Edvard Ravnikar

This brief expla­na­tion that the Slovene Archi­tect Edvard Ravnikar (1907 – 1993) offered for his two build­ings for the Cel­je and Kranj bank branch­es, com­plet­ed in 1962, reveals that he con­sid­ered the struc­tur­al design, or more pre­cise­ly the trans­mis­sion of the force of grav­i­ty, as the essence of archi­tec­ture, in both con­cept and form. He fur­ther explained that ​“in terms of the struc­tur­al solu­tion, both projects some­how ignore the prin­ci­ple of the short­est and the most direct force path to the ground, which in a rou­tine, stan­dard skele­tal struc­ture usu­al­ly appears as an awk­ward for­est of columns between two ceil­ings… In the case of the Cel­je branch, this can be seen in the har­ness­ing sys­tem, where the upper lat­tice sits on a hefty beam above the ground floor, which in turn trans­fers loads onto two strong piers [ 1ab ]; in the Kranj branch build­ing, on the oth­er hand, the same can be seen in the line of columns that moves from the plane of the exte­ri­or wall of the into the plane of the exte­ri­or walls of the upper [ 2ab ]. In both cas­es, the solu­tion reflects the func­tion­al need to pro­vide a sin­gle uni­fied space on the ground floor.”[2]

As he wrote in his per­son­al note­book, archi­tec­ture is not ​“an aes­thet­ic fig­ment of imag­i­na­tion“[3], a result of an a pri­ori image or an abstract artis­tic com­po­si­tion, but some­thing entire­ly con­crete and tan­gi­ble. It is a result of the con­struc­tion method, tech­niques and pro­ce­dures used, its struc­tur­al design, select­ed mate­ri­als and their treat­ment, along with the under­ly­ing log­ic of the way the ele­ments com­bine and connect—always hand in hand with its function—which for Ravnikar was a pre­req­ui­site of for good archi­tec­ture. The idea that a ​“com­pre­hen­si­ble” struc­ture might give archi­tec­ture back the ​“source of design inge­nu­ity” can be read as Ravnikar’s cri­tique of mod­ernist archi­tec­ture, which he felt began to lose the foun­da­tion of its authen­tic­i­ty when it began to hide skele­tal struc­tures and oth­er struc­tur­al ele­ments with­in a building’s inte­ri­or. Sim­i­lar­ly, Ken­neth Framp­ton in his sem­i­nal essay on crit­i­cal region­al­ism point­ed out two decades lat­er that the pri­ma­ry prin­ci­ple of archi­tec­tur­al auton­o­my resides in the tec­ton­ic rather than the sceno­graph­ic.[4]

In this sense, Ravnikar fre­quent­ly stressed the impor­tance of clas­si­cal archi­tec­ture and the uni­ver­sal­i­ty of its dis­ci­pline. In an inter­view in 1985, he explained that for him, the dis­ci­pline of clas­si­cal archi­tec­ture was foun­da­tion­al if one want­ed to ​“move towards the high­er spheres of archi­tec­tur­al knowl­edge[5] … An edu­cat­ed archi­tect is an archi­tect with clas­si­cal edu­ca­tion. There are no oth­ers… If we look back to the ear­ly mod­ern, there’s Paul Cezanne, and we know that after him, every­thing that Mon­dri­an went on to cre­ate was in his shad­ow. And this means the geo­met­ri­cal­ly ordered vision that derives from clas­si­cism.”[6] Accord­ing to Ravnikar the pio­neers of mod­ernism, Adolf Loos, Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe, Wal­ter Gropius, Alvar Aal­to, and oth­ers, were in essence clas­si­cists, and even Le Cor­busier ​“can­not be imag­ined with­out a very exten­sive and thor­ough knowl­edge of the laws and rules of the clas­si­cal ide­al, even though he employs them like a rev­o­lu­tion­ary, inno­va­tor, and avant-gardist.”[7]

