Stage Sets in Zagreb

being the first of two photo-posts on a peripatetic week spent mostly in two capital cities that were, just over 20 years ago, nominally 'socialist'. I was in Zagreb and then Warsaw about a day and a half later in order to sell coals to Newcastle, by telling an extremely erudite Croatian politico-philosophical dance troupe about Soviet cinema and biomechanics, and to talk about socialist architecture in Poland. I promise these won't herald this blog becoming wholly a showcase of travel photos with marginal notes, though that appears to be the way it's going (a good thing or not? Comments, please!). All observations should be considered partial and tentative.

I was in Zagreb as part of an event that also included BADCo, the aforementioned troupe, performing a piece in a factory at the edge of one of the city's yawningly wide roads. Entitled Man.Chair, it entailed the partial re-enactment of a performance piece where a middle-aged man dances in tortured fashion around chair. In this version, this was accompanied by two almost machinically controlled younger dancers, whose Constructivist movements were set in contrast to the Artaudian contortions of their elder, to a grimily rhythmic soundtrack. It was, especially for one as physically inept as myself, enormously impressive, performed with commitment and a total lack of the smug irony which would be attendant on such things in the UK.

The picture above shows where one sort of Zagreb hits another. I agree with Orson Welles that his finest film was The Trial, a hugely overblown, lurid adaptation of Kafka, set largely in the (now) Croatian capital. Amongst other things it is an object lesson in 20th century urbanism. In some scenes a character leaves a room in a studio set to walk through a Paris railway station out into Zagreb. I was, needless to say, incredibly excited when told, in a car in the city, that we were driving past the district where K tries to ask an old woman if he can carry her incredibly heavy suitcase, as she drags it through a landscape of open space and overpowering slabs. I would go there the next day. Yet, what is unique about Zagreb is that it seems incredibly precise in terms of the periods of its architecture. The part that is Hapsburg is very, very Hapsburg, crumbling, ornamental and opulent, a stage set of bourgeois decay. It starts very suddenly when entering from the Modernist south, and is only sporadically interrupted with postwar construction, to deeply unpopular effect, viz:

This skeleton is the remains of what is apparently Zagreb's most hated building, soon to be reclad. The construction site features some new schemes by the same developer, which makes it fairly clear that no new baroque will ensue:

So no more of this, which is better when left picturesquely rotting, after all.

The painting and restoration of this sort of architecture always makes it look rather obnoxious, no matter how historically accurate. In the imagination, these sorts of buildings were always already dilapidated and decadent. There are small outbreaks of modernism inside the Historic Hapsburg Zagreb, which look '30s more than postwar, such as the icy Italian Rationalist buildings of the city's centre.

The part of the city that I was staying in was south of this, in a district of 30s flats which then hits a similarly extreme swathe of post-war modernism, a seemingly no expense-spared showpiece of monumental planning. Running throughout are the most expansive roads, lined by tall buildings which lead to pedestrianised green spaces. There's little of the partial infill or tying together of the loose and messy that marks most capitals. If you don't drive (and the traffic is relentless, even on the weekday late morning when this walk occurred) it can be just a tad intimidating, but it all seems to work on its own terms, if one ignores the amount of carbon being belched into the clouds. At it's centre is the gigantic square, which looks like it exists purely for the purposes of military commemorations.

The road (well, 'road' is a slightly paltry description for this canyon) where some of the most interesting things can be found has at various points been called Moscow Avenue, Avenue of the Proletarian Brigades, and is currently Ulica Grada Vukovara, after the town that was destroyed in the Yugoslav wars. None of the architecture along here is especially original, but it's all very interesting in its experiments and variations on mainstream, international style Modernism. So, we have the city's tallest tower, the delightfully named 'Zagreb Lady' (see top of post), designed by Slavko Jelinek and Berislav Vinković in the early '70s. It echoes Niemeyer in the balance between the curtain wall's repetition and some wilful curving and enveloping - but the seeming urge to add competing angles to it whenever possible seems more restless, less hedonistic, than Niemeyer. Near it are some massive slabs, among which the best was apparently designed, by a student of Le Corbusier, for army officers. It has a peculiar green tint to it, but up close the Beton is extremely Brut, and the thick, physical pilotis seem very directly cribbed from the Unite d'Habitation. At the back, you get the sense that the Ulica is a slight Potemkinstadt, as almost shanty-town like dwellings sit hard against the confident, if somewhat down-at-heel Corbusian slabs.

Yet at the bottom of at least half of the blocks I saw in and around this boulevard, there were shops and well-used cafes, something almost unimaginable over here; while the tenants of the flats which would elicit the immediate reaction of 'omg sink estate' among my countrymen dress more like they work at Canary Wharf than Asda. In amongst the blocks of flats are similarly huge offices, some of which, like these two:

show an urge to create something more discordant than the International Style, playing with angles, walkways and Brutalish hieratic vents and extrusions. New architecture is slicker and uses more glass than concrete, but mostly seems to have just continued in the same vein, without displaying any urge to try and recreate 'streets' (why, when there are already cafes and markets in the tower blocks?) or to offer reduced versions of the Hapsburg world at the other end of town. Across from the gleaming glass Eurotower is the University, and the Kino. Still, there are often moments when something earlier and less modern pokes out, and it's fairly shocking when it does so, especially given the general homogeneity of the place. So here, some more shack-like dwellings are looked over by, this time, some shiny new corporate thing.

Both here and elsewhere there is a lot of political graffiti, which is always a good sign. The philosophy-led insurrectionary Zagreb University went back into occupation recently, but was back in class when I was there. There seems to be a lively Left in the city, which isn't represented by actual politicians, but which contrasts greatly with the creepy political torpor in certain other capital cities, eastern and western. The Kino sign is just there because I liked it.

Google translate implies some selling off souls to capitalism is alleged in the graffiti above.

Here contemporary work is indicted by one of the 'plenums' which formed part of the student occupation.

By comparison, the grinning faces here seem as uncomfortable as a bit-part player in The Thick of It, gamely trying to look both friendly and presedential, clean-cut and impeccably European. The EU is seen as apparently seen as something of a panacea by local politicians, hence the name of the tallest and shiniest new block - the 'Eurotower'.

The area where Joseph K lives is much as you would expect - slabs and open space, lots of good, scrubby and windswept examples of what architects today insist on calling 'public realm', and with plenty of facilities on the ground floors. Some of the blocks, which are more horizontal than vertical, recall the Corbusian period of Soviet '20s architecture, communal flats like the Narkomfin, more than they do the standard towers and slabs of the post-Stalin eastern Bloc, suggesting that either Yugoslav architects knew their history or that the less blut-und-boden sides of 'actually existing socialism' produced curiously similar forms.

The (ack) 'Public Realm' entails a large playing field with rusty goalposts, where on one of the school buildings is a peculiar and faintly chilling piece of graffiti - a group crowding round a blank banner. It's hard to tell whether this is satire, or whether the schoolkids are supposed to fill in a slogan when they have something to demand or advocate, which makes its blankness more unnerving.

Further on, you can see the almost satirical placement of a McDonalds in front of serried tower blocks. 'No two countries that have McDonalds have ever fought a war with each other', said the cretinous Thomas Friedman, inaccurately. Nearby is some more low-rise 60s stuff with new developments nearby in almost the same manner, as if outer Zagreb has decided on a sober, neat international style Modernism definitively, as if this really is the architectural end of history.