Teaching Yugoslav Architecture
Architecture in the former Yugoslavia is also a learning tool. Study trips from a prominent architecture school explore Yugoslav architecture to teach important lessons, from authenticity to nostalgia to sustainability, for designing the built environment.
With David Di Duca and Tetsuro Nagata (Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London).
Listen: “Teaching Yugoslav Architecture” (Episode #127)
Bonus Extras: “Teaching Yugoslav Architecture” (Episode #127)
Ad-free version of “Teaching Yugoslav Architecture” (Episode #127).
Transcript: “Teaching Yugoslav Architecture” (Episode #127)
PETER KORCHNAK: This episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok, a member-supported global community and resource hub for all who remember Yugoslavia. Through membership contributions, Yugoblok members make this podcast (and a whole lot more) accessible and freely available to all. Members can also listen to episodes ad-free and enjoy extended and bonus episodes.
Visit Yugoblok.com to explore and join today.
[JINGLE]
PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, a Yugoblok show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your designer, Peter Korchnak.
Yugoslav architecture continues to fascinate and resonate. I’ve dedicated a fair amount of space to it on the show, monuments, buildings, exhibitions…
Recently I also found out that architecture in the former Yugoslavia is a learning tool. A couple of listeners who teach design at a university in London reached out when I was in Ljubljana as they were passing through with a group of students on a study trip.
DAVID DI DUCA: We thought we should follow up on the fact that we definitely owed you some beers for all the help that the podcast has given us over the years.
PETER KORCHNAK: And beers were indeed had, yes,
DAVID DI DUCA: But genuinely, we have, we’ve used the various episodes on particular themes, but also we’ve actually met some of the people who you’ve interviewed on the podcast.
PETER KORCHNAK: David Di Duca is a designer and architect and part-time instructor of design at University College London’s Bartlett School of Architecture.
We capped the night of pilsners at Tektonik brewery with what else, Burek Olimpija. But anyway, as part of the design course, the undergrads take a study trip abroad.
TETSURO NAGATA: When we’re choosing our sites, we can always ask the students to design, you know, almost in a vacuum. They can, they can design in outer space. They can design, you know, under the sea, if they want to. You know, it’s a kind of open book situation where they’re not restricted by sight, by politics, by finances, finances maybe being the key thing. But we kind of always like to think about places where there’s a social context and there’s a bit of tension.
PETER KORCHNAK: Tetsuro Nagata is also a designer and architect and he and Di Duca co-teach the course and co-lead the study trips.
TETSURO NAGATA: The former Yugoslavian countries, they kind of have this underlying tension that’s very hard to pinpoint it, but it’s a place where, over our lifetimes, there’s been a really huge transition and cultural change from a socialist, unified state to a horrific war to now capitalism and joining the EU. So it’s place where people who’ve had all these extremes of experiences live side by side. And we think that’s really interesting. It’s a place where we can start talking about different user groups and different communities.
And for us for being from the UK, maybe the concept of Yugoslavia is really interesting, because our own country’s just left the EU. The EU’s a, you know, it’s a dream of a place with no borders and unified identities. And it’s a little bit like looking to the future of what could happen after that dream is gone.
DAVID DI DUCA: There’s something about our generation. Tet and I were now, you know, we’re 42, early 40s. We’re sort of the Easy Jet generation in the UK. Like in the UK, the budget airline, easy jet appeared when we were probably 16, 17, years old, and it flew to all these countries in Eastern Europe so there’s always been a kind of personal interest in these countries that suddenly, sort of, we became aware of a sort of critical point in our lives, I suppose, where you sort of start exploring the world yourself. So I think there’s a little bit of that. I’m always quite excited to go to somewhere we’ve never been to before, and places that have had a different social political history, or different political systems even.
But then in Yugoslavia, you’ve got this situation where huge change has happened since, and as architects are interested in the built environment, you’re kind of going to see how the built environment’s changed, how the architecture has adapted, potentially.
PETER KORCHNAK: One of the big overarching themes the course, or perhaps even architecture as such, explores is sustainability. Here Yugoslavia offers lessons as well.
