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Interpolation–Extrapolation: Drago Galić's Residential Buildings at Svačićev Square and Vukovarska Street and Their Two Paradigmatic Design Gestures

Interpolation was the major design procedure through which architectural modernism earned its legitimacy in the urban culture of the interwar bourgeois Zagreb. Modernist insertions strategically punctuated the historicist fabric, reinforcing the existing urban structure and securing the new poetics’ status and prominence. This in turn forced modernist interventions to develop a whole range of careful contextual techniques and procedures. International modernist features in that way underwent specific local fine-tuning and adjustments, establishing an authentic and distinctive local modernist tradition. Drago Galić (1907-1992) belonged to just such tradition. Already in the interwar period he worked on a number of modernist residential interpolations. Aside from superb design solutions, thanks to his progressive social stand, he created innovative spatial frameworks that tested conventional modes of habitation. While designing for the private client, he engaged in shaping new modern subjectivities and promoting progressive collective ideas. After WWII, the new socialist system and the radically changed political context demanded fundamentally different formal and spatial manifestations. Yet true to his embraced architectural beliefs, Galić, along with the entire generation of Croatian architects, continued to follow the line of unequivocal modernist experiments. This paper focuses on two of his outstanding postwar realizations: two apartment buildings, both from 1953, as modernist masterpieces that demonstrate two paradigmatic design gestures in two different urban contexts. One was the case of interpolation in a particularly delicate urban setting of a historical downtown block ; the other an extrapolation of that rich architectural knowledge into an entirely new urban area – in the open space of a grand avenue planned as the center of the new socialist city, designed as composition of free-standing slabs set in a park. Both were the results of the same contextual design method – outcomes of intense creative dialogues, not only with their immediate physical contexts but also with contemporary international models, primarily those Corbusian. However, in neither of these cases, even with the new public client and overall new collective society, did Galić neglect the role and importance of private space. Quite on the contrary, these were indeed supreme cases of residential spatial qualities, bordering in fact on the comfort and standards of a bourgeois apartment or villa. This intricate dialectics of private and public, individual and collective, bourgeois and socialist, modernist and realist, will be particularly discussed, suggesting being aimed here to a much broader, universal humanistic aspiration and ideal.

Drago Galić ; residential buildings ; Zagreb ; Vukovarska Street ; design method ; renewal of dwelling ; post-WW2

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