I had the good luck to make the acquaintance of the Zagreb architecture of the sixties, and precisely the architecture that represents the Zagreb Architecture School, as it is called, of that characteristic stroke, with its élan, and not for that reason any the less carefully thought out and subtle, while walking and driving around the town in pleasant society, which I have always ever after recalled, as in Proust and the story of the madeleines. The one pleasant experience is inextricably linked with the other.

The casual form of today’s sportswear and hairstyles, the way of walking, and apart from that the fact that not even my guide was a born Zagreb woman, were unable to conceal the powerful effect of some very individual elegance and urbane deportment in the city that struck even her. The architecture that I then wanted to see – of Ibler, Pičman, Planić, Vitić, Turina, Haberle (and how many others are there?) – had not been built by Zagreb people alone, and yet the feeling of this atmosphere had been instilled into them; this is an atmosphere in my opinion still not adequately brought out, or described in words (and it might perhaps remain so?), an elegance that, in spite of all their cosmopolitanism, they probably took on with the site.