As demon­strat­ed with his munic­i­pal­i­ty build­ing in Kranj (1960), Ravnikar’s under­stand­ing of the clas­si­cal dis­ci­pline had noth­ing to do with tra­di­tion­al­ism, but with the quest for an iden­ti­ty and authen­tic­i­ty in archi­tec­ture [ 3a ]. The pho­to­graph from the con­struc­tion site reveals that when the rein­forced con­crete struc­ture was com­plet­ed, the building’s exte­ri­or already began to reveal itself [ 3b ]. The basic vol­ume of the build­ing is sup­port­ed by mush­room columns on the ground floor, and the side walls. Hov­er­ing above the com­plex is a mas­sive, tent-like gable roof in the form of a fold­ed self-sup­port­ing slab. The weight of the roof is dis­trib­uted length­wise down two V‑shaped sup­ports onto four piers; two are vis­i­ble on the main façade and mark the divi­sion into three halls on the upper floor. The ceil­ing struc­ture of the halls is sus­pend­ed from the exposed roof truss via steel rods, leav­ing the entire floor free of inte­ri­or sup­port columns. The only façade element—subsequently added—consists of large panoram­ic win­dows insert­ed between the struc­tur­al ele­ments, which gives the raised vol­ume of the halls a sense of light­ness, char­ac­ter­is­tic of mod­ern archi­tec­ture. The dual­i­ty of light­ness and weight is the com­mon thread that runs through Ravnikar’s archi­tec­ture. The orig­i­nal, dis­tinct­ly sculp­tur­al struc­ture fol­lows the straight­for­ward log­ic of the trans­mis­sion of forces, weight, and sup­port. Its design dic­tates the pro­por­tions, the rhythm, and the scale of indi­vid­ual parts as well as of the whole of the build­ing, which bears no his­tor­i­cal motifs of clas­si­cal archi­tec­ture. All struc­tur­al ele­ments are designed in accor­dance with mod­ernist prin­ci­ples and con­tem­po­rary struc­tur­al engi­neer­ing prac­tices. Ravnikar was clear­ly inter­est­ed in the poet­ics of tec­ton­ic form. [ 3cd ]

At the same time, the munic­i­pal­i­ty building’s mod­ern design con­cept car­ries traces of ver­nac­u­lar archi­tec­ture, which accord­ing to Ravnikar is ele­men­tary and as such ​“sur­pris­ing­ly close to what con­tem­po­rary archi­tec­ture is seek­ing to achieve.”[8] In both build­ings he rec­og­nized adher­ence to tec­ton­ics. Ravnikar did not look at local build­ing tra­di­tions for for­mal mod­els, but to find the rel­e­vance of tra­di­tion­al con­struc­tion for the present day; he admired struc­tur­al and spa­tial ratio­nal­i­ty and sin­cer­i­ty. The mas­sive gable roof with exposed roof beams has long eaves to with­stand the weath­er con­di­tions. The build­ing with its sol­id side walls stands firm­ly on the ground in keep­ing with the tra­di­tion­al con­struc­tion prac­tice. Ravnikar used local mate­ri­als and intro­duced dis­creet, care­ful­ly thought-out details, char­ac­ter­is­tic of our built her­itage, keep­ing the inte­ri­or ratio­nal and sim­ple. The result is a build­ing that appears restrained in its set­ting, yet ele­gant and impres­sive. [ 3 e ]

Com­plete­ly trans­formed his­tor­i­cal ele­ments and motifs, such as columns, walls, piers, and exposed roof truss­es, as well as struc­tur­al pre­cepts, were designed in accor­dance with mod­ernist prin­ci­ples. With his orig­i­nal inter­pre­ta­tion of the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of clas­si­cal archi­tec­ture com­bined with struc­tur­al prin­ci­ples and spa­tial designs derived from the ver­nac­u­lar tra­di­tion, Ravnikar cre­at­ed a mod­ern archi­tec­ture with a unique cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty. In his words: “… at the core of it all is the hall with its inte­ri­or vis­i­ble from the square; the roof is accen­tu­at­ed the way one’s good hat rounds off Sunday’s best clothes, the front door is heavy, etc. – in short, prac­ti­cal, usable forms with a sym­bol­ic val­ue.”[9]

The build­ing with its abstract, geo­met­ri­cal­ly ordered exte­ri­or, free of orna­men­ta­tion, is evi­dent­ly mod­ern, but at the same time strik­ing­ly clas­si­cal, axi­al­ly sym­met­ri­cal, and tri­par­tite. It is only the ground floor col­umn on the axis of the build­ing and the asym­met­ri­cal­ly sit­u­at­ed main entrance to the build­ing that defy the prin­ci­ples of clas­si­cal rigour. On the one hand, the strict sym­me­try of the façade can be inter­pret­ed as an orig­i­nal para­phras­ing of the clas­si­cal tem­ple, and on the oth­er of the most mod­est works of Sloven­ian ver­nac­u­lar architecture.

