Parklet Maribor in Žepni park FERI

Background and contexts of the revitalisation of the spaces of two townhouses.

The pocket park and parklet in front of the buildings of the University of Maribor are a successful example of context modulation: analytically measured, efficiently apportioned and elegantly coordinated interventions in central urban spaces.

History is shy in presenting the intentions of the city authorities of the past, who saw Maribor as a representative city, as a city that, in the spirit of many turbulent transformations, should present itself in the light of ever new masters through construction and urban development. On the left bank of the city, one is attracted by the traces of mindful development around the medieval core with a compact structure of urban blocks and an imaginative network of public open spaces, and after the reconstruction of what was in the former Yugoslavia one of the most damaged cities in the Second World War, the architect Ljubo Humek established an understanding of and appreciation for a quality network of elements of public space. While the generation of post-war architects promoted the qualitative principles of dialogue between new buildings and understood the role of contextual design in urban space until the post-modern period, the importance of preserving the network of public ambiences in the city has been forgotten in the last four decades. Despite the fact that public spaces have been left to be dealt with by a multitude of players in the field of traffic management, a few architects – mainly from the circle of the founders of the Faculty of Architecture in Maribor – have in the last ten years begun to actively draw attention to the importance of preserving and upgrading the context of the city’s spatialisation.

Following and discussing several similar interventions in space, the exhibition by architects Tomaž Ebenšpanger, Uroš Lobnik and Peter Šenk (Pavlova Hiša, Bad Radkersburg), organised in 2018, established the term “modulation of context” – all of the interventions in urban space presented so far share the characteristics of the most analytically measured, efficiently apportioned and elegantly coordinated interventions in central urban spaces.