engleski

Ideological Parallax: The Yugoslav Pavillion at the 13th Milan Triennial Exhibition

Besides its primary role of facilitating life, architecture is always implicitly engaged in representation. Quite particular cases are pavilions designed for international exhibitions ; instead of housing actuality, they exclusively serve the representation of ideology. They are architecture without a program but with a purpose: acronyms constructed to represent the constructed reality of a certain political and social context. Through a particular case study – the Yugoslav Pavilion at the 13th Milan Triennial Exhibition from 1964, this paper seeks to reveal multiple layers inherently present in this kind of ideologically charged architecture. Yugoslavia saw the 1964 Triennial and its theme “Leisure and Free Time” as a venue to present the country’s ambiguous political identity and its specific ideology of “self-management” as an applicable model for leisure pursuits. Design of the pavilion was commissioned to Vjenceslav Richter, a prominent Zagreb modern architect with previous experience in exhibition architecture. Using one single element, a 4 by 8 centimeter wooden plank, Richter designed the pavilion structure which served as background for the application of exhibits chosen and curated in advance – photographic posters of people engaged in leisure activities within “self- managed” institutions. Both the abstract and transparent structure of the pavilion, and the use of an “objective” medium – photography, seem to have denoted only neutrality, objectivity and unmediated legibility. However, the specific overlap of the pavilion’s porous structure and the posters exhibited on it, exploded and fragmented the depictions of institutionalized leisure in almost an iconoclastic manner ; it brought forward other connotative layers of their clash. Starting from this theoretical stance, this paper explores the ramifications, motivations, and consequences of instrumentalizing a generally accepted analogy of transparent and abstract—two inherent tropes of modern architecture—as evident, objective and neutral ; it examines the capacity of architecture to represent, but also to simultaneously compromise and subvert, a nominally embraced ideology.

Modern architecture; ideology; transparency; abstraction; iconoclasm

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