A Building Wearing Armour

The first thing that happened to me in Pristina was an old man adopting me. I was circling the National Library with my camera when he appeared at my shoulder, pointed up at the roof and started counting in the air. Ninety-nine domes, he told me — exactly ninety-nine — and before I could say anything we were deep in a conversation about architecture, two strangers craning their necks at the most argued-about building in the city. He was proud of it the way you’re proud of a difficult relative. By the time he left I’d stopped seeing it as ugly. It isn’t ugly. It’s unresolved, which is a far more interesting thing for a building to be.

Picture cubes of concrete in fifteen sizes, stacked without apology, each one capped with its own dome, and the whole mass wrapped head to foot in a white metal lattice — a cage, or chain mail, or a net thrown over the architecture to stop it escaping. Nobody agrees on what the lattice means: a fortress, a veil, a fishing net. The building keeps its own counsel, and the old man seemed to like it exactly that way.

Most architecture wants to be liked. This one only wants to be looked at — and the people who love it, love it like family, flaws and all.

What I didn’t expect was how much it would send me home. Where I grew up in Ukraine there are buildings like this — grand civic concrete, a little overbuilt, a little too serious. The wedding palace, the place you went to register a marriage: a heavy modernist hall doing official business by day and then, in the evening, quietly turning into the spot where everyone my age met up to see friends. The same stone, two completely different lives. Standing under those ninety-nine domes, watching students cut across the forecourt on their way in, I recognised that exactly — a serious building that people had simply, stubbornly made theirs.

Not a ruin — a survivor

This is the one entry in my journal that isn’t abandoned, and I keep it here on purpose. Half of what I love about lost places is the architecture underneath the loss — the ambition, the strangeness, the refusal to be ordinary. Here that ambition is still alive, still in use, still arguing with everyone who looks at it.

I shot it across a full day to watch the lattice work. Flat light turns it graphic, a drawing of itself; as the sun drops it goes three-dimensional, the metal throwing a second skin of shadow across the domes until they catch the last of the light. It survived the wars, it survived the decades of people calling it the ugliest building in the world, and it will outlast its critics — ninety-nine domes, all counted, catching ninety-nine versions of the evening, exactly as my friend at the railing promised.