when saying that these longitudinal gazes into space are for me familiar to those sections and façades published in the books Napori and Architectura Perennis? Architect’s drawings, seemingly so very technical, are in reality so extensive that our gaze has to travel from one detail to another before we comprehend them as an entirety of rhythmic parts that follow each other in a closed sequence, where the intensified monotony (which could be even seen as boring) becomes the main attraction, the same as with the panoramic format. The second thought which springs to mind and cannot be stifled by any means is the comparison to Picasso’s Guernica. The unusual dimensions of the painting are one of the reasons for its magnificent compositional framework where the zigzagging breaking line – a determinant of a classical triptych – crosses the edges of the image only to return to the frame again and thus maximally heightens the orderliness and dramatic feeling of the design. The fusion of the traditional topic and original variation is surprising, but not completely unexpected. This is the way of the majority of good artists. And with this thesis I return straight back to Plečnik again.
The similarities mentioned above with regard to the composition of photographs are in both cases probably coincidental but nevertheless obvious. The differences are equally important. Where Picasso fills his vision of the Apocalypse with a multitude of figures, in Plečnik’s world-class architecture we notice his deliberate idiosyncrasy or even whims for the absence or even redundancy of human beings. Nevertheless, when we think about the bizarre advice of John Ruskin to architects to design all their buildings by bearing in mind how they would look like in ruins, we realise that a man might not be the only measure of all things (the existing and non-existing things which are and which are not, if I finish the quotation of this ancient wisdom). It’s true: photographs capture reality. But the reality can have more than one meaning (or even no meaning at all). That what seems to us in a normal format for the undoubtedly recognisable, becomes through this method unusual, mysterious and almost unrecognisable. Which probably proves that we perceive our environment and the people in it like clichés, based on innate or imparted patterns, probably even on prejudices. 21
In the present case it is especially important to shake them off completely. Only then a magical world of the suggestive, direct or discreet and often paradoxically sharpened non-verbal addresses suddenly opens up in front of us. There is a multitude of examples: in less provoking dimensions of sections, the composition technique redirects itself into a deliberate contrast, achieved by the combination of built structure and lush vegetation and as a rule in the first plane. The crystal-like exactness of solid matter is hiding behind the curtain of coincidentally branched-off treetops. We can avoid human beings but can’t escape from objects. This is what the photographs are telling us. In a way, they are binomes, depictions of the same space in two separate moments. In the first one, the architecture lives next to itself as an autonomous ensemble of walls, roofs and colonnades. In the second one, it becomes a container, filled with an enormous pile of things. In this way, the fourth dimension, time, steals into these images. Thus they deliberately integrate into time with such sovereignty that they will always stay precious documents of architecture.