Concrete and Coast

The concrete is stained with salt. The balconies cantilever towards the water as if the building itself is leaning in to listen.

Along the Croatian coast, a generation of modernist holiday complexes is quietly deteriorating. Built in the 1960s and 70s under Yugoslav socialism, they were expressions of a particular political optimism: that ordinary workers deserved not just rest, but grandeur.

The ideology of leisure

These buildings were not designed as luxury. They were designed as infrastructure for the working class - self-funded holiday resorts operated by trade unions and enterprises, where factory workers and miners and teachers could arrive by coach and spend a fortnight beside the sea. Architecture was a political statement. If capitalist resorts had grandeur, so would socialist ones.

The forms chosen were modernist because modernism was, at that historical moment, associated with the future. Brutalism, in particular - its honest use of material, its visual weight, its refusal of decoration - suited the ideological ambitions of the project. The buildings said: we are serious about this.

Salt air and entropy

What modernist concrete does not do well is age gracefully in a marine environment. Salt air attacks the rebar. The freeze-thaw cycle opens the surface. Water finds its way in and expands. The staining that looks dramatic from a distance is, up close, a record of slow structural failure.

Some complexes have been maintained with care - reclad in new concrete, repainted, fitted with modern plumbing. Others have been demolished. The ones in between are the most interesting: operating, barely, with missing balcony railings and temporary repairs that have become permanent. Guests return year after year, apparently indifferent to entropy.

The architects

Few of these buildings are widely attributed. Their architects worked within state design bureaus, producing drawings that were technically authored by an institution rather than an individual. Names like Zdravko Bregovac and Ninoslav Kuče are known mainly to architectural historians. The buildings exist without the celebrity that might protect them.

This anonymity is one reason they are vulnerable. There is no famous name to invoke, no monograph to wave at a planning committee. The case for preservation must rest on the buildings themselves - on their quality, their history, and the culture they represent.

What survives and what is lost

Travelling the coast in June, the pattern becomes clear. The renovated resorts are indistinguishable from any other Mediterranean hotel: white walls, glass balconies, the same outdoor furniture. The architecture has been corrected back to the international vernacular. Nothing remains of the original ambition except the footprint.

The unrenovated buildings are different. Walking through one - half-occupied, the dining room still serving a fixed menu at fixed hours - you feel the intentions of the original design. The corridors are generous. The communal spaces are genuinely communal. The view from the roof terrace has not been privatised.

These buildings are monuments to an optimism about public leisure that feels almost radical today. Whether that optimism deserves preservation is a question that coastal municipalities are answering, quietly and irrevocably, with bulldozers and render.