Архитектура интернационалног модернизма у контексту репозиционирања социјалистичке Југославије на међународној сцени
International Style of Modern Architecture in the Context of the Repositioning of Socialist Yugoslavia on the International Scene

Summary/Abstract: The changing international alliances of socialist Yugoslavia in the second half of the twentieth century caused widely different political interpretations of architecture that emerged in that period. At the same time, its ethnic, cultural, and religious heterogeneity made these interpretations even more complex. Competing concepts of modernism and socialist realism and modernization and conservatism in different relationships between the aesthetics and political meanings of architecture point to the divergent international politics of socialist Yugoslavia during the Cold War, which confirms the discursiveness of architecture as an ideological instrument. The temporal scope of the subject research is conditioned by the key points of change that, in the time range from the early fifties to the early seventies of the twentieth century, define three basic paradigmatic changes that determine the movements of the modern direction in the architecture and urban planning of socialist Yugoslavia: (1) Existentialism during the fifties as a period of analyticity; (2) Dichotomy during the sixties to the beginning of the seventies as a period of reconciliation between rationalism and humanism; and (3) Polyvalence as the end of rationalism in architecture and the emergence of an economic and political paradigm. Yugoslavia disrupted the clean stylistic division between East and West through its own version of socialist modernism, which emphasized the country’s independence from any bloc. This indicates that the architecture of Yugoslav modernism was not geographically determined, nor was it a passive product, but an active participant in modernization, part of an ideology based on the middle path, that is, on the policy of inclusion and joining the world divided into Eastern and Western blocs. The entire construction of that period in the context of international modernity represents a logic of reconciliation between conservative essentialism (which still believes in creative identity, creative authority and advocates for cultural equality) and progressive deconstructionism (which believes in the identity of socio-cultural construction and advocates for constructed universality and globality). The constructive ideology of late international modernity emerges from this universality and essential conservatism.

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