engleski

Ruins and Slavic Utopia. Architecture of the Social Reform in Croatian Historic Towns, 1945- 1960

Presentation deals with reconstruction projects conceived by the main protagonists of conservation and modernist movements of the post-world war II Croatia. Bearing in mind the triumph of Tito’s communists and the state of bombarded historic towns on Eastern Adriatic, presentation discusses the social, political and professional aspects in architectural conservation and urban planning of the period. In post-war reforms the strengthening of revolutionary collectivist model in Yugoslavia implied both the acts of selective anamnesis and creative prognosis in forging of new political identity. Until 1945 both modernist and conservation movements in Croatia depended on Central and West European traditions. In the new Slavic state, which tended to suppress contributions from Italian, Austrian and German cultures, seen as hegemonic or colonial, two movements had to face a reform of their own. Two models of treating damaged historic towns: nostalgic facsimile reconstructions and reformist new inventions on tabula rasa often estranged the conservators and modernist planners. Major conservators and planners of post-war Croatia (C. Fisković, H. Bilinić, M. Prelog, M. Stahuljak, G. Oštrić, J. Seissel, I. Vitić, N. Dobrović, B. Milić, N. Šegvić, A. Mohorovičić, J. and T. Marasović) had to comply with revolutionary political demands. They had to transform the theatres of war – emptied from its non-Slavic inhabitants – into theatres of normalized life of the communist Utopia, counting both on principles of subtraction and addition in reshaping of bombarded towns. Being a part of social reform, these transformations of the urban scenery were important instruments for the process of inventing the socialist citizen, whose knowledge of the past had to be reshaped by carefully planned corrections on the level of a plot, square, or townscape. Presentation discusses these changes in historic towns of Split, Šibenik, Zadar and Zagreb, based on concepts of the protagonists and bearing in mind sense of the past and political drive for change in the circles of conservators and urban planners.

post-war, ruins, architecture, conservation, Croatia, Zagreb, Šibenik, Split, Zadar

nije evidentirano