DAVID DI DUCA: One of the biggest questions or the biggest issues in sustainability being embodied, carbon being the amount of energy required to build a building. The buildings becoming redundant is like the biggest loss, biggest trauma to the sort of sustainability creds of any building, if you have to knock one building down to make another.
But what we sort of started to realize looking at places where things have changed, or buildings become redundant, or sort of setting out to find places where we’d find interesting buildings which perhaps no longer fitted or were being used for something completely different, was that the stories and what buildings actually meant to people became more important. So you can sort of see what people care about by what they choose to preserve, or what they might make a huge effort to preserve, or how stories get lost.
PETER KORCHNAK: Embodied carbon but also embodied stories.
DAVID DI DUCA: I’m sure there are a lot of people in the former Yugoslavia who are very sad about the condition of the spomeniks and how they’ve not been maintained, but they embody these incredible histories that are not always understood, whereas, I don’t know, other buildings that have been lost, a lot goes with them when they get lost, whether it will be literally, the memories that they evoke in people who were around at the time, or whether it’s the potential they have to keep keep memories alive beyond that generation and so on, or just tell people about how we how one sort of set of people actually lived compared to how the current generation live.
When you go to a place that’s had such a rich, dense history in such a short period of time, there’s lots of people who are still alive, who remember this history happening. So there’s people you can meet and talk to about it, learn about how the built environment, the buildings have changed, whether people have fond memories of the Yugoslavia buildings, whether they us who turn up thinking about these incredible Brutalist masterpieces, and whether actually that’s us fetishising them from afar, or so challenging our own perceptions from afar versus what people locally actually remember and care about, it’s all it’s a really interesting thing for us to do.
TETSURO NAGATA: Yugoslav Brutalist architecture is unique. From the outside, it might seem kind of similar to other forms of brutalist architecture, but I think once you start to understand the nuances, and begin to understand the beauty and the detail, the engineering, how it’s different from other forms of Brutalism, with small nods to expressive, organic forms, but also kind of Balkan vernacular. And I think that as we kind of gone there, we’ve really enjoyed kind of finding kind of those, those nuances, and being able to tell the students, you know, what to look out for, and maybe becoming our own small experts in the matter, very lightly.
And I think the spomeniks that we spoke about is really unique. It’s completely different take on the idea of memorial, which avoids the figurative generally, the figurative that we see across the Western world. But it’s also able to kind of evoke emotions, like really distinct emotions through abstract forms.
PETER KORCHNAK: In the class, the students are tasked to design a building in a city they visit on the study trip, following the trip theme.
DAVID DI DUCA: They have a lot of freedom to choose a site in Belgrade or Ljubljana or wherever we happen to visit with our students, to find their own, their own places. We encourage them to look at buildings which have become redundant, or perhaps have a possibility of becoming redundant, or there’s a way of learning from a building which might be limited lifespan or… So we are still interested in how buildings adapt or change or can be potentially reused, or what we can learn from buildings that have failed to be reused for longevity.
But then we also talk a lot about how stories and trying to build narratives around people’s design projects, about the hypothetical or imagined users for these buildings and how communities might form around them, how that might mean how the building comes to be created, or how it’s maintained, or perhaps how one day in the future, it might switch its user group. So we’re very interested sort of trying to create stories, as much as we are about sort of formal design, or anything about how people actually use spaces and come together to make them.
PETER KORCHNAK: Each trip includes conversations with locals, from various fields, some of whom you may have indeed heard on the show over the years.
TETSURO NAGATA: We’ve tried to be academics in those cities. And we always have really good conversations about what do these what do these cities and what do these countries need? That often leads to a kind of really productive moment for the students, where they start to understand the city a lot more. You got to remember they’re only there for three or four days, and so it’s hard to kind of fully understand the culture. So being able to speak to locals there and experts there kind of really helps us develop our ideas and programs for buildings.
DAVID DI DUCA: Our students do an incredible amount of work on these design projects over the course of three, four months, like a phenomenal amount of work. And they’re never going to be built. They’re never going to be a real building. So that that kind of endeavor that goes into creating this hypothetical building, the work that goes into imagining ways to create a design and communicate the ideas, whether that be the final design, or communicate the ideas about how the design was developed sort of is the project in its own right. It should be of merit all by itself, that you’re commenting on something, experimenting with something, proposing something, asking questions,
PETER KORCHNAK: Since 2023, the duo have taken four of these study trips, each with a different brief.
