Reception of the Zagreb Traditional Wooden House in the Brick Residential Architecture of Zagreb’s Opatovina and Upper Town in the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries

Abstract

During the foundation period of Zagreb’s Gradec and Opatovina, a specific architectural type of wooden single-storey residential house emerged, the so-called purgerska hiža, based on the traditional wooden architecture of the wider Zagreb area, which has been defined, for the first time in this paper, as the Zagreb traditional wooden house. Features of this house type can be recognised in brick residential houses from the 18th century onwards, both in Opatovina and Gradec, and they became a staple piece of architecture commissioned by the economically less powerful and less educated. This paper describes the prominent features of this architectural type, as well as the specificities of a more elaborate type of two-storey house that developed therefrom. Here it is shown that this type continued in the brick form long into the 19th century, and that certain features occasionally cropped up even in the 20th century. All Upper Town and Opatovina houses that can be subsumed under this type have been identified in this paper, as well as houses derived from that type, which can be considered its modifications, and they have been analysed in order to determine where the influences on this type of architecture had come from, adopting a new thesis on Zagreb as a border zone that was influenced by two ethnographic regions: Turopolje and Hrvatsko Zagorje.

Keywords

• Zagreb
• purgerska hiža
• residential architecture
• traditional architecture
• wooden house
• Turopolje