Zlatko Ugljen architect


Stane Bernik

Text in the monograph „Zlatko Ugljen Architect“

As an architect, Zlatko Ugljen is a builder and a teacher whose entire being expresses the unity of the quest and creation; he is simultaneously architect, designer and town planner, the prerequisite of sovereign rule over the entirety of visual spatial organism. We shall demonstrate this in our shared journey through the imaginary and real created landscapes and spaces in which the semantically recognizable Ugljenesque images outline experientially markedly provocative buildings, shaped in a specific poetic fiction as one-dimensional, graphically multi-directionally placed borderlines between the open and external and the inner, confined space, which may be strictly determined by function or wholly liberated.

All this buildings, wheter intended for public use or residential purposes, are designed and constructed in the sometimes pleasant, at times dramatically tempestuous, picturesque and visually conflictic cultural and social space of the ever restless Bosnia and Herzegovina, that ancient and at the same time contemporary western forecourt of the Balkans, with their oriental stamp, which is also, conversely, the orientel portal Western Europe, depending on where one stands and which geopolitical and cultural lenses one looks through. Despite the exceptional power of its modern idiom, his architecture radiates an identity of which the Bosnian origin is discernable, so that one grasps at first glance the meaning of the statemen.