engleski

Socially Responsible Architecture - the Case of Interwar Zagreb

Neues Bauen was established in Croatia in late 1920’s and early 1930’s. In the Kingdom of Yugoslavia Zagreb was politically marginalized and hence not preoccupied with creating a national style. It continued to assimilate the new "trends" primarily thanks to architects educated or professionally trained abroad. The process of Neues Bauen adoption was generally performed in two stages. Initially it was accepted at the stylistic level, and then gradually as an integral spatial and building concept free of ideological implications. In Yugoslavia where 83% of the population was agrarian the working class still in the making, Neues Bauen was deprived of its social and communal functions, restricted to private residential buildings and houses, and a very few public buildings. Only a few architects had accepted it from the beginning in its totality calling for socially responsible behavior and considering the possibilities of applying the new technologies of construction, namely industrialization and prefabrication in the service of society’s spiritual and physical renewal. In 1932 and 1933 the circumstances had changed. Architects pointed to major housing and town planning problems on many different occasions - unplanned residential areas, unsanitary housing conditions, and the impossibility of implementing urban planning, blaming liberal capitalism for generating problems and indirectly suggesting the change of the social and the political system. The subject of this presentation are the major “actions" including a book “Problems of Contemporary Architecture”, boycotts of architectural exhibitions without unique ideological platform, presentation of living conditions with emphasis on the interdependence of social status and quality of housing, lectures on the problems of modern urban planning and finally professional debates. The aim is to determine the level of architect’s involvement in establishing the better working and living conditions of the masses that necessarily implied in Yugoslavia the unacceptable left political views.

Zagreb; Neues Bauen; socially responsible architecture

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