Docomomo Journal

Letters from Paris and Architect Dušan Grabrijan's Archive

Bogo Zupančič — 2024-12-07

The article presents the archive of architect Dušan Grabrijan at the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) in Ljubljana. It describes one of the key moments in the modernization of Slovenian (and Yugoslavian) architecture and society in the 1930s, namely the “invasion” of Le Corbusier’s studio at 35 Rue de Sèvres in Paris by Jože Plečnik’s students. The article primarily focuses on Grabrijan’s correspondence with architects Juraj Neidhardt and Milan Sever, who wrote to Grabrijan in Sarajevo from Paris. Four letters sent to Grabrijan from Paris are just a fraction of the extremely varied and extensive archive, testifying to the influence that the studio in Paris had on the architectural developments in Slovenia. Grabrijan’s archive is one of MAO’s largest. It comprises various materials, from sketches, letters, lecture notes, and official documents to different photographs and similar. The materials from the 1920s relate to Grabrijan’s study of architecture in Plečnik’s seminar at the Technical Faculty in Ljubljana and at École national supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris (ENSBA Paris). Materials from his Sarajevo period date back to 1930-1945, when Grabrijan served as professor at Secondary Technical School (STS) and was fascinated by Bosnian architecture, observing parallels with modernist architecture. The last period offers an insight into the years between 1945 and 1952 when Grabrijan was a professor at the Department of Architecture at the Technical Faculty in Ljubljana. After Grabrijan’s death in 1952, the archive was kept by his wife, who organized the publication of his books and their translations into foreign languages. These documents shed light on extensive architectural connections between Paris, Sarajevo, Ljubljana as well as Zagreb and Belgrade; the authors comment on architectural developments in their circles and on architects with whom they interacted.

Authority to Liberate the Ottoman Legacy

Lejla Džumhur — 2024-12-07

One of the most striking elements of Dušan Grabrijan’s and Juraj Neidhardt’s oeuvre is the extent and freedom of associations with the contested Ottoman legacy in the first decades of the socialist era in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as seen in their book Architecture of Bosnia and the Way towards Modernity. Such freedom primarily resulted from the increasingly favorable political environment that permitted and encouraged decentralization from the predominantly negative portrayal of the Ottoman past.
This paper seeks to unravel the structure and sources of the main discourses used by Grabrijan and Neidhardt in Architecture of Bosnia to deal with the stigma of the Ottoman heritage. We argue that they utilize a certain syncretic language that reflects their own and varied experiences within the Orient-Occident borderline. We assert that their first generating discourse is that of modernism, while the second one revolves around the so-called ‘close neighbor’ or ‘domesticated foreigner’ perspective on the Orient. The premise of Grabrijan’s and Neidhardt’s first position is argued through the parallels of their narrative and the inherent modernist authorization to operate with scientific displacement. The premise of the second position is confirmed through contact nodes with the local differentiated orientalist discourse, which Heiss and Feichtinger (2013) define as distinct in relation to Said’s general concept of oriental Otherness as formulated in Orientalism (1978).
In addition to plunging into the dualistic nature of Grabrijan’s and Neidhardt’s work on the lines of modernism and otherness, center-periphery, the conclusions of the paper point to the broader problem of the controversies of the Bosnian and Herzegovinian heritage, where the relationship of modernism towards/with Ottoman heritage is still an underrepresented subject.

Sarajevo and its Satellites

Dijana Alić — 2024-12-07

In 1942, Grabrijan and Neidhardt guest-edited an issue of the Croatian architectural journal Technical Gazette (Tehnički Vjesnik). Titled Sarajevo and Its Satellites (Sarajevo i njegovi trabanti), the publication contributed to architectural and urban debates and to the development of the regulatory urban plan of the city of Sarajevo. It allowed the authors to present their design work and writings–both individually and collaboratively–framed by their shared vision of a new master plan for the city.
This paper argues that despite the authors’ interest in and fascination with the historic core of Sarajevo, their master plan denied the relevance of the existing urban fabric to the growing city. Their discussion of the old precinct demonstrates the authors’ gradually shifting intentions as they abandon their search for modernity within the old fabric’s authentic qualities. Instead, they associated Islamic urban forms with stereotypical and preconceived oppositional relationships between new and old, progressive and backward. As this paper demonstrates, the result of this approach was that Grabrijan and Neidhardt’s master plan assigned only a peripheral role to the old precinct within their proposed vision. However, even within this publication, some projects, such as designs of mining workers’ housing, anticipate Neidhardt and Grabrijan’s later redefinition of Bosnian architecture as innately modern, which would become a major theme of their subsequent collaboration and well-known book, Architecture of Bosnia and the Way towards Modernity, published 15 years later in 1957.

