Doubt as a project

Miloš Kosec

No one characterised the Slovenian post-war architecture more than Edvard Ravnikar (1907 – 1993), who as a idiosyncratic modernist knew how to continue weaving some threads of tradition. A disciple and collaborator of Jože Plečnik, an anti-modernist par excellence, he consciously broke with his formative influence and went to Paris in 1939 to work with Le Corbusier and to become a fullbloodied modernist. The outbreak of the Second World War forced him to return to his native Slovenia, and the time he spent in hiding while working for the resistance in the occupied country gave him the creative and intellectual freedom to overcome the seemingly unbreachable contrasts between his two mentors. This was perhaps the central seed in Ravnikar’s critical dialects that became a basis of his search for an authentic and regionally conditioned, and at the same time universal and technically advanced architectural expression. From the end of the war all the way into the early nineties, Ravnikar’s dialectical synthesis was being created on his drawing board as well as his typewriter and easel , producing an impressively cosmopolitan series of open-ended and critical meditations on the nature of the role of the architect in the 20th century.

Ravnikar was an architect of extremely wide-raging interests ranging from painting to industrial design, form art theory to writing for popular magazines, from designing buildings to city planning. Perhaps above all, he was defined as a pedagogue, being a supervisor of over 650 theses and decisively forming the generation of influential 1960s regional modernists of the 1960s Ljubljana architectural school. Ravnikar himself built a lot in Slovenia, but most of his competition victories in the rest of Yugoslavia and abroad were never realised. Due to a high number of unrealised projects, therefore, Ravnikar’s influential presence in architectural circles throughout Yugoslavia as well as in the rest of Europe (then as well as now) is not immediately explainable. Recently, two bequests of Ravnikar’s descendants to the Slovene Museum of Architecture and Design enriched the archive donated by Ljubljana’s Faculty of Architecture from. In 2023, a year that the Government of Slovenia devoted to Ravnikar, an opportunity arose to locate within the archive the traces of Ravnikar’s distinct creative process.

The exhibition The Structure of Modernity is not designed as a holistic overview of the architect’s long creative output but rather as interpreting four formative chapters in his lifelong experimentation on creating the architectural synthesis between the critical and the affirmative, between the local and the global, between the archaic and the progressive. The thesis of the authors of the exhibition was that Ravnikar’s cultivation of creative doubt through writing, teaching, designing and planning make the reading of traces of his process worthy of an exhibition in its own right. Instead of the focus of the end-products, therefore, the exhibition takes its cue from one of the many thoughts Ravnikar wrote in his private diaries: “We have the right to be wrong, for a mistake is our adventure, a deviation that brings us closer to the truth. How dull is the truth that architects know beforehand!”

Starting at Ravnikar’s own scheme of “Tree of Architecture” from 1951 with branches of design, history of architecture, professional organisations, art theory, and city planning (biggest of all) that drastically widened the role and tasks of the architect as one of the main agents of spatial reconstruction and social change, visitors enter into the Cabinet, an imaginary reconstruction of the room at the architectural school that served as Ravnikar’s lifelong architectural laboratory. Here, traces of the architect’s diaries, sketches, plans, graphic and industrial design are combined with Ravnikar’s library reminiscences and quotations from his private diaries that extend from the cabinet throughout the exhibition as a linking thread of author’s comments on his own creative process.

The Cabinet is a conceptual springboard for the understanding of next three halls that respectively deal with Ravnikar’s monuments, public buildings and city planning. Lacking ambitious architectural opportunities in the first post-war years where funds were mostly streamed to reconstruction and build-up of industry, Ravnikar found in the commissions and competitions for monuments of the national liberation struggle the perfect opportunity to bring together his study of modern art theory, psychology and philosophy, with his experiences at Plečnik and Le Corbusier ateliers. The result was a novel approach of abstraction in a landscape, Ravnikar’s own resolution of the tensions between the individual memory and collective commemoration that are inherent in the monument.

Focusing on the four Ravnikar’s projects for the industrial town of Kranj, the task of the public building from the late 1950s onwards finally gave Ravnikar to express a modernist totality of architecture, urbanism, art and industrial design. The Municipal building in Kranj from 1960, above all, demonstrates the striking freshness in mediating the dilemma between archaic folk heritage and modernist aspirations of the new urban society, coined into an evocatively authentic yet never before seen, modern totality.

Exhibition ends with some of Ravnikar’s central urban planning projects. Two realised projects for the new town of Nova Gorica and for the new cultural, political and economic centre of the Slovene capital Ljubljana around the Square of the Revolution show Ravnikar in his ability to articulate a dynamic urban design out of his continuous care for linking the new to the existing cultural and spatial context. Ravnikar as a critical modernist comes to the fore at the two vastly ambitious, never realised projects for the new Skopje in Macedonia (destroyed in the 1963 earthquake) and for the New Venice, his proposal for building the Tronchetto district in Venice from 1964. In both of these, Ravnikar’s attention to designing a modernist city primarily from the perspective of the pedestrian, with an active reinterpretation of architectural history and in correcting the infrastructural and spatial cul de sacs of mainstream modernist dogmas exhibit the potency of critical thought transformed into the architectural project. Ravnikar’s utopian yet pragmatic plan for Tronchetto, including his destruction of railway and road links to La Serenissima, is a refreshing contrast to the stubborn belief of many twenty-first century architects that more and bigger is always better. In midst of climate crisis, spatial and social disintegration, critical thought and creative doubt must surely once again become basic foundations of architectural projects?

Annonce