National Unity through Regional Diversity: Architecture as Political Reform in Yugoslavia, 1929-1941

Abstract

When in 1929 King Alexander I Karadjordjević dissolved the parliament and abolished the constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, it was only the final act in a long lasting political drama which had started back in 1918. The country got a new name - the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and it was divided into new regional units which replaced the former historical provinces. These regions became a nucleus of a new national paradigm with huge ideological loading. Architecture played major part in this new regionalist imagination of Yugoslav identity, expressing a visual language of a newly reconceptualised nation.