Origins of Modernity: Plečnik and Grabrijan

Nataša Koselj — 2024-12-07

The first part of this research is based on the analysis of several articles published by Dušan Grabrijan in the late 1940s and early 1950s, his book Plečnik in njegova šola (Plečnik and His School), and the analysis of Grabrijan’s teaching method rooted in Auguste Choisy’s book Histoire de l’architecture (Choisy, 1899), published as a study script. The book Plečnik in njegova šola (Grabrijan, 1968) is based on Grabrijan’s published and unpublished texts, some of which were originally written during his WWII imprisonment. It attempts to critically contextualize, evaluate, and present Plečnik’s work. The book was edited by his wife, Prof. Nada Grabrijan, and published posthumously in 1968.
One of the first three of Plečnik’s graduates, Dušan Grabrijan, is the author of the Memorial to Slovenian Modernity in Ljubljana Žale Cemetery (dedicated to Ivan Cankar, Dragotin Kette, and Josip Murn, with Oton Župančič’s memorial added later, designed by his son, architect Marko Župančič), built between 1924-25 as a result of a winning student competition in Plečnik’s seminar. The memorial was commissioned and funded by Milena Rohrmann. The composition is tripartite, with a reference to Mount Triglav, consisting of three joint columns, of which Ivan Cankar is the tallest and placed in the center. The memorial follows Plečnik’s design principles.
The final part of the paper will examine Plečnik’s modernity and his classical yet modern understanding of the architectural discipline, his ‘flexible classicism’ with his inventiveness, playfulness, daring upcycling, experimentation with materials, forms, and structures, all within the frame of highly developed local crafts, not industry. Indeed, the building industry only really developed after WWII in socialist Yugoslavia. Dušan Grabrijan and Juraj Neidhardt were among the first architects in the region to face the new challenges in architecture. They were trying to answer the new questions: How to connect the new role of an architect, industrialization, and new social needs with the mosaic of local cultures, contexts, and communities, and how to apply Plečnik’s human scale to the modernist architecture of the Balkans?

Intermediary Spaces: The Small-Scale Urbanism of Jože Plečnik

Miloš Kosec — 2024-12-07

The thesis of this article is two-fold. Firstly, Plečnik’s wartime and post-war projects deserve more research attention than they have received to date. A certain level of under-appreciation of Plečnik’s late work is probably a result of a lower number of realizations and perhaps also of insufficient research of this period compared to Plečnik’s career before that.1 Secondly, the article attempts to prove that in the last fifteen years of Plečnik’s life, the urbanistic character of his work was significantly upgraded. The focus lies on the changed urbanistic character of his wartime and post-war realized as well as unrealized projects. In them, the dissolution of the distinction between the interior and exterior of the buildings as well as between public, semi-public, and private programs was intensified, articulating a wide range of intermediary spaces that position many of his later works somewhere between architecture and urbanism. Plečnik’s strategy of small-scale urbanism had a substantial influence on his disciples, including modernist architects such as Edvard Ravnikar and Dušan Grabrijan, who developed a distinct interplay between the principles of international style and original solutions based on local traditions.

Dušan Grabrijan's Macedonian House

Mirjana Lozanovska — 2024-12-07

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.

Harmonizing the Old and the New

Aleksa Korolija — 2024-12-07

This paper seeks to uncover terms of comparability between Bogdan Bogdanović’s and Dušan Grabrijan’s texts, building on a thorough translation and interpretation of the written work published by Bogdanović in Mali Urbanizam and by Grabrijan on Sarajevo between 1936 and 1942. From 1956 to 1958, at the beginning of a successful career as an architect of memorials and monuments, Bogdan Bogdanović produced a monthly column called ‘Mali Urbanizam’ (Small-scale urbanism) in Borba, the Yugoslav publication that bestowed the coveted yearly prize for architecture. This body of articles includes topics concerning urban design, architecture, art, and how reinterpretations and reflections of historical cities and heritage may suggest spatial features adaptable in the post-war reconstruction of Yugoslavia. It is no coincidence that his first article was dedicated to Jože Plečnik, whom Bogdanović considered a pioneer in small-scale urbanism.
Through a comparative analysis of texts by Grabrijan and Bogdanović, this paper identifies the topic of historic urban ensembles both as precedent and as an area for modern design intervention, given the layered and multifold cultural built heritage that preceded the unification of Yugoslavia. The term ‘ensemble’ is here used to encompass the formal and historical peculiarities of Yugoslav cities, including the juxtaposition of eclectic buildings and Ottoman urban fabric, a townscape where buildings adapted to an almost untamed landscape, unlike the clashing of old and new in recent socialist urban expansions. Both Grabrijan and Bogdanović used newspaper articles as a medium to initiate an alphabetization process on the intrinsic values of urban heritage. Their efforts were embraced by a small group of students and fellow architects in an attempt to define a ‘national style’ that would capture all these complexities.

