Prethodno priopćenje
https://doi.org/10.5673/sip.52.1.3
The Resistance of Architecture to Political Regime(s): the Case of Novi Zagreb
Dubravka Vranić
; FORMA studio, d.o.o., Zagreb, Hrvatska
Sažetak
This paper draws upon the case study of Novi Zagreb to examine the extent
to which architecture can resist political authority. Although the circumstances
of its conception are still obscure, I argue that it came into existence as an outcome
of the resistance of architecture to political forces. In contrast to the existing studies
claiming that the first urban complexes of the Naval Institute and Zagreb Fair, were
built on the south side of the river Sava without the intention to build the housing,
my hypothesis is that their construction was part of the project to build a modernist
city from the very beginning, long before the first Plan for South Zagreb in 1962. The
archival research and in-depth interviews show that the majority of strategic decisions
about the infrastructural projects, which enabled the construction of the modernist
city a decade later, were made in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. At the same time,
in the late 1940s, Croatian architects, by resisting the imposition of Social Realist aesthetic
doctrines, defined the modernist paradigm of the “functional city” as a model
for the construction of the new socialist reality. After the political control over the arts
diminished in the early 1950s, the local authorities immediately applied the idea of
a modernist city through thoughtful infrastructure planning. Thus, the actions of the
architects resisting the political pressures of the state may be considered to be architecture’s
capacity to develop autonomously, when restricted by authoritarian powers,
which, in the case of Novi Zagreb, led to the creation of an alternative city offering
excellent living conditions today.
Ključne riječi
Novi Zagreb; modernist city; functional city; architectural autonomy; resistance of architecture
Hrčak ID:
117063
URI
Datum izdavanja:
6.3.2014.
Posjeta: 3.670 *