The Liminality of a Voluntary Exile. Max Fabiani on the Deserts of the Carso/Kras

The experience of exile often embodies the loss of the homeland, a voluntary or forced displacement through migration or expulsion, thus a moving-away-from more than a going-towards. The case of Max Fabiani may seem paradoxical in this sense. From being the architect at the centre of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who contributed to Otto Wagner’s Modern Architecture, Fabiani chose voluntarily to give up his position to return to his native soil, in the framework of the not-yet-finished WWI and the rise of border fascism. The place was marked by a multilingual culture and a fluid society which will no longer last. His decision will reverse emblematically in the experience of becoming a foreigner in his homeland, isolated on exilic grounds, dealing with shifting power structures, interfacing with one social group in conflict with another, at the margins of a provincial and polarised society. By questioning this voluntary exile as a state of transition and suspension in time and space, it is possible to observe how the project for the Ferrari villa and garden (Štanjel/San Daniele del Carso, from 1920), on the backdrop of the Plan for the reconstruction of the towns, villages and hamlets of the Isonzo–Soča river basin (Isontino–Posočje, 1917-22) reveals tensions and contradictions between a banned past and an uncertain future, while new figures and set of relations may arise. The project thus discloses camouflages, counterpoints, negotiations, mediations and co-existences between vernacular and modern, not a nostalgic nor epic conception but the prospective search for the grounded otherness of the place, that acts as a form of projective resistance to all those disruptions enacting the architect’s personal hell. Exile unfolds here wandering through the deserts of the Carso/Kras not to reach a promised land but to enduringly question its survival by design.