CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/16/2018

MoMA's 'Toward a Concrete Utopia' revives a lost architecture

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.