Reversing the Exchange: Yugoslav Architectural Exports to Czechoslovakia

Abstract

The paper aims to map out the numerous projects in Czechoslovakia realized by Yugoslav construction companies from the 1960s to the 1980s and offers the preliminary insights into their modes of operation. Due to insufficient archival records, the paper offers a preliminary insight into the matter. However, with the extensive coverage of these projects in the Czechoslovak professional periodicals, it was possible to trace down fifty projects, done by companies from Serbia, Croatia and Macedonia. Interviews with the surviving protagonists and contemporaries of these collaborations provided detailed introspect into the mechanisms of the processes, with local architects typically responsible for the overall design, while Yugoslav companies provided the design development, technological know-how, construction services, and materials. These insights contribute to a growing body of knowledge about the exports of architecture from Europe’s socialist half during the Cold War and broadens the narrative of international architectural circulation, while unpacking the usual presumptions on “developed” and “und(er)developed”. The paper points to other routes based on the cooperation within the socialist world, but nevertheless across a geopolitical division, the one that separated the non-aligned Yugoslavia and the Warsaw Pact-member Czechoslovakia.