For the better part of three decades, the meaning of contemporary architecture in Slovenia seemed relatively clear. After the country gained independence in 1991, something outstanding happened: within just a few years, the architectural profession underwent a profound transformation. A new generation of emerging architects seized the opportunity to complement the education they had received in Slovenia with postgraduate studies at prestigious international schools of architecture. Armed with new philosophical frameworks, design methods, and formal vocabularies, they returned home in the mid-to-late 1990s determined to introduce this knowledge into a radically contemporary practice. It was Slovenian Architecture’s Roll Over Beethoven moment. Instead of working their way up through established offices, they opened their own practices and, remarkably, won important competitions, often with hardly any prior built work to their name. What today appears almost unthinkable shows the open- minded spirit of Slovenia in the 1990s when the decision makers chose to embrace new ideas as a means of materialising its newly gained freedom.

In the years that followed, a new Slovenian architecture emerged, effortlessly leap-frogging the critical regionalism and post-modernism of the 1980s and 1990s to introduce their vision of an architecture that was unapologetically bold and flamboyantly stylish and connected with global architecture developments. Over time, Slovenian architecture would consolidate a characteristic profile — some might even call it a brand — defined by formal audacity, expressive structural geometries, daring use of colour, a distinct obsession with new materials, and an unfettered ambition to adopt new technologies in design and construction. It was less committed to produce urban fabric than to generate singular acts of building that stand out from their surroundings and draw a clear distinction between context and intervention, as if to confirm the thesis that social and cultural progress is indeed possible, and that a dialectical opposition between old and new remains the most effective catalyst for
societal renewal.

If the submissions to the 2026 Plečnik Award serve as any indication, however, this description may no longer be so valid. It is not false either; some of the submissions clearly still belong to that lineage. But visible cracks are opening up in this familiar narrative. Across a growing number of projects — not only in this year’s submissions, but in Slovenian architecture more broadly over recent years — one can discern the emergence of a different sensibility. These projects are marked by an unusual humility and generosity; by an intuition that the as-found condition of a site often contains already a good part of the generative spatial intelligence that will finally materialise in a new project for this site, and that an important mission of the architectural project is to make this embedded spatial intelligence explicit and effective. Sometimes that can mean that the new intervention is less present by its means than its effects. So a project could no longer be sufficiently defined by the objective footprint of the actual building intervention (measured by usable space, amount of materials used, etc.) but also by its performative footprint which takes into account the project’s contextual field of influence.

This shift of ambition of contemporary Slovenian architecture is still very much in statu nascendi, but noticeable. It is most certainly fuelled by the increasing awareness of architecture’s share in the responsibility for climate change as well as the critical overconsumption of finite planetary resources. As a result, architects are increasingly questioning the almost
automatic reflex of demolish-and-build-anew that has haunted the discipline since the days of Le Corbusier’s celebration of tabula rasa as a necessary means to construct the new. During the past decade, adaptive reuse has slowly but steadily imposed itself as an alternative course of action, not just as a pragmatic option but as a critical architectural strategy to overcome modernism’s fatal inclination toward entropy.  

This economy of means is not only about reducing extraction, demolition waste, or embodied energy. It also reflects a growing awareness that buildings and urban spaces embody essential aspects of social memory and collective identity. If they are demolished, the cultural immaterial knowledge they had carried is lost, as well, and can’t be recreated. The fragile nature of this knowledge makes preservation a task for contemporary architecture, too, not only for heritage conservationists But unlike the latter, architects possess a distinct agency to appropriate inherited structures empathically — not to embalm them as museum objects, but to re-situate them confidently in the present.

