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The (Un)known Maks Fabiani
by Darinka
Kladnik
Translated by Christina Strojan
“Improving your life is always desirable. It’s
clear that the economy affects culture to a degree but it would
be incorrect to claim that a cultural level depends solely on
wealth and we cannot use this as an excuse for the sorry state
of society,” wrote Maks Fabiani in his book ‘Atma,
the Soul of the World’. Atma is a philosophical or religious
term taken from Sanscrit, which originally stands for spirit,
breath, soul and essence, the most intimate part of every human
and every object in the broadest meaning of the word. Maks Fabiani
reflects on this and more. He was a very interesting person
and undoubtedly the greatest town planner of his time and also
one of the most important architects. This year is the 140th
anniversary of his birth. He was born in Kobdilj near Štanjel
on the 29th of April 1865 and died in Gorica on the 14th of
August 1962.
Architect and historian, Dr. Marko Pozzetto, who lives in Trieste,
is well acquainted with him. He wrote several books about him
and his work and he also founded the Maks Fabiani Institute,
which is dedicated to preserving his legacy. He has acquired
a lot of Fabiani’s written material and uncovered many
things that would otherwise have been forgotten. Several years
ago, at a postcard exhibition, he mentioned Fabiani’s
postcards: “The originals are in the Gorica Museum, I
gave them 77 postcards. That is how many I could rescue; they
were given to me by his sister with the intention of public
display. However, these are not all of them; some are in the
National Archive in Gorica. There are supposed to be 450 of
them. After Fabiani’s death they were sold for paltry
money and bought by private collectors.”
Maks Fabiani painted them on pieces of cardboard which he
then cut and posted. Each one also has a stamp. He did this
quite often, sometimes painting two a day. We could call them
his diary because he painted events that caught his attention.
Some were mailed to his mistress Nerra Gatti. His first postcard
was made in Rome in 1895, displaying a portrait of Plecnik,
and the last one was made in 1961, which means that he had been
making postcards for almost 70 years. Many of his projects were
created during that time span. In Dr. Marko Pozzetto’s
opinion, there are only a small number of architects who left
so many of their plans and philosophical ideas for posterity.
He adds: “Fabiani was a ‘border resident’,
belonging to a group of people who frequently had to change
citizenship, language, life style and often also their way of
thinking, just because they lived in a certain area. Often these
people, and especially intellectuals, simply accepted their
fate, but such thoughts never crossed our architect’s
mind. Scientific curiosity enabled him to live a very intense
life even during the darkest times.” Fabiani lived for
the first 30 years in close relationship with the most significant
people in the Habsburg Empire. Later he became one of the eight
resident professors for Architectural Composition in Vienna.
He was considered a Viennese architect and the Austrians even
named a street after him but they resented him for leaving at
the peak of his glory.
At 56 he started anew in Gorica. It wasn’t easy as he
was regarded as a foreigner – a Slovenian or “austriacant”,
a local word meaning a supporter of the Habsburg Monarchy, –
and even worse, professionally incompetent. But he would not
give up; he became a civil servant and produced 92 regulation
plans between 1919 and 1922. He also drew the plans for the
gardens surrounding villa Ferrari in Štanjel. Those plans
are not preserved and some speculate that they were never finished
because of the constant reconstructions between the years 1910
and 1930. He planned the garden in sections: the first and second
courtyard, the Ferrari house surroundings, the area around the
pergola, the flower gardens, the panoramic pavilion, and so
on. Not long ago the gardens were beautifully restored and the
Fabiani walkway was constructed, beginning in Štanjel and
ending in Kobdilj. Sadly, not much is left of Fabiani’s
native house and even the little that is preserved is not open
to the public.
The Maks Fabiani Institute wishes to get more room for a library
and Fabiani’s archive. Perhaps there will even be a museum
for his plans. Even the Jakopic pavilion, for which he drew
the plans, is not standing any more; it was built in 1909 and
demolished in 1962 despite the protests of many artists. Some
of them are still striving to rebuild the pavilion, which was
occasionally called ‘The Little Temple of the Muses’.
For a long period of time it represented the central exhibition
venue for Slovene Visual Arts in Ljubljana.
Max Fabiani made several plans for Ljubljana; his most famous
work is the ‘Regulation of the Provincial Capital City
Ljubljana’ from 1899. Fabiani’s Ljubljana was planned
for about 100,000 inhabitants and to take ‘several decades’.
A year previously, Fabiani started researching the problem of
the area of Ljubljana called Bežigrad and his solutions
are considered by the experts to be a work of art. He was called
in after the great earthquake in Ljubljana in 1895, which shook
the city to its foundations. A part of Miklošiceva Street
around the former Court Square was built according to his plans.
Fabiani planned some other buildings in Ljubljana – the
Hribar House, the former retirement home on Japljeva Street,
the Vicarage on “Gornji” or Upper Square, the famous
Mladika where the Slovenian Foreign Ministry is situated, to
name but a few.
Dr. Marko Pozzetto believes that Fabiani’s work should
be thoroughly researched and presented. Some of the previously
mentioned 92 plans are quite interesting, bold, never realized
and most are completely unknown to the public as is the case
with most of Maks Fabiani’s legacy. His findings are far
from being out of date and certainly worth consideration.
The last chapter of ‘Atma’ talks about foreseen
developments. In it Fabiani underlines: “Maybe because
of his timeless need for love and peace, man is longing for
an era of mutual understanding among people and an incomparably
higher level of harmony than we have today. The Individual is
longing for satisfaction. The wider his scope of action, the
stronger is the need. The emptiness that we feel and notice
has many sources. Beside the inefficiency of the mind and culture
one of the reasons must be a lack of understanding and curiosity
for many things. In this way we can explain the leading egoistic
and pessimistic views that prevent us from understanding others
and recognizing good deeds and true love.”
(Content abstracted from "Slovenija.svet"
published by Slovenska
izseljenska matica.)
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