In the autumn of 1921 the students of the Department of Architecture at the Technical Faculty in Ljubljana were awaiting their new lecturer with great anticipation. They followed the new art trends, and they were especially fascinated by the trends taking place in painting and sculpture, however they were baffled by the novelties in architecture. They were hoping to get a clear insight from the internationally established architect Jože Plečnik. He was seen as ‘advanced as he was at Zacherl’s palace’*.  Their enthusiastic expectations soon changed into acceptance that Plečnik envisaged his pedagogic work differently to them. He changed his architectural commissions into student tasks, which he led and controlled to the last detail. The school drawing room took over the role of his architectural studio, in which work was done almost by dictate.

It would be virtually impossible to distinguish between Plečnik’s and his students’ works created within the school were it not for the signatures. As certain students started to deviate from the master’s path, started to search for their own expression, they encountered a distant reaction from their professor. They accepted all the work they were given at school with great respect and understood it as a necessary task, however they also swallowed it with a bitter aftertaste, for if they were not allowed to develop their own expression while under professional guidance in their early years, they would never be able to develop it. Numerous Plečnik’s students chose to continue their studies after their graduation or work as apprentices under Le Corbusier in Paris. Plečnik’s graduate Gizela Šuklje also left for Paris, but she joined the architecture studio of Auguste Perret. With her correspondence* she managed to preserve a contact between two different ‘schools’. After a while Plečnik invited her to return to Ljubljana and work as his assistant, which she gladly accepted.

Chairs, i.e. ‘reduced architectures’, reveal both streams of Plečnik’s students: Plečnik’s epigones as well as those who decided to follow a different path. With their salon chairs Gizela Šuklje and Marko Župančič preserve the clean lines and discrete, flat, decorative interventions on the backrest and legs. Boris Kobe’s three legged stool with its horn shaped backrest artistically* flirts with the castle or fortification environment for which it was created.

An exceptional example of the transition from the professor’s line of thought to a new, functional style is represented by the chair for villa Epos in Bled, which was designed by Danilo Fürst – unfortunately this chair is not shown at the exhibition.

While Edvard Ravnikar’s chair designed for the Vilfan family is still a traditional ‘throne’, similar to France Tomažič’s chair or the many conventional woodworking products that can be found in bourgeois sitting rooms, the chair Jeep by Braco Mušič and Edvard Ravnikar is technologically and as regards its design an entirely new story. In contrast to the prevailing massive wooden products of the time, this light chair is made from plywood attached to a light construction with a square profile.

Even though this chair clearly moves away from ‘Plečnik’s’ expression, we need to be aware that Plečnik’s students obtained their knowledge of wood and its characteristics from their professor* who trained with his father (a carpenter) and completed the crafts school in Graz, where he was awarded the title furniture designer.* With his knowledge he overcame the set ideas on furniture, experimented and used them in a contemporary way.* His experiments with industrial and serial furniture production can be seen as early as in some of his sketches from his Vienna period.

We should not overlook Plečnik’s influence on the authors he did not formally teach. We have to mention them even though they are not included in this exhibition due to our limitations. Their generation included the noticeable furniture opus of the constriction engineer Anton Suhadolc, who definitely belonged to this circle. The post-war generation brought two explicitly industrial designers: Niko Kralj and Brank Uršič, both with vast opuses, created within the Stol factory.

The 1980s and 90s started revising the craftsmanship approach and the explicit allusions to the famous predecessor Plečnik. In their essence his forms drew on the great cultures from the past, which he merged with local craft ornaments, and which – to quote the language of the post-modernists, became an ornament in themselves. Janez Suhadolc is the most expressive representative of this generation.

Špela Šubic

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*Janko Omahen, Izpoved, Cankarjeva založba, 1976, pg. 20.
*The correspondence is kept in MAO.
*Boris Kobe was also a painter.
*Janko Omahen, Izpoved, Cankarjeva založba, 1976, pg. 85: »He understood wood so well that he could carelessly design wooden seats with legs so thin one barely dared to sit on them. However, there was no worries that anything could go wrong as long as he had a say.«
*Peter Krečič, Jože Plečnik, Državna založba Slovenije, 1992, pg. 22.
*The bookshelves in Plečnik’s house on Karunova 4, for example, are covered by large, hardly treated flat pinewood doors, which was a very unusual carpentry practice, for the time a modern decision, which he introduced regardless of the carpenters who advised him against it.

Location

MAO
Pot na Fužine 2
Ljubljana

Info

infobio(at)mao.si
+386 1 54842 74

Organization

MAO