Women’s presence in the workplace also increased if women made up 24.5 percent of the active workforce in 1948, they accounted for a full third by 1978. Their enrollment in higher education steadily increased for the first three decades after the war by 1962, 45 percent of graduates from the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb were female. The remarkable breakthroughs women made in the decades after World War II cannot be ignored. Male and female architects at work in the Department of Architecture and Urbanism at the headquarters of Energoprojekt, a major Yugoslav construction firm based in Belgrade, Serbia. The contributions of women architects-who have so often been omitted from the histories of socialist Yugoslavia’s architecture-must then be seen in relation to the successes and failures of this constitutional promise of equality.
The few women architects who ultimately commanded public profiles did so in spite of, not through the dismantling of, both the region’s and the profession’s male-dominated cultures. Such a position hindered women’s advancement in leadership positions, and the architectural profession proved no exception. Gender inequality was not recognized as an autonomous issue but was, rather, subsumed under the general discourse of class struggle and self-management. It also adhered to one of the fundamental tenets of the socialist-Marxist ideology that is, women’s emancipation depended on the egalitarian distribution of wealth and vice versa. With the transition to civilian life, Yugoslavia’s first postwar constitution of 1946 unequivocally granted Yugoslav women full citizenship, both by guaranteeing voting rights to all citizens regardless of sex and by providing special protection for women’s place in the production process.
The activities of the Women’s Antifascist Front during World War II, which extended from the armed fight to grassroots political organization, advanced feminist causes and solidified women’s position in the creation of the socialist federation. In socialist Yugoslavia’s founding narrative, the woman partisan had won her emancipation with the rifle. The following essay in particular highlights influential women practitioners from the period and their startlingly original works. Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980, the debut exhibition from MoMA‘s chief curator of architecture and design Martino Stierli, documents how buildings and the people behind them contributed to the modernization and social cohering of a historically multi-ethnic region. Yet for decades after its breaking with Stalin’s USSR in 1948, and later, its brokering of the Non-Aligned Movement, Yugoslavia had been a prosperous country, uniquely positioned between the West and East and oriented toward the Global South. Courtesy Valentin Jeck, 2016, commissioned by the Museum of Modern ArtĮditor’s Note: To American ears, the mention of Yugoslavia-the former federation containing six Balkan republics and Kosovo-evokes bombing campaigns, bloody ethnic strife, and the resounding failures of 20th-century socialism. The architect Svetlana Kana Radević’s design for the Hotel Podgorica (1967) in the Montenegrin capital could be described as an example of Brutalism.
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