New literature on the architecture of socialist modernity in Yugoslavia

The architecture of the former socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe has attracted an enormous rise in interest in recent years. Publications on the socialist modernist architecture of the postwar period abound, their authors approaching the subject in very different ways. Some show an interest in presenting their objects from a romantic perspective, focusing on the exotic pathos of ruins, while others offer more serious, scholarly reflections.

It is important not to dismiss this renewed interest as mere nostalgia. After 1945, the politically ‘Western’ countries of Central Europe sought pioneering architectural solutions in residential building and in urbanization projects. In contrast, the architecture of the Warsaw Pact countries frequently bore the influence of what could be called a certain modernist pathos. In the West, and especially in West Germany and Austria, this kind of pathos was frowned upon, a fact which explains why it evokes so much fascination today. Much of the focus of the numerous publications on Eastern bloc constructions of the 1950s and 1960s rests upon representative public buildings, such as hotels, higher education institutions, museums, and party headquarters.

After much scrutiny of the buildings of the GDR, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR, attention has now extended beyond the Warsaw Pact countries, coming to light in Yugoslavia. Yugoslav architecture enjoyed its heyday in the postwar decades, when, after the Tito-Stalin-split, Yugoslavia managed to evade the socialist realist architectural style associated with stalinism. During these years a great deal was possible, both in terms of grand gestures and infrastructural conceptualization. To date, among the most significant studies of the subject in the German language are those by Udo Kultermann, whose work, since the 1960s, has repeatedly included the architecture of titoist Yugoslavia.^[1] Recently, other authors have turned their attention to the topic. The journal Arhitektura has published special editions on Croatian architects, including Neven Šegvić,^[2] Ivan Vitić,^[3] and Kazimir Ostrogović.^[4] The Zagreb-based architectural journal Oris has, since its establishment in 1999, been firmly devoted to discussion of the classics of Yugoslav modernism. In 1995, Nataša Koselj published a bilingual overview of Slovenian architecture of the 1960s;^[5] Ljiljana Blagojević’s study Modernism in Serbia, which appeared in 2003, quickly became a major work of reference;^[6] and in 2007, Eve Blau and Ivan Rupnik co-edited Project Zagreb. Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice.^[7] In 2008, the exhibition catalogue Balkanology was published, edited by Kai Vöckler for the Swiss Museum of Architecture in Basel and addressing an international readership,^[8] while separate monographs on Bogdan Bogdanović^[9] and Edvard Ravnikar^[10] appeared in 2009. Neither are the activities of the Vienna Insurance Group, active in numerous countries of Central and Eastern Europe, to be neglected. Since 1998, at its headquarters (the Ringturm in Vienna), the Group has organized the renowned exhibition series ‘Architektur im Ringturm’, which focuses on architecture in Central and Eastern Europe, including in Austria itself. The series—under the curatorship of Adolph Stiller and with the involvement of local experts—has brought forth numerous noteworthy monographs on East European architects, and publications addressing modernist architecture in Croatia,^[11] Slovenia,^[12] Serbia,^[13] and Montenegro.^[14] Due to the fact that the overviews provided by these monographs cover territory which had hitherto been unaccountably neglected, several of them have been translated into the relevant local languages.

Although these publications offer examples of serious scholarship, the recent rise in interest has been substantially characterised by photographic volumes whose focus upon ‘ruin-and-pathos-romanticism’ is quite independent of informed substance. One example of this artistic approach can be found in Socialist Modernism, by the Slovenian-born photographer Roman Bezjak.^[15] Bezjak’s book results from his tour of many countries in the former Eastern bloc, but it offers little sense of conceptual cohesion. Bezjak does not differentiate between buildings which have been demolished, renovated, abandoned, or otherwise changed. High quality buildings by renowned architects are depicted, without comment, next to bleak housing estates of prefabricated slabs (Plattenbau) that lack any architectural ambition. Bezjak’s photographs are mostly taken in diffuse, foggy weather, and they are slightly over-exposed: his images give the impression that everything is covered with a malevolent layer of poisonous dust. Occasionally, Bezjak groups together similar elevations of spaces or prefabricated slabs from a variety of countries. His captions, which vary considerably in quality, do not identify a unifying thread.

