“Toward a Concrete Utopia” starts there: We see three briskly edited films celebrating the erection of New Belgrade, a Brasília-style extension of Yugoslavia’s federal capital with large-scale Brutalist projects like the Genex Tower, a pair of concrete high-rises linked by a sky bridge with a revolving restaurant. Later, Yugoslavia took the lead in the Nonaligned Movement, whose first summit meeting was held in Belgrade in 1961. In 1948, Josip Broz Tito broke with the Soviet leadership and steered Yugoslavia to a unique hybrid status that rejected both Stalinism and liberal democracy. But here’s the critical point: It was not behind the Iron Curtain. Yugoslavia was forged from the rubble of World War I and became a one-party Socialist state after World War II. “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980,” an outstanding new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, brings us back to this vanished Socialist state, whose postwar architecture had all the ambition and invention found in the United States, Brazil, Japan and other centers of building at the time. So here’s a quick refresher: Slovenia is the birthplace of the hipster philosopher Slavoj Zizek and the American first lady Croatia, a World Cup finalist with distinctive checkerboard jerseys, pulls holidaymakers to the Adriatic coast European yachts are sailing further south, to little Montenegro, which just had a moment in the news Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, is on a museum upswing Sarajevo, at the heart of Bosnia, is a hub of cafe culture Macedonia has finally settled its naming dispute and is knocking on the door of the European Union and Kosovo is the ancestral home of Europe’s biggest pop star of the moment, Dua Lipa.īefore 1991, when old enmities savagely resurfaced, these seven countries were part of a single federal republic - Yugoslavia - with ethnicities, religions and language groups under a single overarching roof. Some of us still get a little hazy about the seven nations in the lower right corner of Europe, east of Italy and north of Greece.
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