The Resistance of Architecture to Political Regime(s): the Case of Novi Zagreb

This paper draws upon the case study of Novi Zagreb to examine the extent to which architecture can resist political authority. Although the circumstances of its conception are still obscure, I argue that it came into existence as an outcome of the resistance of architecture to political forces. In contrast to the existing studies claiming that the first urban complexes of the Naval Institute and Zagreb Fair, were built on the south side of the river Sava without the intention to build the housing, my hypothesis is that their construction was part of the project to build a modernist city from the very beginning, long before the first Plan for South Zagreb in 1962. The archival research and in-depth interviews show that the majority of strategic decisions about the infrastructural projects, which enabled the construction of the modernist city a decade later, were made in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. At the same time, in the late 1940s, Croatian architects, by resisting the imposition of Social Realist aesthetic doctrines, defined the modernist paradigm of the “functional city” as a model for the construction of the new socialist reality. After the political control over the arts diminished in the early 1950s, the local authorities immediately applied the idea of a modernist city through thoughtful infrastructure planning. Thus, the actions of the architects resisting the political pressures of the state may be considered to be architecture’s capacity to develop autonomously, when restricted by authoritarian powers, which, in the case of Novi Zagreb, led to the creation of an alternative city offering excellent living conditions today.