A Peripheral Moment: Experiments in Architectural Agency1 Ivan Rupnik 1
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he aughts were a difficult time for Croatia. Like Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, this former Yugoslav country transitioned from socialism to capitalism nearly a decade after much of Eastern Europe, delayed by four years of war, and then postwar reconstruction and instability.2 This same decade proved to be an incredibly productive and innovative time for Croatian architects who managed to transform these difficulties into a stimulating situation. The recent global economic downturn, a highly flawed political system, as well as the arrival a host of new highly restrictive building regulations brought on by Croatia’s crawl towards the European Union as well as other factors have contributed to the end of this decade of experimentation. This investigation seeks to mine this period, examining practices that expand the role of the architect and create space for experimentation. These practices, rooted in an unstable peripheral context, nevertheless suggest the potential for greater agency for a discipline increasingly peripheral at the center. The parallel between political instability and creative innovation of this period is not a unique phenomenon in Croatian history. The frequency of such occurrences led Ljubo Karaman (1886-1971), a Croatian archeologist and art historian, to develop a theoretical framework to help explain artistic production under conditions of sustained instability.3 Karaman reacted to the prevailing formal modes of art-historical analysis during the late 19th and early 20th century by developing a contextually based methodology, one that examined the role of the artist as an active agent in a specific political context as well as that specific context’s position within an international network of other artistic contexts. This emphasis on actor and context as opposed to art object provided a framework for theorizing three distinct geo-political spaces of artistic production: that of center, 1 Selected from the introduction to A Peripheral Moment: Experiments in Architectural Agency, (Actar, 2011). 2 The Homeland War, Croatia’s conflict with the Yugoslav People’s Army and a host Croatian-Serb paramilitary formations lasted from 1991 until 1995. Croatian territory was not fully integrated until 1999, when United Nations Peacekeepers left the last occupied areas, allowing reconstruction to begin. 3 Karaman’s formal education in Vienna during the last decade of the 19th century ` the Catholic Priest and was complimented with an apprenticeship to Frane Bulic, archeologist responsible for the restoration of Diocletian’s Palace in Split. This complicated and layered artifact challenged many preconceived notions of early art history and archeology. By 1930 Karaman’s frustration with established methods and theories led to his first major publication, Iz Koljevke Hrvatske Proslosti [From the Cradle of Croatian History] (Matica Hrvatska:Zagreb, 1930). He would later summarize these theories in O Djelovanju Domace Sredine u Umjetnosti Hrvatskih Krajeva (Drustvo Historicara Umjetnosti: Zagreb, 1963).
province, and periphery. Karaman left the theorization of the center to the center, and instead focused his work on distinguishing between province and periphery. While artistic production in the province tends to be directly influenced by one distant center from where it receives information, art objects, and even ‘masters’, the periphery is influenced by multiple cultural and political centers, offering local artists access to these centers while at the same time offering them the ability to synthesize influences and produce unique and independent artistic approaches. Karaman referred to this effect as the freedom of the periphery. This freedom comes at a high cost however, as the influence of multiple political centers insures a permanent state of instability, a lack of strong foreign and local patrons, as well as a deficit of material resources. Karaman was well aware of these ‘negative factors’ caused by the ‘lack of strong political authority here [in Croatia] or from outside’ but insisted that it was precisely these factors that made the works interesting and sometimes progressive if not always artistically novel, ‘in the formal sense of that term’.4 Karaman’s own work focused on Romanesque and Renaissance architectural works in Croatia, however he insisted that his methodology could be useful for other contexts and other periods.5 Although he never explicitly theorized it, the peripheral condition is highly dynamic, as its appearance is tied to shifting geopolitical centers and their own changing inter-relationships. In addition any peripheral space, by its very definition, can be so distant from centers of power as to lack Karman’s associated creative vibrancy, suggesting important temporal and spatial dimensions to Karaman’s theory. The notion of a peripheral moment is an expansion of his theories, one that accounts for this dynamism, and proposes that the freedom of the periphery appears during a particularly significant realignment of geopolitical centers. In Croatia such realignments are a relatively frequent occurrence as a result of its geopolitical position. Notably, the radical restructuring of the map of Europe in the 1920s and again in the 1960s generated 4 Karaman, Iz Koljevke Hrvatske Proslosti, 1930 Pg. 57 5 His work, virtually unknown outside of Croatia has recently received attention in Latin America and in the emerging field of Geography of Art. For more on this see Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art, (University Of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2004).
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