MODERNISM IN-BETWEEN: The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia
Text: Maroje Mrduljaš, Vladimir Kulić
Photography: Wolfgang Thaler
publihsher: jovis, Berlin
Hardcover
21 x 25 cm
272 pages, ca. 304 color images. englisch
ISBN 978-3-86859-147-7
2012
design: metaphor
Socialist Yugoslavia was a country suspended between civilizations, political systems, and Cold War blocs. It produced a remarkable body of modern architecture, which similarly defies easy classification. This book explores the historical “in-betweenness” of Yugoslav modernism and the various strategies architects used to mediate their own position between the different—sometimes directly opposed—concepts of life, culture, practice, and time. The best among them created uniquely syncretic spaces and buildings that blurred the lines between the established categories of modernism. Wolfgang Thaler’s photos capture the richness and complexity of these projects, resilient in face of their often melancholy state today.
Yugoslavia is certainly the most miraculous of the “defunct countries” of the recent past. The texts and images in this book can conjure the power of the vision of a modern culture that was not monolithic, but open, generous, challenging, and inspiring; it had all the qualities that provincialism lacks, rejects, and wants to erase.
Ákos Moravánszky, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
Lucid and compelling, written in a uent style, this meticulously researched book, with its full array of beautiful photographs, is a landmark study of a place and time that produced stirring and original architecture. What one sees in these pages is revelatory, a still mostly unknown building scene of striking power and freshness.
Christopher Long, University of Texas at Austin