Soon after its com­ple­tion, the munic­i­pal­i­ty build­ing in Kranj was hailed as the pin­na­cle of its time[10] and a unique mile­stone that showed a clear deflec­tion from inter­na­tion­al canons, express­ing instead the local tra­di­tion blend­ed with the prin­ci­ples of mod­ern architecture.

Ravnikar’s under­stand­ing of archi­tec­ture is an expres­sion of the excep­tion­al breadth of his intel­lec­tu­al hori­zons, and of his keen inter­est in his­to­ry and tra­di­tion. Which is sur­pris­ing, giv­en a rev­o­lu­tion­ary time that did not look kind­ly on the past. His atti­tude towards tra­di­tion can be best described in the words of T. S. Eliot, who said that ​“the his­tor­i­cal sense involves a per­cep­tion, not only of the past­ness of the past, but of its pres­ence.”[11] Like Eliot, Ravnikar main­tained that ​“tra­di­tion is no ster­ile per­se­ver­ance, but a cer­tain nim­ble affin­i­ty that looks to the past, not for worn-out mod­els, but for points of ref­er­ence.” Fur­ther, he not­ed that ​“tra­di­tion is an arrow point­ing to the future … … Archi­tec­tur­al thought needs to acknowl­edge tra­di­tion, some­thing that was here before, but through its own eyes.”

Sim­i­lar­ly, William Cur­tis in his analy­sis of Ravnikar’s Memo­r­i­al Com­plex at Kam­por on the island of Rab observed that ​“Ravnikar dis­tilled and trans­formed an ancient ruin then recast it in terms of mod­ern archi­tec­ture.”[12] Com­plet­ed in 1953 to mark the tenth anniver­sary of the lib­er­a­tion of the Ital­ian con­cen­tra­tion camp, the ceme­tery was designed as a mon­u­men­tal con­tem­pla­tive route with archi­tec­tur­al ele­ments includ­ing plat­forms, build­ing vol­umes, columns, walls, and open­ings, where care­ful­ly con­trolled views of bal­anced spa­tial com­po­si­tions open up to the vis­i­tor via key van­tage points [ 4ab ] . Ravnikar not­ed that it was his inten­tion to ​“trans­late archi­tec­ton­ic qual­i­ties from dec­o­ra­tive and struc­tur­al ele­ments to opti­cal ones. The colour con­trasts offered by the stone, the sur­round­ing green­ery and the blue of the sea, the rela­tion­ships between the ver­ti­cals of the archi­tec­ture and the hor­i­zon­tals of the sea com­bined with com­posed views that con­nect the exist­ing land­scape ele­ments with new ones, are the key means the archi­tect uses to manip­u­late the observ­er.”[13] He looked to ancient Greek archi­tec­ture for a mod­el, in par­tic­u­lar to the design of build­ing mass­es in the Acrop­o­lis of Athens and the Propy­laeum in view of care­ful­ly framed vis­tas from van­tage points on the pro­ces­sion route [ 4cd ]. The method was intro­duced by Auguste Choisy in his book His­toire de l‘architecture (1899)[14] [ 4ef ], and was ref­er­enced also by Le Cor­busier in his sem­i­nal work Vers une archi­tec­ture.[15]

The use of local stone, too, pays homage to clas­si­cal archi­tec­ture. It is a les­son in stone con­struc­tion, in how stone blocks are stacked, arranged, and held in place. The tallest struc­ture, a 12-metre-tall obelisk is com­posed of heavy stone blocks stacked one on top of the oth­er using only lead joints held togeth­er by steel cables with­in. These emerge in a gut­ter-shaped form on the top of the obelisk, which appears heavy, yet light and slen­der [ 5a ].

The weight of the obelisk is addi­tion­al­ly empha­sised by a carved out groove for hoist­ing ropes [ 5bcd ]. The motif, also fea­tured in Choisy’s book, is known from the tem­ple of Agri­gen­to. [16] Giv­en the lim­it­ed resources and the con­struc­tion tech­nol­o­gy avail­able in for­mer Yugoslavia, the most like­ly method of lift­ing stone blocks on Rab was with a pul­ley sys­tem, sim­i­lar to those used already by the ancient Greeks.

