Architecture
Josip Plecnik (Prague Castle, till 29 September)
Prague beckons
Gavin Stamp
Prague There are many good reasons for visit- ing Prague, that most beautiful city of Baroque and Gothic. An immediate one is to see the exhibition in Prague Castle devoted to one of the great architects of the 20th century but one of whom the British sadly seem to know little.
Joze (as he is known in his native Ljubl- jana, now the capital of the new Republic of Slovenia but called Laibach when he was a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) or Josef (as he is called in Vienna where he was one of the most brilliant pupils of the great city architect, Otto Wagner) or Josip Plecnik (as he is known by his fellow Slays, the Czechs, after he moved to Prague following the blocking of his appointment, apparently on racial grounds, of his succession to Wagner at the Academy of Fine Arts by the odious Archduke Franz Ferdinand whose assassi- nation in Sarajevo three years later had such catastrophic consequences) was born in 1872 and died, marginalised in Tito's Yugoslavia, in 1957. He was, therefore, five years younger than Frank Lloyd Wright, four years the junior of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and three years younger than Edwin Lutyens. Unlike the first two, Plecnik has never been proclaimed a pioneer of the Modem Movement; indeed, he was deeply hostile to Le Corbusier, was a devout Roman Catholic, and believed that the Classical language was the Mediterranean birthright of his fellow Slovenians. But he was one of the most inventive and subtle architects of his time and his stock is steadily rising. He was put on the map by an exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1986. Now he is at least celebrated in Prague, for until recently his close association with Tomas Masaryk was an unwelcome reminder of the existence of a genuinely democratic, Progressive democracy in the first Republic of Czecho-Slovalcia which emerged from the first world war.
Masaryk, national hero and first presi- dent of the state, asked the Slovene to restore and adapt the old castle buildings as a presidential palace; 'the whole of the renovation work on the Castle,' he wrote in 1925, 'both outside and in, must be simple but artistically noble, symbolising the idea of state independence and democracy.' This Plecnik achieved, working with immense care and subtlety. The old ram- parts were converted into a garden of par- adise and new interiors created within the 18th-century buildings. The architect demonstrated a rare ability to create vigor- ous new forms which sing with the reso- nance of comprehensible tradition and which harmonised with the existing fabric — the result making the present restora- tion work on our own Windsor Castle seem as pedestrian as it is provincial.
This beautifully designed and highly intelligent exhibition begins in the columned hall which the architect created as a new entrance to the state rooms, but it does not just consist of drawings, models and examples of Plecnik's careful crafts- manship and highly developed sculptural sense. For much of the display is outside, exploring the architect's interventions by Means of 35 'stops', or explanatory texts (in English and Czech) placed on temporary concrete column heads. These lead the visi- tor from the entrance, with its attenuated flagpoles, to the gardens on the bastion overlooking the stag moat, across the third courtyard with its monolith obelisk and down the astonishing bull staircase to the Paradise gardens, which afford a magnifi- cent prospect of the domes and spires of the city and are articulated by pavilions and gazebos, pyramids and columns, gigantic granite urns and grand masonry steps.
Plecnik believed in tradition, but he never copied. As the Czech Cubist and Modernist architect Pavel Janak put it, 'In plecnik's work nothing is ever repeated as It was in the past, but everything is newly conceived, formed and executed. His art still incorporates columns and cornices, but they are designed in a way they never were
before . ' Believing in the value of a tuneless language, he was much more ver- satile than Mackintosh, who has been so relentlessly hyped this summer while Plec- nik is ignored. Here on show is the furni- ture designed for Masaryk which, beautifully made and developed from antique models, makes the Glaswegian's chairs look both contrived and crude.
I try to resist the attraction of making architects into heroes, for the conse- quences can be misleading and destructive. Of course Plecnik cannot be understood out of context, but he is a giant, one of those artists with an extraordinary ability to speak out of his time and to generate new and compelling forms. What Mackintosh is to Glasgow, so Plecnik is to Ljubljana, but perhaps the contemporary to whom he was closest in spirit was Lutyens — not Lutyens of the country houses but the Lutyens of those searingly abstracted, Mannerist war memorials. Both had the crucial ability seemingly extinct in Britain today — to invent within a tradition. Plecnik could transmute antique forms into something new and vital, but there is also an apparent eccentricity about the Slovene which comes from a unique sensibility.
This strangeness was informed by notions of symbolism as well as by the idea of a primitive, essential architecture propa- gated by the German theorist Gottfried Semper, and the results can be extraordi- nary. His great Church of the Sacred Heart in the Prague suburb of Vinohrady has a tower flanked by obelisks which is reminis- cent of Lutyens, yet it is pierced by a gigan- tic glazed aperture which also serves as a clock. And then there are the strange, faceted walls of purple brick, broken by a diagonal grid of raised blocks of stone. Expressionism, typical of the 1920s? Possi- bly, but the exhibition suggests that these surfaces represent ermine, suitable to clothe the shrine of Jesus, King of Bohemia.
'Public building, public works — all this is nothing,' Plecnik told his students in Ljubljana. 'Only when working a man can feel, for a moment, the wings of eternity, he gets something that nobody can ever take from him — and it is for this reason that art is such a terribly beautiful thing.' Go to Prague before the end of September and see what he meant.
I've ended my post office monopoly - now I'll bite anyone.'
Previous page