The book’s prefatory text describes the photographer’s efforts to convey both the ‘nostalgia’ and the ‘aesthetics’ of socialist urban development. It refers to Bezjak’s intensive—but ultimately fruitless—search for several of the architects whose buildings appear in the book. However, it rapidly becomes clear that these efforts have not extended to the consultation of any serious publications. Even the architects of such iconic and (by now) world-famous buildings as the Cankar Culture and Congress Centre (Cankarjev dom) in Ljubljana, or the Army Headquarters (Generalštab) building in Belgrade—bombed to ruins by NATO in 1999—are deprived of consideration. Taken in all, the volume as it stands is little more than an impressionistic gallery of images. However, and precisely because of this lack of definition, the book succeeds in conveying something of the ambiguity of socialist urban landscapes.

The Antwerp-based photographer Jan Kempenaers also addresses an international readership with his volume Spomenik (Monument).^[16] Like Bezjak, he too displays images taken in a diffuse light, and the twenty-five numbered photographs that make up his slim book show Second World War monuments in several of the former Yugoslav republics. The reader learns nothing about the creators of the monuments, nor about the specific events they refer to. Therefore, it is only the informed reader who is able to identify, for example, Bogdan Bogdanović’s monument at the memorial site for the victims of the Jase—novac concentration camp. Here, like the buildings depicted in Bezjak’s work, monuments in differing states of repair—destroyed, decaying, and intact—are jumbled without elucidating comment.

But Kempenaers’ book seems even more seriously flawed. It is hard to escape the impression of having one’s leg pulled, when one of the photographs depicts (again without comment) only a bush and a piece of rock. Furthermore, and evident from the first quick browse, the book depicts the monument to the Battle of Sutjeska—in Tjentište, Bosnia—twice, yet sells it to the reader as two different monuments. It is also unclear why the cultural centre by the Slovenian architect Marko Mušič in the Montenegrin town of Kolašin features in this book on war monuments at all: perhaps it is simply because of its massive (and indeed impressive) ‘sculpturality’. On the other hand, smaller sites of remembrance, whether in cemeteries, or incorporated into the design of public spaces, do not feature in the book: obviously these are not spectacular enough to fit the photographer’s idea of pathos. Memorials that renounce massive structures and emotive approaches come to mind as important omissions, such as those created by Stjepan Planic on the island of Vis, or Edvard Ravnikar’s ‘Hostages’ Cemetery’, near the site of the Italian concentration camp Kampor, on the island of Rab.

In fact, Kempenaers’ uncritical, aesthetic gaze falls little short of flat romanticism. In his introductory note, the architect Willem Jan Neutelings maintains that nobody today knows about these Yugoslav monuments anymore, before comparing their aesthetic qualities with lifestyle design à la Barbarella and Paco Rabanne! Indeed it is very easy to whisper about ‘mysterious objects’, if such whispering comes as a consequence of a failure to master any of the regional languages and an inability even to obtain translations of the inscriptions on the monuments’ plaques. It may even indicate a lack of genuine interest. Still more concerning is the fact that the photographs, along with their (partly) erroneous accompanying information, have been reproduced in countless blogs and websites.

A third book, formulated according to a similar concept, is Socialist Architecture. The Vanishing Act, by Armin Linke, a photographer, filmmaker and professor of artistic photography at the State University for Design in Karlsruhe.^[17] His atmospheric photographs, which include numerous indoor images, emphasise the melancholy motif of disappearance and are related to the vanitas tradition in art. Unlike many other photographic volumes, Linke’s book occasionally features human beings: people who work in the pictured buildings or who simply happen to pass by. The depicted edifices are déja vus. The reader recognises ‘old acquaintances’, such as the cultural centre in Kolašin (mentioned above and, here, wrongly ascribed to Gradimir Medaković), Nikola Dobrović’s Generalštab building in Belgrade, Bogdan Bogdanović’s memorials in Jasenovac and Mostar, and Vojin Bakić’s monument in Petrova Gora, in central Croatia.

