On Tuesday 13 May 2025, at 5 p.m., a conference entitled "Ivan Antić e le relazioni tra Serbia, Italia e Friuli Venezia Giulia nell'architettura del secondo Novecento" (Ivan Antić and the relations between Serbia, Italy and Friuli Venezia Giulia in the architecture of the second half of the 20th century) will be held in Gorizia at the University of Trieste's Pole in via Alviano 18, to commemorate a leading figure in architecture in Serbia in the second half of the 20th century twenty years after his death.

An exhibition entitled ‘Architettònica: Ivan Antić architetto (1923-2005)’ will also be held from 8 to 15 May at the Gorizia University Pole in Via Alviano.

Ivan Antić (Belgrade, 3 December 1923 - 25 November 2005), of Italian mother and Serbian father, was an architect and academic considered one of the best and most prolific designers in post-war Yugoslavia. He worked on a variety of projects, some of which he realised with his colleague Ivanka Raspopović. The variety of his works, which have won numerous prizes and awards, includes a large number of realisations and projects, some of which are considered masterpieces of more recent Serbian architecture. Among them, several projects such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Novi Beograd (Ušće, 1960-1965 - with Ivanka Raspopović), the ‘21st October’ Memorial in Kragujevać (Šumarice, 1968-1975 - with Ivanka Raspopović) and the ‘25th May’ Sports and Recreation Centre in Belgrade (1971-1973) have taken on iconic and paradigmatic value in understanding the significance of an unrepeatable season of architecture in Serbia, that of the second half of the 20th century.

The exhibition aims to highlight the relations and relationships between Ivan Antić, his Italian origins, Italian functionalist architecture and the architects active in Friuli Venezia Giulia after World War II who were his contemporaries (Gino Valle, Giovanni Donadon, Adalberto Burelli, Dino Tamburini and Roberto Costa among them).

The disciplinary debate animated as early as the late 1960s by Alberto Mambriani with his book entitled ‘Modern Architecture in the Balkan Countries’ (Bologna, 1970), presented to readers the disruptive project of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade by Ivan Antić and Ivanka Raspopović (1960-1965), dedicating ample space to this work. This episode proved to be relevant and animated the debate in Italy and our region in those years regarding the new architectural trends that were taking place in the then Yugoslavia. Conditioned by the ideological opposition of the period, this event nevertheless represented an extraordinary testimony to the liveliness that animated the disciplinary debate of the time, both Italian and international, demonstrating all the importance that was being assigned to the emerging architectural expressions and prospects for a new urbanity that planners in Serbia were proposing in the innovative solutions for Novi Beograd, a theme to which the book devoted particular attention. This fact also had important reflections in our region, so close to the eastern border. Mediated by current international trends, the unprecedented realisations certainly had resonance and reflections in Friuli Venezia Giulia as well, where the architectural debate was searching for a balance between Lecorbuserian tensions and the identification of a path towards a new regionalism. In Friuli, however, the birth of architectural Neo-realism, as a national reaction to the Modern Movement and whose recognised masters would be Mario Ridolfi, Carlo Aymonino, Ludovico Quaroni and Giovanni Michelucci, was followed by the urgent season of reconstruction after the 1976 earthquake.

The catalogue of the exhibition to be presented in Gorizia on 13 May 2025, containing texts by Dijana Milasinović Marić, Igor Marić and Paolo Tomasella, will commemorate the professional twenty years after his death (2005) and fifty years after the only anthological exhibition on his work that took place in Belgrade in 1975. The book is also the first monograph dedicated to the architect Ivan Antić to be published in Italy to date.

The conference programme and all information can be found in the attachment below.