Socialist and Modernist Ideology in the Synthesis of Yugoslav Architecture and Art—The Case of Kockica

Abstract

The former Building of Socio-Political Organizations in Zagreb, now housing the Ministries of the Government of the Republic of Croatia, popularly known as Kockica, is analyzed as a case in which the synthesis of architecture and art became an aesthetic and spatial expression of socialist modernism in Yugoslavia. Designed by Ivan Vitić between 1961 and 1968, Kockica emerged within a broader cultural and political context shaped by self-managing socialism, cultural modernization, and the search for a modern representative language distinct from both the Soviet socialist realism and Western capitalist iconography. The article combines historical-interpretive analysis with an ideologically critical reading of institutional space, artistic commissions and spatial experience, reflecting the evolving social and ideological paradigms that shaped Yugoslav architecture and cultural policy during the 1960s. Its main hypothesis is that the integration of architecture, visual and applied arts, design and sculpture in Kockica should not be understood as decorative enrichment but as a regulatory and representational apparatus through which the ideology of socialist modernization was articulated spatially and sensorially. Special attention is given to the artworks integrated into the interior, regarded as constitutive elements of a visual language of modernity, progress, and cultural emancipation. Kockica appears not merely as a modernist administrative building but as a cultural and ideological artefact in which architecture and art function as a unified system of representation, while its meanings continue to be transformed in the post-Yugoslav context.