Unfinished Modernisations is a collaborative, long-term research platform on architecture and urban planning. "Winner of the Croatian Architects' Association's 2012 Neven Šegvić Award in the category of architectural publication, criticism, and theory. Wolfgang Thaler photographs document these and many other stand-out achievements. Also discussed is the work of Yugoslavia’s leading architects, who transformed their in-betweenness into a new quality: Edvard Ravnikar’s seamless blending of such varied influences as Jože Plečnik, Le Corbusier, and Otto Wagner Bogdan Bogdanović’s war memorials, which filtered deep-seated cultural archetypes through the lens of Surrealism Juraj Neidhardt’s efforts at forging a modern identity for Bosnia based on the vernacular Ottoman heritage and Vjenceslav Richter’s neo-avant-garde experiments, which provided some of the most convincing representations of Yugoslav socialism. Surveyed here is a wide range of topics: from city building and state representation, to the typologies of everyday life. This book explores the historical “in-betweenness” of Yugoslav modernism and the strategies architects used to mediate different-sometimes directly opposed-concepts of culture and architecture. As a result, it produced a diverse body of architecture that defies easy classification and blurs the lines between the established categories of modernism. Socialist Yugoslavia was a country suspended between traditional cultures, competing concepts of modernization, and rivaling Cold War blocs. A tour de force display of more than four hundred photographs, architectural models, maps, graphs, videos, and installations, “Toward a Concrete Utopia” dazzles its viewers with seductive narratives of anti-fascism embodied in hybrid buildings that amalgamate influences of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires as well as various Western modernisms in the service of Yugoslavia’s socialist revolution. Co-curated by Martino Stierli and Vladimir Kulić, “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980” argues that social programs, collectivism, internationalism, and the freedom to experiment shaped the development of architecture in Yugoslavia, and that its distinctive socialist modernism was founded on the project of building a more just and diverse society. “And it’s not that there are no individuals who are nationalists, or racists,” she wrote, “but that the taking of a state position against nationalism, against racism is what makes it possible for a society like this to function.” The extraordinarily rigorous and thought-provoking exhibition of Yugoslav architecture, on view at New York’s Museum of Modern Art through January 13, similarly positions socialism as the political foundation for a multinational and anti-nationalist society. In 1976, black feminist poet and theorist Audre Lorde published “Notes from a Trip to Russia,” in which she marveled at the apparent harmony among diverse ethnicities in the Soviet Union.
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