Prior to entering the exhibition galleries, visitors walked past a cherry red kiosk of reinforced polyfiber, steel, and glass. In doing so, the exhibition presented more than just an argument for expanding the architectural canon the arresting, unwieldy, and often weird structures stand as totems for abandoned or overlooked alternatives, advocating for the relevance of widening one’s perspective to consider systems or values beyond those that dominate our political discourse today. Through more than 400 objects on view, the curators constructed a narrative not of the inevitable failure of the third way, but of the ingenuity, originality, and commitment to social responsibility that was reflected in its rapidly expanding architectural environment in the mid-20 th century. Co-curated by Martino Stierli, MoMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, and Vladimir Kuli ć, Assistant Professor of Architecture at Florida Atlantic University, the exhibition was ambitious and engaging, examining the considerable amount of work produced by Yugoslav architects in the postwar period, both as it relates to international styles of modernism and as it manipulated and diverged from those styles in expressions of its own vernacular forms. It is this architectural landscape that forms the basis of the sprawling, revelatory exhibition Toward A Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia 1948-1980 which was on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from Jto January 13, 2019. But the legacy of Yugoslavia’s aspirations toward multiculturalism, social welfare, and global cooperation remains, articulated in physical form in the built environments of the seven nations it once comprised. From our place in history, we know how they ultimately toppled, with the nation dissolving amidst a series of violent ethnic conflicts and wars of independence in the early 1990s. The young nation’s own internal dichotomies-regional versus national identity, self versus state-required balancing acts of their own. Yugoslavia’s role as mediator of opposing dualities was not limited to the sphere of international relations. This “third way” between capitalism and communism was developed under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito after the country broke away from the Soviet Union in 1948 and allowed Yugoslavia to occupy a unique position as the fulcrum between East and West throughout the Cold War, maintaining political, economic, and cultural relationships on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Whatever its value as political rhetoric or plot device, the notion of a cleanly bifurcated world oversimplifies the period’s geopolitical realities, which included a diverse group of countries coming together as the Non-Aligned Movement in direct opposition to a binary division of global power in 1961.ġ Leading that movement was the nation of Yugoslavia, the southeastern European country that had already positioned itself outside of the Eastern and Western blocs through its pursuit of an independent socialism based on workers’ self-management. Today’s stories of the Cold War, invoked as they are by politicians or television writers, are so often tales of an epic dualities: America versus the Soviet Union, West versus East, us versus them. Organized by Martino Stierli, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, and Vladimir Kulić, Associate Professor, Florida Atlantic University, with Anna Kats, Assistant Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art
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