Towards an authentic path: Structuralism and architecture in socialist Yugoslavia

Abstract

The breakup between socialist Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in 1948 paved the way for radical socio-political reforms as well as a new cultural model that would justify a newly invented Yugoslav socialist Sonderweg. In this context, Structuralism became a key vehicle for implementing the social and cultural values of the newly invented socialist self-management ideology. Structuralism helped shape the new culture via different fields and cultural approaches. This paper examines the origins and importance of Structuralism in architecture in the ideological and political context of Yugoslav socialism. As an avant-garde movement, Structuralism consequentially contributed to the critique of the then predominant functionalist paradigm of high modernism, resulting in a new direction that emphasised aestheticisation, a formal and semiotic approach, and the establishment of universal and archetypal values ostensibly derived from the exploration of vernacular architecture in Yugoslavia. Starting from the premise that all these values had a major impact on the construction of the mythology of authentic and autochthonous socialism, this paper shows how architectural Structuralism played a key role in shaping social and political authenticity and cultural mediation.