Swingin' Belgrade

In Tito’s Yugoslavia, the Soviet bloc was anything but drab.

- 

IN THE EARLY 1990S, Yugoslavia was shorthand for destruction: blasted cities in the heart of Europe, pulverized minarets and toppled bell towers, a whole cosmopolitan society splintered by savagery. Today, the word has acquired the resonance of antiquity, like Dahomey and Mesopotamia. MoMA would like to flip the association, linking the name of a vanished nation to memories of optimism and impassioned building. A hugely ambitious and revelatory new show, Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980, portrays an idiosyncratic, multiethnic, and open postwar society that propelled itself into the industrial age with brio. Curators Martino Stierli and Vladimir Kulic, with assistance from Anna Kats, focus less on the Toward part of the title and more on Utopia. Marshaling hundreds of drawings, models, plans, and photographs, extracted from rapidly vanishing archives, MoMA presents Yugoslavia as a paradise for the politically engaged architect.