Purifying Stagnation
Mia Calasan is a Master's student in Architecture at the University of Belgrade. Her interest in work is currently focused on the intersection of ecological remediation, critical theory, and hands-on material practice. The approach she uses when faced with new concept development always starts from what a site or material is already doing, rather than importing a solution to it, and is always oriented toward involving the local community in the project. This also applies to her recent work, Purifying Stagnant Water of Lake Palić, her master studio project on the revitalisation of balneal heritage, which treats the lake's own reed growth as the basis for a floating purification system. Alongside her studies, she takes part in numerous competitions spanning not only research and design but also industrial design with an ecological focus: VRBA, a chair built from willow wood, explores building with locally available, low-processed materials rather than industrial ones. During her studies, she had numerous projects where she took the same approach, one of them being a tactical urbanism proposal for Belgrade's Kalenić Market at an urban scale. Mia sees architecture as a discipline that grows through dialogue with local communities but also remains open to international collaboration. This concern with what a community is missing runs through her project Slavija - The Hall of Peace, nominated for the 2025 Piranesi Award student nominations, which addressed the disappearance of public space at the scale of a city square. This work integrates conceptual research, design development, visual communication, and written argument into a single, continuous process rather than treating them as separate stages.
Lake Palić, located in northern Serbia, was once one of the region's most significant sites for leisure and healing. Its mineral-rich waters supported a thriving spa culture for over a century. Yet locals still swim in it, showing how deeply the ritual of immersion remains attached to this place despite declining water quality. The idea for the research emerged from recognising that the lake's water serves more than human needs; it sustains an ecosystem of protected species. The project investigates how restoration can support biodiversity and revive the lake's therapeutic and recreational role. The work developed by researching what was already happening at the site, rather than importing an external fix. Drawing on wetland treatment research, including constructed wetland filtration, graded gravel filtration, and UV disinfection, the system uses reed and aquatic plant species colonising the shallows, including Phragmites australis and Typha latifolia, to absorb nutrients while producing biomass later anaerobically digested into biogas. Pollution becomes a resource for its own remediation; purified water restores its therapeutic drinking properties and potential for swimming. The proposal's strength is this logic, a replicable method for addressing polluted waters through existing site processes. Its impact reframes pollution as a resource: the same plant beds restore habitat and attract birdlife, while raising questions of responsibility for the lake's future care. From this system emerges an architectural proposal informed by precedents of self-sufficient floating architecture: platforms host cultivation and digesters, while biogas heats bathing structures, reviving Palić's balneal tradition. Bather, plant, and bird share the same space, drawing on Colin Rowe's phenomenal transparency and Timothy Morton's Dark Ecology to resist the separation of humans from the "natural." I see this evolving beyond Palić: the system's logic is adaptable to other contexts.