engleski

Stjepan Planić - from Interwar Activist to Post-War Personae non Gratae

Stjepan Planić (1900 – 1980) is considered as one of the leading figures in Croatian modern architecture not only due to his exceptionally large oeuvre but also owning to his role in introducing socially sensitive and responsible architecture. In 1931, Planić was introduced to the Udruženje umjetnika Zemlja (Association of Artists Zemlja) that explored current social issues in order to bring art closer to the everyday life and the lower social class. All architects who joined the Association – Stjepan Planić, Lavoslav Horvat, Mladen Kauzlarić, and Drago Galić – studied under Drago Ibler, Zemlja’s co-founder and president. Unlike his colleagues whose activities were limited to participating at the Association’s exhibitions, Planić was also fully dedicated to the public engagement, the promotion of the Neues Bauen and bringing up current social issues. In the manner of defying the totalitarian regime that banned the Communist Party, Planić had the courage to deliver lectures and publish several critical articles in the leftist journals Literatura and Književnik, in which he expressed radical political ideas. The pinnacle of Planić’s engagement were thematic documentary units Selo (Countryside) and Selo i grad – stanovanje na selu i gradu (Countryside and City – Housing in the Countryside and the City) presented at the Exhibition of the Zemlja Association in the mid-1930s. In the post-WWII Socialist Yugoslavia, when all architects previously involved with Zemlja benefited from their membership in the Association (Galić, Horvat, and Kauzlarić become fellows of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts, while Ibler was in charge of the only state Master Workshop for architecture), Planić was punished for his involvement in refitting of the Croatian Artists’ Hall for Zagreb’s Mosque at the time of the Independent State of Croatia. Therefore, both his inter public engagement with explicit leftist political connotations and his contribution to the postwar renovation of the country were ignored, and so far neither separately analyzed nor the fully grasped. While Planić’s interwar buildings were included in overview of the interwar Croatian architecture as early as 1950, none of his numerous postwar buildings had been presented in professional journals. The rehabilitation of Planić as a person and an architect in the mid-1960s was the merit of the art historian Radovan Ivančević. In 1968 Planić was granted with the Republic Award and Society of Croatian Architects’ Award for life achievement. What followed were the 1971 critical retrospective exhibition of Association of Artist Zemlja by Željka Čorak, the big retrospective exhibition of Planić’s work by Darja Radović Mahečić and Ivana Haničar Buljan held in 2003, and the reprint of the landmark interwar architectural book Problemi savremene arhitekture (Problems of Contemporary Architecture) in 1996. The book was edited by Planić and originally published in 1932. Based on the above-mentioned facts, the paper will provide an extensive insight into Stjepan Planić’s interwar activities related to social and professional issues at the time. It will also show the extent to which politics can affect not only an individual’s professional work, but also his or her social perception and evaluation. Interestingly, apart from being ignored as an author over a number of years, Planić’s involvement in Association of Artist Zemlja – despite being a well-known fact of 20th century Croatian architecture – has never been separately elaborated nor adequately evaluated.

Stjepan Planić; activism; modern architecture; Croatia

nije evidentirano