📋 Tender Overview
On November 30, the long-awaited central exhibition as part of Ravnikar's Year opened in the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO). The Structure of Modernity: The Searches of Edvard Ravnikar offers an authentic insight into the architect's office and his legacy.
Edvard Ravnikar
Edvard Ravnikar (1907–1993) reshaped the understanding of the role of the architect in the 20th century, and opened architecture to creative doubt and never-ending experimentation. With his teacher Jože Ple?nik, he developed a talent for drawing and became familiar with architecture as a high artistic mission. He experienced the spring of modernism with his teacher Le Corbusier in Paris. Both teachers, so opposite to each other, shaped the young architect.
Although Ravnikar moved away from Ple?nik's architecture in a formal sense, he remained the most sensitive and original transmitter of his tradition. He discovered surprising modernities between Ple?nik's school and Le Corbusier's studio, just as his own architecture is a kind of synthesis of tradition and modernity.
With a completely original interpretation of the fundamental principles of classical architecture, in combination with the construction principles and spatial designs of local folk architecture, Edvard Ravnikar succeeded in creating modern architecture with a unique cultural identity that is surprisingly self-evident. This kind of belonging to space is an expression of locally adapted architecture, which Ravnikar understood as everyone's existential and spiritual need.
The central exhibition The structure of modernity: the quests of Edvard Ravnikar
The central exhibition in Ravnikar's year, which was set up by dr. Miloš Kosec and Susanne Campeotto, was solemnly opened by State Secretary Matevž ?elik Vidmar. "The Structure of Modernity: The Searches of Edvard Ravnikar is not only a central event in Ravnikar's Year, but an extremely valuable exhibition that offers everyone a genuine insight into the architect's working cabinet and into his as-yet-unpresented legacy, not only asan architect, but as a public intellectual who was constantly looking for ways to improve the world with architecture", emphasized Matevž ?elik Vidmar, among others. He congratulated and thanked all the creators of the exhibition.
Onbased on the detailed research of Ravnikar's legacy, which was handed over to MAO by his heirs and the Faculty of Architecture, the exhibition presents the complexity of the development, search, dilemmas, changes and fate of some of Ravnikar's key works.
"The exhibition does not have a transparent nature, but highlights some key shifts in the mind of this great modernist architect. Ravnikar helps us think about the situation here and now", said Miloš Kosec about the exhibition.
Visitors to the exhibition first enter the architect's cabinet, an imaginative recreation of the creative and intellectual interior space of the architect Ravnikar. From the cabinet of Ravnikar's thoughts, visitors are led through three halls. The first, Monument, is dedicated to the architect's redefinition of the relationship between architecture, history and landscape. The second, House, analyzes Ravnikar's four buildings in Kranj, with which he redefined modernism in the local context. The third, the City, passes by Nova Gorica and Ljubljana's Revolution Square and ends in the progressive horizon of the never-realized plans for Skopje and Venice. Also on display are new photographs by Petr Žargi, which, with a view to the current social and spatial context, comment on how Ravnikar's spaces create and at the same time adapt to modernity, and also comment on our attitude to the legacy of modernism.
The central exhibition of Ravnikar's Year is on display until May 19, 2024.
