101. Buzludzha Always Centered Visitor Experience. Dora Ivanova is Using Its Structure to Create a New One‪.‬ Museum Archipelago

Since it opened in 1981 to celebrate the ruling Bulgarian Communist Party, Buzludzha has centered the visitor experience. Every detail and sightline of the enormous disk of concrete perched on a mountaintop in the middle of Bulgaria was designed to impress, to show how Bulgarian communism was the way of the future – a kind of alternate Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains. Once inside, visitors were treated to an immersive light show, where the mosaics of Marx and Lenin and Bulgarian partisan battles were illuminated at dramatic moments during a pre-recorded narration.


But after communism fell in 1989, Buzludzha was abandoned. It was exposed to the elements, whipped by strong winds and frozen temperatures, and raided for scrap. Buzludzha has been a ruin far longer than it was a functional building, and in recent years the building has been close to collapse. Preventing this was the initial goal of Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova and the Buzludzha Project, which she founded in 2015. Since then, Ivanova and her team have been working to recruit international conservators, stabilize the building, and fundraise for its preservation.


But Ivanova realized that protecting the building isn’t the end goal but just the first step of a much more interesting project – a space for Bulgaria to collectively reflect on its past and future, a space big enough for many experiences and many futures.


In this episode, we journey to Buzludzha, where Ivanova gives us hard hats and takes us inside the building for the first time. We retrace the original visitor experience, dive deep into various visions for transforming Buzludzha into an immersive museum, and discuss how the building will be used as a storytelling platform.


Image: Dora Ivanova by Nikolay Doychinov


Topics and Notes


00:00 Intro
00:15 Buzludzha has always centered the visitor experience.
01:00 “A Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains”
02:40 The Original Visitor Experience
03:02 Dora Ivanova
03:15 Museum Archipelago Episode 47
03:35 Entering the Building
04:25 How to Stabilize the Roof
05:58 New respect for the Buzludzha thieves
06:25 The Inner Mosaics
07:26 Narrated Light and Sound Show
08:25 Moving from Preservation to Interpretation
09:34 Ivanova’s New Motivation
10:20 Buzludzha as a Storytelling Platform
11:10 How Buzludzha Was Built
12:30 Acting before memory becomes history
13:00 Buzludzha’s fate as a binary
14:05 The Panoramic Corridor
15:00 The Care For Next Generation and The Role of The Women in Our Society
16:02 Some Personal Thoughts about a future Buzludzha Museum
17:20 The preservation as proof of change
18:05 “Buzludzha is about change”
19:15 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖


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Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 101. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.




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Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.


Buzludzha has always