Modernism in the Adriatic hotels of Socialist Yugoslavia

After World War II, the state of Yugoslavia declared a wish to establish its own social and state system lying somewhere between the capitalist West and the socialist East of Europe and representing a specific area in a geopolitical, as well as a cultural sense. The modernist’s idea of new architecture and architects as creators of social welfare and happiness coincided with the declared ideals of this new socialist society. With an intense relationship with and openness to the West, architects ‘infected’ by modernist ideas and the unquestioning phenomenological support of the system, generated an authentic modernism. Hotels constructed in Yugoslavia were created very differently to the numerous destinations for mass tourism in the Mediterranean of the time. Yugoslav hotel architecture from that period can be studied as a special expression of modernism, strongly determined by place and a strong connection between man and nature, and showing careful material selection and adaptation to specific climatic conditions.