Children's Holiday Home and Sanatorium, Krvavica

In Krvavica, in the municipality of Baška Voda in Split-Dalmatia County, in the middle of a dense pine forest by the coast, stands the former children's holiday home and sanatorium. It attracts lovers of modern architecture as one of the best-known works of Croatian modernism.

The building was erected in 1963 and 1964 so that the children of military insured persons could be treated and recover in it, and it was designed by Rikard Marasović. It is dominated by a round volume that seems to float on columns. On the ground floor is an L-shaped space for rest and play, which separates the inner circular courtyard from the forest. The service block, partly sunk into the terrain, is functionally separated from the health section and arranged on a rectangular grid. The inconspicuous position in the forest, the spiral movement, the open centre, the ingenious construction and the sensitive response to children's imagination make it a harmonious union of building, purpose and landscape. It is a unique example of modern sanatorium architecture of the second phase of modernism, important also in the international context.

The building is a protected cultural good, entered in the Register of Cultural Goods of the Republic of Croatia under the code Z-6385.

Photo: UdrugaKačić, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.
Data: Register of Cultural Goods of the Republic of Croatia (Ministry of Culture and Media), Open Licence; coordinates: Wikidata (CC0).