Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss

Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss (born 1967) is a Serbian architect, artist and theorist living and working in New York. He was an Ex-Head of Research of Herzog & De Meuron Architects, co-founder of School of Missing Studies for spatial research and founder of NAO.NYC for spatial design at all scales needed based in New York.

Jovanovic Weiss was born in Subotica and lived in Novi Sad and Belgrade until 1995. He then moved to the United States for graduate studies at Harvard University. After two years at Harvard studying with Richard Gluckman, Jacques Herzog and Rem Koolhaas, Jovanovic Weiss moved to New York where he started practicing architecture with Richard Gluckman and Robert Wilson. In 1998 he won the Second Prize in the 2G Competition to expand Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion in Barcelona and soon after opened his own art & architectural practice called Normal Group for Architecture with a partner.[1] This collaboration lasted until 2003 when Jovanovic Weiss founded NAO.NYC (Normal Architecture Office), a collaborative studio for design of architecture, cities and exhibitions and a successor of Normal Group for Architecture based in New York City.[2] He also co-founded SMS (School of Missing Studies), international art & architecture group for studying cities marked or undergoing abrupt transition.[3]

His writing using epistemology as method started with articles for Akcelerator magazine, then as thesis for Harvard Project on the City. Finally he defended his long time research on Balkanization at Goldsmiths College Centre for Research Architecture.

Jovanovic Weiss's theoretical work is mostly known for analysis of Balkan cities in the aftermath of war and crisis in Yugoslavia during 1990s. He coined the term Turbo Architecture and contributed to understanding the geo-political process termed Balkanization and its defining effects on newly emerging capital cities after the fall of Yugoslavia. Jovanovic Weiss defines Balkanization as a bottom-up geo-political process that new capital cities of new countries go through to assert their own urban distinction and character among competing new capital cities and against hegemonic forces of globalization.[4]

Jovanovic Weiss authored books that include "Socialist Architecture: The Reappearing Act [ The Green Box, Berlin, 2017], Socialist Architecture: The Vanishing Act (JRP Ringier, 2012, with Armin Linke)[5] and Almost Architecture (Merz & Akademie Solitude, 2006).[6]

By defining Turbo Architecture as a post-socialist mainstream in nationalizing collective identity through architecture, the author of the book Almost Architecture Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss is presenting his view on the complex relationships between politics, identity search, transition and war itself, all of that represented through specific historical and contemporary strategies in architecture. This book, in an interesting way, deals with depicting the major political shifts and turbulence periods in former Yugoslav and Serbian recent past through contexts of construction or deconstruction of symbolically charged buildings.[7]

He edited the books: Evasions of Power: On the Architecture of Adjustment (Slought, Ed. 2008) and Lost Highway Expedition (School of Missing Studies, Ed. 2007). His work has been published in the books 100 Architects 10 Critics by Phaidon, Harvard Project on the City: Shopping, Did Someone Say Participate?, Networked Cultures: Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space, Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, Atlas of Transformation, Beyond: Scenarios and Speculations, Concurrent Urbanism, Nationalities Papers and Inhabiting Geometry: Anne Tyng as well as magazines and journals such as Harvard Design Magazine, Cabinet Magazine, Perspecta, Akcelerator,[8] Abitare, Domus, DaNS, Architectural Design, Oris, Thresholds et al.

Weiss curated and designed exhibitions in New York of visionaries from the past: Lina Bo Bardi (at Columbia GSAPP), Yona Frieddman (at The Drawing Center) and Anne Tyng (at ICA Philadelphia and Graham Foundation, Chicago). His most recent exhibition on Hannes Meyer and the city of Birobidzhan has been exhibited in Birobidzhan Philharmonic in Far East Russia. The exhibition: ArchiLeaks, shown during October and November of 2019 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, Northern Macedonia marks Jovanovic Weiss' new and epistemological approach to mine data from errors in spatial knowledge.

Jovanovic Weiss previously collaborated with Richard Gluckman and Herzog & de Meuron Architects and artists Jenny Holzer, Anne Tyng, Yona Friedman, Eyal Weizman, Marjetica Potrč, Yevgheniy Fiks and Robert Wilson.

He is currently a faculty at Harvard Graduate School of Design, CCNY Spitzer School of Architecture at CUNY and at Harvard University GSD. He taught at Columbia University GSAPP, Penn Design Architecture, Tyler School of Art Temple University and Cornell University AAP/NYC.