Nikola Dobrović and the Ruins of Non-Aligned Modernism
Nikola Dobrović’s two most emblematic works — the Grand Hotel Lopud (1934–36) and the Generalštab in Belgrade (1954–63) — were produced under radically different political regimes, for totally different clients, and with different intentions. Nonetheless both represent a particular branch of modernist architecture that is hard to label. The architecture produced in the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was experimental, decentralized, and explicitly non-national, shaped by the political project of non-alignment after 1948. As architect-researcher Srdjan Jovanović Weiss reflected in NATO as Architectural Critic: “in contrast to other communist nations like the Soviet Union, which under Stalin chose a Neo-classicist style over Constructivism to represent the state, Yugoslavia constructed its post-war image through experimenting in modernism”. The ouvre of the architect Nikola Dobrović’s — both his design for private villas and leisure complexes and his late work as a state-architect — exemplify this singular branch of modernism.
Nowadays, the Generalštab (Army Headquarters building) still carries the wounds from the 1999 NATO bombing, but neoliberal redevelopment, and deliberate heritage erasure threaten it into being redeveloped through a lex specialis law. What once functioned as an open-air museum of modernism and political trauma risks becoming a tabula rasa. Meanwhile, on Lopud Island, here too, modernism is at risk of being reduced to mere scenery and be victim of imitation and fakery. Dobrović’s Grand Hotel, once a catalyst for the emergence of modern tourism in the Adriatic stands abandoned, and with no project insight to keep it alive. Both buildings are now suspended in an unresolved present, at risk of simplification, erasure, or instrumentalization.
Understanding New Belgrade from the Island of Lopud
Dobrović arrived in Dubrovnik in the 1930s as a radical modernist invited by conservator Kosta Strajnić. Dobrović´s villas — Rusalka, Adonis, Vesna, Svid — and the Grand Hotel Lopud combine functionalism, climate adaptation, material rigor, and a deep engagement with landscape. Although not particularly ideologically driven, the Hotel embodies modernist belief of openness, mobility, and it marked the beginning of modern tourism on the region. Its later history — wartime use as a site of Jewish detention, Tito´s regime appropriation, post-1990s privatization, and current abandonment — complicates and informs its existence. After World War II, Dobrović as urban planner, educator, and state architect, became instrumental in shaping post-war Yugoslavia’s architectural identity. As Jovanović claims, the design of the Generalštab building in Belgrade, pretended to translate Yugoslavia’s non-aligned, decentralized socialism into form: dynamic voids, fractured masses, and an anti-monumental monumentality. The identity of a nation that no longer exists.
The studio establishes a productive conceptual distance. Students will work in situ on Dubrovnik, while thinking and designing critically about Belgrade. Students will develop architectural responses that connect both sites, treating them as parts of a shared political narrative rather than isolated cases. Lopud island becomes a vantage point, a place from which to reflect on modernism, tourism, power, and ruin. Through research drawings, spatial narratives, analytical models, and speculative architectural interventions; the design proposals will explicitly articulate the connections between Dobrović´s works across time and space.
What remains when political systems collapse, reverse, or disappear?
Nikola Dobrović’s villas in Dubrovnik and Lopud, and his later monumental work in Belgrade, are often treated as belonging to different careers. This studio argues the opposite: that Dobrović’s work forms a continuous architectural inquiry, shaped — but not broken — by historical upheaval. Students will analyze how spatial ideas tested in small-scale, regional, leisure-based architecture later reappear transformed in large-scale institutional architecture. Through the work of Nikola Dobrović, it will be studied how architecture operates under radically different political frameworks and how that same architecture is today threatened by new political and economic forces. Students will treat the grand Hotel Lopud and the Generalštab as ruins-in-progress: not frozen relics, but active political objects.
This Design Studio utilizes Dobrović’s work as a specific case study to face complex disciplinary questions: When the political project that generated an architecture no longer exists, what kind of future can that architecture have? How do we preserve and intervene in those architectures whose political and culture framework has radically change over time, what should be prioritized? The course will focus on continuity under rupture, reflecting on how one architect could produce radically different architectures under changing political systems, without abandoning modernism as a project.
Teaching Methods:
The semester takes place in English and in individual work. Work will be carried out in small groups.
In the tension between observation and design, the artistic techniques of appropriation and representation of what is observed and designed play a central role as a tool: a model is a working model, a drawing is a tool, each step is documented and at the end part of the semester work. Continuous attendance and participation in the excursion are therefore mandatory requirements for the students. This design studio leads to a series of visual and textual representations that are carried out during the semester. These include models, drawings, diagrams, photographs, films, essays and interviews. In parallel with the research and design phases of the studio, students are asked to prepare lectures.
Borrowing from curatorial approaches, exhibition design, and landscape design, students will explore strategies of display, framing, partial occupation, narrative spatialization, architectural staging in order to create proposals that reflect the complexities behind the creation and use of existing architecture. Rather than proposing conventional restoration or replacement, architecture is understood as a medium that can hold contradiction, preserve trauma, and resist simplification.
The design work is divided into sections and goes through several stages.
Research of basic information
Development of design criteria and concept development
Development of designs using analog models
Discussion groups and role-playing
Lectures and tours
Excursion
Presentations and feedback sessions
Reflection groups
Workshops
Small group and individual meetings
Lecturers:
Wilfried Kuehn
Carlos Mombiela
Milica Tomić
Tutor:
Andreea Avram
Further Information:
Kick-off: Thu, 12th of March 2026, 10:00–15:00, White Cube, Forschungsbereich Raumgestaltung und Entwerfen
Meetings take place every Thursday.
Excursion to Dubrovnik, Croatia May 4th – 9th ! Participation is obligatory for the design participants. See details in the LVA description 253.O72. Travel and accommodation must be organized independently!