ABSTRACT
If the project had been understood as the emanation of specically Croatian national ideology, its interpretations would have emphasized the Croatian identity while challenging the imperial models coming from Vienna. On the opposite, scholarship has insisted on undeniable parallels between the Ringstaße and Green Horseshoe, even in regard to the characteristics which have not much in common, such as the overall concept and forms of the two urban settings.5 In terms of the building programmes, the institutions of national importance overlapped with representative housing, the parallels between the Ringstraße and Green Horseshoe seem obvious and undeniable. On the other hand, questions of about whose identity was represented by the major cultural institutions of the Green Horseshoe’s plan, monarchical (Hapsburg) or national (Croatian or South Slavic/ Yugoslav), remained answered in accordance to the changing political interests. For example, the rst building to appear as a nucleus of the further development of the Green Horseshoe was the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences (Fig. 1), a cultural, research and educational centre, institutionalized and built with an aim to promote a South Slavic national ideology. Since the dissolution of Yugoslavia the building has hardly been mentioned as the rst ‘ocial’ armation of a Yugoslav idea in architecture based on the programmatic premises of its nineteenth century Croatian patrons, strong advocates of the idea of South Slavic unication. After the name of institution was changed into Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences any association of the building with Yugoslav identity remained only in historical sources.
