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The (Re)Awakening of Postmodernist Themes within the Course of a Modernist Tradition

Despite the adverse conditions of the changed post-WWII political and social context, the modernist tradition in Croatia managed to fight its way to the full cultural legitimacy. Embraced already in the 1930s, it proved resilient enough to defy the dictate of socialist realism, as the normative poetics of the new socialist system. In the sphere of architecture, the key argument of defending such strong modernist functionalist tradition from accusations of being empty and purely mechanical, “devoid of the real, full, inner human substance and as such a clear signifier of the decadent bourgeois West”, was the theoretical concept of “comprehensive functionalism”. The term was introduced by the Croatian architectural theorist Andre Mohorovičić in 1947 as a unique, broad concept that embraced – besides the necessary layers of function, construction and economy – so many other aspects as well, such as aesthetics, history, regional morphology, meaning, culture, psychology and overall, phenomenological dimensions and qualities. Such was – Mohorovičić claimed – always the case with architectural modernism in Croatia. This simultaneously implies that the major themes of the later postmodernist discourse were already incorporated in the immediate postwar debates on Croatian architectural modernism. What is more – and quite paradoxically so – it is precisely those recognizable postmodernist themes that served as arguments for legitimizing Croatian modernist tradition (within the context of sanctioned socialist realism), the same as those postmodern issues were deeply ingrained in the local architectural production. The new postmodern theoretical discourse of the 1970s would then fall on the fruitful ground and reawaken the already extant architectural values and qualities. All this would point to a certain specific local postmodernism avant la lettre: postmodern topics rehearsed in the midst of modernist practices. The essay investigates this unusual synthesis and examines both its background and consequences: What did it mean for the local architectural production in the period 1970- 1990? How did it ground and specifically direct local postmodernist reactions? How did postmodernism manifest itself at all in such strong modernist context? And what was then the destiny of local modernism, just as that of postmodernism? These intricate phenomena are explored on a particularly illustrative architectural and philosophical oeuvre – that of the eminent Croatian architect and theorist Boris Magaš (1930-2013).

Postmodernity; architectural modernism; Boris Magaš; Andre Mohorovičić; comprehensive functionalism

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