Streets and neighbourhoods: Vladimir Braco Mušič and large scale architecture

The Streets and Neighbourhoods project (exhibition and catalogue, with an introductory essay and other texts) follows the professional trajectory of architect and intellectual Vladimir Braco Mušič, a key personality in Yugoslavian post-war urban planning. A multifaceted theorist and expert, Harvard scholar, initiator of numerous studies in urbanism and architecture, and importer of diverse international urbanist theories, Mušič embodies a typical figure of the post-war architectural profession, one that saw architecture as the main tool for the modification of urban and social realities. Between 1967 and 1975, a group of architects and urban planners within the Urban Planning Institute of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia (UISRS) planned and built a series of residential neighbourhoods that soon became recognised, both at the national and international levels, as examples of paradigmatic projects in the field of contemporary urbanism. The neighbourhood projects in Ljubljana (BS-7), Split (Split 3), and Maribor (Maribor –South), which were conceived and designed by a Slovenian project team led by Marjan Bežan, Vladimir Braco Mušič, and Nives Starc, introduced radical changes to the planning strategies that had previously prevailed in the former Yugoslavia. The proposed new strategies were the result of a unique blend of numerous theoretical models and urban visions that stemmed from both domestic and Western cultural and professional experience.