Digitisation of the Edo Mihevc’ Archive

Abstract

EXTENDED ABSTRACT:During the most productive period of his long lasting activity, namely in 1950’s and 1970’s of the 20th century, the Slovenian architect Edo Mihevc had a great impact on the development of landscape and urban architecture, especially in the Slovenian coastal region and Istria, where a great part of urban environment is either directly or indirectly related to his work. The Regional Archive of Koper obtained the architect’s archive and made it accessible to the public by signing a donation agreement with the architect’s widow Ana Jontez Mihevc. The archive was originally stored in three buildings (at his home in Portorož and Ljubljana, in his ex-office and in the basement at the Faculty of Architecture in Ljubljana). The archive was then transmitted to the Regional Archive mainly for the sake of its preservation as it was endangered by inappropriate micro climate conditions (moist, dust) in all three depots. The archive located at the Faculty of Architecture was endangered as the documents were gradually taken away without any control although they had not been catalogued yet. The archive of Edo Mihevc (1911-1985) is gaining its importance for researches in the history of architecture as well as for studies of the period between the wars and especially for studies of the post war period in Slovenia. It is of great importance to the Slovenian coastal region and Istria as the architect and his students designed the regional architectural plan for the Slovenian coast and the north-west Istria as well as urban plans for individual cities and their enlargement which were mostly carried out. Thus, the architect had a great impact on the culture and identity of the local environment. In 2010 and 2011 the Regional Archive of Koper was allocated funds for the digitisation of plans which were considered to be the most sensitive part of the architect’s archive. They were sketched on the tracing paper of different quality. As they were intensively used and sometimes combined with unsuitable materials they were damaged to such a degree that they needed to be restored before being digitised. They were digitised by the company Mikrografija of Novomesto. The storage of these documents represents a lot of problems, some of them being typical for all documents of modern architecture: great volume of documents due to numerous versions of a project, great volume of graphic documents of urban plans, the quality of tracing paper, documents are placed in other public archives (regional public committees) or in private archives, lack of basic data (dates, names …). There are also some specific problems: many documents have disappeared (they were either lost or destroyed) which might be related to the fact that Edo Mihevc had been severely criticised due to the controversy of his solutions. The problem of preserving his legacy is related to the historical and political circumstances in the recent past and the lack of historical distance to the waste corpus of his architectural heritage.