BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 9.5 x 12 in. / 200 pgs / 235 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/26/2018 Active
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2018 p. 52
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781633450516TRADE List Price: $65.00 CDN $87.00
AVAILABILITY In stock
TERRITORY NA ONLY
EXHIBITION SCHEDULE
New York The Museum of Modern Art, 07/15/18–01/13/19
"Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980, an outstanding new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, brings us back to [the] 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. From Ljubljana in the northwest to Skopje in the south, Yugoslavia’s cities served as public expressions of political reinvention, while huge, abstract anti-Fascist monuments, markers of national unity but also artistic independence, dotted the countryside. This nimble, continuously surprising show is exactly how MoMA should be thinking as it prepares to occupy its expanded home — looking beyond its traditional geographic infatuations, diving into fields too little researched and putting its standard narrative of 20th-century art and design under constructive pressure." —Jason Farago, The New York Times
Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980
Edited with text by Martino Stierli, Vladimir Kulic. Text by Tamara Bjazic Klarin, Vladimir Deskov, Andrew Herscher, Sanja Horvatincic, Theodossis Issaias, Ana Ivanovska Deskova, Jovan Ivanovski, Jelica Jovanovic, Anna Kats, Juliet Kinchin, Martina Malesic, Maroje Mrduljas, Arber Sadiki, Luka Skansi, Lukasz Stanek, Matthew Worsnick, Mejrema Zatric. Photographic portfolio by Valentin Jeck.
In Yugoslavia’s “Third Way” architecture, Brutalism meets the fantastical
Squeezed between the two rival Cold War blocs, Yugoslav architecture consistently adhered to a modernist trajectory. As a founding nation of the Non-Aligned Movement, Yugoslavia became a major exporter of modernist architecture to Africa and the Middle East in a postcolonial world. By merging a variety of local traditions and contemporary international influences in the context of a unique Yugoslav brand of socialism, often described as the “Third Way,” local architects produced a veritable “parallel universe” of modern architecture during the 45 years of the country’s existence. This remarkable body of work has sparked recurrent international interest, yet a rigorous interpretative study never materialized in the United States until now.
Published in conjunction with a major exhibition on the architectural production of Yugoslavia between 1948 and 1980, this is the first publication to showcase an understudied but important body of modernist architecture. Featuring new scholarship and previously unpublished archival materials, this richly illustrated publication sheds light on key ideological concepts of Yugoslav architecture, urbanism and society by delving into the exceptional projects and key figures of the era, among them Bogdan Bogdanovic, Zoran Bojovic, Drago Galic, Janko Konstantinov, Georgi Konstantinovski, Niko Kralj, Boris Magaš, Juraj Neidhardt, Jože Plecnik, Svetlana Kana Radevic, Edvard Ravnikar, Vjenceslav Richter, Milica Šteric, Ivan Štraus and Zlatko Ugljen.
Monument to the Battle of the Sutjeska, Tjentiste, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1965-71, by architect Dorde Zlokovic and sculptor Miodrag Zivkovic is reproduced from 'Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Metropolis
Theodossis Issaias
Documents how buildings and the architects behind them contribute to the modernization and social cohering of a historically multiethnic region.
The Architects Newspaper
Highlighting a significant yet thus-far understudied body of modernist architecture, whose forward-thinking contributions still resonate today.
Architectural Record
Josephine Minutillo
Abundance of beautifully hung and arranged drawings, photographs, and models of striking, and in some cases downright bizarre, buildings and monuments.
Designboom
Sofia Lekka Angelopoulou
Highlights architecture’s role in creating a common history and collective identity of a socialist state.
Hypebeast
Joanna Fu
These otherwordly constructions were instrumental in shaping Yugoslavia's national identity.
New Yorker
Justin McGuirk
Above all, the exhibition reminds us that design can be a tool of social progress.
The New Yorker
Justin McGuirk
The great achievement of Yugoslavia was in being able to keep collectivism and individualism in some kind of balance.
Blouin Art Info
A manifestation of radical diversity, hybridity, and idealism that characterized the Yugoslav state iself.
Wall Street Journal
Julie V. Iovine
Astonishing structures surge with unchecked emotions of agony, sacrifice, loss and rememberance.
Art Newspaper
From housing blocks to a rural mosque, ponder marker of unity and individualism from a now-vanished postwar building culture.
