Jože Plečnik (Ljubljana 1872 – Ljubljana 1957), architect and town planner, received his initial training as apprentice to his father, a cabinet-maker. Following training at an applied arts college in Graz, he designed furniture in Vienna, where from 1894 to 1898 he studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts under Otto Wagner. In 1898 Plečnik won the Prix de Rome. Following his return from a study trip to Italy and France, he worked first on Wagner’s project of the Vienna city railway and then established himself as an independent architect.

Between 1901 and 1909, Plečnik was a member of the Vienna Secession. In 1911 he moved to Prague, where he was appointed to a teaching position at an arts college. His lectures, which emphasized both classical and folk architecture, influenced a budding generation of Czech avant-garde architects. In 1912 he was nominated to succeed Wagner at the Vienna academy, but Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a man of conservative taste, prevented his appointment. After 1919, the Czechoslovak president Tomáš Masaryk appointed him chief architect of Prague Castle.

In 1921 Plečnik permanently returned to Ljubljana to teach architecture. Here he raised a group of Slovenian architects (Plečnik’s school), who imitated his style for decades. Until the outbreak of the First World War, all prestigious commissions from the city of Ljubljana and from the Catholic Church went his way; this position eroded after 1940, owing to changing tastes and Plečnik’s disfavour with the new Communist regime.

Plečnik’s artistic views were formed in turn-of-the-century Vienna. He followed Wagner’s rejection of historicism and Gottfried Semper’s recourse to tactility and plasticity. On that basis, he searched for a proper vocabulary of Czech and Slovenian national architecture. In Prague, he found inspiration in medieval art and in folk embroideries. With regard to Slovenians and Slavs in general, he studied and adopted the style of the Etruscans, whom he regarded as ancestors of the Slavs. In contrast to the trends of modern architecture he always maintained columns in his designs, which for him symbolized Europe’s classical and humanist heritage.

Plečnik’s designs moved from Secessionist Art Nouveau (Vienna’s Zacherl House) to modernism. After the emergence of the international style around 1920, Plečnik developed a classical monumentalism, appropriate for the transformation of Prague Castle into the government headquarters and cultural centre of a modern state. In the same period Plečnik also planned a Slovenian variant of the idea of a national acropolis; but his projected remodelling of Ljubljana Castle was never carried out. The nationally-inflected classical style also determines Plečnik’s churches: the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Prague (1928-38) is clad in recourse to Semper’s theories in dark tiles and bright stones designed to evoke the ermine cloak of King George of Poděbrady. The Church of St Anthony of Padua in Belgrade (1929-32) combines the outline of the Roman Pantheon with the Byzantine style proper to traditional Serbian architecture.

From 1928 onwards, Plečnik planned and oversaw the systematic renovation of Ljubljana. His monumental designs (Wagner-based rather than functionalist) emphasized the city’s new dignity as Slovenian capital and its ancient connections with classical Italian culture. The main axis along Vegova Street with several important cultural institutions was adorned with renovated remains of the medieval city walls and with an avenue of monuments to Slovenian scholars and composers. The main water axis along Ljubljanica River (regarded by Plečnik as Ljubljana’s Canal Grande), was embellished with new bridges. One of the most important buildings of “Plečnik’s Ljubljana” was the University Library (1936-41), designed as the temple of Slovenian books. In accordance with Semper’s theories, its Ionic facade was covered over with a “carpet” of red bricks and white stones.