Mission Impossible? I Don't Think So.

architect Ivan Vitić
project Residental Building, Zagreb, Croatia
written by Vedran Mimica

 

Art has to be forgotten:
Beauty must be realised.

Piet Mondrian, 1938

 

Non-figurative art is created by establishing a dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations, which excludes the formation of any particular form. We note thus, that to destroy particular form is only to do more consistently what all art has done. The dynamic rhythm, which is essential in all art, is also the essential element of a non-figurative work.

Piet Mondrian, 1937

 

During the last few years, Viti}’s residential building in Laginjina Ulica has become a landmark for Croatian post-war Modernism and a canonical example for the discussion of modernist projects.

 

When Post-modernism replaced Modernism at the 1979 Portoghesi Venice Biennale “Strada Novissima”, it opened a Pandora’s box of the most diverse architectural scenarios for the end of the millennium. The completion of the modernist project was reviewed, from Frampton to Jencks and from Habermas to Deleuze. From critical regionalism via the critical reconstruction of Berlin to the technological and global approach of the 1990s, architecture has sought new inventions in tradition or in new technologies. The recycling of all past utopias without the creation of new paradigms and new canons has opened a domain where “anything goes” was not only a possibility, but a promising “liberty”.