Milan Mihelič

The Neglected Ljubljana Creator of Sensible Architecture

Architects and those who interpret their work often explain quality buildings in connection with their setting. The concept of genius loci is popular. For fifteen years, UNESCO has supported projects in various European regions aimed at carefully documenting intangible cultural heritage, seemingly minor field names that act as markers of a place’s characteristics. A similar record, with meaningful evaluation of locations, is needed in Ljubljana, where the spread of non-systemic construction is covering the landscape and erasing layers of development from prehistory to today. We are forgetting the city’s only true backbone: the axis that visually connects Mount Krim in the south with the Kamnik Saddle in the north. The Alps and the Dinaric Alps meet in Ljubljana. Along this axis, people formed a footpath, and in the era of ancient Emona, a road. To the east toward Poljane and to the west toward Tivoli, the settlement expanded into what long-time residents call the City. It has never been marked with traffic signs saying “Ljubljana”, but in everyday language the core of the capital is distinguished from Šiška or Bežigrad, Vič or Moste. The broader area of the Slovenian capital between Rožnik and Castle Hill is called the Ljubljana Gate by geographers and urban planners. Before scientists adopted the term, Marko Pernhart described and painted it well in the mid-19th century. In his well-known vista, the mentioned road axis is marked by avenues of linden trees, inspired by Maria Theresa. The line of trees stretches from the Sava toward the space between the two green hills, to the place where the once navigable Ljubljanica breaks through from the marsh. A hundred years after Pernhart, architect Edvard Ravnikar marked the Ljubljana Gate with the confident gesture of his prismatic twin towers (1960–1982). The height of the two towers was limited by the economic crisis, but the idea—older than the Twin Towers in New York—was stopped by no one.

Architect and Ljubljana native Milan Mihelič, who was born near Ribnica in Dolenjska by chance because of his father’s job, was among the most outstanding of Ravnikar’s students. Already as a high-school student in Bežigrad, he became—through his father, a railway employee—keenly aware of the crucial importance of Bavarski dvor for Ljubljana. The northern edge of the City was definitively delineated, just beyond the Bavarski dvor intersection, by the Vienna–Trieste railway. The name Bavarski dvor had previously belonged to a hotel building (demolished in 1962), where Ljubljana’s residents, in the cultural shadow of Vienna and Munich and long before today’s television series, venerated Empress Elisabeth, Princess Sissi of the Bavarian Court.

The intersection of roads and railway remains the city’s Gordian knot. Every day, from the overpass where pedestrians once crossed the tracks in an arc on their way into the City, Mihelič looked toward Mihevc’s Kozolec and Vladimir Šubic’s Nebotičnik. He understood that the site of the unfinished Fabiani Ring, as well as the area west of Oton Gaspari’s post office, north of Mihelič’s residential towers, and of Edvard Mihevc’s buildings, deserved an especially thoughtful intervention. Mihelič entered this space with experience and after a successful competition win. At the Institute for Housing Construction of the Ljubljana Municipal People’s Committee (OLO), he was, already one year after graduating in 1954, a successful researcher, and afterwards—alongside Branko Simčič and together with Ilija Arnautović—a designer of part of Hall A of the Ljubljana Fairgrounds. Immediately after that, he and Arnautović designed the modern residential towers of the Savsko naselje. This confidence led Mihelič toward independent work at the company Konstrukta, where, together with colleagues, he created, designed, and won competitions from 1962 onward. For a long time, he was its key designer and director. He used the same studio and created within it until his death.

Mihelič sought to connect the diverse elements of the northern edge of Ljubljana’s inner core and elevate them. He did not want to refine this distinguished location merely with two tower-like guardians of the northern city gates of a new era. The first comparable structures at the edge of this area were the canopies of two petrol stations. Ravnikar and Mihelič, each on his own side of the street, took as their starting point the structure of Šlajmer’s “Jurček” (1960).

The model of the whole ensemble and photographs of the buildings before the modern additions of instant hotels, shown at exhibitions across Europe and in New York, are changing perceptions of the quality of “Eastern European” architecture, especially in Yugoslavia and Slovenia. Only two buildings reached their final form: the S2 tower, eventually known as the SCT Tower (Slovenija ceste – Tehnika: 1963, 1969–1980), and the MATC telephone exchange (1972–1978), affectionately called the Piano by Ljubljana’s residents. The two new constructions first demonstrated that by adding contrasting elements, it is possible to shape coherent, well-rounded districts out of the earlier cacophony of buildings, while at the same time highlighting high-quality structures, first the Kozolec, and behind it the silhouette of the Nebotičnik. Mihelič had already created the possibility for the coexistence of residential buildings with the two towers on Kersnikova Street, whose emphasized longitudinal floor beams formed a thoughtful complement to the lines of Mihevc’s residential block.

The design and partial realization of Bavarski dvor marked a definitive break into a new era of industrial construction. Mihelič, similarly to Ravnikar on Republic Square, raised his development slightly above the street grid, something we too often overlook. With this, the professor and his most successful student echoed the ancient foundations of temples elevated above a small staircase. Mihelič’s design imaginatively formed a ground level meant for the citizen, the pedestrian, who was to walk freely beneath the towers or into the network of streets behind Liberation Front Square. Above the platform rose the core, a wide concrete column against which open-plan structures with metal and glass sheathing could be attached. The telephone exchange was a masterful connection of diverse elements at the intersection, with a permeable ground floor and a glazed upper façade. The quality of the rhythm of its façade panels, their joints, and the undulating lines has not been surpassed by any newer building in the city. Critics have often compared the building to Norman Foster’s Willis Building in Ipswich, which is far less light, with dark-tinted glazing down to the ground and without integration into the life of the neighbourhood and into the city’s ground plane.

