The investigation of the Bauhaus - as one of the most intriguing artistic and educational experiments in contemporary European cultural and art history - does not lose its momentum and relevance right up to the present day. The research on the impact and significance of this famous avant-garde school is especially emphasized this year, when we celebrate go years from the school's foundation. This essay follows in such efforts and is dedicated to locating the influence that the Bauhaus had on the development of architectural thinking in Croatia in the period between the two world wars. In 1919, the year when the Bauhaus was founded in Weimar, Zagreb established its Technical Faculty, with a separate Architectural Department - a moment that marked the beginning of the university-level education of architects in Croatia. In 1926, the year when the Bauhaus moved to Dessau and opened a new period in the academic orientation and program of this avant-garde school, Zagreb witnessed the foundation of a new, quite specific and progressive architecture school, the so-called "Ibler School", run by Drago Ibler at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts. just like the Bauhaus, the "Ibler School" would not last for long, and would be closed in 1942 due to unfavorable war circumstances, but it will just like the Bauhaus itself - leave the deep and lasting imprint on the artistic life of its environment. More than this curious overlapping of dates and formats of the academic frameworks, what interests us here is a possible closer and more consequential correspondence of the two artistic environments. In that sense we might observe the architecture of Zagreb in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and compare it with the contemporary works of the Bauhaus teachers and students. Such comparison would soon reveal a convincing synchronicity and simultaneity of compared architectures, both in terms of the date of their appearance, and in terms of their aesthetics, expressions, materials, effects and forms. That would point to some more substantial closeness ad correspondence of the two creative environments. This closeness might be explained by the early appearance of the Bauhaus thought and ideas in Zagreb. By the early 1920s Zagreb had two bookstores that kept Bauhaus editions; various local art journals of the time were reporting on the profile and programs of that avant-garde school, and numerous texts of the Bauhaus leading theorists (Gropius, Kandinsky) were published on their pages, just as the works of the prominent Bauhaus teachers (H. Meyer, L. Moholy-Nagy). Recorded were also several visits of Bauhaus teachers and students. As a direct channel of influences we should stress the line of Croatian students who studied at the Bauhaus, in its various phases and in various artistic fields, from the textile art to photography - O. Berger, M. Baranyai and I. Tomljenovic. To confirm a direct architectural link with that vanguard school it is essential to mention the Croatian architect Gustav Bohutinsky, who studied at the Bauhaus in the summer semester Of 1930. And yet, regardless of such undoubtedly important and productive direct contacts, the key moment in understanding the genuine closeness of the two creative environments is the deeper correspondence of their artistic sensibilities, i.e., the already formed proclivity of Croatian architects towards creative approaches and procedures that were cultivated by the Bauhaus. Namely, as the prominent Bauhaus student Farkas Molnar would claim, the architectural forms that we usually recognize as "Bauhaus forms" or "Bauhaus style" were not the issue of some arbitrary aesthetic, formal and stylistic choice, but rather a true and correct architectural answer to questions and problems raised by the immediate social context. It is such essential matters that then directed the socially conscious and responsible architecture to the ideas of functionality, rationality, and technological and structural objectivity, which then in turn - mediated by inevitable artistic intervention and experiment - ended up producing just such innovative formal outcomes and results. It is precisely in such deeper reasons and in the very method of thinking and working that we should try to look for genuine closeness and connections. That Croatian architecture has been, all throughout its past, due to unfavorable political and economic circumstances, marked by a note of restraint, rigor, and formal discipline, and guided by ideas of usefulness, rationality and objectivity is a fact already very well known. Yet as an answer to such limited means, it always reacted with heightened conceptual precision and quality, along with sharpened innovation and experiment. In such way Croatian architecture formed its own authentic method of working and design procedure, which relied more on the logic and clarity of creative and spatial concept than on the richness of formal expression. When such inherent rational tradition encountered severe social problems of the interwar period, there came to a particularly objective, functional and socially responsible architectural reaction. This starts to explain the surprising correspondence in thinking and creative approaches of the Bauhaus and the local architectural scene, just as in their ensuing formal outcomes and results. Such was the platform on which architectural students at the Technical Faculty were brought up and raised. And with the establishment, in 1926, of that experimental and progressive "Ibler School", the correspondence with the Bauhaus poetics became even stronger. As an especially convincing testimony of ideological proximity of the two schools, one ought to stress that Ibler himself was deeply devoted to social issues. As a matter of fact, together with his like-minded colleagues he founded in 1929 the group "Zemlja", a group of progressive painters, sculptors, applied artists and architects, dedicated to social issues, which they intended to solve through joint artistic intervention. Small wonder then that it is precisely from this "Ibler School" that its student Gustav Bohutinsky, after completing third year of his study, decided to leave for the Bauhaus. After one semester spent at the Bauhaus, in spring Of 1930, and exposure to the ideas of Meyer and Hilberseimer, Bohutinsky returned to Zagreb, graduated at the "Ibler School", and started to produce architecture which then rightfully and justly reminds of familiar Bauhaus forms, and not out of some arbitrary stylistic choice. The influence of the Bauhaus in Bohutinsky's oeuvre is most evident in the atelier that he built for his brother, the sculptor Emil Bohutinsky, in 1945 in Zagreb. With its simple cubic form, large glass front, functional spatial organization and exposed construction materials - concrete, brick and glass - it most convincingly testifies to the presence of Bauhaus thought. And yet, it is not just Bohutinsky, as the immediate Bauhaus student, but that whole generation of Croatian architects - faithful to their deeply embraced method of creation and rational functional experiments - that will end up producing architectural works which would recall the familiar Bauhaus forms, testifying thereby not to mere import of style but to the genuine correspondence of their respective artistic and social goals.