The cen­tral archi­tec­tur­al accent of the com­plex, the build­ing of the so-called ​“muse­um”, is built in a sim­i­lar fash­ion [ 6ab ]. A sim­ple curved shel­ter is com­posed of strong pri­ma­ry stone ribs vis­i­ble both on the exte­ri­or and inte­ri­or sides, and sec­ondary infills in the form of thin­ner stone facets clipped togeth­er with lead clamps. The lat­er­al sta­bil­i­ty of the vault­ed struc­ture is ensured by three steel cables, their ends exposed and cov­ered by stone caps where they pro­trude at both ends of the ribs of the par­a­bol­ic curve. Again, we see a dis­tinct­ly dual char­ac­ter of a stone struc­ture that is heavy, yet seems to float, lift­ed off the ground and sup­port­ed only by four ​‘legs’ to allow day­light to flood the inside of the vault from beneath. [ 6cd ]

With its time­less poet­ics, the memo­r­i­al com­plex on Rab exudes restrained mon­u­men­tal­i­ty free of ide­o­log­i­cal con­no­ta­tions. William Cur­tis observes that Ravnikar inher­it­ed the ​“desire to trans­form the past and to fuse the forms of diverse civ­i­liza­tions in a new sym­bol­ic lan­guage”[17] from his teacher Jože Plečnik. ​“At Rab, Ravnikar uses ​‘basic ele­ments’ in a way that oscil­lates con­tin­u­al­ly between com­mon, ver­nac­u­lar usage, and mon­u­men­tal form. Great atten­tion is giv­en to joints, tex­tures, and con­trasts of stone fin­ish­es.”[18]

In the 1960s, Ravnikar put for­ward a series of com­pe­ti­tion projects that stand out with their excep­tion­al­ly bold and expres­sive struc­tur­al designs: the win­ning design for the Skop­je Town Hall (1967) [ 7 ], the design for the Cen­tral Com­mit­tee Build­ing of the Com­mu­nist Par­ty of Mace­do­nia (1966), the pro­pos­al for the inter­na­tion­al com­pe­ti­tion for the new city cen­tre of Espoo, Fin­land (1968), and oth­ers, which regret­tably were nev­er realized.

His built projects, how­ev­er, also show a dis­tinct­ly sculp­tur­al struc­ture that com­plies with the ele­men­tary log­ic of the dif­fer­ence between sup­port­ing and sup­port­ed parts of a build­ing, some­thing that was obvi­ous already with both aforenot­ed bank branch­es. While all Ravnikar’s real­iza­tions are unequiv­o­cal­ly mod­ern, they are also clas­si­cal­ly tri­par­tite with an accen­tu­at­ed ground floor struc­ture that sup­ports a lighter body of the upper floors and is com­plet­ed on the top with a cor­nice. Typ­i­cal­ly, the ground floor has accen­tu­at­ed struc­tur­al ele­ments, mas­sive columns that are often rein­forced by mush­room heads to tack­le large spans; these car­ry mas­sive hor­i­zon­tal, usu­al­ly V‑shaped beams that sup­port the lighter vol­ume of the upper floors clad in the façade enve­lope, or coat. As a rule, the ground floor is glazed across the perime­ter, but it is the mate­ri­als and fin­ish­es on the façade enve­lope that reveal the func­tion of a build­ing. Con­trary to mod­ernist prin­ci­ples, the top floor is com­plet­ed with a cor­nice as a ver­ti­cal con­clu­sion of the build­ing, which only grows more dis­tinc­tive with time until it takes on the role of the tra­di­tion­al eaves. Ravnikar fre­quent­ly stressed the impor­tance of eaves in our cli­mate, name­ly because they pro­tect the façade from the ele­ments. On occa­sion a lighter struc­ture appears on a flat roof as a very free inter­pre­ta­tion of the tra­di­tion­al roof; this is often the most dynam­i­cal­ly shaped ele­ment of a build­ing. The excep­tion is the roof over the bank branch in the old town of Cel­je, where to ensure con­sis­ten­cy of the built fab­ric the mod­ern build­ing received a gable roof that fol­lows the ridges of the his­toric build­ings on the main square.

