Detailing Plečnik: a student workshop with Ákos Moravánszky

Matter and Metaphor in Jože Plečnik’s Architecture

Detailing means more than public attention. It is a precise representation of the constituting parts: the detailing of a story is the description of those aspects that remain unrecognised in a first, superficial ac- count of what happened. “This is just a detail”, we used to say, meaning that while focusing on the detail, we might lose sight of the “big picture”. However, according to Mies van der Rohe (and several other artists and writers), “God is in the details”. But we know that the devil also resides there: something that appears simple at first sight might turn out to be tricky if we need to consider the details. Looking at the de- tail, we start to grasp more than the mere subject matter; we look deeper and understand the significance of the sequence of events. A good detail always points at a whole that might be larger than the building.