Symposium | 28 August 2026 | 15:00–18:00
Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), Ljubljana
The event will be held in English.
About the Symposium and Thematic Focus
The symposium explores contemporary reinterpretations and the generative potential of Jože Plečnik’s legacy. The event opens a space for reflection on how Plečnik’s work offers more than just a historical reference, remaining a remarkably relevant tool for contemporary architectural education, theory, and design both in Slovenia and internationally. Five speakers at the symposium, now in its third consecutive year, will attempt to offer new perspectives on the work of Jože Plečnik.
The symposium is organised as part of the AA Nanotourism Visiting School, an international research and design platform which is part of the Visiting School programme at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London. Nanotourism functions as a critical response to the impacts of mass tourism, exploring local, sustainable, and site-specific spatial strategies based on co-creation and collaboration with local communities and cultural heritage. For the third consecutive year, the AA Nanotourism Visiting School will take place in Ljubljana, in collaboration with MAO, the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Ljubljana, and TU Wien.
The event will feature a series of short lectures and project presentations, followed by a moderated panel discussion and Q&A with the audience.
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?