In the decades fol­low­ing WWII, the domes­tic con­struc­tion indus­try was in poor health and with its lack of eco­nom­ic strength the coun­try did not have access to the con­struc­tion prod­ucts avail­able in more advanced coun­tries. Such lim­i­ta­tions forced archi­tects to seek uncon­ven­tion­al solu­tions, and sparked inno­va­tions unknown in more devel­oped coun­tries. At the time, every detail, every façade ele­ment, win­dow frame, door­post, door han­dle and such was an unequalled inven­tion that Sloven­ian archi­tec­ture had not seen before. This explains Ravnikar’s claim that archi­tec­ture is the domain of under­de­vel­oped coun­tries[19], and as for him­self, he not­ed that ​“I still design as I did under Plečnik: a con­cept and sep­a­rate designs for the impor­tant parts: the façade, foy­ers, stair­ways, doors, win­dows etc. My aim is to pay equal atten­tion across the board to give the build­ing a struc­ture that would evolve nat­u­ral­ly to the last detail.”

Ravnikar worked with tech­nol­o­gy that was mod­ern but suit­ed to his cir­cum­stances and con­text. He test­ed the prop­er­ties and capac­i­ties of domes­tic build­ing mate­ri­als and explored dif­fer­ent pos­si­bil­i­ties for the indus­tri­al treat­ment of tra­di­tion­al mate­ri­als. He demon­strat­ed the end­less pos­si­bil­i­ties of using face bricks, pre­fab­ri­cat­ed con­crete pan­els, thin stone veneer, Corten steel, plas­tic, etc. Grad­u­al­ly, he aban­doned the craft-based approach to build­ing, even when he used tra­di­tion­al, local mate­ri­als. He shaped, arranged and con­nect­ed them in an entire­ly mod­ern, more indus­tri­al-like man­ner, with accen­tu­at­ed edges, and exposed joints and fas­ten­ers. In this man­ner he artic­u­lat­ed the exte­ri­or, and anal­o­gous­ly, with cladding, also the inte­ri­or of his build­ings. The result was archi­tec­ture dis­tinc­tive for its strik­ing com­plex­i­ty and unique poet­i­cal presence.

Ravnikar was excit­ed about con­tem­po­rary struc­tur­al pos­si­bil­i­ties, but he also left his sig­na­ture with a dis­tinc­tive façade enve­lope. His work thus embod­ies a char­ac­ter­is­tic dual­i­ty, or rather a syn­the­sis of Plečnik’s take on Got­tfried Semper’s the­o­ry of dress­ing (Bek­lei­dungs­the­o­rie) on the one hand, and on the oth­er the Anglo-French tra­di­tion, which focus­es in the first place on the authen­tic­i­ty of the build­ing mate­r­i­al and the author­i­ty of the struc­ture, some­thing that was dis­tinc­tive of work in Le Corbusier’s stu­dio, where Ravnikar spent sev­er­al months before the out­break of WWII.

While in his ear­ly works the façade cladding is still rel­a­tive­ly strict, geo­met­ri­cal­ly ordered, and two-dimen­sion­al, he grad­u­al­ly devel­oped an increas­ing­ly sculp­tur­al approach when he began to accen­tu­ate how façade ele­ments were com­bined and fas­tened. The front façades of office storeys on the Ljud­s­ka Prav­i­ca Office and Print­works build­ing (1961), for exam­ple [ 8a ], are designed as alter­nat­ing hor­i­zon­tal bands of plas­tic para­pets and win­dows in excep­tion­al­ly thin pro­files, all of them on the same plane, with fas­ten­ers hid­den out of sight [ 8b ]. The exte­ri­or with its steady façade rhythm reveals the inte­ri­or design con­cept, the dis­tri­b­u­tion of offices of dif­fer­ent sizes across floors. 

The under­ly­ing log­ic of the brick façades for the Fer­ant Gar­den res­i­den­tial com­plex (1967–73) is that of the load-bear­ing skele­ton and infills, i.e. the con­trast between struc­tur­al ele­ments in exposed con­crete and the façade brick cladding that envelops the build­ing like a fab­ric, or a coat [ 9abc ]. The façades are divid­ed into storey-height strips marked by vis­i­ble edges of hor­i­zon­tal, rein­forced con­crete slabs. While the con­crete struc­ture with its many brack­ets, bal­conies, piers, bay win­dows, built-in planters and cor­nices that extend far beyond the build­ings adds to the sculp­tur­al pres­ence of the build­ing vol­ume, the ver­ti­cal con­nec­tions, edges, and cor­ners of the brick cladding on the storeys serve as dec­o­ra­tive accents, hems in the form of elab­o­rate­ly shift­ed bricks that artic­u­late the tex­tile metaphor of the building’s dress [ 9def ]. A sim­i­lar façade treat­ment was used also for Kranj’s Hotel Creina (1970) [ 10abc ].

