In Dubrovnik's walls Any tourist guide will advise you to take in the full sweep of Dubrovnik at a glance by walking along the top of its ancient 14th century walls that stretch for two kilometres between the historic centre and the sea below. From that height Dubrovnik looks compact and homogeneous. The reconstruction of recent years has restored it to its prewar unity, in a careful recreation of its original architecture. All this of course excludes the city's development outside this area, listed under the UNESCO historic monuments to be protected. The random sprawl of building across the surrounding hillsides is an eyesore common among other similar Dalmatian and Istrian cities. Inside Dubrovnik the visible signs of contemporary intervention are at the moment not constructive, but are either re-constructive or consist of wounds inflicted on the city during the notorious attack of 1991, when it suffered the most dramatic autumn of its recent history. In those parts of the
city not damaged badly enough to be fully rebuilt, with the academic zeal that has restored the medieval core to its original though inevitably artificial appearance, there are still traces of the war to be seen in the hundreds of textured holes and scratches in the walls left by shrapnel, shells and bullets. So for the tourist who may still feel slightly uneasy in Dubrovnik, to bump into a convincing work of contemporary architecture comes as a pleasure. This particular project presents itself as a white wall, a sculptural appendix just outside the city ramparts, close to the Austro-Hungarian building occupied by the harbour authority and which at first sight seems to have acquired a second skin. In reality these are the new public toilets, the final project for which was drafted between 1997 and 2002 by the architect Nenad Fabijanic, as an integral part of the restructuring of the port area. It was inaugurated last July. The project frees the previously closed space between the walls and the adjacent building, and restores it to public use by creating an open-roof corridor between the medieval and the contemporary, illuminated from the ground by flush-mounted spots. The narrow and elongated reinforced concrete structure is clad on the inside with Angola black stone. The lavatories and doors are in stainless steel, in a reinstatement of current technological meanings. The exterior facing is in polished Dalmatian stone, a material associated with local building tradition and better known perhaps as "Istrian white". The external wall, at the end facing the square, is eroded by what looks like a giant drop in negative, almost a reference to its specific function but also, perhaps, a flaw in the completeness of the form and a warning signal. Here in Dubrovnik after all, by choice or chance, one of the first instances of contemporary architecture regained is not celebratory but, simply, a public convenience. And this is certainly modern.