2025 Plečnik Awards: ceremony and programme

Chair of the Plečnik Fund Assembly, Mayor of Ljubljana Zoran Janković, invites you to the 2025 Plečnik Awards ceremony, which will be held on Monday, 19th May, at 7:30 p.m. in the garden of Plečnik's House at Karunova 4 in Ljubljana. In case of bad weather, the ceremony will be held in the inner atrium of the City Museum of Ljubljana, Gosposka 15.

»Understanding the relationship between architecture and the broader space is markedly defined by scale, which doesn't hinge upon only the quantities of square or linear metres, but also the comprehension of the relation towards the circumstances in which architecture establishes a specific experience of space. In doing that, the balance of these relations against movement also gains its temporal dimension.

In the context of architecture, the harmony of material, physical space, and movement enables us to glean the ethical attitudes towards the world on the part of those involved in the process of creation. This doesn't include only architects and landscape architects, but also numerous collaborators, managing professionals, contractors, investors, not to mention authors of texts, photographers, and others. Architecture is ultimately a collaborative effort. It is founded upon social values which seem to be slowly disappearing nowadays. The balanced scale of an architectural work is therefore influenced by countless invisible affiliations without which there would be no place in contemporary society for architectural culture.

Both large- and small-scale architecture connects the space with people: it connects the perimeter and the centre, the nature and the city, the inside and the outside, the history and the present, the young and the old, and also the worlds of the living and the dead. It is a calibration tool, which is reflected in all the awarded works

Plečnik Awards represent the foremost Slovene national recognition of the finest realisations in the fields of architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, and the interior executed in the territory of the Republic of Slovenia during the past three calendar years.«, among others, wrote this year's jury.

The Plečnik Awards are Slovenia's most important national awards for the highest quality realisations in the fields of architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture and interior design, created on the territory of the Republic of Slovenia in the last three calendar years.

Plečnik Awards are presented by Architect Jože Plečnik Fund. 

The 2025 Plečnik Awards presentation was made possible by the members of the Architect Jože Plečnik Fund and sponsors: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Ministry of Natural Resources and Spatial Planning of the Republic of Slovenia, City of Ljubljana and Arcadia svetila, Corwin, SŽ - Železniško gradbeno podjetje Ljubljana, Tosidos

The co-organisers of 2025 Plečnik Awards Programme are Architect Jože Plečnik Fund, Plečnik House, Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana and gallery DESSA.

2025 PLEČNIK AWARDS

Managed and co-ordinated by

Boštjan Vuga, Urša Vrhunc

Graphic design

Studio Ljudje

Presentation film by

Matevž Jerman, Rok Kajzer Nagode

Main office

Ajša Jerićević, Marinka Škrilec Lukač

PROGRAMME

AWARD CEREMONY

19. 5. 2025, 19:30

vrt Plečnikove hiše /

Plečnik House garden

Directed and managed by

Matevž Jerman, Rok Kajzer Nagode

Award ceremony presented by

Staša Popović

Produced by

Sklad arhitekta Jožeta Plečnika, Plečnikova hiša /

Architect Jože Plečnik Fund, Plečnik House

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ARTEFACTS EXHIBITION OF 2025 PLEČNIK AWARDS

