Analogies with teaching concepts at the Bauhaus were also present in the teaching programmes of the head of the textile department, Branka Hegedušić.[9] Within the textile department, in the third, fourth and fifth year there was a unit for theatre costumes. The theoretical component included all relevant problem areas in costume design, from studies of texts, librettos, choreographies and directing to the psychology of colours. The practical component included ballet studies and theatre dressmaking, and students attended performances and even independently produced costumes for shows on the repertoire, researching colours in front of the film camera in black and white, as well as techniques for filming in colour.

They also completed practical work in film studies and became familiar with contemporary theatre and film ‘from the realistic to the abstract’ in their final year of study, which attests to the teaching programme’s experimental character. In the teaching programme for fifth-year students in the textiles department, lectures were provided on the theoretical foundations of design like those provided by Zvonimir Radić. There was a separate unit on the ‘influence of the Werkbund Institutes on our applied and industrial art’. Subjects from the fields of art science, the science of styles, the history of art and the general subjects of psychology and psychophysiology comprised separate units. Part of the teaching was carried out in collaboration with the theatre academy where the students attended lectures on the history of theatre while the curators of the Ethnographic Museum and the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb participated in classes on the history of costumes.

The interdisciplinarity of the experimental programme at the Academy of Applied Arts exemplifies in the very best way the works of Zlatko Bourek, Zvonimir Lončarić, Ante Jakić, Vasko Lipovac, Ordan Petlevski, Jagoda Buić and numerous other students who cannot be unambiguously identified by a single art medium in the traditional sense. After studying fine arts in Ernest Tomašević’s class, Višnja Jelačić and Višnja Markovinović worked in ceramics and ceramic sculptures. After studying fine arts, Lidija Laforest experimented with photograms and photo collages, using ready-made photograms. These dealt with individual authorial personalities who were equally successfully involved in different ways of artistic expression: from sculpture and painting to graphic design as well as in the multidisciplinary fields of spatial design, objects for everyday use, applied arts, graphic design and animated film.

Besides the fine arts, the layered design of stage spaces is also crucial to an understanding of the poetics of space that builds specific visual expressions. This includes costume design and sculpture and the fact that the majority of AAA graduates active in animated media made connections between the ludic character of the media, seriality as a structural feature, a self-ironic sensibility, performativity and the theatricalisation of media. Experiment as a method, that is, collaborative work on finding steady and organised solutions to project tasks are recognisable features of their actions. Numerous AAA graduates worked in graphic design, especially in the then nascent sphere of advertising design. Jože Rebernak, collaborating with the advertising agencies Interpublic and Ozeha, and the Zagreb Fair created an exceptionally interesting and prolific body of work in the field of commercial graphic design. At the same time, despite the relatively adverse conditions in Yugoslav industry, many designers established themselves in the new design profession. Bruno Planinšek, Milan Dobrić, Vladimir Frgić, Boris Babić and Mario Antonini, who were graduates of the architectural department of the Zagreb Academy of Applied Arts, are all names who achieved important works through collaborating with industry immediately after completing their studies.

As fresh AAA graduates, they became involved in the public sphere and media space along with their (by then former) teachers. They became protagonists promoting design at exhibitions, and they endorsed the programme’s principles in their practice. The Milan Triennial was the model that inspired the Zagreb Triennial. At the Zagreb triennial’s initial Exhibition in 1955, protagonists of design (who were former AAA students) were present in all sections as exhibitors. The same year, they were among the founding members of the Industrial Design Studio (Studio za industrijsko oblikovanje, SIO), the first group founded in Yugoslavia that sought to work in an organised manner on industrial design problems. The manifesto, which was signed by the architects Bregovac and Richter and by three AAA graduates (Antonini, Babić and Frgić), clearly expresses their advocating a strategy for the ‘radical design of industrial buildings’ for mass production.

The SIO programme was first presented at the exhibition Stan za naše prilike/Housing under Current Conditions in Ljubljana in 1956. Three residential environments were showcased, which were equipped entirely with products from Yugoslav industry. SIO’s greatest achievement was their appearance at the 11th Milan Triennial (1957) where the Yugoslav residential environments featured alongside the French, German, Danish, Swedish, Finnish and Italian environments at this international exhibition on housing. The framework for the exhibition setup was designed by Mario Antonini and Boris Babić, and it was made of a system of modular furniture produced in the DIP Novoselec factory, created by the same designers. The other exhibits also played an important part in the environment’s structural unity, from art compositions, sculptures of decorative materials, ceramics and glass to lighting fixtures.

Most of the works by AAA graduates confirmed the ‘plastic synthesis’ principle in practice. One strand of AAA graduates and teachers presented what was for them the high point of the 1950s at the exhibition of the 2nd Zagreb Triennial in 1959, where the foundational principles of design as identified in the programme goals of the Academy of Applied Arts were conceptually implemented.

Reception of the Bauhaus in Forming the New Socialist Daily Life

Experiment as method: The tradition of Bauhaus Pedagogy as the Academy of Applied Arts in Zagreb (1949–1955)