Martino Stierli (chief curator, MoMA) and Vladimir Kulić (professor, Florida Atlantic University), the co-curators of this exhibition, here explore how architecture was used as a device to implement a utopian dream in the former Yugoslavia, a socialist state. They focused on the period 1948 to 1980 in particular, which was a robust construction period that sought to regenerate its devastated cities after the Second World War and to fulfil the ideals of the nation. This period brackets the unique political context of Yugoslavia: 1948 was the year when Yugoslavia began to take the third path by becoming an independent state, after being expelled from the Cominform due to the conflict between Josip Broz Tito (hereinafter Tito) and Joseph Stalin, and 1980 was the year when the long-ruling dictator Tito died. It was evident that Yugoslavia was under Tito’s dictatorship as he pursed a neutral position while evading a Cold War dichotomy, but the nation’s official policy was driven by ‘self-managed socialism’ where a group of workers stood as the decision makers. Socialism in Yugoslavia operated differently from that of the Soviet Union, and it formed its own identity when racial and cultural diversity was linked to policies of national integration. As such, the architecture of this period is entirely reflected in Yugoslavia’s radical pluralism and hybrid idealism. ‘Historically speaking, a thorough investigation of the architectural production of socialist Yugoslavia will lead to a better understanding of an important but understudied chapter of architectural history in the bifurcated world order of the Cold War’, Martino Stierli asserts. ‘From a contemporary point of view, this body of work serves as a reminder that architecture can only thrive when there is a broad societal understanding of architecture’s power to transform and elevate society and the quality of life it offers citizens.’ This remark shows the curator’s intention to perceive the precise qualities of the former Yugoslavia – which is typically portrayed as a place of destruction and massacre – with a more optimistic lens, architecture, deviating from the primary accounts in contemporary architecture narrated through an emphasis on Western Europe and America.
Installation view of Toward a Concrete Utopia, (Photo: Martin Seck)
Edvard Ravnikar, Revolution Square (today Republic Square), 1960 ‐ 1974. Ljubljana, Slovenia, (Photo: Valentin Jeck, 2016)
Modernisation, Global Networks, Everyday Life, Identities: the exhibition consists of these four sections, displaying about 400 drawings, models, photographs and film reels collected from municipal archives, personal collections, and museums.
The first section ‘Modernisation’ begins with three black-and-white films showing a military parade, cheering bystanders, and labourers. This section explores the rapid rate of urbanisation and industrialisation, technological development, and the new social infrastructure. More specifically, buildings such as the Avala TV Tower, City Stadium Poljud, Zlatibor Hotel, Gas station Petrol, S2 Office Tower are included here: this inclusion implies that not only large-scale public facilities but also private structures such as hotels and office towers were quickly erected, announcing that the building of more audacious forms became possible at that time due to the advancement of concrete architecture workmanship. An interesting notion presented here is known as the ‘social standard’. Yugoslavia provided educational, medical and cultural services at no cost to the public, but new types of architecture that would accommodate services were in need. Therefore, the state provided ample opportunity to architects to try out new architectural and typological ideas. The background to how the notion of how the ‘social standard’ first emerged lies with socialism, as a concept based on Tito’s ‘worker self-management’. Reacting against the Soviet Union’s centralised and bureaucratic government, the right to administer economic resources in Yugoslavia shifted from the state to the decentralised workers’ council. This has particular relevance as cultural autonomy and artistic freedom were regarded as the defining merits of Yugoslavia, giving greater roles to architects and urban planners in practicing self-management principles. In architecture, the ‘social standard’ was revealed as the effort to harmonise major development projects with individual spatial experiences. Services such as education, healthcare, and cultural programming were the indispensable elements in urban planning, as they were also in the Soviet blocks. These social standard buildings served important roles as a modernisation hub of traditional and rural society located on the outskirts. Thirty years have passed since the breaking up of Yugoslavia, but these buildings are still core elements in the regional infrastructure.
In the second section, ‘Global Networks’, the audience can take a closer look at the architecture that resulted from the state’s autonomous foreign policy and the leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement in the Postcolonialism era, including architectural imports and exports such as infrastructure related to Adriatic Sea tourism. With the rebuilding of the Macedonian capital Skopje – after a strong earthquake struck the city in 1963 – taking on a momentum, numerous noted international architects gathered in Yugoslavia, encouraging the blossoming of modern architecture in the context of Yugoslavia. The leader of those noted architects was the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, who won the award for his new masterplan design in the United Nations competition in 1964. It is interesting that the sketches drawn Kenzo Tange, who is related to the master plan of Skopje, can be found in this exhibition. Moreover, architects from both camps designed a number of significant urban buildings, transforming Skopje as a place for the international architecture fair at the peak of the Cold War.The third section, ‘Everyday Life’, focuses on the emergence of progressive forms in mass housing and modern design within the framework of socialist consumer culture. The housing policy of socialist Yugoslavia and the ideology of ‘self-managed socialism’ were antinational while also market-friendly, based on the belief that they were not provided by the nation itself but the obligations of society as a whole. Therefore, the apartment was officially entrusted to the Yugoslavian constitution, becoming a fundamental right granted to all citizens. At the same time, the postwar shortage of housing – due to the Second World War destruction of existing houses and the resulting burst in urbanisation – resulted in the development of prefabricated concrete construction technology and various experiments in architectural plans. Furthermore, beginning in the mid-1950s, exhibitions of typical housing that were held in cities like Ljubljana and Zagreb informed the availability and affordability of modern design to the public. In this section, the audience will find the furniture pieces designed by Niko Kralj who worked at the very first housing-furniture-design department that was founded to support industrial design in Yugoslavia, along with the Rex folding chairs that can be easily seen in Europe.