Bakić’s monument made it to become the cover image for the aforementioned ‘Balkanology’ exhibition, when it was transferred from Basel to the Architectural Centre in Vienna. In Linke’s book, the monument is presented as already having been largely stripped of its original shiny metal exterior. The book also features the iconic edifices built in Skopje as part of Kenzo Tange’s master plan for the city’s reconstruction after the earthquake of 1963. While it is gratifying to see that, in this book, the architects of the buildings are listed in an appendix, it remains unclear why, on occasion, two nearly identical photographs would be displayed next to one another. The volume includes an essay by Srdjan Jovanović Weiss, a Vojvodina-born architect, who writes, among other things, on the representation of labour. As such, his essay has only a peripheral relevance to the book’s central concerns.

The Austrian architectural critic and writer, Friedrich Achleitner, has produced a ‘travelogue’ which takes a different approach.^[18] He provides an inventory of the memorials to war, antifascism, and revolution which Bogdan Bogdanović completed between 1951 and 1981 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Kosovo. Bogdanović died, exiled in Vienna, in 2010. Achleitner makes a claim to comprehensiveness, but not to any scholarly analytical standard. The book contains a series of photographs shot by the author, in which fellow travellers, passers by, and sometimes even Bogdanović himself can occasionally be seen. It is a very personal book, whose shape is influenced not least by the friendship between the couples Achleitner and Bogdanović.

Bogdan Bogdanović’s hometown Belgrade offers a valuable case study of the entanglements which underlie the cultural history of twentieth-century Europe. A network of wide-reaching interrelationships continues to bear an influence on the architecture of today, even though the political status quo seems to demand distinct national perspectives, whether these pertain to Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, or to other states. These entanglements originate at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the workshops and universities of Prague and Vienna. Even in the 1920s and 1930s, architects from Vienna were among those who built in Belgrade. Here, as elsewhere in the newly founded Yugoslav state, the influences of the school of Adolf Loos—one of the forerunners of modern architecture—left a palpable impression. These influences were transferred by the work of, among others, the Croatians Hugo Ehrlich, Anton Ulrich, and Zlatko Neumann, all of whom had studied and worked in Vienna.

Nikola Dobrović, the architect of the Generalštab building in Belgrade, constructed in 1963 and reduced to ruins after the NATO bombings of 1999, is today claimed as a native architect in both Serbia and Croatia. Born in the southern Hungarian town of Pécs, where his brother served as mayor during the shortlived First Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1918–1919, Dobrović studied in Prague, where he came into contact with the radical Czech modernism associated with the artist and publicist Karel Teige. The elegant residential and office building built by Dobrović on Wenceslas Square at the beginning of the 1930s clearly bears this influence. Later in the same decade Dobrović moved to Dubrovnik, where he constructed functionalist villas and hotels in the ‘white modernism’ style pioneered by Le Corbusier. Perhaps the most impressive example is Dubrovnik’s Grand Hotel, built in 1936 on the small island of Lopud, northwest of the town. Even in its present ruinous state, it impressively evokes the glory days of functionalism. It is influenced by Moissei Ginsburg’s Narkomfin building in Moscow, and boasts a dynamic array of balconies and access balconies, ribbon windows, cabin-like small bedrooms, and generously designed common areas. A sense remains of the highbrow architectural expectations of the original guests, whose desire for the grandezza of a noble house is evident in historical photographs. The primary target group were Czech tourists. It is rumoured that the Hilton Group has now bought the hotel, which had been classified as a historical monument. It is to be hoped that the reconstruction will live up to the quality of Dobrovic’s architecture.^[19]

Nikola Dobrović’s works are also represented in several volumes of the aforementioned Vienna-based series ‘Architektur im Ringturm’, focusing on Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro. The latter, published in 2013, features two of Dobrović’s buildings: the post office in Herceg Novi and the home for convalescent children in Igalo. In its coverage of hotels, the volume includes the fishing village Sveti Stefan, whose transformation into a hotel island by Branko Bon from 1955 onwards secured its reputation as a glamourous holiday resort for VIPs. This is an outstanding example of Montenegro’s illustrious history of hotel development.

