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Reaching for the Sky
John Haberin New York City
Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia
Bodys Isek Kingelez in Africa
Near the end of "Toward a Concrete Utopia" comes one last dream of transcending the limits of the human. It steps back to the year before the show's nominal beginning, with Jože Plečnik in 1947. That ideal never quite worked out, and its failure haunts postwar architecture in Yugoslavia at the Museum of Modern Art.
Plečnik created his sketch (in the language of architecture, a section) and wood model as plans for the Slovenian parliament in Ljubljana. The nation's leader, Josip Broz Tito, had not yet broken with the Soviet bloc (assuming that he ever really did), but the architect could still dream of democracy and of the separate entities that Tito had forcibly united. He could also dream of the sky. The conical tower has more than half a dozen setbacks on its way to a short spire at its peak. You may recognize it instantly from art history as the Tower of Babel—and what was that if not a concrete utopia, 
realizing in stone the ideal of humanity united by a common language and an ascent to the heavens? Meanwhile in Africa, Bodys Isek Kingelez, too, pursued art and design to the point of visionary architecture.
Are we there yet?
Are we there yet? Should we be? The five-year-old in me keeps asking, and the questions must haunt a concrete utopia as well. A utopia, by definition and etymology, is a no place, but Tito's dictatorship was all too real. He styled himself as Marshal Tito, and MoMA opens with a propaganda film projected across two walls. It moves between a military parade, cheering marchers, and workers breaking ground for his socialist state.
One might mistake the crowds for a mass uprising, the kind that overcame communism elsewhere in Eastern Europe, but no. It is at once frightening and exhilarating, and so more often than not is the exhibition. Its very title, beginning with toward, shows an awareness that utopia may never arrive. Besides, Marxists long denounced "utopian socialism" as a poor excuse for revolution. Yet the curators, Martino Stierli with Vladimir Kulić of Florida Atlantic University, never shed their excitement. More than four hundred objects, from architects one may have trouble remembering or even spelling, leave one on unsteady ground in a changing world.
It is not an entirely unfamiliar world. Two contributors, Juraj Neidhardt and Edvard Ravnikar, learned from Le Corbusier. Ravnikar's twin towers in Ljubljana, set at an obtuse angle for Revolution Square, look much like the Standard Hotel in the Meatpacking District a block or two from the Whitney today, but with a far bleaker approach. A Japanese architect, Kenzo Tange, won a UN competition for a master plan for Skopje, in Macedonia, as a "future town" in 1964. Concrete also refers to the material for Brutalism, a style that took hold in the West as wel—with, if you believe "Literally Means Collapse" and Alvaro Urbano at SculptureCenter, devastating consequences. Apart from the former Whitney Museum, now the Met Breuer, its masses and windows like exhaust vents can be pretty scary, too.
Yugoslavia, in turn, exported its style. Vjenceslav Richter took it to the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. His pavilions had an almost comic sci-fi in their titles, like Synthurbanism. Yet their glass and marble, set on columns, shone from within at night. Other projects sent Zoran Boojović to Nigeria and others to the Middle East for power plants and cultural centers. And Tito did ally in 1956 with India's prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nassar as "nonaligned nations" between East and West, for the Third Way.
Still, this was a revolution in one country—to borrow a slogan that V. I. Lenin chose for the Soviet Union. Latin American architecture adapted the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier to expanding cities, helping to keep those models alive. Tito longed instead to beat Europe on his own terms. He had to do so, to rebuild bombed-out cities, to transform a mostly rural society, and to establish a capital fit for his aspirations. The year 1947 also marks the beginning of Yugoslavia's first "five-year plan," for a New Belgrade, in today's Serbia. Soon enough, the plans came to Zagreb in Croatia and elsewhere as a "new standard."
MoMA devotes its first room to modernization, and the towers keep coming, with and without the babble. They include apartments for New Belgrade set against empty plazas, and a hotel by Svetlana Kana Radević with a disturbingly massive base. They include an office tower, a TV tower, a telecommunications tower, and a gas station by Milan Mihelić radiating upward and outward. Its pillars leave portals to the sky while casting heavy shadows below, like the regime itself. The Slovenian parliament precedes a final section, for monuments—to the victims of Fascism and to those who fought in World War II. From there on, the pretence of nonalignment is all but gone, and towers give way to hulks once and for all.
Living, work, and leisure
One has every reason for fear. I feared the slab after vertical slab of a building block for Split, in Croatia, by Dinko Kovaćić and Mihalo Zorić. I feared the desolation of Revolution Square (now Republic Square), a bit like the creepy plaza below government offices in Albany, New York State's capital, only more sinister than incompetent. A monument by Iskra and Jordan Grabuloski from the early 1970s resembles an oversized white fire hydrant. One from shortly before by Miodrag Zivković resembles an enormous car wreck. One fears, too, of course for the fate of Yugoslavia.
The show ends with Tito's death in 1980s, well before the slaughters of the 1990s and the nation's dissolution. Still, it makes a fashionable nod to ethnic identities. Where I saw, unmistakably, the Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel, the museum sees touches of Ottoman art and architecture. The building would also have stood behind a latticed wall two stories high, like the rood screen of a medieval church. The curators describe the nation as a laboratory of globalization. One might think instead of the old line about Cuba or the Soviet Union as a laboratory of socialization—with Yugoslavia, too, as a failed experiment.