The last section ‘Identities’ addresses the monuments that were built to commemorate the victims of the Second World War. These monuments were intended as structures that celebrated the party’s struggle against fascism, and they played a crucial role in building an impression of the most important, common history of Yugoslavia. In this regard, these monuments hold very specific and important social functions, in addition to existing as sculptures that extend into architecture. The displayed projects include the Monument to the Uprising of the People and Banija, Monument to the Fighters, The Monument to the Liberation Struggle, the Monument to the Ilinden Uprising, and the Monument to the Battle of the Sutjeska. The exhibition ends by capturing and conveying the essence of the Yugoslavian imagination.
Installation view of Toward a Concrete Utopia, (Photo: Martin Seck)
When MoMA announced this exhibition, a few local media outlets expressed concern about the proposed agenda of addressing hundreds of monuments – which were built to commemorate the victims of fascism and the participants of the Second World War – spread throughout all corners of the former Yugoslavia. These monuments are known as Spomenik to the public, and they stimulate curiosity due to their extraterrestrial appearance in terms of their morphology. This impression may cause people to overlook the complex contexts and meanings embedded in these monuments. The curators were aware of such difficulties, so they only selected a number of monuments rather than gathering up as many geometric or abstract shapes as possible, in order to minimise the potential of ludicrous distribution.
This exhibition can be considered successful if it was committed to 1) creating a new channel for Yugoslavian architecture that has not been fully studied in the field of world architectural history and to 2) exposing independent or affirmative achievements hidden behind its tragic demise. Since the last chapter of the Yugoslavia history is recorded by the suffering of its brutal ethnic massacre, this exhibition was arranged to attend to certain subjects rather than in chronological order, digressing from the model of the rise and fall.
In this context, there are several devices that make such objectives more effective in the exhibition hall, and here Valentin Jeck’s photographs are particularly significant. Along with the existing photographs, drawings, sketches, models, and films, MoMA was in need of new sources that would reveal the objectives behind this exhibition in order to introduce the concrete utopia of Yugoslavia. So MoMA asked the Swiss photographer Valentin Jeck to take new photos of the remaining buildings from a professional standpoint. Granted full freedom of expression, Valentin Jeck visited the former Yugoslavian countries including Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, and the Kosovo territories seven times in two years and took photographs. These images are testaments not only to the remaining buildings but also to the reconstructions or ruins of war-damaged buildings. These photos seem eloquent as, paradoxically, their low saturation and dull atmosphere, present an illusion of the former Yugoslavia as a place without sunlight. Valentin Jeck chose the grey skies of winter rather than the blue skies of summer. His photos are dedicated to capturing the concrete materiality and morphological audacity of these structures, providing the overall tone of the exhibition hall.
Another thing to notice is the colour of the wall painted in each section. They are intended to highlight the models – which are in monotone, similar to the tonality of Valentin Jeck’s photos – that have been newly introduced in this exhibition hall. Within the grey, beige, or neutral toned exhibits, bright colours like yellow, pink and red, serve to divide the sections and guide the audience throughout the exhibition. The ‘Everyday Life’ section employs these bright-toned walls to the greatest effect. Visitors are overwhelmed by the concrete buildings – which are intense and beautiful, but also sturdy and cynical – taking up more than two-thirds of the exhibition space, and as such we are unable to imagine ordinary life beyond such extraordinary visions. However, once we arrive at the third section ‘Everyday Life’, where colourful chairs, televisions, radios, telephones, and posters are displayed in the middle of the space surrounded by the yellow painted wall, they can envisage a more optimistic view of the everyday life in Yugoslavia. At the same time, it is no coincidence that the visitors are brought face to face with the K67 Kiosk, which they encounter just before entering the third section. Launched in 1967 by Saša Mächtig, K67 was a bright red coloured modular system kiosk. It was a type of street furniture that had various functions, including ski-lift booths, street food shops, or shoe shops.
In this way, the ambitious and challenging architecture of Yugoslavia – varying from the Monument to the Battle of the Sutjeska to popular objects – is separate from its political failures and tragic end. Even though the political experiments conducted in Yugoslavia eventually failed, the architecture presented in this exhibition serves as the evidence of its overall ambitions and achievements, showing the potential of social-change-driven architecture which is still valid today. This exhibition will be somewhat disappointing if one expects to see an in-depth exploration of the history of urbanism and architecture in Yugoslavia, such as how traditional elements of the former Yugoslavia enriched the contemporary architecture or what does its vernacular architecture signify. Yet, along with MoMA’s 2015 exhibition, ‘Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955 – 1980’, this exhibition has confirmed the potential of large-scale art museums targeting international audiences, illuminating a part of the contemporary architecture that has not been exposed and presenting a fascinating journey for its visitors.
Miodrag Živković, Monument to the Battle of the Sutjeska, 1965 ‐ 1971, Tjentište, Bosnia and Herzegovina, (Photo: Valentin Jeck, 2016)
Uglješa Bogunović, Slobodan Janjić, and Milan Krstić, Avala TV Tower, 1960 ‐ 1965 (destroyed in 1999 and rebuilt in 2010), Mount Avala, near Belgrade, Serbia, (Photo: Valentin Jeck, 2016)
Milan Mihelič, S2 Office Tower, 1972 ‐ 1978, Ljubljana, Slovenia, (Photo: Valentin Jeck, 2016)
Installation view of Toward a Concrete Utopia, (Photo: Martin Seck)
Installation view of Toward a Concrete Utopia, (Photo: Martin Seck)
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