XX. századi műemlékek és védelmük (A 26. Egri Nyári Egyetem előadásai 1996 Eger, 1996)

Előadások: - Damjan Prelovšek: Joze (Josip, Jusep) Plečnik (Ljubljana, 1892. jan. 23-1957. jan.7)

chosen profession, he answered their suggestion to establish a special club for popularization of architecture. The club was named after G. Semper, more exactly after his fundamental architectural element which was also meant to be the main moral category: ,,0gnjisce" (Hearth). When Plecnik decided to leave Prague, the Czechoslovakian president, T G. Masaryk, supported by the artists' association ,,Manes", appointed him architect for the reconstruction of Prague Castle. Masaryk commissioned Plecnik to renovate the castle and change it into a spiritual centre of the young, democratic state. Until the autumn of 1934 Plecnik kept returning to Prague during school vacations; together with the president's daughter, Alice, he arranged the castle's courtyards, gardens, and interiors, and the park of the president's summer residence at Lány. When dealing with the planning problems of the castle's surrounding, he was met with opposition from the state town-planning commission for the Prague municipal area. This opposition turned into a general campaign against him at the end of 1934. By the 1950s, however, his ideas had partly been put into practice by his assistant and pupil, 0. Rothmayer. In the first years after his return to his native country, Plecnik was engaged only in projects for Prague; from the mid-1920s on he received commissions not only from the Municipality of Ljubljana but also from the Jesuits and the Franciscans. His main supporters were M. Prelovsek, the head of the Municipal Building Office, and the art historian F. Stele. Due to some opposition from a few of his own students and because of the advent of new stylistic trends, Plecnik's position in Ljubljana ceased to be as firm as it had been till the mid-1930s; nevertheless, he still received commissions for monumental works from the municipal government under the mayor J. Adlesic (the new town-hall with the market-place, the Zale mortuary). During World War II Plecnik was preparing plans for the future Ljubljana. When the German oppressor closed down the University, he gave lessons for a shorter time at his home in Trnovo, a suburb of Ljubljana. In the changed post-war circumstances, the only person from among the new men in power who offered support to Plecnik was F. Kozak, Minister of Culture. The Preseren Prize, awarded to Plecnik in 1949, was also a kind of political rehabilitation which brought him numerous commissions for memorials to war victims. He dedicated the last ten years of his life mostly to sacred art, but due to the high costs of these projects and lack of understanding on the side of political authorities, he could not materialize his monumental schemes. He died in his house at Trnovo. The lowest stage of esteem for Plecnik's architecture was reached in the 1960s, but interest in him began to grow again in the time of post-modernism, and it was especially stimulated by the big retrospective exhibition of 1986 in the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. The time spent in Vienna decisively marked Plecnik's development, since at the turn of the century the Austro-Hungarian capital became one of the world's cultural centres and the site of great intellectual development. 0. Wagner promoted the evolutionary transition to modern architecture by a modernization of historicist formal language. This process, demanding a rich imagination rather than factographic knowledge, was theoretically founded by the German architect G. Semper in his book Der Stil in der technischen und tektonischen Künsten, I—

II (Frankfurt am Main, München 1860, 1863); according to Semper's explanation, monumental art was supposed to originate in craft, primarily textile and ceramics. Throughout his life Plecnik kept faithfully to Semper's rules on the metamorphoses of antique models; Plecnik also tried to resolve the problem of national art with the aid of Semper's grammar of forms, especially when in the multi-national Austro-Hungarian empire, the German pressure forced him to seek refuge with the culturally advanced Czechs. He tried to tune his work to the Pan-Slavic chord, deriving both, bitterness and lyricism from Czech folk embroideries, as two prominent characteristics of