TETSURO NAGATA: It’s a really enjoyable task writing the briefs. And it’s kind of looking at the countries and going, what’s the kind of key aspect that we want to not necessarily solve, but question when we get there?
We began in Serbia, and we started with this idea of nostalgia, specifically the Yugonostalgia that some people, perhaps of an older generation still have and from what we hear, some of the younger generation do kind of are starting to learn about even if they didn’t experience Yugoslavia itself.
So we asked the question of whether, whether to look back or to look forward to the future. And interestingly, yeah, when we were in Novi Beograd in particular, I think we met some people who were yugonostalgic—
DAVID DI DUCA: —people in a bar in Novi Beograd who are in their 20s, who are talking about Yugoslavia, and then people who are, you know, who were kind of culturally significant of the era, still doing their thing.
PETER KORCHNAK: The layering of history, in a city that has been destroyed 44 times throughout its history, was of special interest, particularly at the Expo Center site, where a concentration camp was located during World War II.
TETSURO NAGATA: Some of our students designed a kind of music studio based on the Yugoslav punk scene, being very nostalgic there. Also looked at kind of the spomeniks that were a lot of them were kind of degrading, and someone decided to design a museum of spomeniks, coupled with the housing for Roma community, who’d taken over some of the buildings there already. A bathhouse parliament to discuss Serbia’s ascension to the EU which I’m sure is very contentious.
PETER KORCHNAK: In 2024, the class went to Skopje.
TETSURO NAGATA: We questioned authenticity in architecture by examining what the country had done to its capital since— It was a 10-year anniversary of Skopje 2014, the initiative which transformed the center of Skopje into what the government at the time decided was kind of a respectable, looked like a respectable European capital. Some may choose to disagree, but yeah, we thought it’s a kind of good opportunity to kind of go there and discuss what is real and what isn’t, what is authentically North Macedonian. Because I think that is the kind of key question when they— that all the people there are asking themselves, in a way, and so, you know, there are the we go there, and there are these brutalist concrete buildings that have got these polystyrene facades.
PETER KORCHNAK: Skopje 2014 was a major redevelopment in the city in the early 2010s which covered many buildings with facades inspired by classical architecture as a reference to Macedonia’s ancient history. Many many statues, mostly of notable Macedonians from various fields, were also erected around central Skopje. The grand neo-classical revamp of Skopje turned the place into a gallery of kitsch and a lot of what was done at great cost is already falling apart.
TETSURO NAGATA: It feels like a stage set, doesn’t it? That’s, that’s kind of how we were talking about it.
It’s almost like a, yeah, it’s like a theater where there are stage sets, and you can’t really tell whether you’re in a stage set sometimes, or whether you’re in the real world. And that was that was really fun for us. We, you know, partly because the brutalist architecture was of such a high quality. But then a lot of them are abandoned. You know, the post office building bang in the middle of the city. We constantly reference it as one of the best kind of pieces of architecture we’ve seen.
DAVID DI DUCA: Yeah, it’s amazing. And obviously this, this is us going there as outsiders and with our architecture goggles, if you’re viewing the world in a very particular way. Seeing them overclad and changed, and the idea that building, the cities and buildings and identity could be changed as part of a political agenda, to change the positioning of the country or the history of the country, is such such an extreme idea, really, to see it actually actioned on a city scale like that, where they’ve placed new, new sculptures in the streets to represent people, a lot of figures who are, some are contested whether they’re from North Macedonia or not, then also pretending that the these, these, there’s a whole history of architecture that wasn’t there, and it’s all slightly out of scale, it’s all slightly in poor condition now, as bits of polystyrene cladding coming off.
I mean, it’s, in many ways, it’s a sorry tale, 2014 but as an outside architect, neutral observer, it’s a very fascinating thing to have taken place.
TETSURO NAGATA: And our students had quite a lot of fun there with the programs that they decided for their building. So there was one which was a courthouse for the statues that were conceived for Skopje, 2014 so the people of Skopje could decide whether those, those statues, those bronze statues, should remain in the city or not, and if not, I think they were melted down and turned into a playground.
