450 anticipations for the territory of Croatia

The 450 projects presented on these pages are not a true presentation of the “latest” trends which will cover Croatian territory in the next few years.

The 450 projects showing houses, hotels, shopping centres, city squares, bridges, restaurants, schools, museums, roads, city quarters, parks, river embankments, gardens, shops, hospitals, airports, bus/train stations, ports… built in the past 3 years give an inaccurate sampling of Croatian architects and urban planners from various parts of the country. The 450 projects presented at the 38th Zagreb Salon, 2003, are not, therefore, a statistically relevant sample.

These are, above all, ideas: drawings, of projects being carried out or already realized, intended for the most part to change spaces in Zagreb, Split, the rest of the cities along the coast, spacious areas in the inland.

These are anticipations of efforts on the part of individuals and groups who transform space, attempting to realize spaces which are “disassociated” from the averageness of the architectural sector, and as such the results of the Zagreb Salon can become a valuable tool for estimating the ambition and contradictions present in Croatian architecture and the territory within which they have emerged.

countries in transition

What immediately catches one’s eye in Croatia today from among these 450 projects is the simultaneous existence of two parallel dimensions. The quick crossing over from a regime of state socialism to conditions of liberal democracy freed the powerful, particular energy which throughout these last years was transferred onto inherited forms, arising from decades of socialist urban planning and which were not erased.

The individual fragmentation of new transformations, which leads to the authentic disintegration into new private - often wild - constructions, and very often not respecting any kind of urban regulations (from the Report by the Inspection for Urban and Spatial Planning, Ministry of Environmental Protection and Physical Planning, 2002 which states that “from 1375 spatial plans of cities and communities only 674 new ones are in compliance with the Law from 1994”), is flooding and changing the constructed space on the basis of a completely different syntax.

A mass of isolated objects is flooding space which was shaped by decades-long managed planning, the building of large-scale residential quarters, infrastructures, spatial public places and socially representative monumental edifices.

The projects which can be found on these pages - almost all of them individual constructions, closed, jealous of their isolation and proud of their individuality, despite being built one next to the other - illustrate this immense particular act of “newly rewritten” territory, which today acts as a massive palimpsest.

Two Croatias actually live together and overlap, thanks to the radical difference between societal and social “geographies” which created and “wrote” them. The state, party, political lobby on one side, and the institutions of local administration, multinational companies, and multitude of private actors on the other side.

between the state and the individual

Perhaps even the weaknesses of a transitional model of declarative democracy, based on welfare politics, have alleviated the mechanical and unsightly overlapping of these two parallel dimensions. The absence of one long-term tradition of state reformist and socially political direction in relation to urban phenomena, as well as the weakness of institutions capable of managing the parts of the territory “from above”, today outlines the all the more obvious and intense conflict between the liberalistic-oriented majority and the overlay of socialist urban planning. This also happens because there is often a lack of institutions which should carry out welfare politics (especially in the construction of infrastructure and service programs) and those of “functional autonomy” (chambers of commerce, universities, banks, insurance companies, fairs…) which in the countries of western Europe acted like a filter during the period of transition (and up to achieving real self-management) of the processes of urban transformation. There is also a lack of the role of the state which would be capable of directing particular energy into projects of general benefit. But today even private institutions that take over the responsibility of promoting and managing activities of public concern so that they can change and in some way compensate for the lack of state social politics also act equally ineffectively. (In addition, it seems that the actual reviewing of 450 projects warns of the lack of investments in infrastructure that is of general importance: roads, bridges, viaducts, basic urban objects. It appears that in many new urban areas a basic network of canalization still has not been carried out. “Buildings along the coast often do not even have septic tanks. And their number during the summer months almost triply exceeds the real possibilities for canalization capacities.” cit. Slobodna Dalmacija, 13.10.2000). There is also no network of institutions, communities and individuals capable of organizing their own activities within the space, and that they fill physical spaces with their own projects and transformations which have a limited, but obvious social impact. (Multiplicity, USE. Uncertain States of Europe, Skirà, Milano 2003).

fertile delay

Struck by thousands of construction “earthquakes” which are flooding the space created by decades-long socialist urban planning, the Croatian territory today is a place of turbulence and lumbering overtures. In suburban areas, alongside enormous new shopping centers, one can still find surviving hamlets, a historical core and large social-residential houses. In cities, like Zagreb, the areas of the immediate and wider city center have once again been returned to their rightful owners and which real estate agencies are now partially reselling. The ground-floors of entire blocks of the historical center have now become colossal horizontal shopping chains.

