Why Yugoslavia? It’s a question one can’t help but ask, given the circumstances. Martino Stierli, the new chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, chose for his first major exhibition at the New York institution to focus on the built environment of the former Balkan nation, forever imprinted on the collective consciousness for the ethnic war that raged there for over a decade at the close of the last century.

Even before that, it was not exactly known as a hotbed of design. With the exception of Jože Plečnik, whose conical 1947 design for the Slovenian Parliament in Ljubljana is on display (but who is mainly included for his influence on later generations), most of the names in Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 are unfamiliar. “It is part of the job of the museum to critically reassess the canon of architectural history and look at parts of the world not seen as they should have been seen,” explains Stierli.