Engagement as an Aspect of Professional Work

architect Andrija Mutnjaković
written by Tamara Bjažić Klarin

 
An architect is a civil servant who works for the society,because of the society and within the society. His works are the works of a milieu – the milieu gives him tasks, possibilities and motivation, and asks worthy realisations in return. To demand more is absurd and to give less a crime.
Engaged Architecture is the title of the first and, to this day, the only retrospective exhibition of Andrija Mutnjaković, held in February 1975 at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. In the exhibition and in the catalogue’s illustrations, the curator Antoaneta Pasinović focused on Mutnjaković’s visionary architecture. The term that entered Croatian architectural discourse via moma’s exhibition of the same name is appropriate as it encompasses different fields of Mutnjaković’s research: kinetic architecture, biourbanism and the building of structures by employing, in his own words, the enformel method, with the best-known example being the National and UniversityLibrary in Priština.