![]() ![]() Jeck has produced more than three dozen other photographs for the show and its catalog some have an impressive gravity, such as his stately views of the Pristina library and the sparely elegant White Mosque in Visoko, Bosnia. They were shot at night by the artist Valentin Jeck, with dramatic lighting accentuating the building’s stained surface and yellowed glass. The exhibition presents this Skopje building not only with archival plans and drawings, but also with a contemporary model and two large, newly commissioned photographs. The National and University Library of Kosovo, built in Pristina by Andrija Mutnjakovic and still in use, is a mad agglutination of concrete cubes topped by 99 hemispherical domes, inspired by Islamic architecture as much as by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic experiments. The country’s balancing act between East and West, between freedom and authoritarianism, played out in architecture of daring individuality, even as it embodied collective ambitions that Yugoslavs called “the social standard.” In Revolution Square in Ljubljana (today renamed Republic Square), the Slovenian architect Edvard Ravnikar built a pair of audacious office towers whose concrete expanses recall Le Corbusier and Breuer, but whose decorative, oversized rivets hark back to Viennese predecessors. ![]() “Toward a Concrete Utopia” starts there: We see three briskly edited films celebrating the erection of New Belgrade, a Brasília-style extension of Yugoslavia’s federal capital with large-scale Brutalist projects like the Genex Tower, a pair of concrete high-rises linked by a sky bridge with a revolving restaurant. Later, Yugoslavia took the lead in the Nonaligned Movement, whose first summit meeting was held in Belgrade in 1961. In 1948, Josip Broz Tito broke with the Soviet leadership and steered Yugoslavia to a unique hybrid status that rejected both Stalinism and liberal democracy. But here’s the critical point: It was not behind the Iron Curtain. Yugoslavia was forged from the rubble of World War I and became a one-party Socialist state after World War II. ![]() ![]() “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980,” an outstanding new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, brings us back to this vanished Socialist state, whose postwar architecture had all the ambition and invention found in the United States, Brazil, Japan and other centers of building at the time. So here’s a quick refresher: Slovenia is the birthplace of the hipster philosopher Slavoj Zizek and the American first lady Croatia, a World Cup finalist with distinctive checkerboard jerseys, pulls holidaymakers to the Adriatic coast European yachts are sailing further south, to little Montenegro, which just had a moment in the news Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, is on a museum upswing Sarajevo, at the heart of Bosnia, is a hub of cafe culture Macedonia has finally settled its naming dispute and is knocking on the door of the European Union and Kosovo is the ancestral home of Europe’s biggest pop star of the moment, Dua Lipa.īefore 1991, when old enmities savagely resurfaced, these seven countries were part of a single federal republic - Yugoslavia - with ethnicities, religions and language groups under a single overarching roof. Some of us still get a little hazy about the seven nations in the lower right corner of Europe, east of Italy and north of Greece. ![]()
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