The Case of Architect Ivan Crnković

Architect and professor Ivan Crnković has died. Probably, the way he wanted and planned. It has been years, decades even, since he created something new; he repeated always the same jokes and aphorisms on architecture and life, probably already boring himself and others. It does not take an astronaut to understand the space stands in the text On the education of architects, the last Crnković’s text. I wrote the text, as editor of the Yearbook of the Zagreb faculty of Architecture and, judging from a few conversations, Crnković was not too enthusiastic with the result so he inserted this poetical and banal piece of wisdom as a conclusion. Although the outlines of Crnković’s ideas can be detected: his wish that architecture is taught and practised as an autonomous intellectual discipline, and not as a synthesis of art and technology or any other discipline; that education, but also architecture on the whole, opens to the field of the disciplinary, but free research.