A SWEATY FATBEARD posted:

Here are some pics I snapped today. I went out to find me a ciggy and decided to bring my camera along because goons seem to have a boner for bomb shelters.


I don't think you can really appreciate how massive this airlock is - you could easily drop a tiny car through it, and the entrance is probably accessible from what looks to me like a large underground parking facility - hell I ain't going down, it's a good place to get robbed. The whole meadow is fake, it's hollowed out entirely, and the surrounding buildings are strategically placed to take the worst of the bomb shock wave, protecting the vulnerable entrance and the airlocks.




Estates completed during the 1960s generally don't have fancy shelters, but when the Cold War started picking up again during the 1970s, all newly built estates came with at least some form of fortification. Josip Broz Tito thought that, considering the seriously bad track record the Balkans have with ethnic wars, that it's not outlandish to think that these places could see war again and that it may even be nuclear. Another good idea by Tito was how he never equipped Yugoslav Air Force with large carpet-bombing aircraft which could be used to bomb enemy cities - though I reckon that this was probably done not to upset eastern-bloc Hungary, it came as a real blessing during the Yugoslav wars since this absence of bombers kept Zagreb and a lot of other places out of harm's way for the most part.


Another airlock, it's located nearby but I don't think the two facilities are connected. I love the mushroom domes, this is obviously a fallout shelter (large battery-powered motors pull air through the mushroom intakes and run it through a filter to provide fresh air for the bunker.)

God I love the 1970s. Lots of concrete and crazy planning:


Yes, this is a mind-boggling viaduct over the parking lot. 1970s brutalism mandated that lots of concrete should be used in one way or another, and I can only come up with a conclusion that this monstrosity was built "for the hell of it."

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I am reluctant to call these buildings "commieblocks" or "the projects". Both of those terms are used in a perjorative sense to denote "quick and dirty" fixes for housing shortages. In Yugoslavia, new estates were built as a part of the drive for urbanisation and construction wasn't nasty and rushed as it was common in eastern bloc countries.
I am not going to go on a long tirade about the wonders of Yugoblocks because I'm tired and hungry - suffice is to say that our modern buildings wouldn't look out of place in, say, Japan. It's true that we've had a fair share of architectural misses, but the majority of the buildings erected after 1964 in Zagreb were really, really good.