The Seed Bank, Gornja Bucica

The area of Banovina, devastated by wars, politics, and earthquakes, has lost its identity as an agricultural landscape. Nature has “violently” begun to reclaim it. Geological processes – sinkholes – are an additional problem. The context in which I design is losing its population, as the state policy after the war has not taken adequate steps. The earthquake only emphasized the problems in this area further. The main question is how to turn flaws and deficiencies into advantages, or how architecture can and must respond to the chaos it has encountered.

I design the seed bank not as a strictly guarded but as a fully accessible architecture. The local population finds work and education within it. Soil stabilization is achieved through seed vaults and “sinkholes.” The testing site is conceived as an elevated field where plants are grown using hydroponic, aeroponic, and soil-based cultivation methods. The hollow-section pilots carry segments of the testing site – slabs of the thermal labyrinth. At their joints they accept wind catchers, resembling the vault keystones. These wind catchers draw in the external air and introduce it into the thermal labyrinth system, which either heats or cools the air before releasing it into the ventilation system. The testing site is covered by a solar updraft power plant, which, in addition to generating electricity, supports agriculture. The translucent ETFE membrane retains water evaporation from the site, with moisture condensing on the underside of the membrane and creating rain. The buoyancy of the air within the solar power plant varies in intensity from the edges to the center, creating conditions for testing plants under extreme conditions. Temperatures of -18°C are generated by dry ice aggregates, which are bacterially neutral. Through sublimation, the dry ice transitions directly from solid to gas without producing moisture and preserves the necessary amount of humidity (5%) in the vaults. The CO2 produced by the sublimation of dry ice can be directly reused for its regeneration. The water needed for plant cultivation in the hydroponic, aeroponic, and soil cultivation pools is released into the soil through the hollow-section pilotis, thus preventing the formation of sinkholes beneath the site.