Juraj Neidhardt’s early work

Darja Radovic Mahecic — 2024-12-07

The article covers the early work of Juraj Neidhardt (Zagreb, 1901-Sarajevo, 1979) and the architectural themes he introduced. Aside from the large-scale urban projects Neidhardt worked on at the time, the Archiepiscopal Boys´ Seminary–integrated into its landscape and determined by its ambience–remains his only built design in the interwar period. And that was before his departure for Europe to work in the studios of Peter Behrens in Berlin and Le Corbusier in Paris.
In 1925, the Construction Committee defined a detailed program for the metropolitan seminary; Neidhardt made sketches on his initiative under the guidance of Jože Plečnik and, in close cooperation with the Building Committee, designed and supervised the construction until 1928.
Neidhardt established himself as a significant large-scale creator very early on. As part of the seminary, he designed an ensemble that can only be experienced by gradual observation and movement. The tension of the compositional axis is achieved by the dominant tower of the observatory (the only echo of Mendelsohn in Croatian architecture) on one side and the chapel on the other. The meander composition he applied–the spatial principle of overflowing space into space–will become one of the leading principles in urban planning.
As a testimony of the ambivalence of the architecture of the 1920s–large buildings in a bold monumental stripped classical form, showing traces of expressionism–the seminary is often overlooked by urban architectural knowledge. Its survival was put to the test when the earthquake that hit Zagreb in 2020, left it with the red mark (extensive damage), making this an opportunity, through the method of cross-reading and analysis, to take another closer look to understand the dynamics of change and innovation in terms of urban development and individual architectural practice.

How Radical Exactly?

Aleksandar Bede — 2024-12-07

The international competition for the new regulation plan of Novi Sad was held in 1937, in which Juraj Neidhardt’s design was awarded compensation instead of a prize. However, upon further consideration, the city administration decided to adopt a new version of Neidhardt’s plan in the following years. In addition to this plan, he won the administration’s trust to design a series of lower-level plans for the city in 1938-1941. Therefore, Neidhardt became the most prominent figure in the urban planning process triggered by the 1937 competition. However, his final regulation plan for the city from 1941 was rejected in the first post-war revision in 1945, failing to lead to any fruition. Nevertheless, the researchers later characterized the radical modernist approach of this plan as the inspiration for the subsequent general plans of Novi Sad, namely due to introducing the idea of cutting new axes through the urban tissue. There is room today, however, to re-evaluate these claims about the radicalness of Neidhardt’s plan since its solutions were deemed insufficient in bringing radical quality to the urban space of Novi Sad. Furthermore, in the 1938-1941 period, he designed a series of perspective drawings for the new regulation of the streets in the oldest urban core of the city, which brought a decisively modernist approach to treating the urban heritage: keeping only a selection of the most iconic monuments while replacing the rest of it with new modernist structures. These designs can contribute to reinstate the knowledge about Neidhardt’s approach to treating historical heritage, considering his later intricate studies of Bosnian and Macedonian architectural landscapes.

Landscapes of Housing

Nevena Novaković — 2024-12-07

The concepts of residential space and housing, created by Yugoslav modernist Juraj Neidhardt through the collaboration with architect Dušan Grabrijan, have yet to be investigated systematically, especially from the urban design point of view. As rooted in joint ethnographic research of local Bosnian dwelling culture and vernacular architecture, Neidhardt developed a specific approach to modern neighborhood design compared to the prevalent scientific-planning approach in post-war modernism. From the perspective of urban design, Neidhardt examined the possibilities of conceptualizing more humane dwellings in the context of rapid housing construction in post-war Yugoslavia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, looking through the lens of traditional dwelling culture in which architecture is a mediator between man and landscape. The article will distill, describe, and interpret Neidhardt’s ideas of a modern neighborhood that arise from elaborated descriptions of the Bosnian vernacular architecture articulated in close collaboration with Dušan Grabrijan. Neighborhood concepts have significantly different densities and forms, as designed and redesigned through four decades. Nevertheless, the fundamental design principles common to all neighborhood concepts are recognized, focusing on the dichotomy of architecture and landscape in terms of form and meaning. The research was based on analyzing the author’s books and published texts and designs in several Yugoslavian architectural journals.

