engleski

Housing Exhibitions in Croatia in the 1930s and 1950s – from the Subversive Critical Platform to the Vehicle of the New Ideology

Housing exhibitions in Croatia in the period from the 1930s to the 1950s, as well as in the former socialist Yugoslavia, presented different attitudes towards housing and its medialisation due to radically different political and social circumstances: a change from the capitalism of the totalitarian Kingdom of Yugoslavia to the self-management socialism of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Before the Second World War, when about three quarters of Yugoslav population, mainly workers and peasants, lived in substandard houses, architects used exhibitions to inform economic elites about harsh consequences of the housing crisis such as acute health and social problems. They pointed to the shortcomings of social housing policies and to the need to solve the problem by involving the state authorities and municipal governments. Proposed solutions included planned social housing, new housing types, minimum subsistence dwellings, and the latest building technologies including prefabrication. What had been architects’ unfulfilled goal in the pre-war capitalist society became reality in the post-war socialist Yugoslavia. Building of contemporary modern housing was an urgent need and an important part of the national development plan of the society that in principle guaranteed decent housing facilities to all its citizens. While in the 1940s, exhibitions primarily marked success stories of the construction of a socialist society, thus including the housing architecture as well, those from the second half of the 1950s had a completely different agenda – they were converted into a research and educational platform on which a socialist way of living or housing for our conditions and its surroundings – the housing community – were articulated and materialized. The housing community was the core “urban element of the planned development” (of neighbourhoods) and a self-management unit through which the inhabitants managed communal, social and public tasks. At that point, the architects were only one of many groups of co- creators involved in producing a spatial framework and educating the masses on how to live within it. In the period encompassing one quarter of a century, exhibitions were transformed from the subversive critical platform to the vehicle of the new ideology and a supporting mechanism of the newly established housing policy. The change of exhibitions’ role was followed by the change of their organisation frameworks and venues. Before the Second World War, they were non-institutional events privately organised and financed at the most exclusive exhibition spaces, such as Art Pavilions in Zagreb and Belgrade, while after the War they turned into huge events at Zagreb Fair, managed by numerous associations and attended by numerous exhibitors. At the same time, one notion remained unchanged: the continuity of the idea of the social roles and tasks of architecture advocated by architects both before and after the War.

housing exhibitions in 1930's and 1950's ; Association of Artists Zemlja exhibitions ; Family and Household Exhibitions

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