Painted Over

I’ve passed this one a few times over three years in Croatia. It stands just off the coast road east of Split, behind a screen of pines, close enough that you get a grey shape and a roofline through the trunks and then it’s gone. Each time I told myself I’d stop on the way back, and each time I didn’t. This September I finally pulled over and walked in.

From the road it gives you nothing. You come through the trees onto the top terrace and the first thing you get is not the building — it’s the paint. Every surface has been gone over. Retaining walls, stair cheeks, parapets, soffits, the insides of the arches, the inside of the lift shaft: tags over pieces over tags, layers deep, in colours the Adriatic has never once produced. There is not a square metre of bare concrete left at standing height.

Then you stop reading the paint and start looking at what it’s on, and the place snaps into focus. Nothing about the shape has moved. A long low block with its pantile roofs still on, stepping down the slope in terraces of red brick. A concrete fin standing clear of the roofline with a hole cut through it, holding up nothing at all. A canopy cantilevered out over the entrance at an angle nobody would sign off today. A stair sweeping down in one curve into a court that’s now rubble and a small tree. On the sea terrace, a circular basin ringed with rusted steel stubs, and under the slab a pergola ring on a single post with every spoke still on it. All of that belongs to one decade and one idea: build for the coast, build for a fortnight of other people’s summer, build as if the money is going to keep arriving.

Completely painted over — but the silhouette still says Yugoslavia.

That’s the whole thing here. The colour is new and borrowed and applied by people who were not born when it closed. The shape is original and it is not negotiable. You can bury a building in aerosol for twenty years and still read the year it was drawn from a hundred metres away, off the massing alone.

I went down one internal stair — ceiling burnt and peeling back to the slab, treads ankle-deep in cans — and came straight back up. The interest here is outside anyway, on the terraces, where the arches still frame the bay and the breakwater and the mountains behind the city exactly as they were drawn to. That view was the entire argument for the building. It is the one part of it nobody has been able to paint over.

On the way out, through the pines, there’s a blank end wall above the terrace with two words on it and an arrow pointing down: DISCO TITANIC. I don’t know whether that was ever the name of anything here, or whether somebody just thought it was funny. On a grey afternoon in September it was hard to argue with either way.