Synthesis of the Arts with the Region

Mejrema Zatrić — 2024-12-07

Some of Juraj Neidhardt’s most emblematic projects are situated in pristine, non-urban settings. From the Ski House in the pine forests of the Bosnian hills to the Hotel Agava immersed in the Mediterranean shrubbery of the Adriatic Coast, his designs in the landscape were key for him to define his architecture as seeking proximity to and harmony with nature. The design strategy that Neidhardt utilized to realize this ambition was, however, far from constant. While in the 1950s, he relied solely on the “unwritten laws” of the vernacular models to define techniques of new design integration into the specific regional environment, in the 1960s, he produced a series of striking artistic compositions of natural and architectural visual elements, which he described with the notion of “phantasy in tourism.”
This paper analyzes Neidhardt’s writings and several projects of the 1950s and 1960s in order to situate his 1960s architecture excursus into the visual arts within the post-war discourse of the “synthesis of the arts.” Under the influence of his and Dušan Grabrijan’s geography-informed understanding of the unity between art, life, and the regional environment and his research in the regional planning of tourism (both presented in the book Architecture of Bosnia and the Way towards Modernity (Grabrijan & Neidhardt, 1957), Neidhardt developed an original architectural language that synthesized not only architecture and sculpture but also the specific regional landscape into one harmonious visual whole. This aesthetic synthesis, however, communicated a deeper synthesis between architecture, geographic region, and modern state economy, facilitated by the emerging regional planning as the ultimate absorption of the total environment into the comprehensive kind of modernism.

Disciples, Devotees, Scholars, and Friends

Uta Pottgiesser — 2024-12-07

It is a long-standing and well-appreciated tradition of Docomomo International to emphasize its diversity expressed in buildings, sites, and neighborhoods due to different geography, language, education, and personalities. The term multiple modernisms has been coined to express regional, stylistic, and constructive differences in the formal and philosophical expression of Modern Movement across the globe, within the continents, and even within countries. Docomomo conferences and Docomomo Journals have used and interpreted the term over the last 30 years to express and acknowledge the diversity in the growing community of national working parties. We only need to refer to the recent Docomomo Journal no. 67 (2022) on Multiple Modernities in Ukraine1, or no. 36 (2007) on Other Modernisms2, published in parallel with the 2006 Docomomo International Conference in Istanbul and Ankara (Turkey) with the same title. Other issues highlighted local and regional particularities together and, at the same time, referenced common roots and personal links, such as the preservation technology dossier no. 13 on Perceived Technologies in the Modern Movement 1918-1975 published by the International Specialist Committee on Technology (ISC/T) in 2014. In that publication, the specific and long-term collaborations of architects with engineers and artists were explored often leading to exceptional solutions in structure, design, and function.

The Way towards Regional Modernities - Joint Works of Dušan Grabrijan and Juraj Neidhardt

Natasa Koselj — 2024-12-07

The richness and multiplicity of themes addressed in the different contributions made it very difficult to create the optimal order for this issue: every grouping of contributions would undervalue at least one of the aspects of the individual papers. Finally this Journal is structured in three main blocks where the first focusses on the joint origins and joint works of Dušan Grabrjan and Juraj Neidhardt. It includes contributions by Bogo Zupančič, Lejla Džumhur with Aida Idrizbegović-Zgonić and Dijana Alić. The second block of papers has the main focus on Plečnik and Dušan Grabrjan’s work and contains contributions by Miloš Kosec, Mirjana Lozanovska with Viktorija Bogdanova and Aleksa Korolija. The third block of papers focusses on Juraj Neidhardt and is authored by Darja Radović-Mahečić, Aleksandar Bede with Dragana Konstantinović and Slobodan Jović and by Nevena Novaković. As guest-editors, we contributed with a paper on the origins of modernity and the synthesis of the arts with the region in the second and third block.

Books and Reviews

Peter Krečič — 2024-12-07

Heritage in Danger

Mejrema Zatrić — 2024-12-07

Almost the entirety of Juraj Neidhardt’s built work was created in the decades of his late career. Although several emblematic projects—notably the ‘Sextuplet’ collective workers’ housing type—were designed before World War II, Neidhardt’s work as modernist heritage is historically firmly situated in the socialist Yugoslav era. The proper evaluation, listing, and conservation of modern architectural heritage is a relatively new subfield of heritage conservation in many countries around the world. In the majority of ex-Yugoslav states, the institutionalization of these endeavors has been complicated by the political and historical controversy surrounding the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the opposing interpretations of the social, cultural, and historical values of modernist Yugoslav heritage.