Intermediary Spaces: The Small-Scale Urbanism of Jože Plečnik

Abstract

The thesis of this article is two-fold. Firstly, Plečnik’s wartime and post-war projects deserve more research attention than they have received to date. A certain level of under-appreciation of Plečnik’s late work is probably a result of a lower number of realizations and perhaps also of insufficient research of this period compared to Plečnik’s career before that.1 Secondly, the article attempts to prove that in the last fifteen years of Plečnik’s life, the urbanistic character of his work was significantly upgraded. The focus lies on the changed urbanistic character of his wartime and post-war realized as well as unrealized projects. In them, the dissolution of the distinction between the interior and exterior of the buildings as well as between public, semi-public, and private programs was intensified, articulating a wide range of intermediary spaces that position many of his later works somewhere between architecture and urbanism. Plečnik’s strategy of small-scale urbanism had a substantial influence on his disciples, including modernist architects such as Edvard Ravnikar and Dušan Grabrijan, who developed a distinct interplay between the principles of international style and original solutions based on local traditions.