One reason why the architecture and urban planning of Yugoslav postwar modernity has secured for itself such keen international interest is Yugoslavia’s much discussed ‘intermediate position’ between East and West. In 2012, Kai Vöckler who had already, in 2008, produced work on the former Yugoslavia in the context of the ‘Balkanology’ exhibition and catalogue mentioned above, edited a volume on postsocialist urban transformations in Southeastern Europe, which focused on the Yugoslav successor states.^[20] Besides Vöckler himself, the book features a range of authors from the countries under discussion. The collection covers numerous associations, local initiatives and research projects in Zagreb, Pula, Split, Kotor, Belgrade, Mostar, Skopje, and Prishtina, examining their work on both rural and urban planning, as well as their positions on architectural and artistic interventions. Among other contributions, the textual surveys provided in the collection are complemented by a photographic essay on Novi Beograd—Belgrade’s postwar socialist quarter par excellence—by the Viennese photographer Wolfgang Thaler.

Thaler’s photographs also feature in Holidays after the Fall. Seaside Architecture and Urbanism in Bulgaria and Croatia, edited by Elke Beyer, Anke Hagemann, and Michael Zinganel.^[21] The book is an extended version of an eponymous exhibition curated by Zinganel, which focuses solely on Croatia and which has been touring European cities, including Graz, Berlin, Trogir, Vienna, and Rijeka. The exhibition deals with construction, decay, takeovers, and reconstruction, as well as new buildings in Croatian seaside resorts originating in the 1960s and 1970s.

Yugoslavia’s openness to Western tourists—and including a corresponding building up of infrastructures—has cemented its image as a holiday destination in the cultural memory of Germany and Austria, if not of Europe more broadly. A central role in Yugoslavia’s concept of tourism was played by the highbrow architecture designed for tourists along the Adriatic coast—this contrasts strikingly with other Mediterranean holiday destinations, such as the coastal resorts of Spain and Italy. The creation of an ‘affordable Arcadia’ in the 1960s and 1970s was a grand gesture which saw renowned architects such as Andrija Čičin-Šain,^[22] Julije de Luca,^[23] Lovro Perković, Zdravko Bregovac,^[24] and Boris Magaš engage in the development of very different types of tourism-related buildings. Architectural concepts ranged from bungalow-like cubic blocks in the traditions of Le Corbusier and the International Style to complex structuralist agglomerations, as well as to clusters of small buildings structurally adhering to the model of villages.

A fundamental principle of this architecture was that the public should have access to all coastal areas. This resulted in a variety of holiday formats, including vacation homes for workers, camp sites, private rooms, and self-catering apartments, as well as first class hotels with full board. The combination of inclusivity (in terms of access) and a broad choice of holiday formats attracted a mixture of international and domestic tourists. Some of these facilities, such as the Solaris hotel complex near Šibenik—designed by Boris Magaš—continue to function. Others are in a state of decay, like the Haludovo resort near Malinska on the island of Krk, for instance, built by Magaš in 1972 in order to bring in a wealthy international clientele. Refugees were quartered here during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, following which the hotel remained open for some time, but it has now been in decay for about fifteen years. It exerts a morbid romantic appeal, which has sometimes been dubbed ‘ruin porn’ by scholars.

