Rich technical heritage in the Slovene ethnic territory

Slovenia lies in the heart of Europe in an important area, on the edge of the Mediterranean, on the southern side of the Alps, between the West and East, North and South of Europe. Due to its strategic position, the territory of today’s Slovenia, which is the crossroads of the Slavic, Germanic and Romanic worlds, was in the past the object of the interest appetites of many conquerors, and state structures and social systems have been changed many times. After wars, in peacetime, there was a lot of trading, and roads, railways, waterways, and other construction objects were built. Innovative spirit has always been present in this area as well as progressive technical solutions and experts, such as the astronomer Ferdinand Avguštin Hallerstein (1703-1774), who worked at the Chinese court, the inventor of the ship propeller Josef Ressel (1793-1857), and the automobile pioneer, constructor Janez Puh, or Johann Puch (1862-1914). Many prominent experts were born in these places, good constructors came to work here, and many engineers and architects left this area and went to the wider world.

The city of Ljubljana, which is more than 2000 years old, has evolved from an Ancient Roman city of Emona, which was at first a military fortress - castrum. The Romans built many with the sewage network equipped cities and connected them to the roads. In the middle ages, many fortified cities with defensive walls and defensive ditches were built in this area. Around 1500, on the western edge of today’s Slovenia, the famous constructor Leonardo da Vinci built military fortresses and with the containment of the Vipava and Soča rivers he wanted to flood the Vipava valley, thus preventing enemies from entering the Apennine peninsula. Among the most important construction interventions in Slovenia before the industrial revolution we can count the Gruber Canal in Ljubljana (1772-80), and after the industrial revolution, in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and therefore also on the Slovene ethnic territory, the construction of railway lines, stations, viaducts, tunnels and bridges was in full swing. At the end of July 1857, a 578 km long railway connection from Vienna to Trieste was completed. Ljubljana got its prefabricated cast-iron bridge, the Shoemakers’ Bridge, in 1867, and its first reinforced concrete bridge, the Dragon Bridge, in 1901. Between 1903 and 1946, the first urban planner with a doctoral title in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the architect Max Fabiani (1865-1962), born in the Karst region, occupied himself with daring plans how to connect, with the systems of water canals and existing rivers, the Danube river and Vienna with the Adriatic Sea. The plans were realizable, since the construction engineer Josip Pavlin, who worked at the then Imperial- Royal Naval Administration of the port of Trieste, was sent on training in Panama during the construction of the Panama Canal. At the beginning of the 1930s, Ljubljana got its first skyscraper by the architect Vladimir Šubic and the statics expert Eng. Stanko Dimnik, which was for some years the tallest building in Central Europe and for a long time in the Balkans. It is worth mentioning the wooden ski jump from 1936 and of the constructors Ivan Rožman and Stanko Bloudek, which was modernized several years ago, and Slovene hayracks of unusual constructional forms, which are now, with new technologies of drying of hay, slowly disappearing.

During the Austro-Hungarian period, Slovene engineers were mainly educated in Vienna, Brno and Prague, as well as at prestigious foreign technical colleges in European cities, such as Zürich, Berlin and Paris. One of them was a construction engineer Mihael Štrukelj, or Mihael Strukel (1851-1923), who started his study in Vienna and concluded his professional career and path in Finland. The first Slovene professional magazine, Slovene Technician, was published during the Austro-Hungarian period in Prague, on today’s Czech territory, in 1906, as a newsletter of the Club of Slovene technicians in Prague. Its editor was a student Ciril Jekovec, who later established himself in the construction of dams in Argentina. In 1924, the architect Viktor Sulčič, or Victorio Sulcic (1895-1973), also moved to Argentina, and he also succeeded there. The Slovene-Italian architect Anton Laščak, or Antonio Lasciac (1856-1946), constructed for the Egyptian court as well as other palaces in Cairo, Alexandria, Istanbul, and Rome. Architect Ivan (John) Jager (1871-1959), known for his nickname “Builder of Minneapolis”, established himself in Minnesota, USA.