(The unconventional modernity of Bogdan Bogdanovic and Joze Plecnik)

Jože Plečnik (1872–1957), son of Catholic carpenter, grew up in in the old Austrian province of Carniola. He trained as a carpenter and was supposed to follow him in his profession, but he ended up studying architecture at Otto Wagner’s Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. There, Plečnik received the Rome Prize, a graduation allowance to travel through Italy and study classic architecture in situ. His colleague Adolf Loos2 described him as one of the most talented students of the Wagner School. The letters Plečnik sent from Italy to his brother, a catholic priest, give a lot of information about his character and his ideas, his shyness and seriousness, his Catholicism and a certain pan Slavic nationalism. He was supposed to take over the leadership of his master’s school at the Vienna Academy – probably as Joseph Pletschnik – but his candidacy found some political opposition and did not eventuate. After this disappointment, he moved to Prague, following the invitation of Jan Kotěra,3 a colleague from the Wagner School. There, he taught at the School of Applied Arts and designed, among other things, some chalices and other sacred objects, and studied Slavic art in Moravia and Slovakia. When he left Prague, he also received a commission from Masaryk to renovate Hradčany Castle. It was in 1921, after three decades and one world war, that Plečnik returned to his hometown, where in the following years he received a series of job commissions from the city council and also became a professor at the University of Ljubljana