Spaces for Culture and Community

written by Robert Temel

Museums, libraries, concert halls and churches are building types in a certain sense, paradigmatic for architecture in general. Such buildings are often perceived as legitimate representatives of the architecture of a certain period since, being free from financial pressure, they largely embody the ideas and dreams of the society of that particular period. In the time of classic modernism, the residential building became such a paradigmatic building type: it represented the ideas of functionality and socialization which were dominant at the beginning of the 20th century. Such predomination of residential buildings lost its importance by the time of the beginning of postmodernism, at the latest. Now it was possible to express everything through any typology and represent any idea. However, this phase came to its end, so nowadays in the time of parallelism of all architectural styles, we face the situation which seems like that immediately before the start of modernism.