In order to respond to a chronic – and enduring housing shortage, schools of architecture across the federation experimented with prefabrication and user-centred design. This photographic essay offers a glimpse into a forgotten world of social equity and aspiration, made flesh in a carefully considered concrete composition.Ĭonsidered to be the highest quality mass-produced invention, the single-family apartment remains one of the most valued legacies of Yugoslavia. It is therefore unfortunate that the country’s enduring legacy is that of its brutal disintegration – collateral damage of the fall of socialism and a march towards competitive neoliberalism – masking its exclusive contribution to twentieth century modernism. As Yugoslavia evolved – leading the non-aligned movement in demonstrating a third way of economic development – an equally chimeric architectural language emerged informed by architectural language of both East and West. This was the beginning of a uniquely Yugoslav programme of spatial production, out of which grew a distinct vernacular of modernism fused with regional elements.

In an incredible act of statecraft, this building programme used brigades of young socialists from across the country to construct highways, and ready land for large scale house building.

These ambitions were enacted by a large-scale construction programme, effectively building a new socialist federation – combining a number of distinct regional entities with their own cultures and colonial histories. Following the socialisation of property in the years following World War Two, Yugoslavia embarked on an ambitious programme of industrialisation.

Iterated over through successive innovative constitutional reforms, Yugoslav self-management was concerned with a withering away of the state, devolving decision-making to the people through nested social enterprises. Tito’s break with the Soviet Union in the early 1950s paved the way for Yugoslavia 1 to forge its own developmental strategies, based on a return to core Marxist values and away from Stalinist policies.

Kotor brotherhood of shadow