DELEGATES CLUB
(also known as People’s Representatives Club, Parliament Members Club, Interior Ministry Club)
Architect Marko Župančič, 1946–1947
The Delegates Club was the first building in Ljubljana which was built in the era of the new people’s government immediately after the Second World War, when the social situation in the then People’s Republic of Slovenia radically changed. It was designed in 1946–1947 by the architect Marko Župančič, a student of Jože Plečnik. He had worked with Le Corbusier in Paris in 1940 on the Club Village project, among others. The Delegates Club was used for meetings, assemblies and events. It featured a hall, a restaurant, club rooms, a library with a reading room and several rooms for the accommodation of Members of Parliament. For a number of years after the Second World War, it was the main political and social centre in Ljubljana. The building was characterised by a clear design, with spaces meaningfully structured and linked into functional units with accentuated features. The sophistication of the building is reflected in the design of the façades with small and large coffered windows, as well as in the columns, the structuring of the cubic shapes and walls, the use of different materials, etc. In his first major work, shortly after his return from the infamous Dachau camp, the architect Župančič showed all the knowledge he had acquired both during his studies with Professor Plečnik and during his work with Le Corbusier in Paris.
The Delegates Club was a two-storey building, built partially with a cellar, with a flat roof and a U-shaped floor plan, which, including the inner courtyard, formed an almost regular square of 39 x 36 m. The square was a common motif in Župančič’s work. It is also found later in the floor plan of the Workers Club in Trbovlje and elsewhere. Between the Delegates Club and the National Gallery there was a park with mighty trees, and right next to the Gallery there was a passage leading from today’s Štefanova Street towards the Orthodox Church and Tivoli Park. The central wing with the main entrance on Puharjeva Street had floor plan dimensions of 36 x 14.2 m, with two auxiliary wings on either side along the central inner courtyard on the west side along Bleiweisova (now Prešernova) Street, a 150 m2 hall with accompanying service areas, and on the east side along Tomanova (now Prežihova) Street, the administration on the ground floor and rooms on the first floor, a kind of hotel for Members of Parliament and guests. The main entrance was on Puharjeva Street, protruding 3 metres to the street and slightly asymmetrical to the central façade. To the left of the entrance was a canteen with a kitchen and service areas, which continued towards the National Gallery, and the administrative wing. To the right of the main entrance was a club room with a buffet, toilets and a staircase leading to the first floor. In the axis of the club rooms were three columns of circular cross-section, terminating in a slightly curved wall with windows and a column on the west side along Prešernova Street. On the first floor, above the entrance, there was a meeting room, to the left of which were the men’s and women’s toilets, the students’ room and the Communist Party meeting room. To the right there was a library with two rooms for individual study and a large reading room. In the central part of the floor, a pool room of about 150 m2 opened onto the courtyard. The hall, with a ceiling height of 5 metres in the west wing along Prešernova Street, could be accessed through the internal club rooms, from the east side of the courtyard and also from the south, where there was a service entrance. At the east end of the hall there were four round columns, with a passage to the courtyard near them. From there, a massive 8.5 m square stone wall with a small window opening in the middle could be seen. The tract along Prežihova Street and the corner part of the central building along Puharjeva Street had a cellar. It is not entirely clear from the currently available plans and data what purpose these basements served. The façades of the ground floor part of the Club were clad with stone slabs of varying sizes, while the façades on the upper floor were in plaster. A more detailed description of the building is unfortunately not possible due to the lack of pictures and other material.*
What happened in the building between 1947 and 1988, during the forty-odd years of the Club’s existence, after which it was handed over to the National Gallery, could be the subject of a separate and more detailed study. In the initial post-war period, the Club was more of a closed venue, reserved for Members of Parliament and political appointees. The children of political bigwigs, one of them told me, could go there with their parents to see films. Later on, however, the club gradually began to open up to the public and became an artists’ meeting place. The librarian Maks Veselko told me that they used to go to the club’s canteen for an excellent lunch, and I remember the lectures by foreign architects in the early 1980s, organised by the Association of Architects of Ljubljana.
Much was written about the competition for the conceptual design of the renovation of National Gallery and the Delegates Club, but no evaluation of the building was carried out, let alone a detailed architectural-historical record of its significance and qualities. The lack of studies is probably the result of all sorts of goings-on and coincidences during the change of the socio-political system and the beginning of the transition in Slovenia.
