Toward a Concrete Utopia reviewed

2019-03-11T15:03:00-04:00

The North American layman tends to consider the Eastern bloc as a homogenous chunk of misery. It falls to the curators then to differentiate the USSR from Yugoslavia, and they are not off to a good start. Simultaneously, they are obliged to titillate concrete-loving Instagrammers with images of Brutalist hulks. Only once these two aims are achieved can they pose the salient question: does Yugoslav architecture merit more study than a social media scroll?

In his piece for The Observer, George Grylls reviews MoMA's highly publicized exhibition, Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980, which recently came to a close in New York.

Miodrag Živković, Monument to the Battle of Sutjeska, 1965-71, Tjentište, Bosnia and Herzegovina. View of the western exposure. Photo: Valentin Jeck, commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2017.

"In truth, the exhibition has been teasing us for its big finale," Grylls writes. "And just when you were about to ask for your money back, you get what you came for – spomeniki, lumbering onto stage like the Rolling Stones dutifully returning for an obligatory encore."

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Toward a Concrete Utopia reviewed