Size of Architecture

19. 5.–9. 6. 2025

Plečnik House

Exhibition concept

Jerneja Fischer Knap, Urša Vrhunc

Exhibits and photographs

supplied by 2025 Plečnik Awards recipients


Graphic design

Studio Ljudje

Printing and layout

Okvir

Produced by

Architect Jože Plečnik Fund, Plečnik House

________

Calibrating for the Present

20. 5. 2025, 18:00

Gallery DESSA

Concept and moderated by

Eva Gusel, Maja Vardjan

Produced by

Architect Jože Plečnik Fund, Gallery DESSA

________

PROCESS EXHIBITION AND CATALOGUE OF 2025 PLEČNIK AWARDS

Scale

20. 5. 2025, 20:00

20. 5.–12. 6. 2025

Gallery DESSA

Editor

Maja Ivanič

Graphic design of the exhibition and catalogue

Ivan Ilić

Produced and published by

Gallery DESSA

INAUGURAL ADDRESS AT THE 2025 PLEČNIK AWARD CEREMONY

Prof. Boštjan Vuga, Chair of Architect Jože Plečnik Fund Management Board

Ladies and gentlemen,

The image displayed behind me is the new graphic sign of Architect Jože Plečnik Fund. The sign echoes Art Deco playfulness and optimism while simultaneously incorporating a tinge of the mathematical precision and Modernist simplicity of the architectural typographies of the 1^st half of the 20^th century. Could this sign figure as one of the many variations of the script with which Plečnik labelled his projects and buildings? Not quite; there is an obstruction to its ostensible historicity. This is a sign from 2025, it forms a part of the Fund's new visual identity, the winning proposal by group People chosen via an invited tender. Within the sign, the nostalgia and drawing upon Plečnik's typographical heritage is calibrated against a contemporary structure which amalgamates the freely artistic and the rationally disciplined. At the same time, the sign alludes to both novelty and stability. It creates a sensual atmosphere of harmonising the seen and the new. Even by way of the tiny mistakes present in the sign. In its entirety, the Fund's new visual identity expresses - through its harmonious intertwining of historical elegance and contemporary edge - that which is the true mission of the Fund: the actualisation of Plečnik's work and the development of contemporary architectural practices.

Plečnik Awards represent the main Slovene national recognition of the best realisations on the fields of architecture, urbanism, landscape architecture, and interior design produced in the territory of the Republic of Slovenia within the previous three calendar years. Plečnik Awards, which the Fund has presented since 1973, serve both as the constant actualisation of his work as well as a means of proactively guiding the development of architectural practices into the future.

The award is named after architect Jože Plečnik, whose profile transcends both the architectural discipline and the geographical boundaries of Slovenia. Plečnik's works represent the enhancement of the physical context whereby they leverage the existing so as to generate a new quality in the built space. Plečnik's works transcend the scale.

And in the words of this year's Jury: Architecture - both that of the large- and small-scale - connects the space with people: it connects the perimeter and the centre, the nature and the city, exterior and interior space, the history and the present, the young and the old, and people both living and dead. Large- and small-scale architecture is also a calibration tool.

May we, however, endeavour with what we do to not only calibrate and connect but rather to also transcend and establish a new scale, which then retroactively calibrates the new and the existing once more? With his public spaces, which are both calibrated and inclusive, Plečnik established the new scale of the Ljubljana of the day. Plečnik's house with its cylindrical tower and glazed garden room simultaneously calibrates and transcends the scale of the suburban single-storey houses of Karunova Street. This lettuce garden with rows and a bee-hive transcends the scale of a backyard: it becomes a fragrant spring venue of the first evening of the two-day 2025 Plečnik Award event.

The presentation feature about this year's winners, produced this year by director Matevž Jerman and camera operator Rok Nagode, calibrates the architectural and film production and simultaneously transcends the division into either of the two disciplines. It's an architectural film, a document, an artefact which places Plečnik Awards in the social and temporal context.

Both accompanying exhibitions of this year's Plečnik Awards, exhibition of artefacts Size of Architecture in Plečnik House, conceived by Jury member Jerneja Fischer Knap and Fund workgroup member Urša Vrhunc together with the Award recipients, and exhibition of processes Scale in Gallery DESSA complement each other in showcasing the after-the-fact consideration and curated communication by the awarded works' authors. They are an attempt to answer the question of which is that (physical) object, that artefact which will convey the message to the greatest extent, create an atmosphere and showcase the particularity of the awarded work. Or, how the work was being produced, which are the segments, the sequences which may have been a by-product of the project's development yet may go on to become the agents of the next, of the new? The two exhibitions transcend the scale of a standard architectural exhibition and uncover the various layers of the awarded works, together with the film and the printed catalogue produced by Gallery DESSA and the Fund.

The calibration, the establishment and the transcending of the scale in architectural production will also serve as the central theme of the round table between the award winners and the Jury, which takes place in Gallery DESSA the following day, moderated by Maja Vardjan in Eva Gusel. Are the projective power and the potential of the awarded projects tied to the fact that the awarded projects dare to establish a new scale?

We therefore dare to think and act big, notwithstanding the small scale! We dare to establish a new scale! We dare to take risks, notwithstanding the mistakes we may make along the way! We dare to doubt! We dare to show that through our activity, we are not merely the creators of space but of the entire society! May such audacity mark the Fund's future activity.

The works by this year's Fund award winners bear this out. I extend my sincere congratulations to them all.

19^th May 2025