La ricerca delle radici nordiche della modernità nell’architettura slovena degli anni Cinquanta. Edvard Ravnikar, France Ivanšek e la vicenda editoriale di “Arhitekt”(1951-1963)/The search for the Nordic roots of modernity in Slovenian architecture of the 1950s. Edvard Ravnikar, France Ivanšek and the history of the journal “Arhitekt” (1951-1963)

In the aftermath of the Liberation, Slovenia was experiencing a moment of great political and social transformations: the commitment to industrialization and the reconstruction of the destroyed towns were the main focus of the State, while the need for an architectural and planning culture suited to the relief of the socio-economic processes underway was strong. Changes in political and cultural horizons after the split from the Soviet Union in 1948 gave impetus. This paper summarizes the output of many research periods in Ljubljana and Maribor between 2018 and 2021 on the sidelines of a doctoral thesis for the Polytechnic of Turin, retracing the contacts between Slovenian architects and the Scandinavian culture for more than a decade, since 1951, when Edvard Ravnikar, Danilo Fürst and France Ivanšek contributed to the foundation of the journal “Arhitekt”. Scandinavian modernism was indeed a source also for some Serbian and Croatian architects: however, the Slovenian case awakes our interest, because it identified the Nordic archetypes with the work of Jože Plečnik. In his writings of the early 1950s, Ravnikar defined his master as a representative of modern classicism, where the elements of local tradition were organically reinterpreted, just like Gunnar Asplund or Sigurd Lewerentz had done in their country. Some Scandinavian formal characteristics, such as the care for architectural details, thus merged with the legacy of the Otto Wagner school, giving life to the peculiarity of the so-called “Ljubljanska Šola”, the Ljubljana school of architecture, dominant until the late 1970s. Therefore, this research intends to document the acquisition of the Scandinavian archetype as a stimulus for the cultural and economic ambitions nurtured by Slovenian architects, who invented a new tradition