Socialism

Immediately following the Second World War, Yugoslavia’s brief association with the Eastern Bloc ushered in a short period of socialist realism. Centralization within the communist model led to the abolishment of private architectural practices and the state control of the profession. During this period, the governing Communist Party condemned modernism as “bourgeois formalism,” a move that caused friction among the nation’s pre-war modernist architectural elite.

Socialist realist architecture in Yugoslavia came to an abrupt end with Josip Broz Tito‘s 1948 split with Stalin. In the following years the nation turned increasingly to the West, returning to the modernism that had characterized pre-war Yugoslav architecture. During this era, modernist architecture came to symbolize the nation’s break from the USSR (a notion that later diminished with growing acceptability of modernism in the Eastern Bloc). The nation’s postwar return to modernism is perhaps best exemplified in Vjenceslav Richter‘s widely acclaimed 1958 Yugoslavia Pavilion at Expo 58, the open and light nature of which contrasted the much heavier architecture of the Soviet Union.

During this period, the Yugoslav break from Soviet socialist realism combined with efforts to commemorate World War II, which together led to the creation of an immense quantity of abstract sculptural war memorials, known today as spomenik.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s Brutalism began to garner a following within Yugoslavia, particularly among younger architects, a trend possibly influenced by the 1959 disbandment of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne.

With 1950s decentralization and liberalization policies in SFR Yugoslavia, architecture became increasingly fractured along ethnic lines. Architects increasingly focused on building with reference to the architectural heritage of their individual socialist republics in the form of critical regionalism.

Source: Wikipedia