There was a polystyrene recycling plant, so using all the facades and kind of compressing them into a reusable form of polystyrene, again, to kind of to create other building components across the city.
There was also a project that tried to find the real authentic North Macedonia, looking at kind of folklore tales probably from the rural areas of North Macedonia, and creating a library for storytelling within there.
So different reactions to the to the question of authenticity,
DAVID DI DUCA: I feel like I’ve been quite excited about something which a lot of people in North Macedonia are quite traumatized by. So I think this sort of should sort of qualify a little bit. But there’s two sides to the story. We met a lot of people who felt that it was a terrible thing to have happened to the city.
We also hung out with some politicians or sort of political commentators through strange friends of friends, and they gave us this sort of perspective where you can’t ignore the fact that it has increased tourism and a lot of the things that they aim to achieve did happen. So it is a conflicted story.
So on one side, as architects, we’re going it’s great loss of the Brutalist buildings. It’s fascinating to see an identity of a country being trying to be sort of augmented or different story told through changing the buildings.
And that seems perhaps inauthentic to us from our sort of, our sort of architectural education in the in Western Europe. But what is authentic? And what do people actually want to see when they go somewhere or does it actually have an effect on what society does next.
PETER KORCHNAK: The city you may experience today was planned and built in the two decades after the 1963 earthquake—and it endures.
[SOUNDBITE]
Skopje is one of the world’s most Brutalist cities. Come tour it with me on the self-guided walking audio tour “Socialist Skopje: Brutalism in the City of Solidarity.”
On this self-guided walking audio tour on the VoiceMap app you’ll find out how the city was rebuilt after a devastating 1963 earthquake, get a sense of the bold architectural legacy of socialist Yugoslavia, and hear how international solidarity transformed North Macedonia’s capital into a showcase of modernist design and one of Europe’s most architecturally distinctive cities.
You’ll have a chance to see an illegal monument to Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia’s first mall, and the many ways the controversial Skopje 2014 redevelopment project transformed the cityscape.
Get the tour at Yugoblok.com/Travel or via the VoiceMap app.
PETER KORCHNAK: Next, last year, the class went to Sarajevo.
TETSURO NAGATA: In Sarajevo, we looked at the theme of healing, whether that meant the physical scars of the war torn buildings that we saw everywhere across across the city, or all the social damage that the war has had on former enemies who still live side by side in the country. And I think that was kind of the most shocking element of the visit, was to to understand that, yeah, these people live, live together. they they go to school together, sometimes those schools are segregated. And to live in that kind of very split city. And so I think we, we gave this, the students, this, this brief.
And, you know, maybe it’s a bit quite dreamy brief of saying, How can we, at the same time, heal buildings?
DAVID DI DUCA: We spoke to quite a few people about the bullet holes in all the buildings. A few conversations we had touched on the less sort of dilemma, I suppose, between memory and the importance of remembering what happened and fixing buildings and removing those scars and taking that memory in the urban environment, the building fabric away and how that sits with future generations.
About how you recover? Is it good to constantly have these reminders? Sometimes, with something so traumatic, in such an extreme example.
TETSURO NAGATA: Whether to cover up those wounds, or whether, whether we keep them and keep them as a memorial to the war and make sure that people still understand that that happened. But also, is there any way in which architecture could heal some of the fractures within society itself.
We tried to be very hopeful. We did go to the 1984 Olympic sites and look back at happier times, I suppose, and seeing, you know, when the country was a lot more united, and we tried to, we went to the bobsled track and ski jump. And, you know, a few of the students use those as sites to kind of, maybe utilize some of the happier memories that that people may have with those spaces. And it was nice to see the kind of the ski slopes where children were kind of learning how to ski at the bottom of the Olympic sites.
DAVID DI DUCA: We stayed in Hotel Holiday. What’s it called now? The old Holiday Inn. And that felt like an important thing to do to understand the history. And there were a few people we spoke to sort of concurred, saying that they know the history of that building, in many ways, is the can be used to tell the story of Sarajevo over the last 50 odd years, or something.
PETER KORCHNAK: The most recent trip took the group to Zagreb and Ljubljana.
