Geography of Architecture and “The Way to Modernity” Juraj Neidhardt’s Regionalism in Early Socialist Yugoslavia

Abstract

Regions and territories describe the same spaces in very different ways. This dissertation examines architecture’s regionalist conceptual and design ventures that questioned, underpinned and naturalised the post-Second World War modern state territorial development. It does so by telling the history of the book "Architecture of Bosnia and the Way to Modernity," written and designed by modernist architects Dušan Grabrijan (1899-1952) and Juraj Neidhardt (1901-1979) and published in the Socialist Yugoslavia in 1957. "Architecture of Bosnia" has been widely appreciated as the strongest Yugoslav statement on the importance the local cultural specificities hold for modern architecture. Yet, beyond its advocacy for a creative unison between “the old and the new” and Le Corbusier’s preface to the book, little has been known about its conception, production and reception. By delving deep into the book’s form, its authors’ exchange and their inter-war formative experiences (in Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Vienna, Berlin and Paris), their propensity for ethnographic research and correlation of the book with Juraj Neidhardt’s abundant design and planning practice, this dissertation reveals a struggle to establish and maintain the regionalist conceptual set-up, in order to justify the modern architecture’s agency in the world. The central definition that determined the prospects of the "Architecture of Bosnia" project was the one of the region. Not only was the “Bosnian region” the model for the design of the book’s form, but it was also entrusted to the book’s mediality to unify two distinct conceptions: the geographic-historical region that emerged through a range of long, slow, historical reciprocities between the human and their environment; and the territory, defined through developmental strategies of the Yugoslav “experiment.” While the first relied on the vernacular principles of building, called “unwritten laws,” the second relied on the integrative power of infrastructure. The well-known, enlightened, emancipatory project of the Socialist Yugoslavia was at the particularly difficult test in its hinterland, where Neidhardt mostly operated. While the book accomplished the task of regional unification by means of its complex and insightful editorial strategies, Neidhardt’s meticulous regionalist design and planning endeavours remained torn between their will to reach the regional integration and their functional role in the hasty and uncompromising state-controlled industrialisation. This problematic dualism has been an integral part of "Architecture of Bosnia"’s essential premise: that architecture is indissolubly bound to its environment. The book inherited this problem by relying on the human geographic conception of the “milieu”, which designated the conflation between the human and the environmental. Just like human geographers strictly distinguished between their regional and territorial work (or, in other words, their ethnographic research and its instrumentalisation in the political-economic interests of national states), so "Architecture of Bosnia" distinguished between the regional integration of Neidhardt’s designs and economic function of his plans. While the separation of design and planning, complete in Yugoslavia with the institutionalisation of regional planning in 1957, crucially influenced the poor reception of the book, Juraj Neidhardt’s work remains a testimony to a feeble, but inspiring attempt to bring together geography and economy, through moderate rationalisation, ethnographic attention to detail and tackling the distinction between architecture and infrastructure.