Between history, ideologies and conflicts. Architecture in Slovenia 1968-1991

In historiography, a look from the outside has often been illuminating: this is even more valid for the history of Slovenian architecture, where different actors have contributed their own reading of events. Slovenian architecture in the age of postmodernism was far from following foreign trends, as was the case in many post-socialist countries, who mainly embraced the elements of Postmodern architecture after 1989, because it originated from an autonomous reflection on its own meaning and ethics. The slightly more than two decades in the focus of this book was a period of transition. 1968 was a pivotal year, not only in Slovenia, not only in Europe: Vietnam was, civil rights movement in the United States, student’s revolts, Prague spring, cautious privatization efforts in several Socialist countries… The author starts with Plečnik’s international “discovery” and the controversies around his position in the architectural school of Lju. bljana ana and concludes with a thorough discussion of the post-Socialist situation. The 1980s were also a time of large and far-reaching changes in art and culture, a time of new art paradigms, as well as a period of the crisis of modernism and the advancement of postmodernism. Postmodern architecture is usually connected to the “cultural logic of late capitalism” (Fredric Jameson), to the aesthetics of capitalist consumerism.