Dušan Grabrijan's Macedonian House: Fieldwork and its Influence towards a complex Modernism

Mirjana Lozanovska; Viktorija Bogdanova

doi:10.52200/docomomo.72.06

Dušan Grabrijan's Macedonian House

Fieldwork and its Influence towards a complex Modernism

Authors

Mirjana Lozanovska Deakin University https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3342-5681
Viktorija Bogdanova Aalto University https://orcid.org/0009-0008-7556-726X

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DOI:

https://doi.org/10.52200/docomomo.72.06

Keywords:

Macedonian House, Spatiality (spatio-plasticity), Porch - čardak (veranda), House for Everyone, vernacular

Abstract

Grabrijan sought to explain and affirm a coexistence of the modern and the traditional in architecture, especially in his seminal studies of Bosnian architecture and the Macedonian house. Co-authored with Neidhardt, his publication about Bosnian architecture is well-known and studied. Grabrijan’s posthumous publication, The Macedonian House, based on the data collected during his fieldwork in regional towns in Macedonia (1946, 1947, 1949), serves to punctuate the progressive modernizing forces and their focus on reconstruction, urbanization, and speedy industrialization of major centers as well as peripheral areas, in the Socialist Republic of (SRMacedonia), as elsewhere in Yugoslavia. As an archival record, The Macedonian House presents a different focus and a rebalance of the postwar agenda that had eclipsed small towns from architectural interest and had effectively produced the demise of the vernacular traditions in the towns. With an ideology to learn from the architecture of the people, Grabrijan’s work wove the vernacular back into a more complex modernism.
Grabrijan first traveled to S.R. Macedonia in the summer of 1946 as part of a Yugoslavia-wide exchange–solidarity assistance for post-war renewal. He then organized two research journeys in 1947 and 1949, taking a group of students for fieldwork training. In his archives containing the documents and fieldwork for the publication about the Macedonian House, a drawing of a map of the Balkans resonates with the map of Le Corbusier’s 1911 formative journey to the East, including a coded notation which may refer to folklore, culture, and industry. Grabrijan’s enthusiasm for studying the traditional houses in Macedonia takes him to small towns, covering a broad geography of spatial dialects. Drawing from the Grabrijan archives, this paper will explore his fieldwork methods and his modalities of researching the complex conditions from which the “house for everyone” rises above the ground.

How to Cite

Lozanovska, M., & Bogdanova, V. (2024). Dušan Grabrijan’s Macedonian House: Fieldwork and its Influence towards a complex Modernism. Docomomo Journal, (72), 48–55. https://doi.org/10.52200/docomomo.72.06

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Published

2024-12-07

Issue

No. 72 (2024): The Way towards Regional Modernities

Section

Essays

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Author Biographies

Mirjana Lozanovska, Deakin University

is professor of Architecture and director of the Architecture Vacancy Lab at Deakin University. Her work investigates the creative ways that architecture mediates human dignity and identity through multidisciplinary theories of space. Her books include Migrant Housing: Architecture, Dwelling, Migration (2019), Ethno-Architecture and the Politics of Migration (2016), and Iconic Industry (2017). She has published widely on alternative transnational historiography, including work on Kenzo Tange’s masterplan for Skopje (2012, 2017) and chapter on Mimoza Nestorova-Tomić (socialist women architects, 2016). Mirjana is currently investigating immigrant workers at Port Kembla steelworks, co-authored with team (Australia Research Council Discovery Project) , Immigrant Industry: Building Postwar Australia (2024).

Viktorija Bogdanova, Aalto University

is a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University in Helsinki. She is a poet and practicing architect devoted to making, sharing, and co-creating poem-drawings as processual and analytical instruments in architectural research through design. She exhibited her work at conferences for artistic and architectural research in Valencia, Ljubljana, Aarhus, Berlin, Lisbon, Ghent, Trondheim, Belgrade, and Skopje. Her pedagogical work evolved around years of assisting teaching at the Faculties of Architecture in Skopje and Ljubljana, intertwined with individual mentoring on storytelling in architectural design. She is a co-founder of Archi | Contemplatives, an educational platform for writing, drawing, and contemplative practices in visual narration of places.

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