DAVID DI DUCA: We went to Zagreb for two nights and spent one day exploring primarily the trade fair grounds, because we’re interested in ideas around nonalignment this year and identity again a little bit.
But we thought, in the current climate of today’s politics, non alignment was quite an interesting idea to look at. Whether there are, you know or about ways in which conversations can happen across divides, I suppose, as part of that. So the trade fairs in Zagreb, where east and west and lots of other countries would come together during the Cold War era, and Yugoslavia is a kind of third, third place in many ways, seemed like a really interesting place to go.
It’s quite interesting place to explore now, the current uses of the buildings there these vast hangers is also amazing, like the sort of go karting and Laser Quest. Some are abandoned. Some are some of these more sensible things, but it’s we quite enjoyed. Quite enjoyed that sort of history being layered over. You know, how many people doing laser quest in a trampoline park, realize where they are.
[SOUNDBITE]
Zagreb Trade Fair is a Yugoslav-era gem of industrial architecture.
Come tour it with me and Donald Niebyl of Spomenik Database on the self-guided walking audio tour “Monuments to Modernism: Exploring the Rise and Decline of the Zagreb Trade Fair.”
This self-guided walking audio tour on the VoiceMap app explores the fair’s history and significance, tracing its evolution from a symbol of Yugoslav ambition to the neglected open-air museum it is today in independent Croatia. Our tour through the past, present, and future of the Zagreb Trade Fair explores one of the most ambitious and iconic Yugoslav-era projects in the city.
You’ll get a chance to experience the drama of the Cold War through multiple Soviet and American pavilions, admire the Brutalist and modernist creations of some of Yugoslavia’s most notable architects, visit the only preserved building in Europe built in the traditional style by the Chinese, as well as places where Louis Armstrong played a concert, Orson Welles shot a movie, and Croatia’s first president practiced tennis.
Get the tour at Yugoblok.com/Travel or via the VoiceMap app.
PETER KORCHNAK: And finally, Ljubljana.
DAVID DI DUCA: Ljubljana offered pre-Yugoslav architecture through Plečnik, which is an interesting hybridizing of styles, sort of forerunner of postmodernism, that fits with some of the themes of non alignment, or the ideas about sort of hybridization, or finding ways to incorporate ideas from different places, different ideas, and bring them together into holistic ideas.
TETSURO NAGATA: We knew about Plečnik, but I think it’s once, once we were there and we kind of saw some of the decisions he made, and went to his house, and kind of sort saw the way, the amount of work they created, I think we found really inspiring, and students have found really inspiring, giving them a little bit of freedom in terms of the way in which they think about design is kind of, you know, where materials aren’t necessarily what they seem, and references are brought from other places that you might not expect.
DAVID DI DUCA: Contemporary identity in Ljubljana, is different to other parts of the former Yugoslavia, because they’re the closest to mainland—mainland talking from the UK— the closest to sort of Central Europe, geographically, and how that’s had a different impact, whether they whether that sort of identity of being Yugoslavian versus EU is changing memories and what have you. But generally, there’s a real richness of architecture in the city in general, which is fantastic.
Ljubljana has got this Austro-Hungarian architectural history pretty much intact, and has this Yugoslavian area era, era, addition to the north and again, the trade exhibition grounds, they’re really interesting. And—
TETSURO NAGATA: It’s where the layers kind of they still exist with each other, isn’t it? Yeah, whereas in other places, they’ve been tried to be on top of each other, served, in some cases, erased or damaged. So yeah, whereas in Ljubljana, maybe they just kind of coexist.
DAVID DI DUCA: The petrol stations are famously brilliant.
TETSURO NAGATA: Oh yeah, that’s true.
PETER KORCHNAK: It’s too soon to decide where the road will take the young architects next year. It could be Serbia again, as students have turned over. And it could also be countries outside the former Yugoslavia.
One thing is clear. Architecture there offers a multitude of ideas, themes, and issues to explore and learn from and yes, even apply today.
[SOUNDBITE]
PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening.
All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself.
Find additional information, sources, embeds, links, photos, and the transcript of this episode at Yugoblok.
Also at Yugoblok, listen to the extended ad-free version of this and every other available episode. Become a member today, visit Yugoblok.com/Join.
Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić.
I am Peter Korchňak.
Cheers!