The thesis of this article is two-fold. Firstly, Plečnik’s wartime and post-war projects deserve more research attention than they have received to date. A certain level of under-appreciation of Plečnik’s late work is probably a result of a lower number of realizations and perhaps also of insufficient research of this period compared to Plečnik’s career before that.1 Secondly, the article attempts to prove that in the last fifteen years of Plečnik’s life, the urbanistic character of his work was significantly upgraded. The focus lies on the changed urbanistic character of his wartime and post-war realized as well as unrealized projects. In them, the dissolution of the distinction between the interior and exterior of the buildings as well as between public, semi-public, and private programs was intensified, articulating a wide range of intermediary spaces that position many of his later works somewhere between architecture and urbanism. Plečnik’s strategy of small-scale urbanism had a substantial influence on his disciples, including modernist architects such as Edvard Ravnikar and Dušan Grabrijan, who developed a distinct interplay between the principles of international style and original solutions based on local traditions.

The international competition for the new regulation plan of Novi Sad was held in 1937, in which Juraj Neidhardt’s design was awarded compensation instead of a prize. However, upon further consideration, the city administration decided to adopt a new version of Neidhardt’s plan in the following years. In addition to this plan, he won the administration’s trust to design a series of lower-level plans for the city in 1938-1941. Therefore, Neidhardt became the most prominent figure in the urban planning process triggered by the 1937 competition. However, his final regulation plan for the city from 1941 was rejected in the first post-war revision in 1945, failing to lead to any fruition. Nevertheless, the researchers later characterized the radical modernist approach of this plan as the inspiration for the subsequent general plans of Novi Sad, namely due to introducing the idea of cutting new axes through the urban tissue. There is room today, however, to re-evaluate these claims about the radicalness of Neidhardt’s plan since its solutions were deemed insufficient in bringing radical quality to the urban space of Novi Sad. Furthermore, in the 1938-1941 period, he designed a series of perspective drawings for the new regulation of the streets in the oldest urban core of the city, which brought a decisively modernist approach to treating the urban heritage: keeping only a selection of the most iconic monuments while replacing the rest of it with new modernist structures. These designs can contribute to reinstate the knowledge about Neidhardt’s approach to treating historical heritage, considering his later intricate studies of Bosnian and Macedonian architectural landscapes.

Grabrijan sought to explain and affirm a coexistence of the modern and the traditional in architecture, especially in his seminal studies of Bosnian architecture and the Macedonian house. Co-authored with Neidhardt, his publication about Bosnian architecture is well-known and studied. Grabrijan’s posthumous publication, The Macedonian House, based on the data collected during his fieldwork in regional towns in Macedonia (1946, 1947, 1949), serves to punctuate the progressive modernizing forces and their focus on reconstruction, urbanization, and speedy industrialization of major centers as well as peripheral areas, in the Socialist Republic of (SRMacedonia), as elsewhere in Yugoslavia. As an archival record, The Macedonian House presents a different focus and a rebalance of the postwar agenda that had eclipsed small towns from architectural interest and had effectively produced the demise of the vernacular traditions in the towns. With an ideology to learn from the architecture of the people, Grabrijan’s work wove the vernacular back into a more complex modernism.Grabrijan first traveled to S.R. Macedonia in the summer of 1946 as part of a Yugoslavia-wide exchange–solidarity assistance for post-war renewal. He then organized two research journeys in 1947 and 1949, taking a group of students for fieldwork training. In his archives containing the documents and fieldwork for the publication about the Macedonian House, a drawing of a map of the Balkans resonates with the map of Le Corbusier’s 1911 formative journey to the East, including a coded notation which may refer to folklore, culture, and industry. Grabrijan’s enthusiasm for studying the traditional houses in Macedonia takes him to small towns, covering a broad geography of spatial dialects. Drawing from the Grabrijan archives, this paper will explore his fieldwork methods and his modalities of researching the complex conditions from which the “house for everyone” rises above the ground.

The first part of this research is based on the analysis of several articles published by Dušan Grabrijan in the late 1940s and early 1950s, his book Plečnik in njegova šola (Plečnik and His School), and the analysis of Grabrijan’s teaching method rooted in Auguste Choisy’s book Histoire de l’architecture (Choisy, 1899), published as a study script. The book Plečnik in njegova šola (Grabrijan, 1968) is based on Grabrijan’s published and unpublished texts, some of which were originally written during his WWII imprisonment. It attempts to critically contextualize, evaluate, and present Plečnik’s work. The book was edited by his wife, Prof. Nada Grabrijan, and published posthumously in 1968.One of the first three of Plečnik’s graduates, Dušan Grabrijan, is the author of the Memorial to Slovenian Modernity in Ljubljana Žale Cemetery (dedicated to Ivan Cankar, Dragotin Kette, and Josip Murn, with Oton Župančič’s memorial added later, designed by his son, architect Marko Župančič), built between 1924-25 as a result of a winning student competition in Plečnik’s seminar. The memorial was commissioned and funded by Milena Rohrmann. The composition is tripartite, with a reference to Mount Triglav, consisting of three joint columns, of which Ivan Cankar is the tallest and placed in the center. The memorial follows Plečnik’s design principles.The final part of the paper will examine Plečnik’s modernity and his classical yet modern understanding of the architectural discipline, his ‘flexible classicism’ with his inventiveness, playfulness, daring upcycling, experimentation with materials, forms, and structures, all within the frame of highly developed local crafts, not industry. Indeed, the building industry only really developed after WWII in socialist Yugoslavia. Dušan Grabrijan and Juraj Neidhardt were among the first architects in the region to face the new challenges in architecture. They were trying to answer the new questions: How to connect the new role of an architect, industrialization, and new social needs with the mosaic of local cultures, contexts, and communities, and how to apply Plečnik’s human scale to the modernist architecture of the Balkans?

