Pope, Plečnik, and National Classical Architecture

Two architects who were near contemporaries living worlds apart produced some of their nations’ finest classical works that are modern and not modernist.

A nation’s buildings are directly connected to the laws that enable their construction. Their architecture is intended to provide beauty as the counterpart to the laws that seek to protect and provide the common good. Like the current body of laws, the buildings are drawn from national traditions extending back to the nation’s founding principles.

This proposition holds universally—in Chinese, Indian, Western, and Serbian nations, in all of the disparate traditions of architecture and their legal orders. We use the word classical to refer to the highest and best in a tradition, a word that avoids reducing our best buildings to examples of a style and incorporates Demetri Porhyrioius’ explanation that classicism is not a style. When the concept of styles was developed in the 18th c., the temples in ancient Athens were the most admired and were declared to be classic, and the name stuck. As the forms of buildings changed in response to changes in the legal order that they serve, successive groups were given new names such as Romanesque, Gothic, etc.

The classical, now reduced to a mere style, was assaulted in the 19th c. by romanticism that disconnected it from foundational legal orders and connected in instead to the idea of progress now accepted by every nation. Architecture, now an internationally practiced art form, is shorn of its duty to produce beauty to serve a nation is instead serving other ends—technology, economy, being of its time, narcissistic self-expression.

As art objects with changing styles, buildings no longer seek to make beautiful visible examples of a nation’s founding principles, which is the very definition of classical architecture, Its buildings do not exhibit a style but a nation’s sense of itself. Two recent buildings in two very different modern nations, the U. S. and Slovenia, exemplify this modern national classicism in the age of modernism.

The Founders of the United States had a profound knowledge of history and the classical world, and they were abreast of recent developments in philosophy in Britain and on the Continent. From that, and through their extensive experience in governing the colonies and the new nation, the Constitutional ratified in 1789 and subsequently amended continues to protect and promote the common good.

The Constitution, both profoundly new and firmly anchored in the enduring principles of the good, and the buildings they built to serve its institutions combined new and old principles of beauty. In governing, they showed a disregard for imperial Rome and subsequent tyrants and kings, and in building they favored precedents in the pre imperial precedents and the buildings of Palladio and British Palladianism. The examples of Jefferson and other early builders others were subsequently supplemented by Greek examples, but spareness prevailed. There then followed an episode of romanticism that opened the floodgates of eclecticism, although eventually American classicism’s restrained and straitened, plain forms were restored and several architects worked to make Washington D. C. a prime example of classicism’s beauty before modernist styles made their entry there.

Outstanding in capturing the order, harmony, and proportionality and providing the legible identity of the buildings’ purposes was John Russell Pope. His National Achieves Building is a multi-columned strong box. His nearby National Gallery of Art follows the broad configuration of other major federal buildings, diluted here and given a nuanced composition. Allen Greenberg suggested in conversation that its very low relief and plane walls on its flanks are Pope’s response to the rising tide of modernism.

The United States is a relatively new nation, but Slovenia is even newer. In its capital, Ljubljana, little evidence remains of its role as a provincial capital in the ancient Roman Empire. In the general recovery beginning after 1000, it became a provincial capital in Vienna’s Holy Roman Empire, being the northwest salient of a largely Slavic area beneath the Alps near the Adriatic Sea. Made part of Yugoslavia in the post war settlement in 1918, it shared its troubled history until its breakup in 1991 with Ljubljana as its national capital.

Jože Plečnik was born in Ljubljana, and would work to make its buildings and urbanism proud and beautiful evidence of the region’s Slavic heritage. He lacked the advantages of Pope, his near contemporary, who had enjoyed upper class New York parentage, an Ivy League education, two years of travel in Europe, study at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, and residency as the first architect at the American Academy in Rome.

Plečnik was first trained by his father to be a cabinet maker. Ambition took him to the capital, Vienna, where his drawing skill earned him a place in Otto Wagner’s atelier and acceptance at the academy. Diligent in self-education, he immersed himself in Gottfried Semper’s theories about cladding and architecture’s origins while distancing himself from the theories being churned out in Vienna. He withstood involvement in German culture, had a strong Roman Catholic faith, and developed a deep devotion to his native Slavic heritage. Untraveled well into his 20s, winning a bursary sent him exploring. He was unimpressed by Paris, fascinated by Venice in whose architecture he saw Slavic content, and was ravished by Renaissance buildings, especially those in Rome.

After teaching and working for Wagner, he launched his career in 1899 and soon had a few major buildings to his credit. Not wishing to cultivate German connections and declining a professorship in Berlin, in 1911 he moved to the more hospitable Serbian heritage of Prague. In this capital of newly created Czechoslovakia in 1918, his career flourished. With the sponsorship of President Thomas Masaryk he spent the next 20 years reworking its castle with a national classicisms expressing the new nation’s pride while indulging his own fascination with cladding.

Mounting ethnic tensions in Czechoslovakia persuaded him in 1921 to return to Ljubljana. The Mediterranean city had been severely damaged in 1895 and was rebuilt as an Austrian city. Now Plečnik set out to make it a modern classical Serbian city. With the support of government officials and a close ally in the building department, he spent the next thirty years making justly famous major and minor urban modifications and several major buildings.

He also served as a professor promoting the Slavic ethnic heritage and fending off student interest in Perret, Le Corbusier, and Gropius and the clamor of functionalists. Despite resistance by functionalist antagonists in Belgrade and at home, his skillful maneuvering produced his most prominent building, the signature National and University Library, designed in 1930 with its construction long delayed and then a decade in the making.

The library is a great, largely hollow block adroitly inserted into the urban fabric formerly occupied by a baronial palace destroyed by the earthquake. Its rough faced stone ground floor with large windows is followed by an equally high second story that, like the next three floors below a story high smooth faced frieze and cornice, is clad in brick interspersed with blocks of local limestone and fragments of the predecessor building. The small windows in the three intermediate floors have slightly projecting canted panes and thin stone eyebrows.

The entrance is relatively small and on axis with an urban fountain. At the block’s other end, beyond a secondary entrance, larger windows are placed in a recession topped by a balustrade, with his typically personalized profiles, below a tier of windows reaching the frieze with a central, thin column with a floral capital. This fenestration, matched on the other side, lights the reading room lined in its height with books.   

 The block’s inner court lights the building’s wings above the lower two floors where a grand stair leads up to the reading room and side aisles to other rooms. The aisles on this grand entrance’s upper level is a hypostyle with 32 unfluted polished baseless Tuscan columns of local Podpeč limestone carrying simple grillage for the ceiling. Lining the aisle’s sides are tables, each one supported by a pair of very stout fluted Tuscan columns with a baseless, tapered Ionic column (not shown in the section) between them. Their prominent presence testifies to the belief that the Etruscans, the earliest builders in Ljubljana, were Serbians who migrated and founded Rome. Throughout the building are Plečnik’s bravura inventive details and his beloved fluid forms like those that the Art Nouveau used.

 The buildings of both Pope and Plečnik bear the unmistakable stamp of the architectural traditions that serve there nations with their classicism connecting them to their nation’s legal order. They exemplify two distinct national classicisms. Pope’s belongs to a long American national tradition had  been interrupted and recovered and that he then used in his time. Plečnik’s urban interventions and National Library drew on formerly provincial traditions that presage the modern nation’s founding and equipped it to become a national capital when the time came.