‘What is so avant-gardist about Croatian architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries?’, Adolf Stiller (Viennese architect and critic) once asked himself. To answer this question, the exhibition CONTINUITY OF THE AVANT-GARDE was put together in collaboration with the Croatian architecture magazine Oris, and will be on view this autumn at ARCAM.

The exhibition shows projects from three distinguished periods: the thirties, the fifties and sixties and the nineties up until 2009. The focus is on villas, housing blocks, schools, churches, monuments and infrastructure projects in cities such as Zagreb, Split and Dubrovnik, with work by, among others, Frane Cota, Stjepan Planič, Nikola Dobrovič, Ivan Vitič, Kazimir Ostrogovič, Hrvoje Njirič and 3LHD.
Even if they do not directly answer the question posed, together these projects nevertheless give the outsider an idea of the wonder that has taken place in Croatia over the past century and therefore raise another question. How is it that in an unsettled period with so much war, architecture of such a high quality has come into being?
The exhibition is accompanied by an English-language catalogue, with a foreword by Andrija Rusan, publisher and editor of Oris.

Especially for the Amsterdam edition of this travelling exhibition, at the opening on Friday September 18 there will be a symposium about Croatian Architecture in coöperation with Croatian architects who work in the Netherlands.