Marjan Šorli and Domesticated Architecture

The exhibition Marjan Šorli and Domesticated Architecture is the first in a new series of exhibitions Preview, which open and present the MAO collection to the public with an innovative approach. This year, in September, we are celebrating the 110th anniversary of the birth and 50th anniversary of the death of architect Marjan Šorli (1915–1975), a designer, writer, thinker, lecturer, and an exceptional author who has been most often overlooked by the history of architecture. The exhibition is dedicated to exploring the architect's work, but not in a classic closed, curated form, but as an open commentary on the diverse material that the museum has just acquired for its collection.

Marjan Šorli was an extremely unique, yet characteristic representative of Slovenian post-war architecture. His houses draw on a variety of sources, from the Plečnik school, research into anonymous folk architecture, and insights from a study trip to Europe and the USA to Anglo-Saxon theories on the psychology of spatial perception. The architect has written his name into our cultural space primarily with a unique material language and expression that always moves on the edge, between archetypal principles and proven principles and bold extremes of the syntax of the traditional and contemporary materials used, between a subtle relationship to the natural and cultural context and decisive interventions in space. Throughout his entire oeuvre, Šorli has created architecture tailored to the needs of humans. With his erudite knowledge, he drew from the development of architecture, and he built spaces of harmonious proportions and a small scale with traditional materials and elements. At the same time, he took into account the capabilities of technology and spatial organization of his time. His reflections on space are extremely relevant even today, as he defended and cultivated principles such as the coexistence of nature and architecture, the use of simple low-tech approaches to lighting, ventilation, heating or cooling spaces (with intermediate zones), finding the right size of a building and an attitude towards the human scale. His oeuvre answers the question of how to create architecture from scratch that is restrained, simple and respectful, from which we cannot take anything away.

Today, Šorli's oeuvre is in the vast majority of cases destroyed, altered beyond recognition or severely endangered. The majority of the project documentation and plans for his projects have also been lost. Thanks to his family, however, an interesting and valuable part of the archive, which is the core of the exhibition, has been preserved. So it is not a clear presentation of the architect's oeuvre, but an insight into the research process. He combines fragments into loose content sets, compares them, comments on them and supplements them in places. In the largest gaps and where emphasis is necessary for understanding, he adds material from other archival collections. Interpretive drawings of Šorli's architecture plans and models were created by students of the Faculty of Architecture and the Academy of Fine Arts and Design based on analyses and fieldwork. The exhibition does not provide answers, but rather raises questions and encourages research, additions and new interpretations.

Curators: Martina Malešič, Andraž Keršič

Advisory Board: Veronika Leskovšek, Primož Jeza, Ana Kreč

Opening: 30.9.2025, 7 p.m.