Awakening Perast : interconnecting past and present architecture in a baroque town

Abstract

Perast, a baroque town on the Montenegrin coast, and a UNESCO protected site, is an amalgam of nearly three hundred buildings that capture the region's unique history. A vibrant regional center in the XVII and XVIII centuries, Perast today is a dormant town in danger of suffocating under the burden of its own past. My architectural intervention, a conservation school dispersed in five locations around strategically selected ruins in Perast, seeks to reconcile the competing claims of preservation and development: it offers heritage-related vocational training as an economic as well as cultural benefit to the local population. In its architectural ambition to interconnect the historic architecture with the contemporary addition in an innovative way, the conservation school becomes a criticism of the overly sentimental approaches to building in protected historic cities in favor of more invigorating ones.