Thearchitecture of Yugoslavia was characterized by emerging, unique, and often differing national and regional narratives.[1] As acommunist state remaining free from theIron Curtain and theEastern Bloc,Yugoslavia adopted a hybrid identity that combined the architectural, cultural, and political leanings of both Westernliberal democracy andSoviet communism.[2][3][4]
Yugoslav architecture emerged in the first decades of the 20th century before theestablishment of the state; during this period a number of South Slavic creatives, enthused by the possibility of statehood, organized a series of art exhibitions inSerbia in the name of a shared Slavic identity. Following governmental centralization after the 1918 creation of theKingdom of Yugoslavia, this initial bottom-up enthusiasm began to fade. Yugoslav architecture became more and more dictated by an increasingly concentrated national authority which sought to establish a unified state identity.[5]
Beginning the 1920s, Yugoslav architects began to advocate forarchitectural modernism, viewing the style as the logical extension of progressive national narratives. The Group of Architects of the Modern Movement, an organization founded in 1928 by architectsBranislav Đ Kojić,Milan Zloković,Jan Dubovy, and Dusan Babic pushed for the widespread adoption of modern architecture as the "national" style of Yugoslavia to transcended regional differences. Despite these shifts, differing relationships to the west made the adoption of modernism inconsistent in Yugoslavia WWII; while the westernmost republics ofCroatia andSlovenia were familiar with Western influence and eager to adopt modernism,long-OttomanBosnia remained more resistant to do so. Of all Yugoslavian cities,Belgrade has highest concentration of modernist structures.[6][7]
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Immediately following theSecond World War, Yugoslavia's brief association with theEastern Bloc ushered in a short period ofsocialist realism. Centralization within the communist model led to the abolishment of private architectural practices and the state control of the profession. During this period, the governingCommunist Party condemned modernism as "bourgeois formalism," a move that caused friction among the nation's pre-war modernist architectural elite.[8]
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Socialist realist architecture in Yugoslavia came to an abrupt end withJosip Broz Tito's 1948split with Stalin. In the following years the nation turned increasingly to the West, returning to the modernism that had characterized pre-war Yugoslav architecture.[7] During this era, modernist architecture came to symbolize the nation's break from the USSR (a notion that later diminished with growing acceptability of modernism in the Eastern Bloc).[8][9] The nation's postwar return to modernism is perhaps best exemplified inVjenceslav Richter's widely acclaimed 1958 Yugoslavia Pavilion atExpo 58, the open and light nature of which contrasted the much heavier architecture of the Soviet Union.[10]
During this period, the Yugoslav break from Soviet socialist realism combined with efforts to commemorate World War II, which together led to the creation of an immense quantity of abstract sculptural war memorials, known today asspomenik.[11]
In the late 1950s and early 1960sBrutalism began to garner a following within Yugoslavia, particularly among younger architects, a trend possibly influenced by the 1959 disbandment of theCongrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne.[12] Brutalism's growing influence in the nation was most prominently exemplified in reconstruction efforts ofSkopje following a destructive1963 earthquake.[13] Japanese architectKenzo Tange played a key role in pushing for Brutalism in the city, going so far as to propose a full redesign of Skopje in the style.[14][15]The architecture of the city is compiled in Kenzo Tange'sMasterplan of Skopje City 1963 with a collaboration led by the UNs teams of international architects.
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With 1950s decentralization and liberalization policies inSFR Yugoslavia, architecture became increasingly fractured along ethnic lines. Architects increasingly focused on building with reference to the architectural heritage of their individual socialist republics in the form ofcritical regionalism.[16] A notable example of this shift is theJuraj Neidhardt andDušan Grabrijan's seminal 1957 publicationArchitecture of Bosnia and the way into modernity (Croatian:Arhitektura Bosne i Put U Suvremeno) which sought to understand modernism through the lens of Bosnia's Ottoman heritage.[17][18]
Growing distinction of individual ethnic architectural identities within Yugoslavia was exacerbated with the 1972 decentralization of the formerly centralized historical preservation authority, providing individual regions further opportunity to critically analyze their own cultural narratives.[5]
Yugoslav architecture, particularly that of monuments, has attracted increased public attention in recent years.[4] In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Belgian photographerJan Kempenaers released a series of photographs documenting dilapidatedWorld War II monuments and memorials in Yugoslavia. In July 2018MoMA opened a 6 month exhibition entitled "Toward a Concrete Utopia" that provided visitors with a large collection of images, architectural models, and drawings from Yugoslav architecture from 1948 to 1980.[2] Meanwhile, American researcher and author Donald Niebyl has been working since 2016 to create an online educational resource to explore and catalog the history of Yugoslav monuments and architecture, titled "Spomenik Database".[19]
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