Circular design lighting objects were created after the workshop I held at the Mikser Balkan Design Festival in May 2024. The workshop was about repurposing waste and discarded materials, giving it new life in the form of lighting objects. These lighting objects are what was yielded after impressions from the workshop settled down. By combining discarded materials from the construction waste sites with some everyday materials such as colorful cords, metal mesh and LED tapes, an interesting blend of old, worn out and new, colorful elements is being created.

This is an ongoing project of the total refurbishment of an apartment in Block 8a in Belgrade. The initially segmented apartment has turned an open space project following the wishes of the client. The floor area of 60m2 is covered in natural oak herringbone parquet, with almost no partition walls. The kitchen and dining area as well as the living area are connected visually, and the future sleeping area is imagined to be separated by a moving partition. The client couldn’t decide between having a recammier sofa in the dining area or puffy chairs so we experimented with both options. As for the color pallette, we opted for some anthracite & white interior with some pale green doors and kitchen details. The backsplash kitchen wall will be handpainted white drawing on an antrhracite surface. The apartment is placed on an 11th floor and posseses a 20m2 balcony which is partially covered and roofed with glass panels. One of our first imaginations was for the terrace to hold an antique bath tub for the client to enjoy above the noisy city in the surroundings.

The project ‘Light traps’ is a collection of lighting objects created during July 2023. The name of the collection comes from the visual and symbolic inspiration found in the natural world of carnivorous plants and sea jellies. This idea was born out of the personal inclination towards re-purposing discarded materials or objects. And also due to a limited choice when it comes to lighting design supply in the Balkan region. Metals found near metal waste, materials like metal mesh and textile ropes are all used to create lighting objects which demonstrate what can be achieved with little investment and with giving new life to waste.

This is an ongoing project of the refurbishment of an apartment in Block 21, Belgrade. In accordance with clients’ needs the daily area is designed as an open space containing kitchen, dining and living area, a library, and a TV stand. The center of attention is the colored sofa standing out in the mainly white and natural oak setting that surrounds it. The lighting is solved with more peripheral sources of light, rather than fewer central ones. The construction column in the middle of the space is covered in mirror to lighten its presence.

A friend asked a group of friends to help him reconstruct and readapt the space of his bar and restaurant. Finances and time were very narrow and strict, we had to reuse a lot of elements from the previous space and the place had to reopen in a very short amount time. The position of the bar shifted to be parallel to the back wall in order to free up the space for chatting, dancing. Low and relaxing seating area was achieved by introducing new orange seating, making this lower part of the restaurant relaxed in character. The whole space was divided to host a fine dining zone in the upper part of the ground floor. The barrier between two zones was achieved by planting some plants in the black metal pots, creating a see-through barrier but without blocking the sight between two zones of the restaurant. Using low-cost materials found in a local building supply store was helpful financially but also created interesting visual effects. One of them is the green undulating plates originally used for roofing, and now acting as the cover for the old ceiling which was in ruins. Another material we used are thin copper sheets to cover larger areas of walls and some parts of gypsum ceiling, adding the visually stunning effect to the whole space. We drew on all of the copper sheets with whatever we could find to create imprints, in order to give a personal touch to this design decision. Some of the old metal lamps were readjusted to serve as lighting above the bar. The pink and red LED lights were used as an easy fix for creating a visual change but with spending less.

Series of workshops organized around a 10-day summer school with architects, architecture students, artists, landscape architects, engineers. The center of the workshop is the city of Koper, Slovenia. The charming old town of Koper is being deserted by its residents as the consequence of the fast-paced urban development happening outside the old city walls in the form of new shopping malls, garages, huge supermarkets, generic promenades and parks that resemble waste lands. The idea of the summer school was to spend time in the city and act upon it with series of micro interventions which would hopefully activate the old city and invite people to spend their time there, rather than in the newly built malls. Our immediate intervention was carrying the old fishing net around various locations in and out of the old city and creating a happening around it. The old fishing net served as a metaphor for a public pavilion which could host different activities and it could be transportable in order to activate different locations around the city.

The client asked for the project of a house in his home village in western Serbia. The house is placed on a steep terrain which allows for the basement to be partially underground. It holds a garage and an area for play and leisure. The ground floor consists of daily and nightly areas, and the living room exits onto a large terrace overlooking the woods. The exterior of the house strives to harmonize with the surrounding architecture in its style, by introducing stone plinth in the lower part of the house. In the ground floor the woodden windows and shutters are carefully designed with lots of rustic details.

Neighborhood’s Waste-Hubs. Trying to use as much of the solid waste that comes out from the city and give it another life in shape of something else – something usable by all citizens of Gdynia. In this competition we wanted to address the issue of waste production which resulted from the world of over-consumption. By synchronizing with initiatives from the city who already take care of the waste collection and categorization, we want to build so called Waste-Hubs near the locations of collected waste and provide the closest neighborhoods with spaces of workshops where they can participate to transform this waste into something usable. These can be urban furniture, homeless shelters, bookshelves or tents, anything usable for the city’s public spaces, or for the residents themselves. Such new use of waste can be ever evolving because the more people get involved in this idea the more ideas will come out on how to transform the collected waste.

‘Ballancoire’ is a piece of urban furniture imagined to question the behaviour of older generation in playground with their grandchildren. Instead of sitting and watching the younger play, they could participate in the act of playing. The aim of this creation is to make both generation interact in playtime. It is imagined to function as a system of three bicycle wheels interconnected. The wheels are different sizes and each movement from the grandparents influences the rocking of the children’s swing. This proposition was made as a response to the ‘Faire Paris’ competition we did in collaboration with Colectivo Mel.

Informal settlements and informal ways of living in Western Balkan countries may vary from illegal additions to existing buildings to whole informal settlements, and it doesn’t necessarily associate only with the poorer layers of population. The informality in this geo-political area slips through many layers of the urban life, usually in the sole settlements, but it finds its ways in the institutional levels as well. This project focuses on the reality of the single informal settlement mainly inhabited by Roma population in Podgorica, Montenegro in relation to a decade long interference (and lack of interference) of the authorities and institutions regarding this topic. By applying different tactics, from thorough research on site, interviewing residents, contacting NGO’s, Red Cross, institutions, UN headquarters and different actors involved with the area since its beginnings until the moment of thesis creation I tried to make a synthesis of conclusions and make a proposal which could be considered as a compromise between the informal and the formal ways of dealing with this situation. In response to that, my general concept is based on this duality and on different realities of the two streams (the institutional, and the one from site) which is represented in the form of the timeline. This kind of approach helped to organize events and decisions that happened around this space in the past, and gave me thorough insight based on which I proposed my design. I tried to respect both realities regarding this space and its specific situation, being that in the moment of thesis making it was hardly possible that one current will dominate and erase the presence of the other (the institutions take over and eliminate the informal settlement). That’s why the result is a compromising design, which includes both currents and connects them in the form of a ‘line’ consisted of educational, economic, playful activities and space activators.

This project is an outcome of the group project on urban planning in a new part of a town in Chengdu where an artificial lake is created and the city is concentrated around it. The public bathhouse project comes out as an individual project tackling the limits and usage of public spaces in Chinese cities, and the architecture that shapes them. In this project the water breaks the plots where the bathhouse buildings are placed. The reason for this outcome is to avoid the situation where one building dominates a square, but break the whole area into smaller plots in order to achieve a more human-scale sized built environment and gain an easier accessibility for all users.