Erasure Of Memory And Identity
Undoubtedly, the Delegates Club building had to give way to the ambitions of cultural politics and to the annex of the National Gallery, for which Professor Edvard Ravnikar won an internal competition in 1989. This was also a time of political and social change and transition. Professor Ravnikar died in 1993 after an unfortunate fall in Savudrija, so his project, which was modified several times and which included the relocation of the original Robba fountain to the central wing of the National Gallery, was not fully realised according to his ideas. Much has been written about the competition**. Gojko Zupan writes in Sinteza:*** "The jury, which was to select a suitable project to solve the gallery’s space constraints, was chaired by architect Marjan Tepina. The vice-chairmanship was entrusted to Špelca Čopič, PhD, who was assisted by the director of the Gallery, Anica Cevc, PhD, the painter Janez Bernik and the architects Matjaž Garzarolli, Jurij Kobe, Marko Pozzetto, PhD, and Marko Župančič. The last one, the author of the Delegates Club, resigned from the jury for health reasons. The jury was assisted by the rapporteur, architect Savin Sever, and the secretary, art historian Lojze Gostiša. The distinguished jury invited nine authors to participate. Their selection remains a mystery, as it does not correspond exactly to the list proposed by the Association of Architects." The architects invited to participate in the competition were Edvard Ravnikar (1907–1993), Milan Mihelič (1925–2021), Stanko Kristl (1922–2024), Tomaž Medvešček (1944), Miloš Bonča (1932–2006), Igor Skulj (1946–2022), Branko and Ivan Kocmut (1921–2006, 1926–2009), Marta Tobolka Čupić and Boris Podrecca (1940). Tobolka Čupić and Podrecca renounced their participation, and the competition took on a purely local character between Professor Ravnikar and his students. In the competition projects, the authors, including Ravnikar, referred in one way or another to the Župančič building, the structure of which they originally intended to preserve. After the professor’s victory and the many dilemmas that arose, a Report on the investigation of the load-bearing walls and ceiling structure in the building of the Delegates Club in Ljubljana was produced by ZRMK Ljubljana. It was commissioned on June 7, 1990****, together with a geomechanical opinion. Both were negative, and in May 1991, IZTR drew up a demolition plan for the Club. The changes and related events are described in more detail in Alja Grašič’s master’s thesis*****. The exterior of the new National Gallery was built according to the implementation plans of March 1992. In 1996, an international workshop provided Sadar+Vuga architects’ plans for the entrance hall and the complex where Robba's fountain stands. The entrance hall was built four years later, and in 2008 the Robba fountain was finally installed.
The final and complete solution of the National Gallery’s spaces composed of three parts from three different periods and designed by three architects (František Škabrout, Sadar+Vuga architects and Edvard Ravnikar) could have been better. Even our great architect Plečnik, whose works have been added to the UNESCO World Heritage List for their integration of the past, modernity and local identity, advocated the principle that it only makes sense to demolish bad buildings and to preserve for posterity at least the quality architectural parts of buildings as a reminder of past times, striving to incorporate them inventively in the renovated new works. The competition organisers and the jury initially wanted to preserve Župančič’s Delegates Club, probably also because of the cost of construction, but a series of unwise decisions by all the stakeholders in that particular space and time – art historians, architects and others – led to a final solution that is less than ideal. The architect Župančič yielded under the pressure of the tenderers and the experts, agreeing to demolish the Delegates Club. Unfortunately, he did not take a more aggressive stand in favour of his first major work and did not oppose to the jury’s obvious favouring the other projects. Štefanova Street became traffic-clogged and visually blocked in the direction of Tivoli due to the main entrance for visitors from Prešernova Street and not also from Štefanova Street, which could be partially corrected.
One of the few who publicly positively evaluated the Delegates Club building, albeit post-festum regretted its demolition and expressed doubts about the jury’s choice of the architect Milan Mihelič’s solution was the art historian Stane Bernik, PhD, who wrote******: "His (architect Marko Župančič’s, B. Z.) design of the Delegates Club was therefore a continuous expression of the modernist experience – from the source, one might say. With the quality of the whole, the rational arrangement of the interior space and the intimacy of the garden – practically in the city centre – it confirmed the thesis of extended functionalism and was its most eloquent monument. It was sacrificed to the ambitions of expansionist one-dimensional cultural programmes. Now, in its place stands a significant postmodernist-postneoclassical building, or the new wing of the National Gallery (E. Ravnikar, 1989–1993). The question is whether it was necessary to demolish the building. The competition for the new wing of the National Gallery (1989) offered a well thought-out and high-quality solution (M. Mihelič), which took into account the incorporation of the architecture of the Delegates Club and thus the material preservation of architectural memory. Nostalgics can only be consoled by the fact that this idea is said to have missed out on winning the competition by one point."
Župančič’s building of the Delegates Club, like Ravnikar’s Modern Gallery, links Slovenian architecture with the influences of Plečnik and Le Corbusier. Slovenian architects were the most numerous among architects from all over the world, except for the French and the Swiss of course, in the studio of the guru of modern architecture, Le Corbusier, before the Second World War. There are many unrealised competition entries by Slovenian architects who worked for Le Corbusier, but very few realised projects. It is a pity that we cannot show to both the national and international professional public not only one, but two comparable, excellent Slovenian architectures and two excellent architects from the period when they were under Le Corbusier’s influence. We could have two different architectural faces of Le Corbusier’s influence in our country and a dialogue between two of Plečnik’s students who worked for him in Paris.
