A Peripheral Moment - Experiments in Architectural Agency, Croatia 1999-2010

An extraordinary wave of architectural experimentation, innovation and overall spatial and formal quality decidedly marked the past decade of the Croatian architectural scene. A Peripheral Moment registers its decisive phenomena, presents outstanding practices, and introduces the most exciting examples, seeking to provide them with equally an exciting theoretical framework and foundation. The explanatory potentials of the book thereby rival the innovative effects of the presented architectures, acquiring broader, if not universal, methodological relevance.
Faced with the ineffectuality of normative planning methods in conditions of political and economic instability, architects developed new agile and flexible modalities of architectural intervention. Many of these strategies engaged the hybrid conditions of the postcommunist city where socialist and capitalist urban and architectura formations coexist in a diffuse and flexible patchwork. But the opportunity grasped by Croatian architects in the aughts was not in securing commissions (they didn't actually build much) but by reconceptualizing practice and creating provisional institutions -most notably the UHA (Croatian Architecte Association) - that enabled experiment and innovation in practice, and created a forum for critical discourse.
Most important, the architects whose work is presented in thie volume recognized that architectural agency consists in taking responsibility for the city. This, in many ways, is the significance that Croatia's peripheral moment holds for today. What became apparent in Croatia during the lest decade was the simultaneous existence of two parallel dimensions and the way in which the quick crossing over from a regime of state socialism to conditions of liberal democracy freed a powerful architectural energy that was transferred onto inherited forms, without erasing them.
This book is a stimulating investigation of that turbulent period, testimony to an immense and particular act of "rewriting" a territory.