BRAVE NEW FORMS
The architecture megashow at MoMA
Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 highlights the era when the nation became politically and economically fortified after the second world war. It’s eye-opening for a number of reasons. First, it puts Yugoslavia on the map as a nation with an extraordinary legacy of modern architecture. The buildings documented here are stunning, and most likely unfamiliar to those who haven’t traveled through the country or studied the subject. The installation, featuring drawings, photographs (many commissioned for the exhibit by Valentin Jeck), video, and furniture, provides a rich context for the design.
Second, the show makes a strong case for concrete over steel and glass, the preferred materials of high modernism. Valentin’s photographs have a graininess and grandeur that capture surfaces of aging concrete magnificently. One sees in these avant-garde concrete structures the innate plasticity of the material, the drama of sculptural forms, and the inventiveness of the architects. One sees traces of, and perhaps homage to, Le Corbusier, Lou Kahn and Paul Rudolph. And one sees a unique modern language emerge, one unconstrained by orthogonal geometries and open to emotional expression. Some of the buildings, through pragmatic in programing, have the feeling of science fiction.
Finally, and most deeply, the show reminds one of what architecture, at its most elemental, can mean and do. Similar to South American architects today, the Yugoslavian architects featured here were operating at a nexus of shifting political and cultural identity, making forms charged with meanings that were in every case more than formal. The resulting buildings are hopeful, forward-looking, violent and otherworldly. At a time when so much of contemporary American architecture is cynically corporate, intended primarily to improve the value of a property, these buildings – that climb, spin, splinter and rage – elevate physical experience, and give testimony to history and place.
Photograph by Valentin Jeck. Marko Mušič, Memorial and Cultural Center and Town Hall, Montenegro, 1969-75.