The Delegates Club would be a welcome architectural addition to the exploration of modernist Ljubljana, where a number of modernist buildings from the 1930s and late 1940s can be found in the vicinity of the demolished Club. These include Šubič’s Nebotičnik block of houses, Sivec’s Dukić blocks, Mušič’s Workers’ Hall, Lušičić’s store Bata (called Nama after the war), Rohrman’s Hotel Slon, Medved’s Slavija Palace, Spinčič’s Viktorija Palace, Sunko’s Dunav Palace and Ravnikar’s Modern Gallery, as well as the recently disfigured Zupan-Bloudek’s Ilirija swimming pool and the long-demolished 1920s Costaperaria’s Ljubljana Fairground. In the competition for the University of Ljubljana Zaloška Campus with the Faculty of Medicine which has just ended, the story repeats itself, this time with the only surviving work by Župančič in Ljubljana. It is the planned demolition of the two-storey building of the Institute of Pathophysiology on Zaloška Street, where Župančič’s 1961 circular pavilion was demolished years ago. The pavilion was inspired by the constructor Jean Prouvé, with whom Župančič was the only Slovene to work at Le Corbusier’s studio.
Relationship Between Ravnikar and Župančič
The relationship between the seven-years-older architect Edvard Ravnikar (1907–1993) and the architect Marko Župančič (1914–2007) was not distant, as the difference in years would make it seem. They spent almost two years together at Plečnik’s Seminar, from the autumn of 1933, when Župančič arrived, until Ravnikar’s graduation on May 18, 1935. The two are also linked by their work in Le Corbusier’s atelier in Paris. Ravnikar worked there for three and a half months, from mid-February 1939 to June 1, 1939, and Župančič for six months, from December 1, 1939 to May 31, 1940. Their paths in the studio did not cross; Ravnikar had his own circle, which included Milan Sever, Marjan Tepina, as well as Juraj Neidhardt and Dušan Grabrijan, while Župančič was friends with a colleague from Plečnik’s Seminar, Jovan Krunić, a native of Vojvodina. Both Župančič and Ravnikar, together with the Gorizian architect Božidar Gvardjančič, who had also graduated from Plečnik’s studio, collaborated on the proposal for the urban planning of Nova Gorica. Župančič was the first to fall into the disgrace of the Minister of Construction, Ivan Maček Matija, for his disobedience at the presentation of the drafts. There are increasing indications that Ravnikar was not in favour of the younger Župančič. In August 2004, the architect Župančič evaded my question about their relationship and what he thought of Ravnikar’s National Gallery, which was built after the 1947 demolition of the Delegates Club, and said nothing bad about Ravnikar. Župančič did not receive any recognition for his architectural, urban planning and design work, which is probably due to the opposition of Edvard Ravnikar, who was on the evaluation committee. Župančič, on the contrary, supported Ravnikar’s ideas and solutions in the juries, for example for the building of the Kranj Chamber of Commerce and Industry and others. Župančič could have produced much more in better working conditions, as he had at the Atelier for Architecture (AZA) and elsewhere. It is a pity that he did not become a university lecturer, because in a more relaxed environment he could have developed professionally and offered his students a wealth of knowledge and experience, but because of opposition from others, the university doors were closed to him.
Text by Bogo Zupančič, Ph.D.
Translation: Jerca Kos
Sources and notes:
*Final report on the work and conclusions of the evaluation committee for the conceptual internal
competition for the project for the redevelopment of the premises of the National Gallery and the
Delegates Club building, including the extension and connection between the two buildings and the
external landscaping. List, Association of Architects of Ljubljana newsletter, 6, 1990, pp. 22–28; Gojko
ZUPAN, Four competitions in Ljubljana. Invited competition for the conceptual project for the
redevelopment of the premises of the National Gallery and the Delegates Club building. Sinteza.
Revija za likovno kulturo, 87–90, 1991; Alja GRAŠIČ, The Temple of Fine Art – Competition for the
New Wing of the National Gallery (1989), Master’s thesis, University of Maribor, Faculty of Arts,
2021.
**Gojko ZUPAN (1991, pp. 36–41.)
***Report on the investigation of the load-bearing walls and ceiling structure in the building of the
Delegates Club in Ljubljana, ZRMK Ljubljana, commissioned on June 7, 1990.
****Alja GRAŠIČ (2021), p. 72.
Figure 1: The building of the Delegates Club, viewed from the corner of Puharjeva Street and
Prešernova Road. The main entrance to the building, set forward on the street, is visible on the left.
Photo: Janez Kališnik, inv. no. F0006175, Museum of Architecture and Design Collection.
Figure 2: The Delegates Club before demolition, viewed from Puharjeva Street. Neg. no. 18025, ©
National Gallery, Ljubljana.
Figure 3: The western façade of the Delegates Club. Photo: Janez Kališnik, inv. no. F0006172,
Museum of Architecture and Design Collection.
Figure 4: View of the inner courtyard of the Delegates Club. Photo: Janez Kališnik, inv. no. F0006173,
Museum of Architecture and Design Collection.
Figure 5: The Delegates Club before demolition, viewed from Prešernova Road. Neg. no. 18034, ©
National Gallery, Ljubljana.
Figure 6: The Delegates Club before demolition, viewed from the corner of Puharjeva and Prežihova
Streets. Neg. no. 18029, © National Gallery, Ljubljana.