City Building in Yugoslavia
Jelica Jovanovic
Vladimir Kulić
Martino Stierli2018, TOWARD A CONCRETE UTOPIA: ARCHITECTURE IN YUGOSLAVIA 1948-1980
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Abstract
In 1911, on his journey to the East, the young Le Corbusier arrived in Belgrade via the Danube. Although disappointed with the “ridiculous capital” (noting, however, the site’s “excellent [geographical] position”), the many folk artifacts at the city’s ethnographic museum fascinated him, and the young Corbusier marked Belgrade with an F for “folklore” on his travel map, as he did for many of the sites he visited in the Balkans. Fifty years later, however, the rustic capital had transformed into a Corbusian city of grand scale: New Belgrade. The project was vested with symbolic meaning: the country chose to drain a swamp along the former border between Ottoman and Habsburg empires to erect the only wholly new capital in postwar Europe. New Belgrade was but the most visible of the many manifestations of Yugoslavia’s specific form of urban development, a process that transformed the formerly rural, underdeveloped country into an urbanized and industrialized one in less than fifty years.
Key takeaways
- The year 1980 also marked the beginning of an economic and political crisis, as well as the emergence of the concept of postmodernism in Yugoslav architectural discourse, which together heralded considerable changes in architectural production going forward.
- However, if one carefully considers Yugoslav architects' production and networks of exchange between the years 1948 and 1980, a very different picture emerges.
- The Yugoslav regime had in fact broken with Stalinism in 1948, only three years after the end of World War II and the foundation of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
- Bogdan Bogdanović, who would emerge as one of the defining figures of postwar Yugoslav architecture culture, reviewed the architectural section for Politika.
- Meanwhile, Yugoslav architectural exports were by no means limited to Western Africa.
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