Haludovo has gained a certain notoriety as the ‘most photographed ruin of the Adriatic’ and has often served as an inspiration for artwork. A multi-part documentary, aired on Croatian television, examines the architectural icons of Adriatic tourism, which are partly landmarked, but which nevertheless have often been in decay following hasty privatisation.^[25] Boris Magaš, Haludovo’s architect, was for many years a professor of architecture at Zagreb University. In the 1990s he served, for a short time, as an adviser on architecture and urban planning for president Franjo Tudjman. In Croatia, however, he is best known as the architect of award-winning sports complexes such as the Poljud Stadium, home of the soccer club FC Hajduk Split, built at the same time as Ivan Antić’s swimming venue was being constructed next door for the 8^th Mediterranean Games in 1979. Magaš himself regarded the stadium—designed to put the audience at the centre of events, with reference to the principles of ancient theatres— as his masterpiece. One of the most valuable companions for visitors to the city of Split is a 2011 architectural guide, published by the Faculty of Architecture of Split University in a Croatian-English edition.^[26] It not only documents the buildings constructed for the Mediterranean Games, but also covers the district Split 3 which has been enjoying renewed scholarly attention, and the recent regeneration of Split’s riviera, known as Zapadna Obala (West Coast).

Boris Magaš began to work in the field of tourism in 1967/68, when he built the aforementioned Solaris resort on a flat peninsula north of Šibenik. The resort featured five jointly administered hotels of different categories, holiday homes for domestic workers, and an artificial ‘ethno-village’, constructed in the fashion of Dalmatian mountain settlements, where souvenir shops and restaurants were located. The flat, white, cubic blocks of the hotel buildings shimmer elegantly among high pine trees, their facades broken by the sliding shutters of closable loggias. As in all larger seaside hotels, refugees were accommodated in Solaris during the 1990s. Later, the resort was once more restored to its touristic function, but in recent times, a part of the complex has been renovated brutally.

Haludovo, designed in a fashion similar to Solaris, was Magaš’s follow-up assignment. It was, if anything, an even more ambitious undertaking, and resulted from the fact that his first project in Šibenik had won the Borba newspaper’s architecture award shortly after completion. One curious feature of Haludovo’s development was the involvement of Bob Guccione, editor of the American magazine Penthouse, when planning was already underway. Years of lobster and champagne dinners followed, and Haludovo played host to politicians and somewhat disreputable guests from the jet set, who were entertained with performances by international show stars. With the fall of socialism came war, and a change in the hotel’s fortunes. It provided accommodation for refugees before being relaunched as a hotel, sold to an Armenian investor, closed, partially demolished, and put into limited operation again. Now long empty, the hotel is the subject of contradictory rumours of all kinds, from demolition plans to bids for restoration.

Today, architecture-loving travellers roam Magaš’s stunning architecture, climbing over scrub and piles of shards into the two-storey high halls whose concrete flying roofs shoot dynamically out of the buildings. They explore the atrium cottages which nestle gracefully against the hill, the abandoned basement discotheques, the beach bars, and the curved seashore terraces. Ultimately, the increasingly devastated ruin amounts to a memento mori, the remnant of an attempted Americanization of the Yugoslav tourism industry in the early 1970s. Shortly before his death in the autumn of 2013, Boris Magaš gave an interview which was included in Michael Zinganel’s exhibition, ‘Holidays After the Fall’. The architect unemotionally put forth his opinion that a conceptualization such as Haludovo would have no function in today’s world. It would be okay to tear the complex down, he said, and to build something new and better suited to present needs.

The book that resulted from Zinganel’s research and his exhibition on the Croatian coast includes an investigation, by Elke Beyer and Anke Hagemann, of holiday resorts on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. Beyer and Hagemann balance an interest in the architectural styles of the Bulgarian hotels with a concern for their condition and use since the 1990s. There is an ironic secondary meaning in the book’s title, Holidays After the Fall, which extends beyond its allusion to the fall of socialism and addresses the near-total fall in the numbers of overnight guests following the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia. The inference—suggested by the book’s addition of a section on Bulgaria—that Yugoslavia and Bulgaria can, more or less, be lumped together in one story has struck a negative chord with Croatian scholars in particular. They object that this conflation blurs the ideological differences between the two socialist countries. It remains a fact, however, that both countries strongly focused the expansion of their tourist infrastructures on attracting a clientele from the capitalist West.

