Tomáš Valena: Plečnik's Ljubljana and Prague Castle as a Humanist Reconstruction of the City

At the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University in Prague, a lecture by Professor Tomáš Valena, one of the greatest experts on Josip Plečnik, will take place on Thursday, April 19, 2018, at 6:30 PM in the Gočár lecture hall (room no. 155) on the topic of Plečnik's Ljubljana and Prague Castle as a Humanist Reconstruction of the City.
The topic of the lecture loosely follows the unfortunate attempt of cooperation between the Czech Republic and Slovenia in nominating Plečnik's work for the UNESCO list under the title: “Timeless Humanist Architecture of Josip Plečnik”.
The speaker will first attempt to elaborate on various humanist traditions and determine their possible relevance to Plečnik's work. He will then define a specific humanism in Plečnik's architecture through the use of anthropomorphic elements and scale, “being with things,” and the universal comprehensibility of architectural language. This mainly involves the implantation of small architectures into existing urban situations. Plečnik developed this strategy of humanist urban reconstruction in the 1920s while working on public spaces of Prague Castle, and later fully developed it in his native Ljubljana. There, he reconstructed urban sequences around the Roman walls, the axis of Vegova Street, the space of Zojzova Street, and Šentjakob Square, as well as the banks of the Ljubljanica. In a certain sense, we can also include Žale, the city of the dead, in this. The term Plečnik's Ljubljana soon became established for this metamorphosis of the city. This humanist reconstruction of the city is one of Plečnik's unique contributions to the world heritage of 20th-century architecture.
Everyone is cordially invited to the lecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University in Prague.
Architecture for a New Democracy - Documentation of a unique exhibition from 1996 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia.
In connection with the lecture, we would also like to draw attention to a small exhibition of the large Plečnik exhibition from 1996, which will be opened from April 18, 2018, in the space below the semicircular terrace in the garden Na Valech at Prague Castle.
The exhibition at Prague Castle documents the concept and form of one of the most significant cultural projects realized at Prague Castle in the 1990s. The exhibition of the work and legacy of Josip Plečnik included seven exhibits in the interiors of the Castle and four thematic installations of the Master's works in the exteriors, conceived as exhibits in situ. These were connected by thirty-five thematic stops along the exhibition route, which included all of the artist's realizations from the 1920s and 1930s, during which he worked here at the invitation of TGM as the castle architect. Plečnik's work in the Castle complex thus effectively became part of the exhibition, which was a unique endeavor in terms of scale and the genius loci of the Castle in contemporary exhibition practice.