I met Aleksa Dmitrović last summer, when he came to Motovun with Velja Ilić, who has a house in the hilltown together with his wife, Bojana. They live in Belgrade. Aleksa and I share a number of interests, and so we hit it off at once. A generation younger than me, he knows quite a few of my old friends and acquaintances from the capital of former Yugoslavia mainly through his father. Aleksa arrived with Velja yesterday evening, and we had a good chat on the hotel terrace this afternoon. One more time, I struggled with many names that were very close to me once upon a time. After so many years, my memory is failing me all too often.

As design in the broadest sense of the word is one of Aleksa’s interests, I asked him at some point whether he knew of Nenad Novakov. “Hey,” he raised his eyebrows and chuckled, “he was my teacher!” I was delighted, and I proceeded to tell him about an urban planning competition that Nenad had organized many years ago. Many of my friends took part in it. To prod my memory, I opened the laptop that I had with me, and searched for Nenad’s name. The project I was talking about popped up at once (“On Socialist Spatial Order: A Normative Application of Entropy Maximization,” June 18, 1979). I was amazed that this was the only piece in which his name had appeared, though. For crying out loud, Nenad was one of my closest friends in Belgrade!

A designer of note, he was instrumental in my own early successes in the field. I took part in several design competitions, and I came on top a few times. That was in the late Sixties, when design was taking off in former Yugoslavia. I met Nenad through his first cousin, Milan Brkić or Brka, who was my closest friend for years. We were studying architecture at the time, and we were inseparable. Alas, both Nenad and Brka are dead by now! Nenad went first, too. The best I could do when I returned home was to write about the surprising hole in my magnum opus. The name of the piece suggested itself without any thought. My deepest apologies, old friend.