Model of the Northern City Gate design, view from the south, 1972. Archive of the heirs of Milan Mihelič.

The odyssey of an architect who won a series of urban and architectural competitions and developed the idea of a monumental concrete core and hovering glass, rounded structures, was precisely described by the architect’s best interpreter, Dr. Stane Bernik. The esteemed art critic already in 1980, through an exhibition and a book, explained the key milestones of Mihelič’s oeuvre. At that time, everyone still believed that Bavarski dvor would grow into an exceptional whole, extending all the way to Slovenijales, and would incorporate the often overlooked Pavilion B of the Ljubljana Fairgrounds, worthy of comparison with the bold contemporary works of Oscar Niemeyer.

Mihelič’s comprehensive plan for the redevelopment of Bavarski dvor was, through a few strokes of overconfident investors and behind the curtain of star architects with a few box-like suspended façades, transformed into an urban quandary of two oversized, clumsy box towers belonging to various international hotel chains—towers with no connection to the urban fabric and excluding the pedestrian from the City. Before this, a commercial building with the pompous name Eurocenter had been thrust onto Tivolska Road. Toward the end of his long life, the academician Mihelič watched with bitterness as the city’s pseudo-urbanists supported ever-growing interests in hotelization. How meaningfully, how harmoniously, and with playful architecture and thoughtful details his Bavarski dvor would have flowed past the Fairgrounds into the Slovenijales complex, had it been fully built: this younger generations will see and read only in the second monograph by dr. Stane Bernik on Milan Mihelič, the architect of sensible rather than spectacular forms.

The Prešeren Award, Slovenia’s highest national cultural honour, usually highlights the works of artists and celebrates creators who shape Slovenian and broader cultural space. Since 1949, when Jože Plečnik received it, architects have often been among the laureates. The works of these artists ought to be comprehensively protected. Interventions in them should be extremely rare and carried out with respect—carefully considered exceptions only. The practice of the last two decades has been different. Distinctive architecture and high-quality urban designs by the academicians Edvard Ravnikar, Savin Sever, Milan Mihelič, Marko Mušič, and others are being uncollegially reworked and destroyed by their peers.

Architect Mihelič (1925–2021), much like his older brother, the painter France, was a multiple recipient of the Prešeren Award. Which of his architectural icons still exist and allow us to live in or beside them and learn from them? This year marks the centenary of the architect’s birth, and it is time to walk through his diverse oeuvre and reconsider how we understand and preserve Mihelič’s masterpieces in Ljubljana, in the compact settlement of the capital, in the City.

Author of the text: Gojko Zupan

Text sources:

Bernik, S. Milan Mihelič. Ljubljana: Architectural Museum, 1980.
Bernik, S. Milan Mihelič: Architecture Between Reality and Vision. Ljubljana: SAZU, 2011.
Zupan, G. Milan Mihelič. Modra arhitektura. Ribnica: Miklova hiša Gallery, 2014.

Sources and notes:

Video 1: Various archival footage of Bavarski dvor. Archive of RTV Slovenia.

Image 1: View from the Nebotičnik building towards the northern parts of Ljubljana, with Mihelič’s Tower S2 rising in the centre, around 1985. Photo: Viljem Zupanc. Held by the Historical Archives of Ljubljana; SI ZAL LJU Photo Archive 0342, A6-009-072.
Image 2: Bavarski dvor before 1960. Photo: Svetozar Guček. Courtesy of the National Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia (MNSZS).
Image 3: Underpass on Dunajska Street around 1975. Photo: Viljem Zupanc. Held by the Historical Archives of Ljubljana; SI ZAL LJU Photo Archive 0342, A6-008-031.
Image 4: Petrol gas station on the former Prešeren Street – section drawing, author: Milan Mihelič, February 1967. Archive of the heirs of Milan Mihelič; held by the Museum of Architecture and Design.
Image 5: Model of the Northern City Gate design, view from the south, 1972. Archive of the heirs of Milan Mihelič.
Image 6: Model of the Northern City Gate design, view from the northwest, 1972. Archive of the heirs of Milan Mihelič.
Image 7: Characteristic view of the Northern City Gate design, 1972. Archive of the heirs of Milan Mihelič.
Image 8: Model of the Northern City Gate design, view from the south, 1972. Archive of the heirs of Milan Mihelič.
Image 9: Model of the Northern City Gate design, view from the south, 1972. Archive of the heirs of Milan Mihelič.
Image 10: Model of the Northern City Gate design, view from the north, 1972. Archive of the heirs of Milan Mihelič.
Images 11–18: International Automatic Telephone Exchange (MATC, also known as “The Piano”). Photo: Janez Kališnik. Courtesy of the Museum of Architecture and Design.
Image 19: View of Tower S2 from Trg Osvobodilne fronte, with Plečnik’s Insurance Palace in the left foreground, 2007. Photo: Miran Kambič.
Image 20: Façade detail of Tower S2, 2007. Photo: Miran Kambič.
Image 21: Intersection at Bavarski dvor and Tower S2, 2007. Photo: Miran Kambič.
Image 22: Tower S2, 2007. Photo: Miran Kambič.

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