House on the Edge of the Plain, Murska Sobota

The architect has created a minimalist masterpiece for himself in homage to the modern architecture that characterised the interwar and postwar periods in Murska Sobota.

Murska Sobota is a town in the far north-east of Slovenia, where Hungarian influences intertwine with the Pannonian milieu and where the horizontal characterises the endless plain defined by a gently rolling landscape on the horizon. In the minds of many Slovenians, the area has remained remote, far from the centre, far from the main events of the nation – not only political and economic, but also architectural. And yet, this is far from the truth. Murska Sobota is only an hour’s drive away from Maribor and Graz, and only a little more to Zagreb or Budapest, with which Murska Sobota had political ties for quite some time. Architecturally, individual buildings in Murska Sobota display direct influences of Hungarian Secession.

This is where the architect Feri Novak originated from – the environment, which was still very rural at the time. Novak trained with Behrens and Le Corbusier and returned to his hometown in the late 1930s, where he succeeded in creating some truly high-quality works of functionalist architecture with his new, European outlook. Initially working for private clients, at least three of his villas are outstanding works that would otherwise have been unimaginable in the small provincial town of the time. Later, after the Second World War, he succeeded in designing the urban layout of the developing town and adding several buildings for public use, so that one of the streets now rightly bears his name.

This is also where the architect Tomaž Ebenšpanger originates from, which makes it easier to understand what a challenge it was for him to design his own house, a residential pavilion on the Prekmurje plain. The villa, as we might call it, perhaps not in terms of size, but certainly in terms of typology and appearance, stands on the edge of a residential estate built a decade ago with little architectural ambition.

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