Dušan Grabrijan's Macedonian House

Grabrijan sought to explain and affirm a coexistence of the modern and the traditional in architecture, especially in his seminal studies of Bosnian architecture and the Macedonian house. Co-authored with Neidhardt, his publication about Bosnian architecture is well-known and studied. Grabrijan’s posthumous publication, The Macedonian House, based on the data collected during his fieldwork in regional towns in Macedonia (1946, 1947, 1949), serves to punctuate the progressive modernizing forces and their focus on reconstruction, urbanization, and speedy industrialization of major centers as well as peripheral areas, in the Socialist Republic of (SRMacedonia), as elsewhere in Yugoslavia. As an archival record, The Macedonian House presents a different focus and a rebalance of the postwar agenda that had eclipsed small towns from architectural interest and had effectively produced the demise of the vernacular traditions in the towns. With an ideology to learn from the architecture of the people, Grabrijan’s work wove the vernacular back into a more complex modernism.Grabrijan first traveled to S.R. Macedonia in the summer of 1946 as part of a Yugoslavia-wide exchange–solidarity assistance for post-war renewal. He then organized two research journeys in 1947 and 1949, taking a group of students for fieldwork training. In his archives containing the documents and fieldwork for the publication about the Macedonian House, a drawing of a map of the Balkans resonates with the map of Le Corbusier’s 1911 formative journey to the East, including a coded notation which may refer to folklore, culture, and industry. Grabrijan’s enthusiasm for studying the traditional houses in Macedonia takes him to small towns, covering a broad geography of spatial dialects. Drawing from the Grabrijan archives, this paper will explore his fieldwork methods and his modalities of researching the complex conditions from which the “house for everyone” rises above the ground.