OHS Spaces for Reflection: What comes after modernism?

This autumn, we invite you to join us for the thematic event OHS Spaces for Reflection: What Comes After Modernism?, organised in collaboration with guest curator Blaž Šenica, architect, researcher and editor of a radio programme on architecture.

Through a series of guided tours, we will visit selected architectural projects in Ljubljana dating from the 1970s to the 1990s. The programme will take us across different scales and typologies – from architectural details and interiors to sacred architecture, public space, residential neighbourhoods and larger urban developments.

We will visit the Church of Christ’s Incarnation in Dravlje, Boris Kraigher Square – today’s Ajdovščina, Platana Bar and Bistro and DESSA Gallery, the Zupančičeva Jama mixed-use residential and commercial district, and the Novi Tabor residential neighbourhood. Buildings and spaces that we often encounter in our everyday lives will serve as a starting point for a closer look at one of the most significant periods in recent Slovenian architectural history.

The guided tours will take place in two parts – Part I: 10–12 September and Part II: 6 October 2026. The programme will conclude on 7 October at 6 pm with a discussion at DESSA Gallery, where, together with our guests, we will open a broader conversation about the architecture that followed modernism and its relevance today.

Curator’s Introduction:

As the fervour of the heroic period of Slovenian architectural modernism began to lose its force, a possibility opened up within architecture to explore new paradigms of reading space, architectural design, understanding of architectural practice, and the role of the architectural discipline. During this period of research and conceptual adventurism, new positions and orientations emerged from the intellectual ferment that was initially expressed primarily in written form. They were soon complemented by numerous architectural realizations. In these we can discern early articulations of principles that were later matured and refined in the work of the architects who have shaped Slovenian architecture over the past few decades.

The relationship with the past established itself as a key point of departure for the postmodern shift in the architectural imaginary, where the exploration of the relationship with tradition serves to reinterpret historical continuity. The dialogue with history becomes one of the central themes — and this concerns not only the relationship with the history of the space and society into which a given architectural project is placed, but also an explicit conversation with the history of the architectural discipline itself. In parallel, a new understanding of the city is explored, one that moves away from the modernist city and seeks parallels with the “classical” modern, yet pre-modernist, city. Out of this develops a kind of cosmopolitan aspiration toward urbanity, and architectural creations are tasked with the mission of city-making. Such ambitions are directly linked to the reinterpretation and actualization of inherited artifacts and urban structures, since architectural designs proceed from a concrete context and strive to establish a direct semantic bond with it. The pursuit of architectural expression and its meaning thus shifts from the speculative — which characterized the modernist conceptual horizon — toward the interpretive, where historical interpretation locates the contemporary within its own past.

The OHS tours, ranging from the detail to the entire city district — from the spoon to the city — will draw attention to a vital and dynamic period of Ljubljana architecture and will raise questions about the relevance and possibilities that examples of architecture produced after modernism perhaps still continue to open up.