Exhibition Credits

Neither wholly modern nor wholly historicist, the work of Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik (1872–1957) resists being categorized into any specific architectural movement. Rather, Plečnik, who played a pivotal role in transforming his home city of Ljubljana after the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, created a distinctly Slovenian architectural language during a critical period of national identity formation. Plečnik did not create a sweeping, grand vision for a new city. Instead, for more than three decades, he worked incrementally on urban projects large and small, creating an accretion of interventions that effortlessly graph onto an existing context. Pre-Mo Po-Mo: Micro-Urbanism in Jože Plečnik’s Ljubljana brings together these works of micro-urbanism—lampposts, steps, paving, and ornament—that mediates between the scale of the body and the city. Through modest means, these works produce a sense of intimate monumentality, revealing how cumulative, human-scaled design can transform urban experience.