Docomomo Journal
Not a member yet
547 research outputs found
Sort by
Public Buildings in the Architecture of Ukrainian Modernism: Workers’ Clubs
Full text linkAmong the avant-garde monuments preserved in Kharkiv and creating its unique architectural character, the buildings of workers’ clubs occupy a special place. The construction of buildings with such a function began in Kharkiv at the beginning of the 20th century, but after the October Revolution, workers’ clubs became almost the main symbol of the era, because they symbolized the desire for a new life and the creation of a new person. In the works of avant-garde architects, the club became a favorite design theme. During the architectural competitions of the early and mid-1920s, a typology of club buildings was compiled and original compositional and artistic solutions formed, which reflected a creative discussion about the development of Ukrainian architecture: the struggle against the revival of baroque trends ended with the victory of a new direction — Modernism. The architecture of Kharkiv workers’clubs in the 1920s and 1930s reflects the development trends of Ukrainian modernism, but it has its own characteristics related to both regional features and the individuality of the masters who took part in their design. Kharkiv’s clubs reflect the diversity of views of, and approaches to, form-giving by architects with different views and experience, whose buildings constitute a unique architectural heritage. The purpose of this study is to identify the characteristic features of Kharkiv workers’ clubs and determine their place in the general picture of Ukrainian modern architecture for the further development of a program for their preservation. The research uses the methods of historical-architectural, functional-structural and stylistic analysis, which includes traditional general scientific approaches. The material collected, analyzed and systematized in this article can be used for further scientific research in the field of the development of historic architecture, for the implementation of project proposals for the restoration and conservation of individual monuments, and in education
Sarajevo and its Satellites: The Baščaršija’s Contribution to the New Master Plan of Sarajevo
Full text linkIn 1942, Grabrijan and Neidhardt guest-edited an issue of the Croatian architectural journal Technical Gazette (Tehnički Vjesnik). Titled Sarajevo and Its Satellites (Sarajevo i njegovi trabanti), the publication contributed to architectural and urban debates and to the development of the regulatory urban plan of the city of Sarajevo. It allowed the authors to present their design work and writings–both individually and collaboratively–framed by their shared vision of a new master plan for the city.This paper argues that despite the authors’ interest in and fascination with the historic core of Sarajevo, their master plan denied the relevance of the existing urban fabric to the growing city. Their discussion of the old precinct demonstrates the authors’ gradually shifting intentions as they abandon their search for modernity within the old fabric’s authentic qualities. Instead, they associated Islamic urban forms with stereotypical and preconceived oppositional relationships between new and old, progressive and backward. As this paper demonstrates, the result of this approach was that Grabrijan and Neidhardt’s master plan assigned only a peripheral role to the old precinct within their proposed vision. However, even within this publication, some projects, such as designs of mining workers’ housing, anticipate Neidhardt and Grabrijan’s later redefinition of Bosnian architecture as innately modern, which would become a major theme of their subsequent collaboration and well-known book, Architecture of Bosnia and the Way towards Modernity, published 15 years later in 1957
Origins of Modernity: Plečnik and Grabrijan: Architecture between the Classical Canon and Structural Honesty
Full text linkThe first part of this research is based on the analysis of several articles published by Dušan Grabrijan in the late 1940s and early 1950s, his book Plečnik in njegova šola (Plečnik and His School), and the analysis of Grabrijan’s teaching method rooted in Auguste Choisy’s book Histoire de l’architecture (Choisy, 1899), published as a study script. The book Plečnik in njegova šola (Grabrijan, 1968) is based on Grabrijan’s published and unpublished texts, some of which were originally written during his WWII imprisonment. It attempts to critically contextualize, evaluate, and present Plečnik’s work. The book was edited by his wife, Prof. Nada Grabrijan, and published posthumously in 1968.One of the first three of Plečnik’s graduates, Dušan Grabrijan, is the author of the Memorial to Slovenian Modernity in Ljubljana Žale Cemetery (dedicated to Ivan Cankar, Dragotin Kette, and Josip Murn, with Oton Župančič’s memorial added later, designed by his son, architect Marko Župančič), built between 1924-25 as a result of a winning student competition in Plečnik’s seminar. The memorial was commissioned and funded by Milena Rohrmann. The composition is tripartite, with a reference to Mount Triglav, consisting of three joint columns, of which Ivan Cankar is the tallest and placed in the center. The memorial follows Plečnik’s design principles.The final part of the paper will examine Plečnik’s modernity and his classical yet modern understanding of the architectural discipline, his ‘flexible classicism’ with his inventiveness, playfulness, daring upcycling, experimentation with materials, forms, and structures, all within the frame of highly developed local crafts, not industry. Indeed, the building industry only really developed after WWII in socialist Yugoslavia. Dušan Grabrijan and Juraj Neidhardt were among the first architects in the region to face the new challenges in architecture. They were trying to answer the new questions: How to connect the new role of an architect, industrialization, and new social needs with the mosaic of local cultures, contexts, and communities, and how to apply Plečnik’s human scale to the modernist architecture of the Balkans
