Tag Archive for: architectural theory

After a short afterwar period of the Marxist radicalism, in the 1950s and the 1960s, a correction of antibourgeois Marxist revolution occurred in Serbia by practicing a “relentless critique of everything that exists”. At the end of the 1960s and in the 1970s, this political strategy was transposed into a specific civil-democratic model of critique involving “society versus state”. In the architecture of the 1970s, the understanding of the traditional creative practices and the traditional images of heritage was marked by a certain civic model of critique which, based on the understanding of national tradition founded on internal emotional, ideological-political, historical and interest-driven diffusions, can be grouped into radical, conservative or liberal. The open call for an urbanistic arrangement of the Marx and Engel’s Square (Trg Marksa i Engelsa) in Belgrade, was open from June to November 15, 1975. It coincided with the transition from “a social-planning radicalism” to “the evolutionist perspectives” in the development of the city. With adoption of an enforcable planning-strategic documentation for the development and arrangement of city spaces, at the end of the 1960s which redefined an intuitive influence of architects on the city image, this evolutionary perspectivism, however, gave birth to a contradictory voluntarism and a culture of losing the architectural synthesis of the city. Faced with the perspective of a disoriented, long lasting and partial evolutionism, the eminent actors in the field of architecture searched for solutions in a new authoritarianism, in broad arrangement strokes and robust accentuations which departed from the old model of spatial planning by switching from a class-revolutionary to a state-revolutionary mythology.