Plečnik Collection

Plečnik received guests in the small room panelled with wood on the ground floor. Renovated room in 2015

From 1972 until 2010 the Plečnik Collection represented an important department of the Museum of Architecture and Design. Now managed by the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana), the collection is located at a separate location in the Plečnik House in Trnovo, where Jože Plečnik lived from 1921 until his death in 1957.

The collection consists of Plečnik's original work and furniture, his library, his drawing tools, and his personal belongings. The original artefacts of Jože Plečnik encompass a large archive of sketches, plans, photographs, and models made of wood, clay, and plaster, as well as Plečnik's correspondence and his student work. The main part of the collection is on display in the cylindrical annex of the house, constructed between 1923 and 1925 by the architect himself. In 2015 the exhibition premises were extended. Today the collection is housed in a complex of two houses at Karunova ulica 4 and 6, with an adjacent garden with a lapidarium.

The renovations of the Plečnik House and its surroundings lasted for two years, the Plečnik collection together with a permanent exhibition and a study centre is on view since September 2015.

Jože Plečnik, standing in front of the cylindrical extension of his house in Trnovo, 1926. Photo by Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana documentation/Plečnik Collection.

Background

The Plečnik Collection department was established along with the Architecture Museum in 1972, to focus on the preservation of Plečnik's estate, yet it was opened to public in 1974, side by side with the Plečnik House. The role of the department was to preserve the existent material as well as to acquire the new, to explore the period and circumstances in which the master lived and worked, and to educate, present and promote the work of Jože Plečnik. Since 2010 the collection, together with the entire inventory of furniture and other objects used by Plečnik and preserved in situ at the Plečnik House, has been managed by the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana.

Jože Plečnik

Jože Plečnik (1872–1957) left his hometown Ljubljana when he was 16 years old to study in Austrian Graz, later on he became a student of Otto Wagner in Vienna. He lived and worked in the cosmopolitan surroundings of Vienna and Prague, and after 33 years returned to Ljubljana with the intention of turning a provincial town into a capital of a nation. Few cities have had the personal seal of a single architect so strongly impressed upon them as Ljubljana has with Jože Plečnik.

Among Plečnik’s achievemens of neo-classical style were the Zacherl project in Vienna and the renovation of the Hradčani Castle for Masaryk, including a series of presidential apartments, the courtyards and the gardens.

The continued development of the architectural profession in Slovenia was ensured when the University of Ljubljana was established in 1919, and Jože Plečnik was invited to teach at the Department of Architecture from 1921. He considered traditional heritage not as a restriction, but rather as an inexhaustible source architecture, and his urban plan for Ljubljana (1929) gave him the opportunity to map out and implement his grand vision for the city. Over the course of two decades, with extremely limited financial resources, he married classical architectural forms with his own imaginative ideas to create a series of monumental new Buildings (the National and University Library, the Market Collonade, the Mutual Insurance Building, the Flat Iron Building Peglezen, the Žale Cemetary), bridges (Three Bridges, Shoemaker’s Bridge), and churches (Church of St Francis of Assisi, Church of St Michael in the Marsh).

Plečnik has also been praised abroad for his high degree of originality and innovation in the use of historical, regional and even local features. In January 2015 the Czech and Slovene Ministry of Culture nominated The timeless, humanistic architecture of Jože Plečnik in Ljubljana and Prague for the inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

External links

Gallery

Portrait of Jože Plečnik, 1933

Plečnik House in 2012, before the renovation works that were accomplished in September 2015, Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana

The interior of Jože Plečnik's studio in the year of the master's death in 1957.

Plečnik Collection, work table in Jože Plečnik's master's studio, 1957. Photo from Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana documentation/Plečnik Collection.

Plečnik Collection, some objects from the master's studio, 2011.

Drawing utensils preserved in situ at the Plečnik House, 2015.

Plečnik received guests in the small room panelled with wood on the ground floor. Renovated room in 2015

Plečnik House, reception room detail, 2015

Architectural design of the cylindrical extension of Plečnik House, Karunova street 4, Ljubljana, 1923

Jože Plečnik, standing in front of the cylindrical extension of his house in Trnovo, 1926. Photo by Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana documentation/Plečnik Collection.

Winter garden at Plečnik House, Karunova street 4, Ljubljana, 1923

The renovated complex (designed by Arrea Architecture) of the two houses at Karunova Street with the Plečnik Collection in situ, a new permanent exhibition on Jože Plečnik and a study centre, 2015.

Renovated Plečnik House, cylindrical annex, 2015

The entry porch in Plečnik House, with the master's collection of sculptures and spolia, 2015. Photo by Matevž Paternoster/Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana.

The architect Jože Plečnik moved to a single-storey house at Karunova Street 4 in Ljubljana's Trnovo district in 1921, and extended it with a cylindrical tower in 1924. Plečnik House exterior, renovated in 2015. Photo by Andrej Peunik/Museum and Galleries of ljubljana

Renovated Plečnik House, house front, 2015

The authentic interiors are preserved just as Plečnik created them, with his own original design of furniture and a wealth of small objects. Renovated Plečnik House, 2015