will be planted and boardwalks created so the development does not dominate but blends into the landscape set well back from the water.
What is new here is the application of an architectural intelligence to a banal genre. Croatian architecture, particularly in the big cities, has traditionally been, and still is, sophisticated and responsive. But the building activity on the coastal resorts (and most of the country is coastal or island) has been dominated by the kind of depressing development that has irreparably scarred Europe's resorts.
This proposal by 6a is a model of its kind. Its realisation will provide the perfect antidote to acres of unambitious building and, hopefully, a powerful tool in persuading developers that there is value in thoughtful architecture.
