The exhibition explores modernistic architecture and design’s relationship to nature and their approach to ecological thinking. Its starting point is the collection of the Museum of Architecture and Design and its extensive selection of projects, objects, and documentation from the fields of architecture, design, and photography of the 20th century.

The Modernist ideal of progress, anchored in notions of continuous economic growth and industrial production, has defined 20th century. Modernism seems to have drawn a sharp divide between nature and society. Humankind placed itself above and outside nature, and were intended to shape and exploit the natural world for their own needs. Architecture and design understood nature primarily as something to be regulated, controlled, exploited, even conquered as raw material for human progress. This has contributed significantly to the depletion of natural resources and global warming.

The exhibition critically illuminates this polarisation and blurs the notional dividing line between nature and culture.

In socialist Yugoslavia, a modernist oeuvre emerged which differed from the more universal modernism; architects incorporated diverse vernacular traditions as well as landscape and regional specificities in their thinking and designs and understood nature and the local environment in ways that rendered architecture something more like an environmental discipline. Although few creators dealt directly with environmental issues the way we might today, the beginnings of ecological thinking had begun to appear, in individual projects and in initiatives and research related to nature conservation and spatial planning. These interdisciplinary activities emerged in parallel with international environmental movements and paved the way for a more decisive entry of ecology into social, architectural, and design discourse in the 1980s.

The project strives to reflect on contemporary discourses on sustainability and climate justice and to explore which early attempts at such thinking remain relevant today. In this sense, nature is modern precisely because we must constantly rethink what this means and in practice consider it in the context of the time and urgency in which we live.

Curators: Cvetka Požar, Maja Vardjan

Partners: Društvo humanistov Goriške, Krater