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 he 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.

Max Fabiani's 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, Gorica 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 city of Opatija (Croatia).

Today the archive is housed in the Štanjel castle, which was renovated according to Fabiani's plans. As he was a renaissance type of a man and so 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 conceived as 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 a 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. The archive comprises mostly copies from several European archives. An extensive catalogue of it is available on-line.

Other foundation's activities involve cooperating in exhibitions on Fabiani like the Adijo Dunaj, pozdravljen Štanjel [Good-bye Vienna, Hello Štanjel] at the Lojze Spacal Gallery in 2004 and at the Museum of Architecture and Design in 2005. The foundations is also involved in the multiple activities that form the so called Fabiani's year 2015.

They also set up workshops and often deal with practical architectural and urbanistic issues; one can here mention their collaboration with the Department of Architecture at the University of Ferrara. The foundation was 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. It also published a translation of Fabiani's philosophical work Akma : duša sveta [Akma: Soul of the World], followed up in 2007 by the book Maks Fabiani - a Guide to his Architecture in Slovenia and Italy and accompanied by occasional exhibition catalogues.

Since 2006, together with the 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 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 together they co-wrote the much acclaimed book titled Modern Architecture (though in the end Wagner was the only one credited). The book shocked the European architectural community of that time and 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 and during that time 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 the 50th anniversary Franc Joseph's reign, partly for the World Expo in Paris in 1900 and for 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. He developed his urbanistic ideas for major Italian cities like Venice, Rome and Bologna, but probably implemented them in Gorica only. Yet, much of his work for Italy was done anonymously due to the political climate of that time.

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 report was actually the first text on urban planning in Slovenian language. Though this plan was not endorsed as such, most of its 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 and Gorica in 1917, he naturally left a significant mark in that region. He also took over the renovation of the war-torn Posočje, Gorica and Karst region in the years 1917–1922 and was later the chief architect and urban planner for Gorica, where he stationed his studio until his death.

He was the mayor of the medieval town Štanjel in the years 1935–1945 and his restoration of that place 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 revitalizing medieval infrastructure and yet retaining its heritage looks. Together with his relative Enrico Ferrari he created (architectural and engineering) projects for the Ferrari Garden in Štanjel, a splendid park just outside the village. After the Second World War Fabiani moved to Gorizia in Italy and worked there until his last days. He died in 1962 at the age of 97.

Matjaz Zbontar - Max Fabiani by matjaz zbontar on YouTube

Fabiani and Plečnik

Jože Plečnik and Maks Fabiani were arguably the two most important Slovenian architects and town planners who also share quite some common history, as Fabiani used to act as Plečnik's senior at Wagner's studio. Their work most visibly overlapped in Ljubljana, where Plečnik created some of his most known works (like the 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 of Fabiani's churches, as was his handling of the Vegova street in Ljubljana modelled upon Fabiani's arrangement in front of the Vienna Technical University.

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 (powered by either petrol or compressed air), an armoured tricycle, a warship, a special chain-less 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 means of huge ducts, lowering 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 Plečnik : Fabiani by Amir Muratović (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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