#Concrete utopia script reading full#
#Concrete utopia script reading series#

What emerged was a political entity that was neither totalitarian communism nor a capitalist democracy but something in the middle-one might call it market socialism. Established after the Second World War, the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia may have begun life as a Communist state in the Soviet mold, but, in 1948, Tito broke with Stalin and began to reshape the country along less statist lines. Yugoslavia was defined by its in-betweenness. In the case of Yugoslavia, there is just as much cause to interrogate our newfound interest, because the architecture expressed one of the great political experiments of the modern era. If Brutalism is loved once more today for its heft and material honesty, it is also so closely associated with social democracy that to be nostalgic for one is to be nostalgic for the other. (Never mind that we are in southern Europe here, lapped by the Adriatic.) What one misses by seeing this exhibition as stylistically fashionable is the political content.

#Concrete utopia script reading series#

The exhibition itself plays this up with a series of newly commissioned photographs by Valentin Jeck that luxuriate in stained concrete and gunmetal skies.

And it’s true that nostalgia for the raw concrete surfaces of the nineteen-sixties and seventies has seeped into the aquifer and is gushing out in Instagram feeds, coffee-table books, and music videos. Reading the broadly positive reviews, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the exhibition’s timeliness is linked to the fact that we are in the midst of a full-blown Brutalist revival. While there is no doubt that the extraordinary output of socialist Yugoslavia deserves that place, there is also a risk that the architecture’s true significance is not fully absorbed. For the curators, the aim is for Yugoslavian modernism to find its place in the architectural canon (which, after all, MoMA has done more than any museum to create). That would be a happy outcome, but there are higher stakes here. On seeing that the building makes a minor appearance in the Museum of Modern Art’s new exhibition “ Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980,” my first thought was that perhaps the powers that be in Sarajevo will finally consider it for renovation.

#Concrete utopia script reading full#

That marble façade is like a smile full of chipped teeth. Today, the building is far from its serene best. Completed in 1963, it was designed by Boris Magaš, with Edo Šmidihen and Radovan Horvat, in the International Style. Formerly known as the Museum of the Revolution, the building consists of a blind marble slab that appears to float above a glazed ground floor.

It’s a fun but rather kitsch place to be located in the city’s finest, and most zealous, modernist building. The lampshades are made from soldiers’ helmets. Inside, a bronze bust of the man himself, Josip Broz Tito, presides over a red room bedecked with Second World War-era military paraphernalia. At the back of the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Sarajevo, is a café called Tito.