Tamara Bjažić Klarin, PhD, M. Arch.

Biography

Born in 1972 in Zagreb, where she completed her secondary education at the Language Education Centre. She graduated from the Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb, in 1997. She worked as a research assistant and senior research assistant at the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (HAZU), Croatian Museum of Architecture, from 2002 to 2015. She defended her doctoral dissertation at the Department of Art History, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, in 2011. She pursued further training at the Fondation Le Corbusier and the Institut français d'architecture (IFA) in Paris (scholarship of the Government of the French Republic, 2006) and at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich, where she was an academic guest (scholarship of the Swiss National Science Foundation, 2014).

She participated in two projects funded by the Croatian Ministry of Science and Education: Analyses and Guidelines for Architectural and Spatial Concepts in Tourism on Croatian Territory, 1945–2000 (HAZU, project leader Academician Miroslav Begović, 2002–2004) and Modernism and the Spatial Identity of Croatia in the 20th Century (HAZU, project leader Academician Boris Magaš, 2007–2011), as well as two projects funded by the Croatian Science Foundation: Modern and Contemporary Art Networks, Artist Groups, and Associations: Organizational and Communication Models of Collaborative Artistic Practices in the 20th and 21st Centuries (Institute of Art History, project leader Dr. Ljiljana Kolešnik, 2014–2018) and the bilateral Croatian–Slovenian project Models and Practices of Global and Cultural Exchange and the Non-Aligned Movement: Research into Spatio-Temporal Cultural Dynamics (Institute of Art History, project leader Dr. Ljiljana Kolešnik, 2020–2023).

She led the institutional research project Formal, Theoretical, and Social Aspects of the Expanded Concept of Architectural and Artistic Heritage in the Second Half of the 20th Century (2019–2021), and, together with Prof. András Ferkai, PhD, the bilateral research project Architectural Encounters between Croatia and Hungary: Models of Professional Knowledge Exchange, 1914–1945 (Croatian Ministry of Science and Education and the Hungarian Ministry of Human Resources, National Research, Development and Innovation Office, Budapest, 2021–2023).

She is a collaborator on the Croatian Science Foundation project ARHZAG – Architecture and the Culture of Housing in Zagreb, 1880–1940 (Institute of Art History, project leader Dr. Irena Kraševac, 2023–2027). She is the Principal Investigator of the project The Right to Housing: Production of Spaces of Everyday Life in Yugoslavia (1945–1991), funded by the European Research Council under an ERC Consolidator Grant (Housing.Yu, ERC-CoG, No. 101171985, 2025–2030) within the Horizon Europe programme.

She is the author of the books Ernest Weissmann: Socially Engaged Architecture, 1926–1939 (HAZU, 2015), For a New, More Beautiful Zagreb! Architectural and Urban Planning Competitions in Interwar Zagreb, 1918–1941 (Institute of Art History, 2020), and The Development of Trešnjevka: The Periphery's Struggle for Urban Standards (BLOK – Institute of Art History, 2022). Together with Dr. Ljiljana Kolešnik, she co-edited the volume French Artistic Culture and Central-East European Modern Art (Institute of Art History, Zagreb, 2017). Her books Ernest Weissmann and For a New, More Beautiful Zagreb! received the Charter of the Croatian Society of Art Historians and the Neven Šegvić Award of the Croatian Architects' Association for publicistic, critical, scientific, and theoretical work.

She has published more than thirty scholarly papers in journals including the Journal of Modern European History, Radovi Instituta za povijest umjetnosti, Život umjetnosti, Prostor, and Ars Adriatica, as well as in volumes issued by distinguished publishers in Belgium (Leuven University Press, Leuven), Switzerland (gta Verlag, ETH Zurich; Birkhäuser, Basel), the United Kingdom (Bloomsbury, London; Routledge, London; Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge), Poland (Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw), and the United States (MoMA, New York). She is also the author of numerous encyclopaedia entries (Croatian Biographical Lexicon, Zagreb; Bloomsbury, London; Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon, Leipzig and Munich).

She has presented at around thirty conferences in Croatia and abroad, including at gta ETH Zurich; Bauhaus-Universität Weimar; the German Historical Institute (GHI) and the Institute for the History of German Jews, Hamburg; the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, Marburg; Docomomo International; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; Politecnico di Milano; IUAV, Venice; and MAO, Ljubljana.

She teaches and mentors doctoral students at the Department of Art History, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. She is also a doctoral mentor in the PhD programmes in Humanities at the University of Zadar and at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Ljubljana.

She has co-curated exhibitions at the Croatian Museum of Architecture (HAZU), the Glyptotheque (HAZU), the Klovićevi dvori Gallery, and the Nikola Tesla Technical Museum, all in Zagreb, as well as at the Hungarian Museum of Architecture and Documentation Centre for the Protection of Monuments (MÉM-MDK) in Budapest and at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo (FAU-USP). She contributed to the exhibition projects Unfinished Modernisation (UGM Maribor, 2012) and Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 (MoMA, New York, 2018–2019).

Since 1998, she has been active in popularizing architecture and urbanism through television segments and programmes as well as documentary films produced by Croatian Radiotelevision (HRT). She authored numerous contributions to programmes Kulturni krajolik (Cultural Landscape), Kultura prostora (Culture of Space), and Prostor, vrijeme, arhitektura (Space, Time, Architecture). Together with Ana Marija Habjan, she co-authored the programme Trikultura – arhitektura i dizajn (Tri-Culture – Architecture and Design, 2003–2006), the series Rijeka: arhitektura i grad (Rijeka: Architecture and the City), and about a dozen episodes of the documentary programmes Suvremenici (Contemporaries) and Jedno djelo (One Work).

Together with Ana Dana Beroš, she co-authored the scripts for programmes dedicated to recipients of the Viktor Kovačić Lifetime Achievement Award of the Croatian Architects' Association, within the series Točka na A (Project 6 Studio, for HRT) and Čovjek i prostor (Man and Space; Zoom d.o.o., for HRT). The series Čovjek i prostor received the Neven Šegvić Award of the Croatian Architects' Association for publicistic, critical, scientific-research, and theoretical work. She also contributed to the programme Baština, mi i svijet (Heritage, Us and the World) on the Third Programme of Croatian Radio (editor: Dr. Snješka Knežević).

She was editorial bord member of the journals Život umjetnosti and Čovjek i prostor. She is a member of the Association of ERC Grantees (AERG), the Croatian Society of Art Historians, and the Croatian Architects' Association, within wich she was the Publishing Council member and as its first Deputy President. She is one of the fourteen founding members of Docomomo Croatia (2024).