of other, more specific details that cannot be determined in advance, it follows that strategy must be developed at the battle site itself.” In other words, strategy is endlessly malleable, adaptable, and agile. It is also at its most effective when it is formulated on the battlefield, in conditions that Clausewitz describes as “friction.” We suggest that it is appropriate to adopt the terms of warfare when considering the conditions of Zagreb’s twentieth-century modernization. Planning in Zagreb was intensely contested at the highest levels and occurred in conditions that can be accurately described as embattled. Regulation plans drawn up at each stage of Zagreb’s modern development—during the Habsburg Empire, Royal Yugoslavia, and Socialist Yugoslavia—were proposed with the understanding (even expectation) that they would be opposed by the authorities in Vienna, Budapest, or Belgrade. The plans therefore had to be strategic in anticipating and attempting to evade rational opposition. With limited power in relation to those centers, Zagreb had to strategize carefully to achieve its objectives. (...)
objectives. The larger conception of the plan informs each of the smaller authored moves, and the smaller moves impact and modify the larger direction of the plan. As Project Zagreb documents, the challenge of Zagreb’s permanently transitional state was engaged by successive generations of architects in Zagreb who developed strategies both for building on specific sites and for generating the larger urban conditions that would support and proliferate that construction. Working individually and collectively, with private clients, and the city planning office, they developed strategies for generating the modern city by means of carefully conceived and clearly authored architectural projects. Those projects were not merely tactical; they did not merely exploit opportunities. Instead, comprised of several moves that are contingent and constrained, they created opportunities in circumstances where none had existed. By spontaneously staging the conditions for further actions and strategies, these projects opened the city to innovation and expanded the possibilities for architecture to shape the urban landscape.
From Strategy to Practice As we delaminated the historical layers of Zagreb’s built fabric, and read them against the regulation plans periodically drawn up by the planning office to direct the city’s urban growth, it became clear that the unstable environment of Zagreb made conventional methods of planning and realizing projects impossible for much of the twentieth century. The situation called for more agile and assertive techniques of intervention. It required strategies that did not merely delineate the future development of the urban terrain, but that actually generated the city itself. In short, the situation required strategies that were architectural as well as urban. It required urban architectural projects that engaged the city at the level of the plan and thereby became instrumental, durational, and urban. In this sense, the making of twentieth-century Zagreb was as much an architectural project, as it was an urban project. The architects who built modern Zagreb consistently designed buildings that functioned urbanistically, and transformed the organization and use of space far beyond the immediate context of the buildings themselves. Consistently staging the conditions for future moves, each individual intervention prepared the ground for further interventions. This is a practice based on a concept of the city as an ongoing, open-ended project—an open work—in the dialectical sense in which Umberto Eco describes works that combine openness with internal coherence, that are inclusive and in some sense uncontainable, but also composed and integral within themselves. In terms of the city, the open work is a multi-authored project in which each individual intervention is part of a much larger highly strategic and carefully staged plan of action with, often precise, formal
Practice What are the processes by which architectural strategies evolve into practices? Strategy, as a mode of operation, does not directly translate into praxis. Strategy can be thought but not reified. However, when strategy generates physical form and space—a type of knowledge particular to architecture—that knowledge becomes materially and historically specific. The forms and spaces therefore become open to interpretation, proliferation, and development, and the strategies that generated them become available for application to conditions and contexts that may have little to do with the original context in which the strategy was developed. Through extrapolation, (the process by which knowledge produced in a particular context is applied to other contexts) therefore, architectural strategies can be said to generate architectural practices. It is clear that we are not dealing here with “everyday practices” and tactics of resistance, as theorized by Michel de Certeau. Instead we are concerned with the generation of authored form and the production, proliferation, and instrumentation of a form of knowledge particular to architecture. We understand practice here in terms of the sociospatial dialectic described by Henri Lefebvre as the “social production of space.” Space, in Lefebvre’s formulation, is neither an object (substance) nor a subject (consciousness), but rather “a social reality—that is to say, a set of relations and forms.” Space is historically produced and both shapes and is itself shaped by social practice. Spatial structures such as architecture therefore do not merely reflect (or reify) social or political practices. Instead, by shaping the spaces in which social life takes place, they condition those practices. The urban (a condition rather
7 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, 1984 [1976]), 177–178. 8 Ibid., 119. 9 Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. A. Cancogni (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 20.
10 Michel deCerteau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1984). 11 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991), 116.
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