Beaver Center – Nature Conservation Center Sotla

With its presence in space and a mission to preserve the natural habitat, the Beaver Centre has become a litmus test for both sensitising and fostering a sense of responsibility in the local and broader community.

What is it that connects architecture to the time and place it is positioned in? How can architecture create a space of the wider community that it should encompass? How can architecture itself determine the area of its influence, and how that is communicated?

Today, giving meaning to the reasons and initiatives underlying the decision-making process to construct new buildings is somehow outside the cause-and-effect discourse of the profession itself (as it is not the architect who decides what is being constructed). Construction is planned elsewhere, by decision-makers and politicians, hand-in-hand, less frequently in cooperation with architects. However, it is ultimately the architect who accepts, positions, gives meaning to and defines the ideas due to the necessity of realisation, and determines them by making an architectural move in the given circumstances. The responsibility and mission of the profession is precisely in raising questions, and highlighting and addressing the problems that need to be considered in the case of such decisions. The construction of new buildings in a community is always inextricably linked to the desire for the development, growth and opportunities the buildings offer. New buildings repeatedly testify to a much desired and urgently needed progress, they present the idea of who we want to be or become, and what are the values that will connect the broader community … through the space we co-shape and in harmony with it.

The complete article is published in Winter 2021 issue of Piranesi No. 44-45/Vol. 29.