As far as the Yugoslav section of the book is concerned, Zinganel defends his choice to confine his research to Croatia, arguing that approximately 85 per cent of the erstwhile Yugoslav coastline now belongs to Croatia. Although this is true, it is a choice that perpetuates a (Croatian) critical perspective which relegates the other former Yugoslav republics to the margins of research on the cultural history of modernity. Needless to say, any comprehensive survey of Yugoslav seaside hotel construction would need to give attention to the large—scale developments of other Yugoslav republics. These include Edo Mihevc’s enlargement of Portorož (Slovenia),^[27] Edvard Ravnikar’s urbanistic plans for the coastal strip behind Sveti Stefan (Montenegro), and Neum, the only seaside resort on the very short Bosnian coast. Since socialist times, buildings here have been constructed far more densely than anywhere on the lavishly long Croatian coastline. The Zenit hotel complex, planned by Slobodan Jovandic, received the Borba architectural award in 1987.

While it offers a Croatian-Bulgarian (rather than Yugoslav-Bulgarian) perspective, Holidays After the Fall can still be described as a comprehensive book: its two main parts are replete with essays detailing the broader contexts of architectural history and postsocialist privatisation. Highlights include a series of historical photographs produced in the 1970s by the Zagreb travel agency Turistkomerc, and a photographically illustrated essay on the Bulgarian coast. Its competent, factual approach earns it a recommendation as a valuable reading text.

A highlight of the 2012 European Capital of Culture programme in the Slovene city of Maribor was the exhibition ‘Unfinished Modernisations’, held at the Umetnostna galerija (Art Gallery) and curated by Maroje Mrduljaš, Vladimir Kulić, Matevž Čelik, Antun Sevšek, and Simona Vidmar.^[28] It was the photographer Wolfgang Thaler, whose work has been already been mentioned, who initiated this project with his intention to document Yugoslavia’s postwar architecture. The project subsequently drew upon the expertise of the Serbian architectural historian Vladimir Kulić—who earned his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin with a thesis entitled Land of the In-Between. Modern Architecture and the State in Socialist Yugoslavia, 1945-65^[29]—and Maroje Mrduljaš, the managing editor of the Zagreb-based architectural magazine Oris. They coordinated the extended research project with experts from Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia, holding four international conferences and producing several publications.

The project’s title, ‘Unfinished Modernisations’, implies the hypothesis that implementing the principles of modernity, in the context of the everyday structures of a state, is an ongoing process. This is especially true when it comes to the sociopolitical features of socialist Yugoslavia’s architecture and urban planning, which, as the project partners maintain, hold the potential for productive future debates. Consequently, the exhibition covered topics as diverse as the tourism architecture of the Yugoslav Adriatic coast, Slovenian mining towns (such as Velenje), prefabrication, and the Borba architectural prize, awarded annually in the Yugoslav republics from 1966 to 1990.

Ambitious projects were not confined to the tourism architecture of titoist Yugoslavia. They also encompassed the building of kindergartens, libraries, post offices, factories, hospitals, universities, cultural centres, and large residential complexes. The Yugoslav architects engaged closely with contemporary international developments, and regular exchanges took place with the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, France, the US, and Japan, among others. The connections with Japan led, in 1963, to a unique conceptualization, when Kenzo Tange brought together a team to develop a master plan for the reconstruction of the Macedonian capital Skopje, substantially destroyed after a devastating earthquake. Tange brought elements of architectural metabolism, highly topical in Japan at that time, to the Balkans.

Tange’s project for Skopje remained unfinished, as so many others did. Utopian approaches were impeded by the necessities of reality—surely a constitutive part of any utopia. ‘Between Utopia and Pragmatism’ is therefore an apt title for Maroje Mrduljaš’s contribution to the exhibition catalogue, which focuses, precisely, upon the counterplay of experimental approaches and the constraints of necessity. The continued fascination with the buildings of the 1960s seems to be rooted in precisely this radical, utopian ambition, and in a creative courage which manifests itself more in architecture than anywhere else. This boldness of vision continues to shimmer through the exposed concrete facades, and speaks to today’s onlookers in spite of the tangible, banal realities of everyday life.