Hyperallergic
Roko Rumora
This exceptionally designed show succeeds in distilling the architectural legacy of a country best known, in and outside of it, for falling apart.
PIN-UP
Yugoslavia’s unique position anticipated the current age of globalism, and studying its architecture will tell us more about postwar modernity than the tired old histories do.
New York Times
Jason Farago
Tells one of the most underappreciated stories of postwar architecture: the rise of avant-garde government buildings, pie-in-the-sky apartment blocks, mod beachfront resorts and even whole new cities in the southeast corner of Europe.
Artforum
What struck me most about this long-overdue examination was that, despite economic limitations and the dominance of Communist Bloc aesthetics, extraordinary creativity and diversity persisted-attributes that feel in conspicuously short supply even within today's increasingly privatized milieu.
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Featured image, a 2016 photograph of the interior of Zlatko Uglen’s Serefudin White Mosque in Visoko, Bosnia and Herzegovina, built 1969–1979, is reproduced from Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980, published to accompany the show currently on view at MoMA. Perhaps one of the most reviewed shows in the city this year, Toward a Concrete Utopia is “simultaneously improbable and significant,” Natasha Seaman writes Hyperallergic this week. “The show argues for its importance to both the erstwhile country and 20th-century architectural history. As such, it is an opportunity for revelations as much as nostalgia about the country that was and the concrete buildings that remain, like the bleached bones of dinosaurs.” continue to blog
Since the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, many of its most ambitious architectural projects have fallen into disrepair. "The commons—from urban public spaces to the various civic, educational, and cultural facilities—have been subject to shady privatization schemes, reduced to mere real estate," Martino Stierli and Vladimir Kulic write in MoMA's wonderful Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980. "Many of the monuments commemorating the victims of fascism and the antifascist struggle of World War II have been vandalized or completely destroyed, now discredited as 'Communist.' Though the vast majority of buildings and structures continue to be used and inhabited, they—as with postwar and brutalist architecture in other parts of the world—have suffered from neglect due to a general lack of appreciation of the architectural propositions and concerns of that period." Pictured here is a monument to the Ilinden Uprising, Krusevo, Macedonia, 1970-73, by Iskra and Jordan Grabul. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.5 x 12 in. / 200 pgs / 235 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $65.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $87 ISBN: 9781633450516 PUBLISHER: The Museum of Modern Art, New York AVAILABLE: 6/26/2018 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Edited with text by Martino Stierli, Vladimir Kulic. Text by Tamara Bjazic Klarin, Vladimir Deskov, Andrew Herscher, Sanja Horvatincic, Theodossis Issaias, Ana Ivanovska Deskova, Jovan Ivanovski, Jelica Jovanovic, Anna Kats, Juliet Kinchin, Martina Malesic, Maroje Mrduljas, Arber Sadiki, Luka Skansi, Lukasz Stanek, Matthew Worsnick, Mejrema Zatric. Photographic portfolio by Valentin Jeck.
In Yugoslavia’s “Third Way” architecture, Brutalism meets the fantastical
Squeezed between the two rival Cold War blocs, Yugoslav architecture consistently adhered to a modernist trajectory. As a founding nation of the Non-Aligned Movement, Yugoslavia became a major exporter of modernist architecture to Africa and the Middle East in a postcolonial world. By merging a variety of local traditions and contemporary international influences in the context of a unique Yugoslav brand of socialism, often described as the “Third Way,” local architects produced a veritable “parallel universe” of modern architecture during the 45 years of the country’s existence. This remarkable body of work has sparked recurrent international interest, yet a rigorous interpretative study never materialized in the United States until now.
Published in conjunction with a major exhibition on the architectural production of Yugoslavia between 1948 and 1980, this is the first publication to showcase an understudied but important body of modernist architecture. Featuring new scholarship and previously unpublished archival materials, this richly illustrated publication sheds light on key ideological concepts of Yugoslav architecture, urbanism and society by delving into the exceptional projects and key figures of the era, among them Bogdan Bogdanovic, Zoran Bojovic, Drago Galic, Janko Konstantinov, Georgi Konstantinovski, Niko Kralj, Boris Magaš, Juraj Neidhardt, Jože Plecnik, Svetlana Kana Radevic, Edvard Ravnikar, Vjenceslav Richter, Milica Šteric, Ivan Štraus and Zlatko Ugljen.
