Maks Fabiani Foundation

The Maks Fabiani Foundation was founded in 1999 with the aim to support and further the research on the work of the architect and urban planner Maks Fabiani (1865–1962). Its main activities thus include book publishing, expert consulting and, most importantly, maintaining and developing the archive of Fabiani's work and heritage. Though the latter is thought by many to be one of the most important architects of Mitteleuropa in his time, documentation of his work has been only modestly preserved due to the destruction wrought by the Second World War.

His architectural signature style was secession and historicism tinged modernism, which he – together with his urbanistic proposals – imprinted into the urban landscape of numerous European cities, most notably in Vienna, Trieste and Ljubljana. Still, his work can be found all over Middle Europe, from Bielsko in Poland and Konopište in the Czech Republic, to the coastal cities of Opatija (Croatia) and Palermo (Italy).

Today the archive is housed in the renovated Štanjel castle, which is Fabiani's creation as well. As he was a renaissance type of a man, being also a town planner, an arts historian, a speculative engineer and a painter, philosopher, poet and fiction writer, this archive holds a rather varied collection.

Background

The idea for the foundation was formed while the architect and art historian Marko Pozzetto (1925–2006) was writing his book Maks Fabiani - Vizije prostora [Max Fabiani - Visions of Space], which was published in 1997. Pozzetto has been working on Fabiani for 35 years, during which he has been actively collecting and categorizing relevant documentation and other materials. Upon its founding, he contributed these to the foundation.

This archive became a part of the Centre for Karst Architecture in 2010

Foundation's activities

The foundation's main project, the archive, also functions as library. There, one can find Fabiani's writings, his engineering plans and sketches, second hand assessments of his work and various studies and photographic representations of his heritage. An extensive catalogue of all this is available on-line.

Other activities involve cooperating in exhibitions and projects like the 2006 documentary on Fabiani and Jože Plečnik. They set up workshops and often deal with practical architectural and urbanistic questions; one can here mention their collaboration with the Department of Architecture at the University of Ferrara. The foundation was also intensively involved in the renovation of the Štanjel village (which was in great part re-imagined by Fabiani) and helped set up the so-called Fabiani trail in that same area, where the architect lived out his last few decades. The trail consists of several pathways connecting the locations and buildings that are associated with his life.

Though the foundation existed only unofficially at the time of its release, it is in a way also the publisher of Pozzetto's book on Fabiani. Later, it published a translation of Fabiani's philosophical work Akma : duša sveta [Akma: Soul of the World] and produced various other publications. Since 2006, together with Slovene Association of Urban and Space Planners, the foundation is involved in presenting the Maks Fabiani urbanism award for best projects of urban, regional and spatial planning in Slovenia and, since 2015, in the neighboring countries of Austria, Italy, Croatia and Hungary.

Maks Fabiani

Though Max Fabiani was born in Kobdilj, a hamlet in the Slovenian region of Karst, he conducted his studies and also a big part of his career in Vienna. He attained his doctorate on urban planning there (being the first person to write it on this topic) and later worked as a professor of ornamental drawing, interior design and for a short time of architectural composition. He was the founding member of the Austrian Society for Architecture and the president of the Austrian Society of Engineers and Architects. For a time he worked as an urban advisor at the Viennese Interior Ministry and was later Franz Ferdinand's counsellor for architecture and history of art and urbanism (as anecdotes go, he supposedly advised him – obviously unsuccessfully – not to go to Sarajevo).

Fabiani worked with Otto Wagner for a few years and – though Wagner was the only one credited – they co-wrote the much acclaimed book titled Modern Architecture, which shocked the European architectural community of that time and which has seen countless translations and reissues. They also worked together on Wagner's Vienna Electronic City Railway project.

His own architectural studio in Vienna was operating between 1896 and 1917. He was commissioned for a number of elite projects in the Empire. Some of them are the still iconic Viennese buildings Artaria, Urania and Portois&Fix. He projected the pavilions for 50th anniversary Franc Joseph's reign, the World Expo in Paris in 1900 and the Imperial Kings exhibition in London. His projects of that time also include Franz Ferdinand's mansion at Brioni, the renovation of the Konopište castle, the Casa Bartoli palace in Trieste and the Spas for civil servants in Opatija.

He left Vienna in 1917 and after that based most of his project in either Slovenia or Italy, where his works and urbanistic ideas can be found in Venice, Rome, Bologna, Trieste and many other cities.

Fabiani's work in Slovenia

Besides Vienna, Ljubljana bears the mark of Fabiani most strongly. In the aftermath of the 1895 earthquake that destroyed much of the city, Fabiani's proposal was actually the first text on urban planning in Slovenian language. Though this plan was not endorsed as such, most of his ideas were implemented and the present day Ljubljana still displays its logic. Some of his important works in Ljubljana are the Krisper's, Hribar's in Bamberg's mansions, the Mladika building, the Miklošič park and partly also the Prešeren Square. He also built the much famed and later destroyed pavilion for the painter Rihard Jakopič and at that time even helped the Slovenian impressionists to exhibit abroad.

After Fabiani returned to live in Kobdilj, he naturally left a significant mark in that region. He also took over the renovation of the war-torn Posočje and Furlanija regions and was the chief architect and urban planner for Nova Gorica, where he stationed his studio until his death. His restoration of the medieval village Štanjel is unique in his re-imagining of the castle as the place for communal infrastructure (i.e. the the school, the medical centre, the cinema hall, the local dance-hall and the municipality offices and vaults). As such, this was one of the first examples of the now common practice of giving such functions to old feudal infrastructure and yet retain their heritage looks.

Plečnik and Fabiani

Jože Plečnik and Fabiani were arguably the two most important Slovenian architects and town planners who also share quite some common history. Fabiani used to act as Plečnik's his professor at Wagner studio, where they worked together. The older and more worldly Fabiani also helped Plečnik get around in the Viennese society and academia.

Their work most visibly overlapped in Ljubljana, where, for example, Plečnik created some of his most known works (The Marketplace and the Insurance Company building) on urban designs of Fabiani. The famed Plečnik's National and University Library was supposedly also very strongly influenced by one Fabiani's churches, as was his arrangement in front of the Vienna technical university the inspiration for how Plečnik handled the Vegova street in Ljubljana.

Fabiani inventor

Fabiani was a classical all-rounder and as an engineer he worked on very curios, if not always realizable projects. These projects include the machine for walking into the mountains (powere by either petrol or compressed air), an armored tricycle, a warship, a special chainless bicycle, a flying machine powered by hands (the prototype was financed by the Italian army) and an idea for the ventilation of the city of Milano, for which he planned to bring fresh air from the mountains by way of huge ducts and lower the summer temperatures for up to 10 degrees.

Despite the ingeniousness of these ideas, they were never finalized in any functional form.

External links

Maks Fabiani Foundation website (in Slovenian)
A catalogue of the foundation's archive
A documentary on Maks Fabiani and Jože Plečnik (in Slovenian)
An article of Fabiani's engineering projects (in Slovenian)
Brochure on the CKA and Max Fabiani (PDF) (English, German, Italian)
The Fabiani Path

Maks Fabiani Foundation

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