vodotoranj
(Place, tavern, firm, Yugoslavia)
The ugly water tower building at Main Street #2 in my city. Masterpiece (or masturpiss) of the soc-realism in architecture, where they tore down the old City Hall and built this contraption instead, as part of "modernization". As if it wouldn't be as modern somewhere else - we could have two centers, for that matter. The water part is the funny part - they miscalculated the statics, the soil can't sustain so much weight with that kind of foundation. So it's called the water tower, but it never held any water.
Except that it's not so. At some point in 2021 I found this article:
"It's interesting that the reservoir, i.e. the tank on the top, sized 14x14x5 meters, which gave the name to the building, never served its purpose. At the time the Watertower was built, the experts from the water and sewers utility claimed that the vat is necessary to maintain a continuous pressure in the network and water consumption. The data, however, show that the tank was filled only once, on Vidovdan [28th June] in 1964, when it was tried out. The tank took about a million liters of water. The controllers from Slovenia recorded that the building sank just 2,6 millimeters, without any tilting.
...this building is not a representative of soc-realism. The author followed the trends of the time and did modern architecture such as was done in, say, Japan. Very similar buildings still exist in Osaka. So the Province institute for cultural monuments protection, which was in charge when Watertower was remodeled, ordered that the basic tenets of its Novaković's architecture remain undisturbed, because it's an important representative of the modern post-war achitecture in the city."
Doesn't say why it wasn't filled again, i.e. why did the water utility give up on it. It does say that there's nothing wrong with the building per se, it's just that it's shoved smack in the middle of the old center. Had it been put somewhere else...
The bank held the ground and first floor; its erc was, IIRC, on sixth. The radio was on the top floor (9th?) until about 2017 or so, when it was shut down because of some law copied from who knows where, by which a city can't own a public medium.
Mentions: 25-X-1969., june 1971., 01-IX-1971., 02-I-1972., 08-III-1972., 06-V-1973., 05-VI-1973., 27-VII-1986., 12-XI-1987., First allnighter, 11-II-1989., Interest, as per bank, 02-V-1992., 20-V-1998., 08-VIII-2005., 27-III-2011., 10-VIII-2011., 28-XII-2014., Last call for retirement, 10-XI-2015., 18-X-2016., They are here, 31-VIII-2018., Bajaga i Čorba, 09-V-2019., 21-X-2019., 07-V-2020., 21-VII-2020., 26-V-2021., 20-VII-2021., 26-VII-2021., 18-VIII-2021., 02-II-2023., erc, Ružica Bajin (Ruška), Šanta, in serbian