OWARD A CONCRETE UTOPIA: ARCHITECTURE IN YUGOSLAVIA 1948-1980YUGOSLAV PAVILION AT EXPO 58 Architect Vjencestay Richter (1917-2002) Bas se Location Brussels ‘The first World's Fair to open after World War I1, Expo 58 in Brussels offered the young Yugoslav socialist state a prominent platform in which to articulate a position of openness within the bifurcated Cold War political order. The 1958 Yugoslav pavilion—designed by Vjenceslav Richter, a Croatian artist and architect who created several prominent exhibition pavilions abroad—was intended to serve as a conduit in educating the Expo's international public about the distinct brand of Yugoslav socialism, one that represented a progressive political ideology wholly different from the more rigid and bureaucratized Soviet Communist system. ‘The pavilion itself lacked any of the ornamental flourishes asso- ciated at the time with Soviet Socialist Realism, thereby tacitly commu- nicating to visitors the split between Yugoslavia and the USSR. Nor was the Yugoslav structure placed with Warsaw Pact states around the Soviet Pavilion; rather, it stood near the British and Portuguese Pavilions, alongside a wooded patch of trees that emphasized, by contrast, the modernity of Richter’s design. The distinctly avant-garde building, with four cascading galleries arrayed across two split-level stories, was sheathed in ceiling-height glazing, which made the transparent box appear to glow at night. Richter initially proposed a monumental central column meant to carry the entire weight of an elevated gallery volume, but, to his regret, this radical structural solution was abandoned at the behest of skeptical engineers. The realized scheme instead rested on twelve columns arranged along the perimeter (so as to preserve the open ground-floor plan) and featured, adjacent to the building, « detached sculptural 115-foot steel obelisk, which gestured at the original idea, demarcated the pavilion, and represented the six constituent ‘Yugoslav states with a motif of six curvilinear steel elements. Yet the built structure retained several of the exceptional features of Richter’s original competition scheme—its free circulation, for example. Visitors to the pavilion were completely uninhibited by doors, either internal or external, including on the ground-level plaza, which was elegantly paved with twelve multicolored varieties of polished Yugoslav marble. Ultimately, Richter’s architecture was the single most successful element of the Yugoslav Pavilion in Brussels, earning praise from leading newspapers and trade magazines such as Architectural Review, which dubbed it one of the six best national pavilions at Expo. In a noteworthy postscript, Richter’s building continues to serve a didactic function today, though both the socialist Yugoslav state and the 1958 World's Fair have run their respective courses. After the fair, a Belgian contractor purchased the Yugoslav Pavilion and reconstructed it as the College of Saint Paulus in the nearby town of Wevelgem, where the building still stands. Anna Kats