Folds in the façade enve­lope give depth to the archi­tec­ture, the third dimen­sion that is addi­tion­al­ly empha­sised by the inter­play of light and shad­ow. This qual­i­ty comes to the fore in the Repub­lic Square com­plex (orig­i­nal­ly Rev­o­lu­tion Square), where the tex­tile metaphors are so explic­it that they evoke pleat­ed draperies [ 11abc ]. The stone slabs of the façade pro­trude from the build­ing like shades, form­ing oriels by the win­dows and where the light paus­es, thus artic­u­lat­ing the hor­i­zon­tal and ver­ti­cal divi­sion of the façades. There is no con­tact where they cross paths; they often change direc­tion, angle, and plane, as a rule reach­ing across cor­ners as well as across con­tacts with the load-bear­ing struc­ture. Despite its weight, the gran­ite cladding appears light against the cast con­crete of the sup­port­ing struc­ture; this is addi­tion­al­ly under­lined by vis­i­ble edges that reveal the thin­ness of the slabs. Unlike in his ear­li­er works, where Ravnikar hid façade fas­ten­ers, the Repub­lic Square build­ings bare their façade fas­ten­ers open, show­ing them off like a unique archi­tec­tur­al orna­ment – or stich­es on a dress. The sub­struc­ture also peeks out here and there, addi­tion­al­ly enhanc­ing the light­ness of the façade enve­lope. [ 11 de ]

The con­struc­tion of the Repub­lic Square com­plex took more than two decades (1960–82). The polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic cri­sis at the time meant that new investors took over the project and intro­duced new pro­grammes. Instead of the planned polit­i­cal cen­tre of the coun­try, the com­plex became the city’s com­mer­cial and cul­tur­al cen­tre. This meant exten­sive changes to the orig­i­nal urban and archi­tec­tur­al con­cept: both tow­ers were low­ered to half the envis­aged height and received instead an artic­u­lat­ed façade and dynam­ic fin­ish­es on the top, which togeth­er with the ground floor exten­sions con­tributes to the rich tapes­try of the com­plex. [ 11f ] Ravnikar tried to keep pace with always new pro­gram­mat­ic and invest­ment ini­tia­tives with a so-called ​“open design process”, some­thing he had not done before: ​“for years now, it has been clear that it is impos­si­ble to achieve the goals and sat­is­fy the com­plex needs of today by ​’design­ing every detail down to the last screw’. There is anoth­er way, where we have to keep in mind the fick­le­ness of future sit­u­a­tions, the always new con­stel­la­tion of part­ners, and shift­ing finan­cial and tech­no­log­i­cal capac­i­ties with­out los­ing con­trol of the flow of events, so that we can ensure that our inten­tions grow into a real­i­ty.”[20]

The most notable fig­ure of the Ljubl­jana school of archi­tec­ture after Jože Plečnik, Ravnikar was a charis­mat­ic teacher who left a pro­found mark on gen­er­a­tions of archi­tects with his projects, writ­ings, and ped­a­gog­i­cal work. It was large­ly owing to him that a spe­cial, region­al­ly adapt­ed mod­ernist archi­tec­ture began to emerge in Slove­nia after the end of WWII. At the time when local char­ac­ter­is­tics of the built envi­ron­ment were already begin­ning to dis­ap­pear across the world and when oth­er Yugoslav republics embraced inter­na­tion­al mod­ernism, Ravnikar advo­cat­ed for archi­tec­ture with a cul­tur­al­ly spe­cif­ic char­ac­ter. He built the authen­tic­i­ty of Sloven­ian archi­tec­ture on the foun­da­tions of tec­ton­ic prin­ci­ples of clas­si­cal and ver­nac­u­lar archi­tec­ture, as a dia­logue between mod­ernism and tra­di­tion, the uni­ver­sal and the local.