On Thursday, February 12th at 6PM dr Michael Zinganel from Academy of Fine Arts Vienna will hold a lecture about the heritage of Croatian socialist recreational architecture. The lecture will take place at the Institute of Art History, Suur-Kloostri 11, room 104, and be moderated by dr Epp Lankots.
After WW II many Austrian intellectuals perceived the Third Way of Tito’s Yugoslavia during the cold war period as a familiar but more radical version of political and economic neutrality in between the East and West. For the Austrian middle class Yugoslavia’s Coastline became one of their favorite summer tourist destinations, and for Architects the explicit modern style of the new WWII monuments, buildings, urban and tourist developments an alien but exotic attraction – a 1:1 museum of superb late-modern design, most of it built in the 60s and 70s, also thanks to vast support from the West.
In the wake of the political change after the fall of Communism, the dis-integration war, and the privatization of business, many urban developments and outstanding buildings have been economically and physically restructured, in a myriad of ways, leaving a legacy of deserted ruins, cautious renovations, exorbitant conversions, and radical densification. But the more these built monuments of Modernisation are endangered to vanish the more they are rediscovered and re-appriciated by architects and intellectuals today.
Michael Zinganel studied Architecture at Graz University of Technology and History at the Vienna University. He is working as writer, artist, and curator. He had taught at several universities and academies in Austria and abroad, most recently at the postgraduate program of the Bauhaus Dessau foundation. In 2012 he co-founded the independent research institute Tracing Spaces. Since 2014 he is Associate Research Scientist at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Principal Investigator of the project “Stop and Go: Nodes of Transformation and Transition” about East European Traffic Corridors. His most recent book: Holidays after the Fall: Seaside Architecture and Urbanism in Bulgaria and Croatia, co-edited with Elke Beyer and Anke Hagemann, Berlin: jovis 2013, ISBN 978-3-86859-226-9