The unique architectural heritage of modern Skopje now risks falling prey to this banality. Numbered among the best examples of this legacy are the railway station, designed by Tange; the Macedonian Opera and Ballet House, designed by the Biro 77 architectural group; Janko Konstantinov’s Central Post Office; the Kyrill and Method University, by Marko Mušič; and the Museum for Contemporary Art created by the ‘Warsaw Tigers’. Lately, as part of the project ‘Skopje 2014’, the city centre around Macedonia Square has been covered by a Disneyland of lavishly ornamented buildings in neoclassicist style. Some of these are not even buildings, but facades erected in front of existing structures. In the young and contested Republic of Macedonia, the overwhelming need for self-representation has relied on flat symbolism and classical allusions. This is a circumstance which massively threatens Skopje’s architectural modernity.

The Maribor exhibition catalogue is also available in English, and the ‘Unfinished Modernisations’ project was documented in detail in the book Modernism In-Between. The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia.^[30] The essays by the participating scholars perfectly complement the photographs of Wolfgang Thaler, who consistently steers clear of a performative portrayal of the buildings.

The definitive English language edition of Unfinished Modernisations, co-edited by Mrduljaš and Kulić, appeared in 2012.^[31] It, too, bears the subtitle Between Utopia and Pragmatism. The volume’s illustrations have been brilliantly designed, but its textual contents would have benefited from more attentive editing. The book opens with a clearly arranged historical overview of politics, culture, and architecture in Yugoslavia and elsewhere, followed by chapters which provide architectural surveys as well as more focused analyses. The topics covered in this publication include partisan monuments (treated here in a scholarly manner); Novi Beograd; Skopje; Novi Zagreb; the newly built Slovene towns of Nova Gorica and Velenje; the enlargement of Split through the construction of Split 3 in the 1960s; the reconstruction of Zadar’s old town, badly damaged during the Second World War; the Zagreb trade fair; and the low builds in the residential area Ljubljana-Murgle. It is, perhaps, no surprise that—given this is the most competent and comprehensive publication on Yugoslav modernity—the book is in very high demand.

Maroje Mrduljaš is also one of the six curators responsible for ‘Lifting the Curtain. Central European Architectural Networks’, an exhibition staged as a ‘Collateral Event’ at the Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2014. The exhibition, an initiative of the architectural network TRACE, was a collaboration of six institutions from Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Croatia, and Austria (the latter represented by the present author). It covers international networks in Central European architecture from the end of the First World War to the postsocialist decades, focusing on interactions across the often surprisingly permeable Iron Curtain. The exhibition catalogue was published in German and English in spring 2015, when the exhibition was relocated from Venice to Vienna.^[32] It subsequently toured in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Budapest. A more comprehensive English—French reader is forthcoming. Only a few of the thirty-six case studies on the history of architectural ‘border-crossings’ in Central Europe address the work of individual architects such as Juraj Neidhardt, Drago Ibler, and Nikola Dobrović. Most focus instead on instances of international cooperation, in six chapters entitled ‘Experiments’, ‘Collectives’, ‘Transfers’, ‘Encounters’, ‘Research’, and ‘Publics’. These studies attempt to establish links between national narratives and broader interpretive frameworks. Two case studies are dedicated to Skopje, one of which examines the UN-promoted competition, in the aftermath of the 1963 earthquake, for an urbanistic master-plan for the reconstruction of the city. The participating architects and urban planners ranked among the most renowned of their time, including Constantinos Doxiadis, Adolf Ciborowski, Van den Broek en Bakema, Luigi Piccinato, and the eventual winner, Kenzo Tange.

