In 2026, the AA Nanotourism Visiting School returns to Ljubljana for a third consecutive year, continuing its investigation into the city through architectural observations, critical tourism, and site-specific action focusing on the work of Jože Plečnik. Building on discoveries and collaborations established in previous editions, this year’s programme focuses on Plečnik’s micro-ambients: intimate spatial moments, thresholds, and carefully choreographed situations that inform everyday life in the city.

While Plečnik’s work is often read through monuments, ensembles, and urban gestures, much of the power of his interventions lies in the smaller scale: the canopy of the Central Market, the banks of the Ljubljanica that bring the river to citizens, and pyramids and obelisks marking axes in the city are just some examples. These spatial devices, conceived for a different social and political context, today operate within a city transformed by tourism, climate pressures, new forms of public use, and shifting ideas of heritage and authorship.

The 2026 workshop will investigate selected sites in Ljubljana where Plečnik’s works already structure everyday urban experience, such as the Mirje Pyramid or the Vegova street interventions. Each location will be approached not as a static heritage object, but as a living spatial condition in flux, activated through the introduction of a 1:1 contemporary architectural response that mirrors, extends, distorts, or critically reinterprets Plečnik’s urban interventions. Conceived as spatial companions, developed through close observation, drawing, and on-site construction, the interventions will aim to reveal how spatial conditions are negotiated, adapted, or contested amid contemporary urban life.

Symposium | 28 August 2026 | 15:00–18:00
Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), Rusjanov trg 7, 1000 Ljubljana

Speakers

Vid Žnidaršič: Learning from Plečnik

Vid Žnidaršič is an architect, architectural historian, and educator based in London. In addition to leading the AA Nanotourism Visiting School programme, he acts as a Design Fellow in the MArch course at the University of Cambridge and a First Year Studio Master at the Architectural Association in London. Across these pedagogical platforms in the UK and Slovenia, Vid often draws on Jože Plečnik’s oeuvre and explores how architectural and urban interventions remain generative in contemporary design education — something he will reflect on at this year’s symposium.

Fanny Bruckbauer, David Eibensteiner, Dora Janušič and Larissa Silva Lopes: Repurpose, Reinterpret

An international group of students and architects (TU Wien, UL FA, Clancy Moore Architects) who came together at the 2024 AA Nanotourism workshop. Under the mentorship of AA Nanotourism and with the support of Plečnik’s House, they developed the publication Repurpose, Reinterpret: Tracing Spolia and Reuse in Plečnik’s Ljubljana alongside an accompanying exhibition.

At the symposium, Dora Janušič will present their joint research project, publication, and exhibition on behalf of the group. The contribution explores Plečnik’s use of spolia and his methods of recycling and reinterpreting material heritage. In doing so, it offers a new perspective on Plečnik’s work, the invisible connections within Ljubljana, and the city’s contemporary development.

Klaske Havik: Plečnik’s Fictional Diary 

Klaske Havik is Professor of Methods of Analysis and Imagination at the Faculty of Architecture in Delft. Her publications include Urban Literacy (2014) and the edited volumes Architectural Positions (2009) and Writingplace (2016). She was an editor of the architecture journals de Architect and OASE and initiated the Writingplace Journal for Architecture and Literature.

At the symposium, she will present Plečnik’s work in Ljubljana as a double oeuvre, where the stories of the architect and the city intertwine. Through a literary reconstruction, she will explore how Plečnik introduced metropolitan ambitions into a mid-sized city through micro-interventions, riverbank designs, and major urban gestures (the Triple Bridge, NUK, Žale), creating spatial fragments and narrative threads for the everyday experiences of its inhabitants.

Eva Gusel: Plečnik and His Double: Repetition as Architectural Operation

Eva Gusel is an architect and publicist working in the fields of architectural design, architectural criticism, and theory, with a focus on researching contemporary architectural and other creative practices. She is the co-author of several exhibitions and renovations, including the renovation of law offices in Metalka, which was nominated for the Plečnik Medal.

At this year’s symposium, her lecture explores doubling and repetition as a distinctive operation in Plečnik’s architecture. Rather than simply borrowing from history, Plečnik repeatedly copies, transforms, and even imitates himself, turning duplication into a playful and surprisingly contemporary design method.

Miloš Kosec: Plečnik’s Literary Criticism

Miloš Kosec is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Ljubljana. He completed his MA studies in 2014 in Ljubljana with the thesis Ruins as Architectural Objects and his PhD studies in 2019 at Birkbeck College, University of London with the thesis Passivism: Activism and Passivity in Contemporary Architecture. Miloš is also a curator and critic. His research focuses on the history of modernism, politics and monuments, decay and demolition, heritage, the notion of passivity and immaterial interventions in space.

The presentation at this year’s symposium will raise the question of literature as a field of architecture. Why is re-reading the literature of Jože Javoršek and Lojze Kovačič crucial to freeing Plečnik from the shackles of an “eternal” icon and commercial commodity, and throwing him straight into the midst of conflicting urban life?

Applications on: www.nanotourism.aaschool.ac.uk

AA Nanotourism team:

Aljoša Dekleva — Programme Head

Vid Žnidaršič — Programme Head

Bryce Suite — Invited Mentor

In collaboration with: FA, Faculty of Architecture, Ljubljana; TU Wien, Austria; MAO, Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana