Ekspresionizam u beogradskoj arhitekturi (1918-1941)

A multitude of inspired but mostly unexecuted designs in the first quarter of the 20th century helped shape expressionism into a recognizable movement in European architecture. Viewed critically from a historical distance, it emerges as an amalgamation of inconsistent programmes and short-lived phases in the work of fantasy-prone architects, emotionally responding to considerable contradictions of a turbulent age. Apart from Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, where it produced the best architectural outcomes, it also developed in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Switzerland, Italy, Turkey, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia from 1929). For a long time considered retrograde because of its exponents’ wild subjectivism, expressionism has over the last few decades been looked upon more objectively and on an equal footing with more consistent architectural pursuits. Expressionism in Serbia, adopted from central Europe spontaneously and without much theoretical preparation (slightly later than in Croatia and Slovenia), was primarily recognizable in exterior compositional emphases, much less in spatial structures of some complexity. Expressionist ideas found their way into Serbia circuitously, through emulating examples from international architectural periodicals, rather than through analyzing central-European landmark examples in situ. Moreover, unlike their Croatian contemporaries, Serbian architects maintained no personal or professional contact with the authoritative leading figures of central-European expressionism, which is why the latter’s methods were not productively elaborated in their architectural practice. Without being thematized in the architectural curriculum or in architectural criticism, expressionism amounted to an idiom amenable to being adapted to the local situation. Yet, the merit of some expressionism-inspired works and their concurrence with color-based expressionism in Serbian painting and similar trends in avant-garde literature and music shows that the style found its embodiment, to no small extent, on the Serbian cultural scene. The Serbian architects opting for creative interpretation of contemporary styles and their adaptation to the local taste (which treated almost every new building as unique and prestigious), and carried by powerful emotions, founded two varieties of national expressionism. Avoiding the ‘pure’ monostylistic architectural language in favor of a syncretistic multilayered one, romanticists accepted it wholeheartedly as a means for stressing the outline of imaginative compositions, combining it with post-secessionist and national-style patterns, while modernists used it fruitfully for accentuating angles and plastically breaking up their sprawling structures. In most executed and unexecuted designs, for the most part created in Belgrade, Niš and Novi Sad (to an extent also in Leskovac and Šabac), expressionism is primarily observable in form, less in the organization of space, interior design and construction. Even though it only rarely manifested itself in a pure or complete form, it did, along with Czech cubism, central-European functionalism, and French purism and art deco, play a significant part in the linguistic crystallization of Serbian modernism. It may also be observed in pre-modernist phases in the work of the founders of Serbian modernism, Present in a more or less developed form in interwar Belgrade architecture, expressionism was obviously retreating before the rush of eclectic late-modernist and monumentalist academic concepts in the last pre-war years. It was not revived until several decades later, by the creative wing of the Belgrade school of modern architecture, and in the work of today’s neo-modernists. The overview of the most important works of interwar Belgrade expressionism has shown a diversity of ways in which its repertoire was used. The movement’s innovative style and seductive symbolism had an appeal to leading and less prominent architects alike, whose work remains insufficiently studied. Hence the meticulous recording of as yet unexplored examples emerges as an important objective of historical studies in the future.

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