During the 1960s and 70s, thousands of monuments commemorating the Second World War called 'Spomeniks' were built throughout the former Yugoslavia; striking monumental sculptures, with an angular geometry echoing the shapes of flowers, crystals, and macro-views of viruses or DNA. In the 1980s the Spomeniks still attracted millions of visitors from the Eastern bloc; today they are largely neglected and unknown, their symbolism lost and unwanted. Antwerp-based photographer Jan Kempenaers travelled the Balkans photographing these eerie objects, presented in this book as a powerful typological series. The beauty and mystery of the isolated, crumbling Spomeniks informs Kempenaer's enquiry into memory, found beauty, and whether former monuments can function as pure sculpture.

This book is offered in memoriam to the Flemish Brutalist architect Juliaan Lampens (1926-2019). He originally sketched the design for the Chapel of Our Lady of Kerselare in chalk on a blackboard wall in his studio in Eke before it was built from 1963 to 1966. Half a century later, Bart Lodewijks is drawing on Lampens' masterpiece, also with blackboard chalk. The chalk drawings on the chapel represent a reimagination, a return to the design that originated on the wall in Eke. The temporary drawings and surrounding environment, in all its seasonal changes, are being photographed by Jan Kempenaers.

Spomenik - the Serbo-Croat/Slovenian word for monument - refers to the pioneering abstract memorials built in Josip Tito's Yugoslavia between the 1960s and the 1990s, marking the horror of occupation by Axis forces and the triumph of their defeat during World War II. Through these imaginative creations, a forward-looking socialist society, free of ethnic tensions, was envisaged. This publication brings together more than 80 examples of these stunning brutalist monuments. Each has been extensively photographed and researched by the author to make this book the most comprehensive survey available of this obscure and fascinating architectural phenomenon. A fold-out map on the reverse of the dust jacket shows the exact location of each spomenik using GPS coordinates.

The aesthetics of a non-Soviet form of socialism, drafted by four Yugoslav artists in the 1950s. As the cold war gained momentum in Europe, Tito's break with Stalin led to Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Eastern bloc in 1948. Confronted with this new reality, the Yugoslav government decided to bridge the indeterminacy of its cultural politics through a creative strategy: it commissioned young artists and architects to draft the aesthetics of a non-Soviet form of socialism. Agents of Abstraction frames the liaison of socialist cultural politics and modernist artistic practice by interlinking ideas of decentralization, experiments in state-funded arts and architecture, nonrepresentational forms, and self-reliance. The cultural and geopolitical contexts are accompanied by rare visual material, much of which appears in print for the first time.

A curated collection of some of the most powerful and awe-inspiring Brutalist architecture ever built This Brutal World is a global survey of this compelling and much-admired style of architecture. It brings to light virtually unknown Brutalist architectural treasures from across the former eastern bloc and other far flung parts of the world. It includes works by some of the best contemporary architects including Zaha Hadid and David Chipperfield as well as by some of the master architects of the 20th century including Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph and Marcel Breuer.