Selman Selmanagić - "the Balkan Le Corbusier"

Croatian scholarship is poorly acquainted with the life of the well-known Berlin architect, designer and professor, Selman Selmanagic. The enviable and lengthy career of this successful Bosniak and his exciting and dynamic life, intersecting with different cultures, certainly warrants attention, especially considering the contemporary research into the legacy of the Bauhaus tradition and the modes of its reception in Eastern Europe. Selman Selmanagic was the only Yugoslav who did his entire degree in architecture at Bauhaus. For twenty years he led the Department of Architecture at the Kunsthochschule in Berlin, and through his work influenced not only the education of students of architecture but of all other fields. Through his long professorial career, Selman Selmanagic marked many generations of his students and colleagues equally by promoting the idea of a single curriculum which encapsulated architecture, design, applied and decorative arts, technology and science – “totalen Architektur.” It is interesting that in the 1930s he spent some time in the Near East and that he collaborated with, among others, the studio of Richard Kauffmann in Jerusalem precisely when a significant number of his Bauhaus colleagues emigrated to the then Palestine, and when a specific variety of European architectural modernism, and through that the Bauhaus tradition, was being interpreted creatively in this region. Of particular significance was his participation in the Planungskollektiv team (the planning team), together with a number of distinguished architects, many of whom attended Bauhaus and were his colleagues in the anti-Nazi movement, from 1945 to 1950 which, led by Hans Scharoun, planned the post-war rebuilding of Berlin, where Selmanagic was at the head of the Department for the Planning of Building and Renovation of Cultural and Sports Structures, and for the Protection of Monuments (Leiter des Referats fur Kultur- und Erholungsstatten-plannung). As well as working as a professor and architect, he was an urbanist, a set designer and a very successful and established designer. Some of his designs have secured him a place as one of the classic figures of twentieth-century architecture. He extensively advocated the Bauhaus ideas and aesthetics in furniture design and interior decoration. It is of particular interest that he actively took part as a main consultant in the renovation project of the Bauhaus building in Dessau in 1975.