Female students of Jože Plečnik between tradition and modernism

Slovenian architectural historical compendiums rarely include women architects and their buildings. ¹ The most important survey of 20th-century architecture in Slovenia, authored by Stane Bernik, mentions only one work solely designed by a woman architect and two completed projects where women architects are noted as co-authors. ² Likewise, DOCOMOMO Slovenija_100, (DOCOMOMO Slovenia_100) ³ presenting 100 of the most important buildings of the 20th century in Slovenia, contains only two objects by women architects. In contrast, the monograph titled 20. stoletje: arhitektura od moderne do sodobne (20th Century: Architecture from Modern to the Contemporary) ⁴ completely ignores the achievements of women architects. Furthermore, only those women who were active after 1965, when post-war Slovenian architectural activity witnessed its first creative phase, or after 1991, when Slovenia became an independent state, ⁵ receive notice in the above-mentioned monographs. Yet women’s contribution to Slovenian architecture, beginning with the establishment of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia in 1946 (after 1963, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia or SFRY) until the mid-1960s, has been ignored. Turning to the present day, gender discrimination in architecture persists: The first woman to become a full, tenured professor at the University of Ljubljana, Živa Deu, was only appointed in 2014, almost a century after its Department of Architecture was established.