GHETALDUS, Zagreb
For the public space the inner selling space represents an open stage where, on its shining floor, move the actors - customers and salesmen, whereas the street life and legendary houses invade this inner space as reflections on its glass and stone surfaces. A complete permeation of the outer and the inner gives to the "new" Ghetaldus meaning of the town's communicative point.
Experiential intensity of the Fabijanić's interior is determined by a dialectic relationship of the liquid and the firm, the shining and the subdued, the transparent and the closed. Such contrasts are not unusual but, in this case, the principle is represented by strongly stated materiality - dozens of coldly shining spectacle frames pinned like butterflies on the panels covered in soft sheepskin.
The floor in polished light stones, as a bearer of the unstable and the changeable, reflects all the phenomena of the inner and outer space. Vibrating reflections of spotlights, light niches, ceiling lights as well as streetlights give an impression of rippled water surface.
The elements of firmness in this interior - the sculpture of the ova staircase and the strongly patterned palissandre-veneer stop and soothe the eye.
This panel of strong but calm graphic, reminiscent of the Villa Tugendhat dining-room partition, has a similar visual effect - a dark balance to the light gamut ofthe whole space, but, for the architect, it was not associativity that was crucial but existentiality of the material itself, as with the exceptional palissandre-veneer whose existence in itself is an excuse for its use, as with sheepskin foil to exhibits and especially with the stone staircase where the structure of travertine ondulato is expressed at its best.
Sculpture of the staircase experienced as a core of the whole design is a bond between its two completely different parts.
The white compact space of the eye's specialist's premises represents a calm movement in contrast to the alegretto of light and reflexes of the upper floor. The waiting room with the "Venetian" ceiling of closely spaced ribs with daylight coming through satined glass of the upper floor, with refined artificial lightning is equally treated as the representative selling space above.
Every inch of the design is treated with the same care so that nothing could be added or taken away from the manifestation of those spaces aiming at quiet harmony.
Text by Vera Grimmer
