Hi I’m Martino Stierli.
And my name is Vladimir Kulić.
Welcome to K67 Kiosk.
It's a highly artful piece of design, which found its way into the streets to
be used by everyone on a daily basis.
Bookshops, ticket stores, bakeries even, red, yellow, orange, white, blue--sprinkled all
over the urban environment.
It was really an important contribution to create
some kind of a life space for citizens in Yugoslavia.
The end of World War II, there was a moment of destruction and trauma
but then was transformed into a great source
of energy for the reconstruction of the country.
Hundreds of thousands of young people contributed to the construction of new railway lines,
highways, dams, factories.
The war really had left deep scars that
produced an enormous forward-looking utopian vision of a better world.
And architecture played a fundamental role.
Here we are standing by the S2 office tower.
This building is organized around a massive central core.
And then we have very elegantly cantilevering out the office part of the building.
This office section is actually resting on two very, very slender
columns that really makes this massive building almost float in the air, pushing the very
notion of structure to the very limits.
Originally it was intended as only one of an entire series of high-rises that were going
to define an entire new city neighborhood within Ljubljana.
The Avala TV Tower sits on the Mount Avala, outside of Belgrade.
TV towers around the world are the new exciting building typology, a symbol
that Yugoslavia and Belgrade have emerged into the modern era.
The tower does kind of resemble a rocket.
The white mosque is a project by the Bosnian architect, Zlatko Ugljen, in Visoko, it's a small
town outside of Sarajevo.
Visoko had been using a 16th-century Ottoman mosque, a very traditional building that burned down.
And then the Yugoslav state basically mandated the reconstruction of a new mosque with modern
architecture, which led to a lot of resistance because people were used to their ways and
wanted to have their old building back.
So it took a lot of convincing on part of the architect.
The roof sort of takes up the pyramidal form of the traditional mosque in the Balkans.
But then what he does, he punctuates it with a series of five skylights that lets the sun
penetrate into the interior of the building.
The sun sort of moves over a very sparsely furnished interior, where light becomes almost
a building material on its own right.
Stadia are not always the most elegant buildings.
Not the case in Split.
The Poljud Stadium is probably one of the most beautiful stadia anywhere built in the world.
The entire structure survives, thanks to a system of three steel cables that run around
the perimeter as if it were a giant belt that holds the entire stadium together, preventing
it from falling apart.
It's often compared to a sea shell, which is appropriate considering its location, that
it's not really far from the sea.
How does this visionary thinking behind modernization, this utopian vision, actually arrive in the
everyday life of the citizens living in this country?
It was of course through design objects.
Many people in the West have this notion that Yugoslavia was this drab horrible place between
the Iron Curtain. What this gallery here actually shows is that there was really a very vibrant
pop culture and a consumer culture in place in Yugoslavia.
One of the underlying principles of modern architecture, especially housing and apartment building
is that they are trying to be flexible spaces that are not stuffy but that are open, have
a lot of light in them, and that allow for a variety of different users.
And what you need for that kind of space are of course light pieces of furniture that can
be moved around easily and adopted for different situations.
So I want to point out the Rex folding chair which is one of the most successful design
objects that were ever produced in Yugoslavia.
It's a very innovative use of plywood. It is bent and then it has these sort of slits
that make it even lighter, which of course was quite a challenge in terms of design and
production to keep it...to make it stable nonetheless.
I'm standing in front of another commissioned work by the Serbian filmmaker Mila Turajlic.
She uses found footage, from TV films and TV series as well as feature films that were
shown in Yugoslavia at the time.
You see many, many scenes of people moving into the new apartments that were provided to them.
So it addresses in a very humoristic and funny way problems that came about shoddy construction,
apartments that were too small for large families.
There was actually a conversation in Yugoslav society about precisely these problems.
But it's also, of course, what shall we say, the freedoms that these new spaces such as
here, an elevator afforded to the citizen.
So you can use the elevator as a place for a private get together and just press the
up and down button until you're tired of it.
You might actually wonder how this piece came into the Museum
and in fact, into MoMA's permanent collection.
Not only did we...
Okay.
We have a guestbook here for visitors of the exhibition to leave their comments and notes.
"I think that this kind of architecture has a unique identity. Preserve it."
There's, like, hearts here and smileys.
"Complete lack of human scale."
Oh, you didn't pay much attention.
A visitor from Finland who says, "Everything in this exhibition was," capital letters
"totally new to me. Awesome."