The thesis focuses on the specific connection between architecture and the public post office network in Slovenia. It begins with an overview of important spatial milestones that marked the development of the public post office network: the first organized mail system in the Roman Empire, the nationalization of the postal system in the 18th century and its availability to the general population in Austria-Hungary, and the construction of post office buildings across Yugoslavia. Rather than merely a tool for transmitting messages, the public postal system is discussed as a public infrastructure available to all on equal terms, i.e. as an egalitarian (infra)structure. Such operation is not only good and practical, but in the first place progressive. The thesis discusses as progressive the practice that has endured in our environment despite the logic that dominates the world today. In a world of inequality, the public post office network operates with a logic of equality. There is an inherent connection in physical space between the public postal service and architecture. In the thesis I justify this premise by analysing three ways in which the post office and architecture relate: the post office as a space of architecture, architecture and the post office as tools of modernisation and representation of the country, and architecture and the post office as an intersection of social bonds. Although they are interlinked, I justify each of these ways with two examples from architecture: a post office building and a delivery area with mailboxes.
|