Gosprom Ensemble in Kharkiv and the Concept of Modern Style
Full text linkThe ideologists of Constructivism and “production art” of the 1920s put forward the slogan “not style, but method!”. However, the Constructivists-“productionists” movement carried a stylistic charge of great power. The intentions of the Constructivists-“productionists”, their manifestos and slogans are polemically pointed evidence of their awareness of their own place in the Soviet culture of the 1920s. Creative practice continued the development of a certain artistic tradition. It is necessary to reconstruct the development of the problem of style in the concept of “productionists” as a natural and historically determined stage of the movement. The manifestation of the rejection of the idea of style in artistic creativity in the concept of “production art” paradoxically corresponds to its specific conditions in setting the task of creating and identifying the mechanism for the development of modern style. They are analyzed in the article.The “anti-stylistic” orientation of “production art” was paradoxically opposed to the orientation towards a “Constructivist style”. In the late 1920s, it covered a wide range of architects and artists who did not belong to the Constructivist movement and who opposed them. In this regard, the fate of several outstanding monuments of the Modern Movement in the architecture of Kharkiv is indicative — the House of State Industry (Gosprom), the House of Projects and the House of Cooperation. They were the largest and most integral ensemble in their architectural and compositional solution, which embodied the ideas of the Modern Movement in Soviet architecture. The reconstruction of the ensemble after the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) showed the contradictions that were embedded in the Constructivist concept of the modern style. The duality of understanding the art form in it was revealed. On the one hand, it acted as an independent stylistic entity. On the other hand, it could also be considered as a framework, a “draft” of some further work with the form. The concept of modern style defended by the “productionists” was problematized by the practice of “Constructivist stylizations”
Kharkiv International Competition: The Apogee of the Soviet Architectural Avant-Garde
Full text linkOne of the sides of a large study dedicated to the forgotten international competition of 1930 for the Project of the State Ukrainian Theater of Mass Musical Action in Kharkiv is touched upon in this article. Its purpose is the reconstruction of the competition events, identifying the features of the process of their organization. The competition attracted a record number of foreign contestants not only from many European countries, but also from other continents (from the USA and Japan). Why did it generate such widespread interest? Which famous architects took part in it? Who evaluated the projects and according to what criteria were the awards distributed? The author of this article is looking for answers to these questions. The problems of the research are due to the fact that the originals of the competition projects have not survived, and their photocopies and preparatory sketches are scattered in the archives of many countries. Information about the competition and its contestants is scarce and is documented in different languages: Ukrainian, German, French, Russian, Japanese, English, Croatian, Swedish. Only painstaking gathering, meaningful and comparative analysis of textual and graphical information obtained during the study, allows the author to reproduce the course of the competition, to reveal its significance for the development of architecture in Ukraine and for the world Modern Movement. The article analyses the methods that ensured a high level of organization of the competition and an open, unbiased assessment of its results. The distribution of prizes and the authors of the winning projects are also listed. The Kharkiv competition took place at a crucial period for the Soviet avant-garde: 1930-1931 were the last years of its heyday, after which it was banned and persecuted for many years. That is why it is so important to collect these lost puzzles of architectural history
A Study of the Kharkiv Architectural Avant-Garde: Challenges of Authenticity Preservation
Full text linkThe article addresses the issue of preserving Kharkiv’s architectural heritage from the first third of the 20th century. The main focus is on the preservation of authenticity of the early modernist heritage in the context of a crisis situation associated with the overall state of heritage preservation in Ukraine and during active military operations. The research was conducted in the context of the planning development and spatial structure of the Kharkiv historical center and suburbs, where new workers’ settlements were formed, as well as considering the architectural layers within the structure of historical districts of Kharkiv. The main objective of the study is to determine the value and authenticity of the architectural heritage of early modernism. The study employed the methods of historical, retrospective, and comprehensive analysis. The general plan of the “Socialist Reconstruction of Kharkiv” from 1931-1933 and the historical-architectural reference plan of Kharkiv from 2019 were analysed as additional sources. The research results provide comprehensive information about the architectural and urban heritage of this period and emphasize the attention to the issue of preservation of authenticity. The conclusions of this work will serve as a basis for further development of specific measures for the conservation, restoration, and preservation of historical monuments in Kharkiv from the first third of the 20th century. The research will also contribute to raising public awareness about the value of early modernist architectural heritage and encourage the implementation of restoration programs to preserve these important landmarks
Composition Methods of the Soviet Architectural Avant-Garde: Svoboda Square in Kharkiv
