Sculptor Ivan Mestrovic and others, The Exhibition Pavillion of the Croatian Society of Art, 1934-1938.
From Blau and Repnik, case study 9.

Mirogoj Cemetery, founded in Zagreb in 1866.
From Blau and Repnik, case study 2.

Book Review

Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice

Eve Blau and Ivan Rupnik

With contributions by Hrvoje Njiric, Helena Paver Njiric, Charles S. Maier, Vedran Mimica, Vladimir Mattioni, Ivan Rogic, Fedja Vukic, Snjeska Knezevic, Aleksander Laslo and others
Barcelona and New York: Actar, 2007. 336 pp., color and duotone illus., € 30
ISBN-10: 849654057X, ISBN-13: 978-8496540576

PDF version
Eve Blau and Ivan Rupnik’s book Project Zagreb examines how the recent transition in Central Europe is neither new nor a phenomenon particular to post-communism, since Central European cities have been more or less continuously in transition since the beginning of the modern period. By transition, Blau means “a state of instability with uncertain outcome, not as the passage from one stable condition to another.” Urban Zagreb, as the Croatian capital, is a creation of the modern period, and a perfect site to examine the generative dynamic of such transitions in which it has almost 150 years of continuous experience. In fact, almost every twenty or thirty years Croatia was in a new period of intense political turmoil and radical social transformations, in which architecture was an important factor in the program of overall modernization and constructing new meanings in relation to the complex national history, cultural traditions, opposed political programs and identities. In other words, it is not so much the influence of its current experience of transition as much as the impact of a long history of adapting to and creatively engaging instability that has enabled Zagreb to endure as city with a strong urban and architectural culture. This history and experience make a city like Zagreb a key subject for understanding the spatial dynamics and potentials of the transition today.

Project Zagreb began with a two-semester long seminar at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in 2004-2005, taught by Blau and organized in collaboration with Rupnik. The two brought the Harvard students to Zagreb, a travelling exhibition was developed and shown at multiple venues, and the project came to a close with this book published in 2007. The project analyzed the modus operandi of Croatian architects in permanently changing and unstable conditions from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The book is organized chronologically, according to the types of transitions characterizing particular historical periods which have left physical traces in the tissue of the city, documented by the authors in seventeen case studies.

The first chapter, entitled “Supranational Empire: Modern Infrastructure and Identity 1848-1907,” examines the shaping of the national metropolis under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, analyzing among others the following elements: the city’s central square (which reinvented its appearance many times—beginning with a representative stage set, then reshaping existing buildings and constructing new ones); Mirogoj cemetery (an example of multicultural and religious tolerance which brought together earlier, scattered graveyards, and is considered one of Europe’s most beautiful cemeteries); and the “Green Horseshoe” (an example of a liberal interpretation of Vienna’s Ring).

The second chapter “Avant-Garde: Modern Architecture as Urban Instrument 1908-1931” demonstrates how modern movement architecture found its room in interpolations, while larger projects were executed either as fragments of the initial idea or in several stages. Here, the emphasis is put on a series of examples from housing architecture as well as on the round Croatian Artists exhibition pavillion constructed in Zagreb in 1938, unique in this part of Europe.

“CIAM Urbanism: The Functional City 1932-1956,” the third chapter, traces the fate of Zagreb’s General Regulatory Plan which emerged from the 1930 international competition, was subsequently presented at CIAM’s meeting in Athens in 1933, endorsed in 1937 as the example of the Capitalist Functional City and changed in 1947 into the General Plan of the Communist Functional City.

The fourth chapter “Self-Management: City as Site of Experiment 1957-1989” explores the architecture of the Zagreb’s International Fair, the works of the large construction enterprises and autochthonously achieved standardization of construction elements, the so-called Jugomont 61.

The fifth and the final chapter, entitled “Transition Economy: Urban Rules 1990-2007,” discusses the small steps taken in solving the enormous urban chaos created in recent years, focusing on international seminars organized around the endorsement of the master plan for Zagreb in 2000. The authors propose that in a transitional environment there is no stability needed for the normative planning: each and every architectural or urban project in such an environment starts under one set of conditions and ends under another set of conditions, as documented by the case studies in this book. All chapters are supplemented with texts by art historians and architects from Zagreb.

In examining Zagreb’s urban situation Blau and Rupnik used all possible sources—from research studies, scattered archival materials, photographs and documentary films, to interviews with stakeholders in construction and urban planning. The ingredients of this book have been long known to the historians of Zagreb’s architecture but in the book Project Zagreb they are combined in a new “recipe.” The authors conclude that Zagreb’s architects and city planners—by working in an unstable environment bearing uncertain consequences for the final result—developed original strategies for shaping the city.

In addition to the text itself, the book’s great value lies in visual analysis and interpretation. By focusing on multidimensional variables the authors examine and analyze transition as condition, strategy and practice through a range of graphic techniques: assembly, mapping, diagramming, layering, animation, projection, analytical modelling, and stop-frame photography to visualize synchronous and non-synchronous transformations occurring at different rates in different sectors. This method of reading and analysis brings into sharp focus the role of practice and of architectural knowledge in the urban process.

Two decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain the architecture of the former communist countries is still not integrated into the history of the European architecture. Blau and Rupnik’s book about Zagreb—as an open city in which transition has been the permanent condition for the city’s architects and city planners for more than a century—is an unavoidable work not only for architects but also for sociologists, historians and others examining the culture of the city. This work has also given names to many phases of the process in which the post-communist countries witness the speedy transitions from centralized state economy to liberal market economy, giving rise to pluralistic democracies and new divisions of social classes.

Darja Radovic Mahecic
Zagreb and Geneva