"ABECEDA – Bogdan Bogdanović: Miniatures – The Alphabet Is Architecture

**The exhibition The Alphabet Is Architecture, opening on 4 September 2026 at 7:30 p.m., presents a lesser-known yet highly significant aspect of the oeuvre of Bogdan Bogdanović—architect, memorial designer, writer, draftsman, and one of the most original thinkers on the city in the former Yugoslavia. At the heart of the exhibition is a series of alphabet miniatures in which letters cease to function merely as linguistic signs and instead become points of departure for imagined cities, buildings, and entire spatial worlds.

The drawings were created in the mid-1990s following a conversation between Bogdanović and his friend and translator, Klaus Detlef Olof, about writing as one of humanity's greatest inventions. Bogdanović distilled the complex relationship between letters, numbers, and architecture into a single sentence that became the exhibition's title: "The Alphabet Is Architecture." Shortly afterwards, he presented Olof with two small boxes containing hand-painted alphabet miniatures, conceived as illustrations for the German edition of his book Gradoslovar, which was ultimately never published.

In these miniatures, every letter becomes the beginning of a possible city. Bogdanović shapes them like the illuminated initials of medieval manuscripts, bringing together script, ornament, architecture, and landscape. His cities are not portraits of real places but condensed symbols of the very idea of the city—as a space of civilisation, memory, encounter, and human continuity.

The exhibition also highlights Bogdanović's Istrian episode through archival photographs documenting the creation of Adonis in the Dubrova Sculpture Park near Labin, his only non-memorial sculptural work.

The exhibition serves as a reminder of the remarkable breadth of an artist who understood architecture as applied anthropology and the city as one of the fundamental expressions of our shared humanity.

The exhibition is funded by the City of Pula, the Istria County – Regione Istriana, the Government Office for Human Rights and the Rights of National Minorities, and the State Budget of the Republic of Croatia through the Council for National Minorities.