The second case study is concerned with the active support that the People’s Republic of Poland gave to Skopje’s reconstruction, in financing the city’s new museum. As part of a Unesco-led project, the young architects Waclaw Klyszewski, Jerzy Mokrzyński and Eugeniusz Wierzbicki—collectively known as the ‘Warsaw Tigers’—realised the new Museum of Contemporary Art, an airy, modern building, whose existence testifies to the ‘fraternal’ support which existed among the socialist states and to the political dimension of Skopje’s reconstruction.

As the initiator of the non-aligned movement in Cold War Europe, Yugoslavia’s role was also a special one in other respects. It benefited, for example, from the exportation of construction technology to decolonized African states. A key role was played by the Belgrade construction enterprise Energoprojekt: during the 1970s and 1980s, 80 per cent of its profit came from Africa and the Near East. Another example of the status attained by Yugoslav technology is to be found in the Institute for Material Testing (Institut Za Ispitivanje Materijala, IMS), whose system of prestressed concrete elements, IMS Žeželj, was used in large residential complexes, schools, and family houses, substantially boosting the Yugoslav export economy and eventually leading to the development of diverse CAD software systems.

As another of the case studies reveals, the UN was supporting the Yugoslav government’s research on infrastructural developments in the tourism sector on the Adriatic coast as early as 1963. Between 1967 and 1972, interdisciplinary planning groups established regionally focused schemes for the southern Adriatic, the upper Adriatic, and for the city of Split. These Adriatic projects gained worldwide recognition as exemplary instances of international cooperation.

Local manifestations of the structural substance of modernity were also at the centre of Croatia’s contribution to the Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2014.^[33] The focus of architectural groups such as ‘Platforma 9.81’ (Split, Zagreb) and ‘Motel Trogir’^[34] upon the preservation, restoration, and utilization of Croatia’s surviving examples of architectural modernity also attests to the increased local and international interest in this topic. Their attention is directed particularly towards those iconic objects which have finally been classified as historical monuments, but are nevertheless lying idle and facing an uncertain future. They include Rikard Marasović’s Holiday Sanatorium for Children of the Yugoslav People’s Army (Jugoslovenska narodna armija, JNA) in Krvavica, near Makarska, and the Sljeme motels, built in the early 1960s along the new Adriatic coastal road (Jadranska Magistrala) in Rijeka-Preluk, Biograd, and Trogir. These were designed by Ivan Vitic for motoring tourists, and combined quarry stone masonry, exposed concrete, and glass walls in the style of Le Corbusier, blending traditional local materials with modern ones. Saving these motels has become an urgent issue, given their present decaying state. They have fallen out of use: today, transit tourists travel on the highway, and the coastal road is used predominantly by locals, who do not need a place to stay overnight. The restoration of Ivan Vitić’s former JNA cultural centre in Komiža on the island of Vis has, after all, been a success story. Having sustained war damage and, subsequently, been left empty, it has now been renovated and is once more being used as a cultural centre.

In Slovenia, too, there has been a return to modernist roots. Edo Mihevc, for example, is, almost single-handedly, responsible for creating the modernist touristic infrastructure of Portorož, Slovenia’s most important seaside resort.^[35] The designer Niko Kralj, who died in 2013, was a student of Jože Plečnik, Edvard Ravnikar, and Edo Mihevc, and made himself a name particularly as a designer of plywood furniture.^[36] His folding furniture series, Rex, is experiencing a merited renaissance, once more produced and sold all over the world. The Museum of Architecture and Design (Muzej za arhitekturo in oblikovanje, MAO) in Ljubljana pays tribute to Saša Mächtig, the designer of the K67 kiosk, this multifunctional booth produced in large quantities in the small southern Styrian town of Ljutomer, exported to many countries, and still frequently encountered. Slovenian postal service even issued a stamp dedicated to the kiosk.^[37] The story thus goes on, and this much can be affirmed: the historiographical treatment of the architecture of Yugoslav modernity has become varied and lively enough finally to do justice to this topic.

Translation from the German: Sabine Rutar