The recognition of 20th-century architecture in Brazil is still a field restricted to specialists, which makes the remaining assets of this collection susceptible to defacement or even destruction. The designation of the Lagoa Rowing Stadium as a historic landmark by the city of Rio de Janeiro gives us the possibility of reflecting on the existing dispute between the public interest, protected by the listing in 2005, versus the financial voracity of private groups toward the asset in question. Grotesque defacement was undertaken starting in 2003 with the approval of the State and city administrations, including the intent to turn the sports complex into a business complex, thereby distorting the original proposal from the 1950s.

Docomomo International is proud to present the first Open Issue of the Docomomo Journal. Creating the opportunity for scholars, practitioners, policy makers, activists or any other group of authors to publish in our journal without having to wait for a thematic Special Issue on a theme that would fit their topic felt like the logical next step in (the continued) continuing professionalization of the Docomomo Journal.In the plan of action for the candidacy of Delft University of Technology as the new headquarters for Docomomo International – presented in 2021 – open access to the journal and expansion of its reach was advocated:“In addition, Docomomo International aims to involve the Docomomo network more actively into the production of content – in particular linked with the new biannual conferences, seminars and workshops related to digitization, education and sustainability. This will strengthen the role of the Docomomo Journal as a link between Docomomo members, the Docomomo chapters to serve the Docomomo network, and its impacts on professional practices and the general public.”The Open Issue aims for contributions that do not fit within the topic of the thematic Special Issues but fit the overall scope of the Docomomo Journal. All contributions to this open issue have had the same peer reviewing process, but instead of organized by guest editors, now under the wings of the editors-in-chief. The 2024 Open Issue features articles on the Lagoa Rowing Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, industrial heritage in Egypt and Iran, on Erik Gunnar Asplund’s Stockholm public library, the transformation of a former hospital to a criminal justice complex in São Paulo, and the House of Manoel Coelho in Curitiba.The creation of a yearly Open Issue in addition to the two regular thematic Special Issues is the next step in the evolution of the Docomomo Journal, that once started as a simple Newsletter and evolved into an academic peer-reviewed and indexed journal (figure 1). The first Newsletter was published in 1989 and changed into a Journal in 1993 (no. 9). Starting with no. 28 in 2003 the lay-out and graphics of the Docomomo Journal changed tremendously, marking the transition into a more academic oriented journal. Another change in graphics took place in 2010, starting with no. 42 and Ana Tostões and Ivan Blasi as editors, also marking the move towards online publication of the individual articles in the Docomomo Journal. In 2022, with the special issue on Modern Plastic Heritage (no. 66) a new lay-out and publication scheme was adopted to accommodate fast online and open access publication of new issues of the journal and its individual articles.The 2024 Open Issue (no. 71) marks the newest development and we call upon the Docomomo Community to continue using, referencing and contributing to the Docomomo Journal, not only to the thematic Special Issues, but also to the Open Issues.

The study object of this paper is architect Manoel Coelho’s (1940-2021) house in Curitiba, Brazil. The main objective is the historiographical documentation and descriptive analysis of the residence’s architectural design. Projected by the architect and built in 1980-81, it is located on an urban plot in a residential neighborhood in Curitiba. It is characterized by the use of fair-face concrete and utilizing color as the main design element. This article begins with a description of the architect’s biography and then of the project itself, firstly through an analysis of the existing bibliographic references and then through a descriptive analysis of the house. The result of the documentation is a reproduction of the original project through plans, sections, and elevations. In parallel, current photographs taken during a survey illustrate the description. Through all these materials, we can better understand the effectiveness of the project documentation methodology and the contribution of this survey to new research on related subjects and, of course, on the production of this architect and others, whose work is still little researched and published.

This article analyses the conversion of a big hospital and teaching complex, designed between 1968 and 1978 and commissioned by Santa Casa de Misericórdia de São Paulo to a team of architects led by Fábio Moura Penteado, into the biggest criminal justice complex in Latin America, since it was acquired by the State of São Paulo in the mid-1990s and opened in 1999. The architectural characteristics and the superlative scale of the complex constitute a privileged object to analyze the potentialities and limits of architectural flexibility, as well as how this concept is related to the modern project culture, specifically with the general strategies developed by the so-called Escola Paulista.