The Hotel and Tourism Architecture of Aleksandar Dragomanović on the Adriatic and Reflections of the Dutch School of Architecture in Croatia

Abstract

The architect Aleksandar Dragomanović, one of the key luminaries of Croatian post-war Modernism, left a creative oeuvre of over a hundred works, among which the most poorly known, and so far unpublicised, are designs for hotels, holiday complexes, restaurants and marinas along the Adriatic. At issue are some dozen architectural complexes devised for Opatija, Lovran, Medveja, Mošćenička Draga, Zadar, Split and Jelsa, which were mainly created as competition entries (1949–1961), then awarded and highly valued, but due to their avant-garde nature and demands, they were never realized. Its typological and technological innovativeness at the beginning of the ‘golden age’ of hotel development on the Adriatic, as well as the highly aestheticised level of artistic and compositional expression, are an unavoidable part of the ex-Yugoslavian modernist heritage, with clear reflections on the European context of the time, particularly of the Dutch architectural school.

Keywords

• aleksandar dragomanović
• late modernism
• tourist architecture
• hotel buildings