Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Ivan Vitić
Croatian, Yugoslav; 20th-century
Zagreb, Croatia: Prisavlje 14
59%
Kockika. 1968
An arresting arch-(late-)modernist composition, but there's something about the presence which the materials have — too much glass too freely disbursed; concrete that's unweighty, almost decorative-seeming — that softens the blow the building might otherwise have had. The cube wants to be perilous, it seems, or maybe domineering, but it's just a bit too well-proportioned to the base's huge extension outwards to convey all that much danger or verve. And, again, its facades of vertically accented concrete and neat gridded glass exert a sort of mitigating effect on the intended extremity of the balancing-act the whole structure is performing. The obvious prototype, of course, is SOM's Lever House in New York, which is both more deftly sculptural and, in terms of its surface effects, better conceived as a totality. Compare the visual uniformity of Lever House's exterior to the relative busyness of Kockika's; compare the tightness of the former's footprint to the openness and sprawl of the latter. (TFS, 2025)