PLECNIK CREATED HUMANE AND GRACEFUL CIVIC SETTINGS FOR THE EXERCISE OF THE DEMOCRATIC IMAGINATION

摘要

The time has come to take closer account of the extraordinary work of the great and unjustly neglected Slovenian architect and town planner Joze Plecnik. His practice in Slovenia and at Prague Castle, in the inter-war years of the last century, constitutes a brilliant demonstration of the possibilities of an architecture and art of urban space, and its principles are perfectly adaptable to the civic, political and spiritual needs of the city centre today. In his home town of Ljubljana, and in Prague during the early years of the first free Czechoslovak republic, Plecnik created humane and graceful civic settings for the exercise of the democratic imagination. Buildings, spaces and objects were arranged and configured in sequences that drew upon a profoundly progressive understanding of both Classical architecture and Baroque urban design, comprehended within an idiosyncratic - but essentially Modernist — vision of the modern city. In both locations he was primarily concerned with creating the conditions for what might be described as perambulatory subjective narratives — and with inscribing those necessarily personal passages within a broader, historical, public story.