Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss
Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss was a Harvard educated research architect from Serbia, artist and theorist living and working from New York and Berlin. He was an Ex-Head of Research of, co-founder of School of Missing Studies for spatial research and founder of 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 completing his degree in architecture and engineering. His previous degree was at Advanced Mathematics at Gymnasium Jovanovic Jovanovic-Zmaj in Novi Sad in 1986. After Belgrade experience he moved to the United States for graduate studies at Harvard University on 1995. After two years at Harvard studying with Richard Gluckman, Jane Wernick, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Adriaan Geuze and Rem Koolhaas Jovanovic Weiss moved to New York where he started practicing architecture with Richard Gluckman and Robert Wilson. He opened an independent architectural practice called together with Swiss architect and writer Sabine von Fischer in New York City, and together they won the Second Prize in the 1998 2G Competition to expand Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion. Von Fischer later founded . Their collaboration lasted until 2003 when Jovanovic Weiss founded, a collaborative studio for design of architecture, cities and exhibitions based in New York. He also co-founded SMS, international art & architecture group for studying cities marked or undergoing abrupt transition.
His writing using epistemology as method started with articles for magazine, then as thesis for Harvard Project on the City. He became contributing editor of as of 2000 and its first issue. 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 former 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.
Jovanovic Weiss authored books that include Socialist Architecture: The Reappearing Act,'' Socialist Architecture: The Vanishing Act and Almost Architecture.'
He edited the books: Evasions of Power: On the Architecture of Adjustment and Lost Highway Expedition. 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, The Village and the Revolution, Across the Atlantic, Other Scale of Things and Inhabiting Geometry: Anne Tyng as well as magazines and journals such as Harvard Design Magazine, Cabinet Magazine, Perspecta, Akcelerator, Abitare, Domus, DaNS, Architectural Design, Oris, Thresholds et al.
He is currently running NAO.NYC - Normal Architecture Office.
Weiss curated and designed exhibitions in the United States of visionaries from the recent past: Lina Bo Bardi - 30 Years of MASP, Yona Frieddman: About Cities and Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry. His recent exhibition
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 was faculty at and at CUNY. He taught at Columbia University GSAPP,, Tyler School of Art Temple University and Cornell University AAP/NYC.
His art residences consist of being Fellow at Solitude Akademie, Stuttgart. Most recently Jovanovic Weiss is resident artist at PIK - Potsdam Institute for Climate Change Impacts via DAAD/Berlin with a project Better than Weather: In Praise of Human Search for Comfort.'' Jovanovic Weiss is fellow of Salzburg Global Seminar for 2021 in the section of American Studies.