Along the coast the symbols of socialist tourism are surrounded by a mass of residential houses, while foreign capital - as what happened recently in Split - competes for the building of immense tourist, residential and commercial centers, which in other parts of Europe is no longer a novelty. The subject here is about the processes of transformation which covered, even going back some 15-20 years, and radically changed the spaces of the countries of Western Europe. These transformations were caused by radical social changes: a growth in the number of individuals capable of independently investing in the changing of a settled space; a crisis of oligarchic regimes in the managing of space; a reproduction of sub-systems of individual actors in competitions and who are mutually equal in the managing of local parts of the space. In Croatia, as well as in other countries of Eastern Europe, a chance is being offered to gather a treasure trove of the often dramatic and devastating experiences from neighbouring European countries, along with the start of a very important process of discovering ways in which the state and institutions of local administration can help direct - but not become involved or to have control over - powerful, particular private energies which are now moving across the territory, and how to always extract some sense of public benefit from private architectural initiatives where infrastructure, green areas and controlled housing rates are concerned.

Croatia today is being offered, more than any other eastern countries, a considerable chance to use its delay in a fruitful way, and that it closely studies the foundations of European urban planning.

How to avoid having large shopping centers create a “void” in their surroundings, like some gigantic spaceships, and instead create the opportunity for new forms of public and communal space?

How to redirect the energies that pulsate in the diffusion of family homes and force them to also produce public spaces and infrastructures?

How to protect the coast, the land’s true great resource, and how to direct, curb, and occasionally redefine - but so as not to lose them - large projects along the coast which are being spurred by foreign capital?

How to prevent the islands from becoming tourist theme parks and to have them retain the complex diversity of their functioning and way of life?

These are all inevitable and difficult questions because there are no previous experiences - be they far or near - to which we can look towards.

Here the issue is about an unusual opportunity for experimentation and exploration that from up close observes the culture and capability of the class of intellectuals to which Croatian architects and urban planners belong. (Ivana Katunarić, “Croatian delay - case study of Bol”, Domus Academy, Milano, 2003) And Europe from that standpoint today has nothing further to teach us to that end.

illustrated concepts, built concepts

It is precisely this kind of thinking about the great responsibilities being carried by contemporary architecture in Croatia (Saša Randić, “Foreword”, in these pages.), that prompted us to select the presented projects, the ones capable of rising above the simple functionalistic response to the problem posed by the client, and it convinced us to award the architects who showed themselves capable of transcending stylistic preoccupations and linguistic classifications.

We selected those projects that are capable of realistically approaching the conditions of the real estate market, dealing with the client’s demands, but always committed to the thought of producing a symbolic and functional “plus-value”, that offer the city and community something more than what the individual investors who are financing and producing architecture today across Europe demand.

Reviewing the vast developments across the territory of contemporary Croatia brought us to the idea that from the large number of projects we give priority to a small number that are in the position of making use of the power of individual and fragmented energies for the creation of spaces that turn to local communities and call on them for interaction, exchange, competition and comparison of thoughts.

This convinced us that even in Croatia the future of architecture, as a discipline of general social benefit, is measured by the capability of discovering new spatialities and new planning tools, and the realization of “examples” that are open towards the future and which question ordinary and uninventive responses that architecture very often offers to its clients.

It is unimportant whether these architectures are already built, in the process of being built, whether they are competition projects or whether they are only imagined; it is unimportant whether it is about a usable object, infrastructure or building. The members of this small group share something that is altogether more important: extravagant, breakthrough generosity.