engleski

Sinturbanism: socialist legacy of utopian spatial thinking

Croatian architect Vjenceslav Richter published his treatise on Sinturbanism in 1964, at the moment when the influence of high modernism on architecture and urbanism in Yugoslavia was reaching its peak. It was also the moment when harmonious post-war urban transformation and planed urban growth suffered a serious blow by series of political and economic reforms resulting – at the end of 1960s – with a significant structural changes of Yugoslav society that also revealed incapacity of modernist urban planning to fully embrace egalitarian dimension of self-managing socialism. Richter responded to this “flaw in the system” with the utopian vision of the city as a complex structure of self-contained living units fulfilling all existential and social needs of their inhabitants and serving as “spatial modulators” of social interactions. Setting rational and clearly legible spatial relations – a defining principle of Sinturbanism – in direct connection to rational organisation of Yugoslav socialist society, Richter clearly pointed the social ambitions of his proposal, but the rigidity of that correlation almost turned sinturbanism’s utopian dimension to its opposite. Preserved by elaborated relation between built and natural environment and imaginative application of technology it is important legacy of utopian spatial thinking from the period of socialism that deserves our attention.

utopian architecture; socialism; spatial thinking; urban planing

Rad je odabran za objavljivanje u zborniku skupa, koji će biti tiskan krajem 2015. godine.