Edge City

A band of young Slovenians are repurposing abandoned sites to create a buoyant contemporary cultural scene in Ljubljana.

- Tom Seymour

Ljubljana is the most provincial of European capitals. Small, out of the way, a traditional thoroughfare, from Roman times onwards, for those travelling to grander, more storied places: Venice to the west, Vienna to the north, Budapest to the east, the beautiful Croatian coastline to the south. But it should not be overlooked. There’s a reason Slovenia’s capital and largest city translates as ‘the beloved’. Provincial it may be, but Ljubljana is anything but a cultural backwater. It is one of the most characterful cities on the continent – a perfectly preserved palimpsest of European architectural history ringed with forests, lakes and mountains.

The city dates back to the 1st century AD. It was then a Roman outpost named Emona, and remnants of Roman walls and churches are still visible. In the Middle Ages, its position as a crossroads between competing dynasties saw it sacked, occupied and largely destroyed by warring foreign rulers. There were also catastrophic earthquakes in the region in 1511 and 1895 that effectively razed much of the medieval city to the ground. But, as it rebuilt itself on both occasions, it did so in the midst of history-defining eras for art and architecture. Now it is full of baroque and Renaissance-era buildings with later additions during the Secessionist and art nouveau period.

One man was particularly influential in this latter period. Architect Jože Plecnik was born in Ljubljana and, after an education in Graz and Vienna and a decade renovating Prague Castle, returned home to Ljubljana in 1921. Beyond Slovenia, he was barely known. His lack of a signature style all but disqualified him from mainstream European architectural discourse of the time, and he remained an obscure figure until some years after his death in 1957. Yet few architects anywhere in the world have had such a great impact, or made such a lasting impression, on the city of their birth.