engleski

Modernity in Architecture, Urban Planing and Interior Decoration After the Second World War

Everyday life’s modernity is mirrored not only in the availability of contemporary industrial products or the impact of these products on the possibility of more efficient pastime and its harmonisation with assembly line rhythms, but also in the fact that it takes place in the city – the only location that can technologically and organisationally cater to the general desire not only to live a modern life, but to be modern as well. Living a modern life meant living in an apartment with modern infrastructure in a newly built neighbourhood with carefully planned community and sporting facilities and accessible public transportation, with a sufficient amount of green areas and a promise of building public services (schools, kindergartens, healthcare facilities) which would, often more in theory than in practice, facilitate everyday duties. The necessity of post-war renovation and accelerated residential and industrial construction ensured architects and urban designers a special, almost demiurgic role in the process of socialist modernisation. Action strategies, which reflect the zeitgeist and convey the idea of progress, as well as new views expected from all the stakeholders in this architectural, urban and design process in the post-war period were profoundly set by the means of planned economy and scholarly principles, mainly taken over from the Soviet practice. However, the period of domination of ideology and aesthetics of social realism was relatively brief, thus leaving its most powerful imprints just as in art in a sort of semi-theoretical or semi-critical discourse instead of tangible realisations. This discourse was at the same time offered as a repository of instructions for a “correct” new approach to the issues of socialist architecture and urban planning, as well as their corrective method. The process of modernisation, in the sense of adopting a modern way of considering, deploying and structuring public space, hence began sometime around 1950 in the form of discussions about the “human character of socialist culture” and attempts at recapitulating positive heirlooms of national and international creativity and defining new working methods. These new working methods were supposed to strike a balance between form, function and construction, and prevent the domination of any of the aforementioned elements so as to avoid Soviet-type formalism and monumentality. Given the high level of destruction of the built environment, the renovation process, i.e. architectural and urban modernisation focused on designing new city centres and neighbourhoods, residential, healthcare and sporting facilities, daycares, theatres, cinemas and other completely new building types, such as culture houses and parks, amateur clubs and kolkhozes. In the wake of the general discussion about a new and authentic socialist culture with a “human face, ” which ensued after the demission of socialist realism, post-war architecture at first tried to define its identity, equally denying both the functional access of Western European modernism and the Soviet model’s eclecticism. However, these tendencies were relatively short-lived and already in the early 1950s the functionalist notion of city was accepted as the most suitable template for socialist urbanisation. Working methods, related to the new technological processes, mainly to the assembly line principle and vision of architecture as a housing machine, were utilised to create new (parts of) cities, whose narrative bypasses the idea of a separated historical centre and instead tries to create preconditions for citizens’ identification with a newly built neighbourhood. The expected modernity of new urban unities relied on the heroic optimism of restoration and a “faith in a perfect world, in the quest for truth and purity, belief in a linear process, science, ratio and technocratic solutions” (David Parker, Paul Long). Following up on the experiences of interwar functionalism, such post-war architectural practice was international ; it rejected any kind of connection with the national, which is equally evident from new regulatory plans and a series of individual projects and realisations channelling Le Corbusier’s notion of architecture and urban design, which represented the mainstay of modernism in domestic building practice in the early 1950s. Functionalist orthodoxy was somewhat mollified by emotional factors, but the development of many of our cities depended not only on the chosen poetics, but also on political decisions, like, for example, in the case of the symbolic cornerstone being laid on the sandy soil of Novi Beograd, which was to become the first monument of the socialist era. In other words, the previously mentioned “demiurgic” role, bestowed on architects and urban designers by the socialist society, implied not only the mandate of methodological and technological progress, but also a symbolic representation of political order. The configuration of urban environment was, therefore, a result of both ideological and building effort, defined by in the socialist, as well as in other post-war societies expressive capabilities of architecture, application of new technological solutions, and a series of political, economic and social circumstances and controversies. The amount and fierceness of these controversies does not surprise us, given the fact that in the ‘50s and ‘60s accelerated urbanisation was perceived as “one of the most blatant aspects of revolutionary changes in the socio-economic structure, ” according to Milan Prelog. Like new urban design, new architecture was wrapped in the aura of “new humanism, ” resulting from the belief that the quality of life in the socialist society, which offers a new, different and more equitable image of the world, exceeds capitalist countries’ achievements. The issue of creating architecture whose functionality and design would bear the mark of socialism, according to the idea that the socialist system, just like all previous systems, should create its own authentic architecture, remained without a tangible result. Differences between social organisation models are hard to transpose into an architectural, design or urban glossary. Therefore, a desire to create a new type of architecture or, "monumental architecture deriving from the power of working masses" (Žarko Domljan), will mainly stay within the fixed parameters of rational, modernist functionalism and the post-war version of international style. Unlike the previous decade, which focused on resolving numerous problems imposed by the process of intense migration from rural areas into new urban and industrial areas, the ‘60s were a time when many European environments tended to explore new urban visions, great changing structures and "plugged-in" cities, which eventually became the icons of visionary architecture. A specific combination of pop-culture, art and situational ideas soon crossed the boundaries of the usual urban design glossary, winning the sympathies of the public around the world with unconventional ideas and an aesthetics that often provoked numerous discussions. A new concept of urban megastructure a spatial-structural framework with a series of changing modules for living and work developed in this period and anticipated many of the characteristics of contemporary cities. The paradigm of such visionary modern architecture, often encountered in our national architects’ practice, is represented by the idea of load-bearing construction that can be expanded, stretched and constantly enriched with new, flexible, modular units and new contents. This structural framework can house all urban functions (Vjenceslav Richter’s "synth-urbanism"), and its endless expansion was also supposed to be enabled by using smaller, prefabricated construction units (rooms, apartments, houses, even smaller mixed-purpose buildings) that should be plugged in or suspended from the existing construction, which is the only (and long-lasting) constant of such megastructure (Radovan Delalle). The prospects of utopian architecture in this period were frequently based on new technologies, especially those resulting from research made in the military or “space” industry, such as new types of suspended constructions or spatial grid structures, as well as different systems of spatial organisation focused on “restraining” the uncontrolled growth of urban centres (Andrija Mutnjaković). Continuous cities, spatial cities, plugged-in cities, new life forms those were the titles of these imaginative utopian architectural discourses, mainly considered in the context of visual arts and design.

architecture, urbanism, residential architecture, socialism, modernity, industrial architecture, new urban and architectural visions

Priložen je opsežniji sažetak na engleskom jeziku. Isti tekst objavljen je u hrvatskom izdanju knjige "Socijalizam i modernost. Umjetnost, kultura, politika 1950.-1974." ; ISBN: 978-953-7615-37-6.