![]() ![]() ![]() Image courtesy of Ivan VitiĆ Archive, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts Perspective drawing of an apartment building on Laginjina Street, Zagreb. But this architecture speaks not only of the failures of the past – it also throws the failures of the present into stark relief, not least the miserable architectural culture of the United States and the utter inadequacy of housing in neoliberal economies. The most active response they could elicit on these terms would be an impulse to preserve them from the neglect of successor regimes. ![]() These buildings are, from this perspective, now museum pieces, to be wondered at in their otherness. This belated recognition of what is, as the show makes clear, a significant body of Modernist architecture, could perhaps be attributed to the relatively safe distance we have attained from the failed Yugoslavian state, which collapsed into vicious ethnic conflicts in the early 1990s. And yet, here in MoMA’s architecture department, are the relics of Yugoslavia’s concrete utopia, as the title of the exhibition puts it: monuments to anti-fascist partisans, vast social housing projects and community centres designed to produce the agents of a self-managing socialism – all just two blocks south of Trump Tower. That an unabashed homage to the architecture of a socialist state should, in appearing mere steps away from Fifth Avenue, still feel surprising or incongruous in the 21st century, is testament to the legacy of the Cold War and the ideological antagonisms that continue to shape our world. Author: Valentin Jeck for Museum of Modern Art in New York, 2016.MoMA’s powerful exhibition on Yugoslavia’s architecture is testament to the successful heterogeneity of a failed socialist state Photo: Edvard Ravnikar, Republic Square (former Revolution Square). Please visit the following links for more information on the exhibition and the exhibition catalogue. The exhibition will remain open until 13 January 2019. Tamara Bjazić Klarin, PhD, and Sanja Horvatinčić, PhD, from the Institute of Art History in Zagreb, contributed as members of the Exhibition Advisory Board and authors of two chapters in the exhibition catalog. The exhibition has been organized by curators Martino Stierli, Vladimir Kulić, and Anna Kats. The exhibition includes more than 400 drawings, models, photographs, and film reels from an array of municipal archives, family-held collections, and museums across the region. ![]() Toward a Concrete Utopia explores themes of large-scale urbanization, technology in everyday life, consumerism, monuments and memorialization, and the global reach of Yugoslav architecture. The architecture that emerged-from International Style skyscrapers to Brutalist “social condensers”-is a manifestation of the radical diversity, hybridity, and idealism that characterized the Yugoslav state itself. “Situated between the capitalist West and the socialist East, Yugoslavia’s architects responded to contradictory demands and influences, developing a postwar architecture both in line with and distinct from the design approaches seen elsewhere in Europe and beyond. The exhibition "Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980" is opening on 10 July 2018 in Museum of Modern Art in New York ( MoMA). ![]()
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