The Architect Vladimir Potočnjak (January 17th, 1904-May 16th, 1952): The Forgotten Cofounder of Modern Architecture in Croatia Between the World Wars

Architect Vladimir Potočnjak (1904-1952), a cofounder of Croatian Modern Movement is almost nonexistent in the recent Croatian architectural history. The research of archival sources, accompanied by acquired drawings and books from his library, comprised thor-ough analysis of his realizations, projects and publications. Potočnjak graduated from the Architectural Department of Zagreb’s Institute of Technology in 1926 and apprenticed to Adolf Loos in Paris where he improved drawing skills, subsequently to Ernst May in Frankfurt a/M and finally to Hugo Ehrlich in Zagreb. Between 1931 and 1945 he was li-censed architectural engineer in Kingdom of Yugoslavia and successively in the Inde-pendent State of Croatia, additionally an architectural critic and theoretician preoccupied with problems of standardization. After 1945 he was appointed senior manager for archi-tecture in the collectivized Croatian Stately Design and Planning Institute. Cooperating with Zlatko Neumann, junior architects Antun Ulrich and Dragica Perak, in 1947 he won Yugoslav competition for the Federal Government Presidency Palace, later the Federal Ex-ecutive Council Palace, today the Palata “Srbije”. Fully preoccupied to its construction un-til his death, he concurrently translated Ernst Neufert’s “Bauordnungslehre” in Serbo-Croatian. Although classically educated, Potočnjak blended Modern Architectural narrative with layers of German Expressionism, visible on seminal drawings of Palata “Srbije”.