Architecture of Tourism

written by Maroje Mrduljaš

Tourism is an industry that is one of the foundations not only of Croatian economy, but also of Croatian identity. However, tourism is also a global phenomenon with important influence on lifestyles, urban dynamics, even the perception of the whole world which, at a time of the domination of mediated, mediatized experience, somehow turned into a spectacle of tourist view. Tourism architecture in Croatia, as shown by the tradition of modernism, is a good testing ground for architectural research. The history of modern architecture has yielded a rather small number of interesting hotels, but, in Croatia, precisely in that seemingly prosaic but, programmatically, technologically, and even socially complex typology, some of the particularly valuable and utterly authentic contributions to the architectural debate were realized. That tradition of specific building culture, which includes not only architecture, but also the methods of investment management and urban planning concepts, is necessary in order to continue to develop further, in new social conditions, the phenomenon of the entire modernization of the social and built environment through tourism.