TALKS
Creative Hour: Architecture and Design
October 9, 2025 | 5:30 PM
Architecture and design, though distinct disciplines, continually intersect and overlap in practice. Their points of contact emerge through spatial forms and the ways these forms shape the user’s everyday experience. The new Creative Hour in Urania focuses precisely on these moments of transition.
A conversation between Damir Gamulin, a designer whose practice spans from graphic to spatial design, and Ana Šverko, architect and architectural historian, will open up questions such as: What happens when disciplines stop defending their own boundaries and begin creating a shared language? Can collaboration be more than the sum of individual contributions?
Instead of a linear presentation of works, the discussion begins from the experience of different modes of collaboration. Gamulin’s practice demonstrates how a project can become a site of exchange, dialogue, and experimentation. Whether designing a museum exhibition, an architectural space, or their digital interpretation, the boundary between design and architecture in his work is never predetermined – it is renegotiated each time.
Through dialogue with Šverko, who knows his work from various roles – as a colleague, client, and interlocutor – the conversation will address moments when disciplinary boundaries are essential for preserving knowledge, as well as those when it is productive to dissolve them. It is precisely in these moments that new languages and interpretations emerge.
Participants:
• Damir Gamulin – designer and researcher, graduate of the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb, Department of Design. His work spans graphic, interior, and architectural design, exhibition scenography, and advanced interactive digital design. A recipient of numerous awards, he has exhibited or participated in projects at the Triennale di Milano (2022), Taipei Biennale (2020), and Venice Biennale (2006), as well as at many regional exhibitions. He is co-founder of OO (Organizirano oblikovanje) with Antun Sevšek, through which he explores spatial transformations and technology as generators of new experiences.
• Ana Šverko – architect, architectural historian, and senior research advisor. Head of the Cvito Fisković Center of the Institute of Art History in Split. Her research focuses on the architectural heritage of the eastern Adriatic and on the relationship between space, travel writing, and drawing. She has published in international journals, authored several books, and serves as vice president of the Croatian Architects’ Association (UHA).
The true value of a discipline becomes visible when it consciously enters into dialogue with others. Architecture and design demand precision and responsibility toward their own knowledge, yet their greatest strength emerges in the moments when they allow for overlap.
Such collaborations are not merely technical matters – they generate new social and cultural models, introduce the user as an active participant, and render the project open to change and reinterpretation. The discussion at Urania recognizes these transitional points as crucial for understanding contemporary practice.
Architecture and design may employ different tools and languages, but their paths inevitably intersect in space. The conversation between Damir Gamulin and Ana Šverko at Urania raises a central question: Can this very overlap become a generator of new practices, new meanings, and new social relations?
Creative Hour seeks to create a platform for critical reflection on these questions. This event is not conceived as a retrospective but as an open forum for exchange and dialogue on what interdisciplinarity means in the contemporary context.
Seats are limited – please reserve your spot here. Admission is free!
This program is co-financed by the City of Zagreb.
