From the Apartment to the City and Back

written by Maroje Mrduljaš

 

Housing is the fundamental existential theme in architecture, a task researched primarily as the topic of optimizing investment and benefit during the modernization of cities after the Second World War. ‘Projects for Big Numbers’ were done in Croatia and the region of the former Yugoslavia as a rapid, then traumatic urbanization conditioned by ideological, utilitarian, but also cultural motives. Demographic changes in housing were radical, and the promises of the ‘right to an apartment’ with all other ‘housing benefits’ were only partially fulfilled.