Full text linkThis paper explores the composition logic of the creativity of the Avant-garde masters and to identify the principles of the composition language of the architecture of modernism.To characterize the composition language of Avant-garde architecture, systemic, historical-genetic and semiotic methods of research are used. Architectural composition is interpreted as an activity that has its own semantic, morphological and syntactic features. In the example of Svoboda Square (the former Dzerzhinsky Square) in Kharkiv, the logical methods of artistic activity and thinking of the architects of the Soviet Avant-garde of the 1920-1930s are studied.At the beginning of the 20th century avant-garde movements were created artificially, consciously, by an act of will, and they strove to dictate their ideas, concepts and principles as universal and general. The architectural language of the Avant-garde is normative, ascetic and rigidly organized. Distinctive features of the artistic movements of the Avant-garde are the deep analyticity of thinking and the normativity of the declared requirements, abstract concepts and symbols. The logical principles of composition are often repeated thanks to stable semantic associations and are reflected in geometric structures and forms. Thus, the methods of compositional thinking of the Avant-garde form a monological system, i.e. they are internally holistic and normative, not allowing alternatives. It was possible to identify and show that the Avant-garde, as a monological language system, is characterized by the following features: internal integrity, self-sufficiency, normativity; stability of figurative language devices; restriction of freedom of artistic expression with the help of a concept, declaration, slogan, clear conceptual system.Researchers and designers should treat the phenomenon under study not as a “closed”, stylistically defined object, but see it as a complex historical process of structure formation based on an even more complex process of development of thinking and activity of architects and builders of a particular period
Concreto Academy kicks off: Erasmus+ Project
No full textThe Concreto Academy has officially launched its mission to advance modern concrete heritage conservation with an impactful kick-off meeting held on March 6th at the Town Hall of the City of Ivrea. The event, attended by a diverse and enthusiastic audience, marked the beginning of an ambitious Erasmus Plus funded project aimed at preserving architectural heritage through innovative approaches
Dušan Grabrijan's Macedonian House: Fieldwork and its Influence towards a complex Modernism
Full text linkGrabrijan sought to explain and affirm a coexistence of the modern and the traditional in architecture, especially in his seminal studies of Bosnian architecture and the Macedonian house. Co-authored with Neidhardt, his publication about Bosnian architecture is well-known and studied. Grabrijan’s posthumous publication, The Macedonian House, based on the data collected during his fieldwork in regional towns in Macedonia (1946, 1947, 1949), serves to punctuate the progressive modernizing forces and their focus on reconstruction, urbanization, and speedy industrialization of major centers as well as peripheral areas, in the Socialist Republic of (SRMacedonia), as elsewhere in Yugoslavia. As an archival record, The Macedonian House presents a different focus and a rebalance of the postwar agenda that had eclipsed small towns from architectural interest and had effectively produced the demise of the vernacular traditions in the towns. With an ideology to learn from the architecture of the people, Grabrijan’s work wove the vernacular back into a more complex modernism.Grabrijan first traveled to S.R. Macedonia in the summer of 1946 as part of a Yugoslavia-wide exchange–solidarity assistance for post-war renewal. He then organized two research journeys in 1947 and 1949, taking a group of students for fieldwork training. In his archives containing the documents and fieldwork for the publication about the Macedonian House, a drawing of a map of the Balkans resonates with the map of Le Corbusier’s 1911 formative journey to the East, including a coded notation which may refer to folklore, culture, and industry. Grabrijan’s enthusiasm for studying the traditional houses in Macedonia takes him to small towns, covering a broad geography of spatial dialects. Drawing from the Grabrijan archives, this paper will explore his fieldwork methods and his modalities of researching the complex conditions from which the “house for everyone” rises above the ground
Landscapes of Housing: Juraj Neidhardt’s Contextual Approach to Modern Neighborhood Design
Full text linkThe concepts of residential space and housing, created by Yugoslav modernist Juraj Neidhardt through the collaboration with architect Dušan Grabrijan, have yet to be investigated systematically, especially from the urban design point of view. As rooted in joint ethnographic research of local Bosnian dwelling culture and vernacular architecture, Neidhardt developed a specific approach to modern neighborhood design compared to the prevalent scientific-planning approach in post-war modernism. From the perspective of urban design, Neidhardt examined the possibilities of conceptualizing more humane dwellings in the context of rapid housing construction in post-war Yugoslavia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, looking through the lens of traditional dwelling culture in which architecture is a mediator between man and landscape. The article will distill, describe, and interpret Neidhardt’s ideas of a modern neighborhood that arise from elaborated descriptions of the Bosnian vernacular architecture articulated in close collaboration with Dušan Grabrijan. Neighborhood concepts have significantly different densities and forms, as designed and redesigned through four decades. Nevertheless, the fundamental design principles common to all neighborhood concepts are recognized, focusing on the dichotomy of architecture and landscape in terms of form and meaning. The research was based on analyzing the author’s books and published texts and designs in several Yugoslavian architectural journals