September 18, 2017, 7pm
311 East Broadway
New York, NY 10002
USA
Join us at e-flux on Monday, September 18 at 7pm to celebrate the New York launch of Socialist Architecture: The Reappearing Act, featuring a discussion with author Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss and architecture critic Nina Rappaport, moderated by Nick Axel.
Socialist Architecture: The Reappearing Act (The Green Box, 2017) is a book by Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss with a series of photographs by Armin Linke, following up from the authors’ earlier collaboration Socialist Architecture: The Vanishing Act (JRP Ringier, 2011).
Since 2009, Jovanovic Weiss and Linke have been documenting the current state of selected sites of socialist architecture across former Yugoslavia. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia disappeared in the early 1990s, to be Balkanized since under various new democracies. Each of these new democracies or states inherited monuments, buildings, and infrastructures that were tailored to the former socialist society. After the disappearance of Yugoslavia, this inherited architecture often remained empty in a kind of limbo between reutilization and modern archaeological ruin. The documentation in Socialist Architecture: The Reappearing Act considers this indecisiveness in five emerging democracies: Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia, and investigates the fate of a former ideological architecture and its impact on the contemporary science of spatial perception.
Having once been built in the name of inclusion of Yugoslavia’s soft socialism, today these buildings, monuments, and infrastructures find new life as makeshift public spaces, performing the reappearing act of their own spatial magic—a significance more open-ended than ever intended by the offical view of traditional socialist rule. This is an opportunity to declare the success of architecture over traditional ideology, and work with these sites in creating a future for all.
Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss is a Yugoslav-born architect and theorist living in New York. He studied architecture at the University of Belgrade, at Harvard Univesity, and at Goldsmiths College where he received his PhD on the topic of Architecture of Balkanization. He has worked on projects and research with architects Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron, and Richard Gluckman, and has collabotorated on exhibitions with Lina Bo Bardi, Yona Friedman, and Anne Tyng. His work has been shown at the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Belgrade, House of World Cultures in Berlin, and The Aronson Galleries at The New School in New York. Jovanovic Weiss is a contributing editor at Cabinet magazine and a fellow of the group Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths College, London. He is the author of Almost Architecture (2007), Socialist Architecture: The Vanishing Act (2011), and Socialist Architecture: The Reappearing Act (2017).
He is the founder of NAO.NYC, consultancy for research in architecture and urbanism based in New York.
Nina Rappaport is an architecture critic, curator, educator, and publications director at Yale School of Architecture. She founded and directs the think tank Vertical Urban Factory, which includes a traveling exhibition and a book published by Actar in 2016.
Rappaport has taught urban theory and industrial urbanism at Parsons School of Design, Syracuse School of Architecture in New York, Barnard College, and Yale School of Architecture; and has contributed essays to Architecture, Architectural Record, Praxis, Future Anterior, 30/60/90, and Tec21 among other venues. Her books include Ezra Stoller: Photographer (with co-editor Erica Stoller; Yale University Press, 2012), and Support and Resist: Structural Engineers and Design Innovation (The Monacelli Press, 2007).
Socialist Architecture: The Reappearing Act
The Green Box, 2017
English
Design: Anja Lutz // Book design
12 x 18 cm, 72 pages, 27 illustrations, softcover with flaps
ISBN 978-3-941644-92-2q
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.