Vladimir Kulić Knihy

Socialist Yugoslavia was a country suspended between civilizations, political systems, and Cold War blocs. It produced a remarkable body of modern architecture, which similarly defies easy classification. This book explores the historical “in-betweenness” of Yugoslav modernism and the various strategies architects used to mediate their own position between the different—sometimes directly opposed—concepts of life, culture, practice, and time. The best among them created uniquely syncretic spaces and buildings that blurred the lines between the established categories of modernism. Wolfgang Thaler’s photos capture the richness and complexity of these projects, resilient in face of their often melancholy state today.

Bogdan Bogdanovic (1922–2010) was a Yugoslav architect, theorist, professor and a one-time mayor of Belgrade. His idiosyncratic memorials to the victims and heroes of World War II, scattered around the former Yugoslavia, continue to attract attention today, more than 25 years after the country’s collapse. The monuments, cemeteries, mausoleums, memorial parks, necropolises, cenotaphs and other sites of memory Bogdanovic designed between the early 1950s and late 1970s occupy a unique place in the history of modern architecture, redrawing the boundaries between architecture, landscape and sculpture in varied and unexpected ways. This book presents Bogdanovic’s built oeuvre through his own eyes, in a selection of nearly 50 color photographs of his memorials, which the architect took soon after the completion of each project. Carefully staged and taken with professional medium-format cameras, these photos, many of them previously unpublished, are in themselves works of art that bespeak their author’s surrealist sensibility. The publication includes an introduction by the architectural historian Vladimir Kulic, a preface by curator Martino Stierli and a selection of Bogdanovic’s own thoughts on photography, excerpted from an unpublished interview that Kulic conducted in 2005.