11/30/2023 0 Comments Concrete utopia script readingHistoric ties between the two states, spearheaded by MoMA’s own travelling exhibitions during the postwar years, reveal the relative ideological palatability of Yugoslavia at the time. These international links are emphasised in the catalogue essay by Martino Stierli, for whom this is the first exhibition as chief curator of architecture and design at the museum. Le Corbusier’s studio was a particularly fecund source of ideas, hosting numerous Yugoslavian students during the postwar period. To the Yugoslavians, this break instigated a rejection of the Neoclassical architecture of Socialist Realism in favour of the legacy of the region’s interwar designers, as well as a keen attentiveness to developments in the West. To the United States, this made the state an attractive bridgehead on the USSR’s periphery, and so it became the recipient of much economic and military aid, and also of cultural diplomacy. It severed ties with the Soviet Union in 1948, thenceforth following its own path under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito. The canonisation of these buildings is doubly belated given that Yugoslavia was never really on the other team. And yet, while it would be absurd in some respects to place this exhibition in the same category as a 2019 Brutalism calendar, it cannot be seen removed from the same situation, which has produced reactions in registers political and aesthetic, high and low. (One notable exception is MoMA’s 2007 show, Lost Vanguard: Soviet Architecture, 1922-32.) Instagram accounts and coffee-table books devoted to ‘cosmic communist constructions’ continue to proliferate, with Yugoslavian war memorials a fixture of these formats. It is in this context that the rediscovery of socialist architectures has become so relentless over the last decade as to be almost tiresome, at least in its more superficial forms. 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. MoMA’s powerful exhibition on Yugoslavia’s architecture is testament to the successful heterogeneity of a failed socialist state
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