One has every reason for confusion at that. After the torrent of buildings and names come alcoves for still more architects, abandoning chronology and themes alike. Bogdan Bogdanović, born as long ago in 1922, had his roots in Surrealism. He just happened to be contemporary enough to hold "public happenings" at his school. Neidhardt has his alcove, too, including a photograph of a "suspended motel" over a river. Not every experiment turned out so badly after all.
Utopia may never have arrived, but it had a rapid start and made serious progress along the way. A five-year plan evokes bleak housing in East Germany. Reinforced concrete sounds no more promising. A grid of red, yellow, blue, and green by Ivan Vitić only rubs in the lack of color in the rest. Yet beauty still appears in the ceiling lights, striped tiling, and long lines of a university medical center, by Stanko Kristl. Ravnikar's assembly hall looks more like an opera house.
Along with the promised utopia came ambition, in what a later show calls "Designing Peace." It appears in the engineering challenges of concrete walls, pillars, buttresses, cantilevers, and interlocking modules set at 45 and 90 degree angles. It appears even more in the move beyond official spaces to the space of culture and everyday life. Plans for Split brought together spaces for living, work, and leisure. Earlier buildings include domed stadiums, cathedrals (yes, under socialism), museums, universities, and schools. New York City was not the first to demand pre-K for all.
The show has a space for construction on behalf of coastal tourism by the Adriatic. Yet its pools welcomed locals, and a hotel nestles nicely into existing hills and trees. Others, too, promised an integration of architecture and the city, even if in practice one towered over and confined the other. Next comes a room for interior design, including folding chairs and the bent wood veneer of a ceiling fixture. A bright plastic telephone and television would go just fine with Ettore Sottsass and his red portable typewriter for Olivetti in Italy. They may look now like awkward remnants of the 1960s, but utopias have had worse endings, too.
Africa's field of dreams
Frank Lloyd Wright never saw his urban farms or mile-high apartments, and a handful of slim towers rise today in New York as little more than an investment, an ego trip, and an eyesore. Still, decades after Wright, his open space in a vertical city lived on in Central Africa, thanks to Bodys Isek Kingelez. For Kingelez, it was the key at once to a resurgent nationalism and a new international order. More than that, it was a field of dreams. As seen in "City Dreams" at MoMA, he imagined a future without need for doctors or police. As Villa Fantöme, it would even have a bridge from an isle for the dead.
"A city without high-rise buildings," he wrote, "is a dead city, a non-existent city." Like many a dream, though, his never came true, and it is hard to know whether he conceived it as architecture or art. Born in 1948, Kingelez comes in a long line of visionary urban planning, starting with public spaces and private gardens—and his arches quote La Défense in revolutionary Paris. He has a parallel in the real-life transformations of Latin American architecture in the mid-twentieth century, not to mention Eastern Europe. Still, when he reconceived his rural village as a city of banks and skyscrapers, he assigned it a date a millennium away. Even Buckminster Fuller felt a greater urgency.
The show's thirty models have plenty of ideas, like a UN headquarters flanked by stars and planted with evergreens—or a tower for the Palestinian Authority patterned after a minaret. When Kingelez exhibited in Paris during the Cold War, he showed a design for Germany as well, with flags for both halves of a divided nation. Often as not, though, he leaves many of the specifics, too, to the space between artistry and planning. He makes his colorful constructions from such materials as wrapping paper, toy balls, bottle caps, and Styrofoam. What are those cones projecting out of his sports complex, and what could take place in its slim central tower of beer and soda cans anyway? Form here will never follow function.
Is he recycling or succumbing to consumerism and excess? His entire enterprise has a backward flavor. Like Robert Moses, he has ample space in the city for sports arenas, garages, and highways, but not pedestrians. His skins of deeply inset windows look right out of Miami condos. He also passed much of his adult life in Zaire, the dictatorship that replaced the Belgian Congo until 1997, and a sign touts the party of its dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. Still, Kingelez was nurturing hopes and not crushing them. He kept his towers to mostly under a dozen stories, and he could not have approved of the low ceilings in the new Penn Station under Moses, which crush the spirit of commuters to New York every day even after the advent of Moynihan Train Hall.
He bows now and then to sobriety, with a palace for Hiroshima and a research hospital for AIDS. (The canopy for the latter could pass for stadium seating, too.) More often, though, he appeals to the imagination. He situates his university in Maryland, at a time when he had never once left Africa. When he finally visits France, he assigns it a fictitious Baie d'Espoir (or Bay of Hope). More than one twin tower takes the shape of wings.
The curators, Sarah Suzuki with Carsten Höller, adopt no particular order and no decisive judgment on his utopias. But then Kingelez barely evolved up to his death in 2015, in what had become the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Those soda cans give shape to his structures while providing them with logos, but would they have appeared in the end? No one is saying. For all that, he shares with Moses and the master builder's greatest critic, Jane Jacobs, a belief that architecture trumps ideology and economics. It does, that is, in the field of dreams.
"Toward a Concrete Utopia" ran at The Museum of Modern Art through January 13, 2019, Bodys Isek Kingelez through January 1.