BETONIRAMO!

No, not a defiant shout as you prepare to parachute from a plane - it's Serbo-Croat for "let's pour some concrete!". Since I last wrote a blog update, things have moved on apace. The forming boards are off the ground floor walls so for the first time we can see the basic outline of what will one day be our family home – and it’s with particular pleasure that we see our large sliding door openings all give us a lovely view of the valley.

Imzo and his men have got cracking on some landscaping concrete work and sealing the “underground” parts of the back wall with bitumen and further water-repelling layers, working with an organisation that as far as we can see is beyond pretty much every other building team we’ve heard of in this country. There have been a few mis-steps, but up to now minor errors have been caught early and rectified without losing much in the way of time. Mostly, they continue to be a client’s dream, punctual, hard-working, flexible and most importantly for me, not at all prone to bouts of what I call “going shouty-crackers” when informed that there has been a mistake (theirs or mine).

As we head into the Xmas break, we know that our build will one day become a lovely family home, but right now there’s no getting away from the fact that we have a big lump of rebar and concrete on our land.

But hey, this is Montenegro – we’re just trying to fit in! It reminded Emma and I about our long in gestation project to document the best (ie, worst) of communist Yugoslav architecture, a Blurb project that sadly took a back seat with the advent of babies and business. A chance Twitter conversation the other day with the like-minded Ruud Peeten of Dutch company Yugo Travel served as an additional aide-memoir so in the spirit of concrete-hood, I thought it would be fun to give a special shout-out to some our favourite ex-Yu building s that are so ugly, they’re actually rather brilliant.

Hotel Zlatibor, Zlatibor

Known locally as the Concrete Rocket, this minimalist edifice in Serbia’s eponymous resort town ticks every box. Ugly? Yes. Concrete? Yes. Completely out of kilter with everything around it? Yep. Proudly displaying its single hotel star? Check. A special mention should also go to Virpazar’s Hotel Vir, another unoriginally named retro-Soviet style hotel from the same era that appears to be equally proud of its “Gold Standard” rating (from 1978!) that still hangs in a nice picture frame over the crumbling reception desk and which hasn't even got its own website. The Hotel Vir, though, doesn't look like a bad guy's lair stolen from the set of Bladerunner. Or like it's about to take off.

Kolašin spomenik

Littered at random all over the former Yugoslavia are these sculptures called spomenik – literally, monuments. Whereas Virpazar’s spomenik features men with large biceps flying their flag and bearing arms (you know, brave communists fighting fascists, etc) and therefore makes sense, most of these things don’t. There’s one that looks like a tulip in nearby Godinje. There’s one that looks like a collapsing wave in nearby Golubovci. I have no idea what this one, from Kolašin, is supposed to be. A magnificent parody of Sydney’s Opera House? A shrine to origami? All I do know is that it’s fabulously ugly.

Robna Kuća, Bar

Bar’s most famous building, left, is Robna Kuća, affectionately known as “The Three Tits”. There’s even  a fourth tit a bit further down the road on the other side that serves as a tourist information point rather than crap shopping centre, but it’s very much the Gummo Marx of the set and often gets similarly forgotten about. One has to admire the balls of the architect, who had clearly decided long before to not-give-a-solitary-f**k about what anyone else thought of him or his work and created a design so ahead of its time that even near the dawn of 2015 the world is still playing catch-up. Allegedly it was supposed to resemble three circus tents. Three very nipply circus tents.

Catholic Church, Podgorica

There’s not much I can say about the Catholic Church in Podgorica. That it is the ugliest church in the whole history of Christendom is, despite the worthy challenge of Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral, surely a given. To say that it was at any stage designed seems slightly unfair on the notion of design. It sits on the north side of the city like a perma-frowning grey monolith, its resemblance to a war-time bunker only exacerbated rather than softened by its equally brutalist bell-tower. If aliens ever try to make contact with mankind, I’d station Richard Dreyfuss or Keir Dullea here and just wait patiently.

National Library, Pristina

Sweet Jesus, where do we begin with the National Library in Pristina, Kosovo (above), the only building in history to have contracted bubonic plague? A monstrous blend of concrete, steel and white plastic, this is what might have resulted had Jeff Goldblum shared his teleporter with a building rather than fly, or if God had started playing real-life Tetris and then given up in a fit of fury before phlobbing all over his latest failure to set a high score. Or perhaps it’s what happens when giant snowballs hit a collection of dinosaur cages. This isn’t just the ugliest building in the whole of ex-Yugoslavia – it might have a very reasonable shot at being the ugliest building in the known universe.

I'd like to think our "bunker" isn't quite up with these beauties, but right now it's not far off. In a few days we break for Xmas, and then return to the build in the new year, so until then it's fingers crossed that we remain on schedule, on budget and that Santa drops a set or three of sliding doors into our stockings.

Merry Christmas, and have a Happy New Year everyone!*

*everyone being a fluid concept, I note that I still only have four followers. And I'm pretty sure one of them is either my wife or my mum.