"Dangerous liaisons. Preserving post-war modernism in city centers".
Conference,15-17 February 2001, Helsinki, Finland

Greetings from Slovenia

[See photos]

Natasa Koselj

Slovenia and Finland have at least two things in common: they are both quite small countries, located in the border between East and West and they are also linked with the fact, that they both belonged to the industrial undeveloped world in the begining of the twentieth century. In the 50's and 60's many Slovenian architects visited Alvar Aalto's work in Finland and some of them also met him. We could say that Slovenian post war architecture followed the path traced by Alvar Aalto, the path towards localising universal modernistic concepts.

It was really useful and instructive to participate the conference Dangerous Liaisons in Helsinki to me and I am thankful to all the organisers and the lecturers for that wonderful experience. We are also preparing a conference in our capital city Ljubljana this autumn, dealing with the conservation of 20th century architecture in Slovenia, with the emphasis on the problems how to preserve our post war architecture which is most threaten now. Although the problems of conservation 20th century architecture are global in principle, we have an additional problem linked with our post war regime.

In the begining of the last century Slovenia belonged to the industrial undeveloped countries. For a long time it was one of the provinces of Habsbourgian Monarchy and then a part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Although we are a Slavic nation Slovenian people were culturally always European oriented. Most of our scientists and artists, as well as our famous architect Jože Plecnik, studied in Wiena. After the second world war Slovenia became one of the republics of socialistic Yugoslavia, but the cultural, historical and social patterns of Yugoslav republics were very different and a lot of people were not satisfied with the socialist regime.

The fact is, that our own industry and also the most of our national building environment was established at that time. The problem is, that after our independence people regret everything connected with our socialist period, especially our post war modernism, where architect Edvard Ravnikar played a leading role. So, it is not just a matter of aestetic, but a strong psihological decline connected with our post war period. That is one of the reasons that has been causing a lot of dammage in the last few years by demolition of the interiors, buildings and urbanistical concepts established in years 1945-70 which should be preserved as national heritage.

You are asking, do we have to preserve those ”dangerous liaisons“? I think they are so different - every house maintain its own story, relation and content - they should be treated individually mostly by people who have a relationship with them, who know them, use them, love them and hate them. It was really interesting to attend juicy Sausage discussion as a foreigner in Helsinki - what will be your next object of lustration if you knock down The Sausage?