engleski

Architecture Competition as an Instrument of Cultural Policies - Yugoslavia Practices

An architecture competition is a democratic way of obtaining the best design for a particular building project. At the same time, it is a matter of prestige and proof of social and economic power. By launching a competition, the investor is granted the privilege to choose, among those submitted, the design that best suits their needs and worldview. In most cases, competitions are organised by corporations, various civil groups and public institutions, spanning from municipalities to states. In the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the state usually launched competitions for complex buildings of political and cultural significance only after the assassination of King Aleksandar in 1934, when the authorities became more open to democratic procedures. They provided all architects with the opportunity to play an equal part in the national architectural scene and to embody, through competition entries, ideas of the society they lived in. This established practice continued in the mid-1940s in the socialist Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia and in the early 1950s after Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet Union. The competitions for public buildings discussed in this paper, such as the Presidency of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia and Communist Party headquarters in New Belgrade, just to name a few, show how the above-mentioned opposing political systems misused this democratic practice and turned it into a tool for implementing a particular ideology and for monitoring architectural practice. Instead of a space for experiment and dialogue, competitions were used to provide templates and widespread particular “national” architectural and urban planning practices by increasing the number of competitions, publishing competition designs, and finally by construction. This paper will focus in particular on architects’ participation and their role in competition’s procedures along with their contributions to the emergence and promotion of different ideologies.

architecture ; architectural competitions ; Kingdom of Yugoslavia ; Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia

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