Exhibition Downtown Zagreb in Brasil

The exhibition on the architecture of the historic core of Zagreb will be held in Brasilia (City Hall) on the 19th November and São Paulo (Faculty of Architecture FAUSP) on 26th November 2024. The exhibition was conceived by a team of authors from the Institute of Art History in Zagreb – Dr. Irena Kraševac, Dr. Tamara Bjažić Klarin and Ivana Haničar Buljan, in collaboration with architect Dr. Krunoslav Ivanišin. Author of exhibition design and layout is Zvonimir Prusina. Exhibitions will be opened by Ranko Vilović, the Ambassador of the Republic of Croatia to Brazil, together with Dr. Katarina Horvat-Levaj, director of the Institute of Art History in Zagreb.

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The selected corpus of representative buildings forms the main urban substance of Zagreb, giving it the characteristics of a Central European metropolis and shaping the administrative, cultural, scientific, educational, economic, commercial and tourist center of the capital of the Republic of Croatia.

In the late 19th century, Zagreb was home to a number of distinguished architects and builders whose works are presented in the exhibition. Most of the projects from this period were carried out by Herman Bollé and the architectural firm Hönigsberg & Deutsch. In the early 20th century, a younger generation of architects, including Rudolf Lubynski, Vjekoslav Bastl, Dionis Sunko, Viktor Kovačić, Hugo Ehrlich and Ignjat Fischer, built on their legacy. As a result of fruitful collaboration with contemporary investors, these architects and firms built a large part of the city center within the so-called “Green Horseshoe” zone. Harmonious interpolations in the 1920s and 1930s led to the rise of a generation of modern architects such as: Drago Ibler, Slavko Löwy, Stjepan Planić, Juraj Denzler, Egon Steinmann, Aleksandar Freudenreich and Zvonimir Požgaj. Post-war modern architecture in Zagreb was shaped by Drago Galić and Ivan Vitić. In the 1970s and 1980s the realizations by Milan Šosterič, Ines Filipović and Nikola Filipović, Miroslav Begović, Radovan Tajder, Branko Kincl and Dražen Juračić stood out. More recently, the city center has been shaped by the projects of Svebor Andrijević, Otto Barić, Senka Dombi, Krunoslav Ivanišin and Lulzim Kabashi.

The exhibition opens with the building of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, built in 1880, and ends with the contemporary interpolation of the MET hotel, opened in 2023. The exhibition represents a critical choice that emphasizes the interpolation of modern and contemporary architecture in a historicist urban matrix and shows the pluralism of styles that ultimately harmoniously merged into a cohesive and attractive complex of the center of Zagreb, connecting the past with the present.

You can download the exhibition flyer here.

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The research presented in the exhibition is the result of work on the projects “Architecture and Housing Culture in Zagreb 1880-1940” and “Architecture and Visual Arts of Urban Entities in Croatia.”

The project is financially supported by the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs of the Republic of Croatia.

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Contacts:
Ivana Haničar Buljan
Irena Kraševac

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