Such acts of appropriation and re-situation often require not major interventions, but rather thrive on subtle modulations of what already exists. They call not for a hammer, but for a scalpel. They require, firstly, empathy for the cultural crust of the earth that humans have aggregated over the course of thousands of years, and which should not be judged by the interests of just a very small section of history. Secondly, they arguably benefit from an understanding of architectural leverage and the ability to define how much or how little intervention is necessary to produce a desired operation. Modernist architecture is full of examples in which massive interventions produced embarrassingly little effect — or worse, destroyed qualities already present in a place. But there is significant evidence to the opposite case as well: a kind of architectural intervention that, with an often-surprising economy of means, manages to improve the spatial qualities of a situation in decisive ways.

In this sense, architecture seems to be undergoing the same transition from efficiency to sufficiency which constitutes the crucial paradigm shift for a sustainability that seeks systemic change rather than lip service. In an efficiency-based approach, the architect seeks to inject a maximum of design information into a given situation. In a sufficiency-based one, he or she first gauges the leverage of intervention that will achieve a desirable outcome with a favourable ratio between effort and effect.

When architects ask that question seriously, they may discover that a moderate but precise intervention is often all that is needed. As a parameter of performance, sufficiency may well diminish the currency of the building spectacle and potentially boost a humbler architectural expression which privileges effect over display. But this does not in any way mean a reduction of architectural ambition. The American architectural theorist Robert Somol once distinguished between two opposed kinds of architectural impact. The first provokes the reaction “Wow! What?”: one is initially overwhelmed by a building’s spectacular appearance, only to begin questioning its meaningfulness on second thought. The second triggers the opposite response — “What? Wow!”: one is initially puzzled by a building that seems strange at first sight only to realise, after reflection, that it is in fact radical and compelling.

By qualifying this shift as the defining element of contemporary architecture in Slovenia today, the jury does not suggest it would be an invention of today. Far from it. It obviously has a historical lineage which, among other sources, can be traced back specifically to one of the most idiosyncratic protagonists of Slovenian modernism: Oton Jugovec. His protective structure for the archaeological remains of the medieval settlement of Gutenwert (today located in the village of Drama in the municipality of Šentjernej) represents a legendary precursor of a sufficiency aesthetics. Consisting only of a roof supported by two central posts, but lacking any exterior walls, the structure iconizes the most fundamental function of architecture: shelter. It is devoid of rhetoric but full of performance. In a way, Jugovec anticipated the aspirations of the architects that perform today that subtle shift of Slovenian Architecture, who all admire him as a mentor in spirit. For them, Jugovec was not only important through his buildings but also through his institutional role. He had designed the project in Gutenwerth in his role as head of the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Slovenia, i.e. he intervened in the capacity of a heritage preservationist. But as a practising architect, he did not approach the preservation of heritage from the point of view of art history, which was the intellectual seedbed of institutional heritage preservation. He saw monuments as buildings that needed a sympathetic caretaker to accompany and support the building’s continuous evolution beyond its original conditions. It’s an unconventional understanding of heritage preservation based on the premise that a building is never finished, but always open to transformation, that can be referenced in most of architectural history before the invention of modern heritage preservation in the 19th century. Jugovec did not invent this either, but could build on the work of earlier figures, architects like Plečnik and Ravnikar, but also heritage preservationists such as Max Dvořák, France Stele, and others. He was to be the last architect for a long time to head the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage. After he left the position in 1973, the Institute adopted again a more institutional understanding of heritage preservation, assuming sole authority over the management of historical buildings, which left architecture to deal with new construction only. It would be very interesting how Architecture in Slovenia (and beyond) might have developed differently if Jugovec could have continued his work. In a wicked way, that branch of contemporary Slovenian architecture addressed here seems to create a wormhole through space and time all the way back to Jugovec to pick up the thread of his thinking in their projects today – half a century later.

It has often been said that history does not proceed in linear progression from lower to higher states of evolution. It moves more like a spiral, revisiting similar states of order at different moments in time. Perhaps Slovenian architecture has now reached such an unlikely alignment in its own historical evolution where two different moments in time are connected by a vertical axis which links past and present to a more complex form of contemporariness — one where timelessness and nowness do not contradict but complement each other.

Andreas Ruby, president of a Plečnik Awards Jury 2026