ABSTRACT
Jože Plečnik has occupied a peculiar place in the scholarly (and popular) historiography, mostly because he failed to conform to conventional expectations for a modern(ist) architect. His particular modernism departed essentially from the paradigmatic model of rationalism, internationalism, and anti-historicism that remains the legacy of the idealistic pioneers of modern design and landscape architecture. Instead, Plečnik was inspired both by modern industrial aesthetics and by the appeal of antiquity, by the possibilities of new building techniques and by age-old methods of construction, by international standards of democratic progress and by chauvinist Slavist aspirations. Although the material results of these perspectives and practices may be comparable in terms of imaginative stylistic solutions pursued by others in Central and Eastern Europe, it is through delving into Plečnik’s motivations and strategies that the originality of his methods and attitudes might be most suggestively disclosed—and the extraordinary breadth and variation of modernism itself might be adumbrated.
