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Architecture in the service of ideology

This lecture deals with the articulation of a totalitarian political belief through architecture, construction and urban planning. In a series of examples – ranging from Hitler’s architectural and urban psychosis, through Niemeyer’s Brasilia, North Korea, China, Israel, Libya and Dubai – it is possible to collate several construction ventures where this ideology has met with architectural form and given it new meaning and purpose. Today, the example of National Socialism in this context is paradigmatic because it denotes the systematic self-critical ‘coming-to-terms’ with the architectural heritage of the period. While examples of places where the absolutism is in power are all too familiar (North Korea, China or Libya), Israel’s case seems exceptional and unique because it establishes an entirely new order of architectural and urban governance and management of social groups.

The same theme of architecture in the service of ideology can be reduced also to the narrower socio-political context of the Southwestern Balkans, through a few examples to illustrate the specific ideological strains of architecture of the South Slavic nations of the nineties onwards.

Irfan Hošić

IRFAN HOŠIĆ (1977, Bosnia and Herzegovinia) gained his master’s degree in 2008 at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb with prof. Zvonko Marković, PhD with the Department of Art History. He lives in Bihać, where he works as a Senior Assistant at the Technical University (Department of Textile Design) on courses in art history, history of textiles and clothing from the 20th Century and the sociology of culture and fashion. He organised the exhibitions “What Is Abstraction? Art in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Fifties and Sixties” (2007), “Art and Terrorism – H ART after 11 / 9″ (2009) and Clothing as a Symbol of Identity (symposium and exhibition), all at the City Gallery in Bihać. He is a regular contributor to the Sarajevo independent weekly newspaper Dani.