The Environment of Organic Theory: Juraj Neidhardt’s Organicism in Early Yugoslavian Architecture and Urbanism

Abstract

The commitment that the architects of emerging Socialist Yugoslavia made towards its revolutionary society in the early 1950s resulted in a pursuit of theory capable of articulating architectural social aspirations. In the case of architect Juraj Neidhardt, this pursuit entailed an interrogation of a lineage of interwar modernist organicism, which he inherited as Le Corbusier’s intern in the 1930s. The theory was premised on the existence of the universal social body, perceived as an organic whole and operating at the scale of the city. In the course of the 1950s, however, Neidhardt developed a conception of organicism that relied on the scale of the region as both the reference of an organic whole and the scope of operation. This paper unravels the relationship between Neidhardt’s new organicism and the Yugoslavian political–economic paradigm and how it was rooted in the discovery of the environment. This frames the political relevance of the pairing between organic theory and the environment.

Keywords:

• Yugoslavian architecture and urbanism
• architectural theory
• modernism
• organicism
• planning
• Juraj Neidhardt

Notes

¹ Dennison Rusinow, The Yugoslav Experiment 1948–1974 (Oakland: University of California Press, 1978).

² Ibid., xiii.

³ K. Michael Hays, “Introduction,” in Architecture Theory Since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), x.

⁴ For recent studies in modernist urban planning, see David Haney and Elke Sohn, “Traces of Organicism in Gardening and Urban Planning Theories in Early Twentieth-Century Germany,” in Bio-Centrism and Modernism, ed. Oliver A. I. Botar and Isabel Wünsche (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 107–26; and Andrew Shanken, “The Tree in the System: Shifting Urban Paradigms in Mid-Century,” Perspecta, 45 (2012): 143–52.

⁵ See also the canonical study by Alan Colquhoun, “Typology and Design Method,” Perspecta, 12 (1969): 71–4.

⁶ See also Stanislaus Von Moos’s discussion of the Modulor in the larger system of Le Corbusier’s “elements of a synthesis”: Stanislaus Von Moos, Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis (Rotterdam: 010, 2009), 312–17.

⁷ See also Reinhold Martin, “Organicism’s Other,” Grey Room, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 34–51.

⁸ Tomislav Premerl, Hrvatska moderna arhitektura izmedju dva rata (Zagreb: Nakladni zavod matice hrvatske, 1990), 108.

⁹ Dušan Grabrijan and Juraj Neidhardt, “Sarajevo i njegovi trabanti – Arhitektonsko-urbanistička razmatranja uoči nacrta za regulaciju grada Sarajeva,” Tehnički vijesnik, 59, nos. 7–9 (1942): 197–322.

¹⁰ Colquhoun, “Typology and Design Method,” 71–4, 72.

¹¹ Von Moos, Le Corbusier, 312–17, at 316.

¹² Grabrijan and Neidhardt, “Sarajevo i njegovi trabanti.”

¹³ Ibid., 202.

¹⁴ Dijana Alić, “Transformations of the Oriental in the Architectural Work of Juraj Neidhardt and Dušan Grabrijan.” Doctoral thesis, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2010, 121.

¹⁵ In order to avoid both political subordination and economic exploitation by Soviet Russia, Yugoslavia stepped out of the Communist Block and the Cominform in 1948. This event is also referred to as the “Tito–Stalin split” after the names of the two countries’ leaders.

¹⁶ Dennison Rusinow describes the distribution of power in the inter-war Kingdom of Yugoslavia: “The Croats, Slovenes and other non-Serbs in the South as well as the North, the majority of the population, found themselves living in what was really a Greater Serbia, with a Serbian king, Serbian capital, Serbian prime ministers throughout the inter-war period (except for a few months in 1928) and Serb domination of the officer corps of the army and bureaucracy”; Rusinow, Yugoslav Experiment, xvii.

¹⁷ Suzana Leček and Tihana Petrović, “Država i znanost: jugoslavenstvo na III. slavenskom kongresu geografa i etnografa 1930. godine,” Studia Ethnologica Croatica, 23 (2011): 149–82.

¹⁸ Jovan Cvijić, Balkansko poluostrvo i Južnoslovenske zemlje. Osnovi antrpogeografije (Belgrade: Državna štamparija Kraljevine Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca, 1922), 111.

¹⁹ Branislav Krstić, Atinska povelja i misao arhitekata i urbanista FNRJ 1950-ih (Belgrade: author, 2014), 11.

²⁰ Josip Seissel, “Problemi izgradnje mediteranskih gradova i naselja,” in Krstić, Atinska povelja i misao arhitekata i urbanista FNRJ 1950-ih, 313.

²¹ Nicholas R. Lang, “The Dialectics of Decentralization: Economic Reform and Regional Inequality in Yugoslavia,” World Politics, 27, no. 3 (1975): 309–35, at 314.

²² Ibid., 320.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ For observations on Yugoslavian modernism and regionalism in the recent comprehensive study on the architecture and urbanism of Socialist Yugoslavia, see Vladimir Kulić, Maroje Mrduljaš, and Wolfgang Thaler, Modernism in Between: The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia (Berlin: Jovis, 2012), 87–91.

²⁵ Dušan Grabrijan and Juraj Neidhardt, Arhitektura Bosne i put u savremeno (Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije, Kiril Vidmar, 1957), 452.

²⁶ Rudolf Bićanić, Economic Policy in Socialist Yugoslavia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 38.

²⁷ Marjan Tepina, “Ekonomske zakonitosti urbanizacije i regionalno planiranje,” in Regionalno prostorno planiranje (Belgrade: Izdanje urbanista Srbije, 1957), 17.

²⁸ Grabrijan and Neidhardt, Arhitektura Bosne, 452.

²⁹ Cvijić, Balkansko poluostrvo i Južnoslovenske zemlje, 111.

³⁰ Gajo Petrović, “Why Praxis?,” Praxis, no. 1 (1964), https://www.marxists.org/subject/praxis/issue-01/why-praxis.htm (accessed May 7, 2016).

³¹ Le Corbusier, “Preface,” in Grabrijan and Neidhardt, Arhitektura Bosne, 6.