Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Vjenceslav Richter
Croatian, Yugoslav; 20th-century
Zagreb, Croatia: Ulica Lavoslava Ružičke
82%
Rakete. 1968
The Rockets (as they're called) are probably the greatest buildings in Zagreb, towering over the gauche Habsburg pastiches that make up the city's historical center, as well as concentrating within themselves much of the austere dynamism that's present as mostly not more than potential in the town's many other modernist efforts (which tend to be shyer than the Rockets when it comes to departing from the sheer orderliness of a system). A big part of what makes Rakete great is how thoroughly articulated is its site: without detracting from the monumentality of the three buildings, the parking lots and common spaces around them echo certain elements of the towers' appearance and elaborate some of their sculptural ideas, such as the tapering braces at each building's four corners. This correspondence between setting and structure coaxes out and amplifies the slim beauty of the towers: the perfect balance of the negative space between them; their nearly invisible dissimilarities in height and proportion; their slight shapeliness provided by those tapering corners. (TFS, 2025)