Practicing Dialectical Materialism: The Balkan House and Architecture in Socialist Yugoslavia

Abstract

This article examines relationships between architecture and ideology in socialist Yugoslavia by exploring the cultural interpretation and appropriation of the Balkan house in achieving modern, specifically Yugoslav architectural expression. Through the contextualization of the period’s different narratives on the Ottoman vernacular and various architectural designs related to it, the aim is to demonstrate how Yugoslav architects relied on Marxism to appropriate vernacular architecture into the modernist discourses. Dialectical materialism was used as a key for the interpretation of the opposition between what was seen as the negative and positive elements of the Balkan house, which challenged banal polarization between the traditional and modern and led to a more nuanced understanding of backwardness and progress in vernacular architecture. The idea of architectural metamorphoses of vernacular to modern forms was justified by evolution and revolution, the basic concepts of the Marxist understanding of processes in society and culture. The Yugoslav interest in the Balkan house represented a living, perceivable example of how the relationships between tradition and modernity, the past and the present, as well as men and their environment, became incorporated into new architecture of ‘socialism with a humane face’, which stood at the heart of Yugoslav social and political experiment.