Svetlana Kana Radević (1937-2000), among the most prominent architects in socialist Yugoslavia, will be the subject of a retrospective, the first exhibition to survey the anti-fascist memorials, hotels, residential projects, and civic buildings that are among the highlights of her hybridizing ouevre. Celebrated for its deft synthesis of local materials and international Brutalist tendencies, as well as a generosity of proportions and informal spaces for leisure and exchange, Radević’s architecture embodied the egalitarian ambitions of the Yugoslav welfare state much as it reflected her transnational professional trajectory: she ran her namesake atelier in Montenegro even as she lived between Philadelphia, Tokyo, and Podgorica during the 1970s and 1980s. Skirting the Center will show original drawings, photographs, and correspondences from her personal archive, a trove of recently-recovered materials that make it possible to contextualize and historicize an exceptional, if overlooked, figure of postwar architecture. 

Radević remains the only woman and, at 29, the youngest architect to ever win the prestigious Borba Architecture Prize, socialist Yugoslavia’s highest architectural honor, which she received in 1968 for her first built work, the Hotel Podgorica (1964-1967). By 1972, when she moved to Philadelphia on a Fulbright fellowship to study with Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania, she was already the rare female architect to command a profile of national prominence in Yugoslavia and a fixture of the country’s architectural star system. Radević initially visited Japan while working on a Ph.D. in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania—one of the first women in North America to pursue doctoral study in the field—and moved in the late 1970s to Tokyo, where she worked with Kisho Kurokawa the following decade. 

The previously unseen materials in Radević’s personal archive reveal an architect who mediated between geopolitical and societal registers: regionally, negotiating between vernacular building tradition and the globalizing tendencies of late modernism; nationally, designing celebrated civic spaces and social condensers that facilitated a progressive public sphere between the socialist state and its citizenry; and internationally, articulating a decentered, post-colonial axis by which the Montenegrin architect simultaneously and seamlessly worked between Yugoslavia, Japan, and the United States.

Skirting the Center, curated by Dijana Vučinić, Anna Kats and Ana Dobrašinović aims to significantly expand Radević’s representation within the architectural canon by exhibiting the highlights of her built work for the first time: the Hotel Podgorica (1964-1967) and the Hotel Zlatibor (1979-1981), which made socialist  luxury broadly accessible to both locals and foreign visitors, who commingled on expansive terraces with picturesque views; the Petrovac Apartment Building (1968), with its sculptural façade and generous apartment plans; as well as the Monument to Fallen Fighters at Barutana (1980), a sculptural memorial landscape that commemorates local anti-fascist fighters. In its revisionist scope, the project expands upon research initiated as part of Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which featured several key projects by Radević in its survey of the country’s architectural production.

Radević subverted hierarchies that privilege cosmopolitan centers over provincial peripheries by locating her personal practice in Montenegro. Yet her architecture was ultimately supranational, simultaneously digesting vernacular building traditions as well as her global study and work experience. By seeking to re-center her historical figure, long relegated to the peripheral fringes of modern architecture’s normative history, this exhibition recovers her distinctive role as a negotiator of the spatial contract—between state and citizenry, between center and periphery—as a case study in facilitating social consensus and cultural exchange for contemporary practitioners,” the curators noted. 

Thanks to the trust of Kana’s family, led by Tamara Goliš, the exhibition is realized by APSS Institute and the company Strategist, under the patronage of the President of Montenegro and with the support of the Capital City of Podgorica and the Secretariat for Culture.

 Dijana Vučinić, Curator
 Anna Kats, Curator
 Ana Dobrašinović, Curatorial Associate
 Katarina Milačić, Marketing and Communication Manager 
 Luka Bošković, Graphic Designer
 Marija Raspopović, Marketing and Communication Assistant

 Collaborators 

Contributor to the catalogue: Dr Tatjana Koprivica

Team members: Dea Đebrić, Lazar Betić, Milica Bubanja, Stepan Jevtić, Jovan Đukanović
 Proofreading: Dragana Erjavšek

We are thankful to the sponsors of the exhibition: Savana, Bemax, CEDIS, Uniprom, Glosarij, Zetagradnja, EPCG, Hipotekarna banka, Metropolis, CGES, Artemide, as well as numerous individuals, institutions, and partners who made their archives and documents available for the needs of the exhibition, among them – Pobjeda, Radio Television of Montenegro (RTCG), the National Museum of Montenegro, the Museum of Yugoslavia, the Public Institution Museums and Galleries, the Municipality of Mojkovac, Lovćeninvest, the Montenegrin Cinematheque, and the State Archives of Montenegro, our colleague Slobodan Bobo Mitrović, photographer Duško Miljanić, and photographer Lazar Pejović.