Geography of architecture and the “Way to Modernity” - Juraj Neidhardt’s regionalism in early Socialist Yugoslavia

This dissertation examines architecture’s regionalist conceptual and design ventures that questioned, underpinned and naturalised the post Second World War modern state territorial development. It does so by telling the history of the book Architecture of Bosnia and the Way to Modernity, written and designed, starting in 1949, by modernist architects Dušan Grabrijan (1899-1952) and Juraj Neidhardt (1901-1979) and published in the Socialist Yugoslavia in 1957.
By delving deep into the book’s form, its authors' exchange and their inter-war formative experiences (in Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Vienna, Berlin and Paris), their propensity for ethnographic research and correlation of the book with Juraj Neidhardt’s abundant design and planning practice, this study reveals a struggle to establish and maintain the regionalist conceptual set-up, in order to justify the modern architecture’s agency in the world.

While the book successfully conflated the geographic-historical region and territory by means of its complex and insightful editorial strategies, Neidhardt’s meticulous regionalist design and planning endeavours remained torn between their will to reach the regional integration and their functional role in the hasty and uncompromising state-controlled industrialisation.

This problematic dualism has been an integral part of Architecture of Bosnia’s essential premise: that architecture is indissolubly bound to its environment. The book inherited this problem by relying on the human geographic conception of the “milieu”, which designated the conflation between the human and the environmental. Just like human geographers strictly distinguished between their regional and territorial work (or, in other words, their ethnographic research and its instrumentalisation in the political-economic interests of national states), so Architecture of Bosnia maintained distance between the regional integration of Neidhardt’s designs and economic function of his plans.