Summary

The architect Josip Costaperaria and the modern bourgeoisie of Ljubljana

The architect Josip Costaperaria significantly redesigned the architectural image of Ljubljana between the first and second world wars. He was born in 1876 in Croatia, educated in Zagreb and Vienna (Technical University, Academy of fine arts) and came to Slovenia from Trieste after WW1, upon concluding a military episode in Serbia. Despite Friulian and German ancestry, partly also Croatian, his attitude was pan-Slavic, which he considered progressive at the time, thus he joined the Slovene environment of Ljubljana. His attitude was probably conditioned by contacts with progressive Slovene citizens of Trieste, participation with the architect Max Fabiani and surely his marriage to the Slovene concert singer Mira Dev. Immediately after WW1 – in the time of quest for Slovene national style in architecture – he was introduced to the present Slovene economic, political and cultural elite in Ljubljana. They became his main clients and for them he designed the Ljubljana Fair, the complex Ljubljanski Dvor and several projects for the Jadran Bank. In short, buildings that gave the city a new urban framework. At the age of fifty, after graduating in 1927 under the mentorship of Prof. Dr. Clemens Holzmeister at the Academy of fine arts in Vienna, where he studied contemporary directions in architecture, he designed several rented buildings in Ljubljana. After 1930, in and near the area Vrtača, he began building modernist villas, which represent his creative pinnacle in Ljubljana. The villas were designed following functionalist principles, but their exteriors were ornamented by formalistically strict, yet still decorative facades. After 1935, during his illness, traditional concepts and elements became increasingly prevalent in his work, marking the beginning of his late period. His clients were the Mayor of Ljubljana Ivan Hribar, the family von Pongratz in Bled and Prince Auersperg in Kočevje. After WW2 he was convicted for participating with the Fiera di Lubiana in 1941. Later he worked for the company Projektni zavod (Slovenija project) in Ljubljana, where he designed several rehabilitation and refurbishment projects, as well as new buildings, all pertaining to the period of socialist renewal. His most important work from this period is the addition to the Palace of justice in Ljubljana. Abandoned and impoverished, he died in Ljubljana in 1951.

Because of his multi-ethnic background Costaperaria mingled with ease or difficulty in various national environments: Croatian, German-Austrian, Italian, Slovene and Serbian. Wherever present, he strived for cohesion and tolerance, thus living the fate of a European, much before the concept became the rationale of future daily political rhetoric, during a time when nationalist environments accepted such ideas rather reluctantly. He was well-educated, spoke several languages and was the member of many clubs, juries and panels. He left his mark on Ljubljana, after all he was the first architect to create progressive architecture for the modern Slovene bourgeoisie, architecture, which the young nation’s elite was ready to identify with.
Bogo Zupančič

Translation Ivan Stanič