Socialist Architecture: The Vanishing Act

Since 2009, photographer Armin Linke and architect Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss have been documenting ex-Yugoslav Socialist architecture-buildings that were either left vacant or only recently repurposed when the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia was dismantled in the early 1990s. Socialist Architecture commemorates these structures in present-day Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Serbia.

The Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia vanished during the early 1990s and the former Socialist states were Balkanized into a number of emerging democracies. Each of these new states inherited monuments, buildings, landscapes, and infrastructure, which were constructed specifically for the former Socialist context and needs. After Yugoslavia vanished, most of the inherited architecture was left vacant and in a state of limbo between being repurposed and reused for new content, or simply being declared Socialist archeology, and continuing its life as ruins. By creating documentation, "Socialist Architecture: The Vanishing Act" captures the indecision of five particular emerging democracies today: Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Serbia, and the distinct effects their irresolution creates spatially and visually on former Yugoslav architecture.

CREDITS

Author: Armin Linke and architect Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss. Texts by Tobia Bezzola, Philipp Ursprung, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss
English / German Edition, January 2012.

Publisher: JRP/Ringier  ISBN 9783037642450
9.75 x 13.5 inches Hardcover  
132 pages, 100 color

The authors

Armin Linke was born in 1966 and lives in Milan and Berlin. As a photographer and filmmaker he works on a progressively growing archive of various human activities and new natural and artificial landscapes, seeking to document situations in which the boundary between fiction and reality fade and become invisible. He is a lecturer in architecture and basic design at Milan Polytechnic, IUAV in Venice, and ZKM Karlsruhe. His multimedia installation about the contemporary Alpine landscape was screened at the Venice Biennale and at the Graz Architecture Film Festival.

He is a guest professor at the HfG Karlsruhe ad at IUAV Arts and Design University in Venice, and a research affiliate in MIT's Visual Arts Program.

Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss (born 1967 in Subotica, Serbia) is assistant professor of architecture at Temple University's Tyler School of Art and founder of Normal Architecture Office (NAO). Weiss has a master's degree from Harvard University, where he studied with Rem Koolhaas, Jacques Herzog, and Richard Gluckma,n and gained experience working before opening his own practice in 2003. His work on preserving public spaces in transition from the Socialist era is best known through designs and activism for Handball Stadium in the city of Novi Sad. His books included Almost Architecture, which explore sarchitecture vis-à-vis emerging democratic processes, and Lost Highway Expedition Photobook, which witnesses the rapid urbanization of southeastern Europe. Weiss was recently selected by Herzog & de Meuron Architects as one of one hundred architects to design a villa in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, to be built during 2010-11. He is currently a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths College, University of London.