Plečnik’s spiritual sensibility places him among architects of the Mediterranean and, although he was born in Ljubljana and first saw the sea on his visit to Italy after graduation from the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts, his sense for plastic form and the wish to build in stone has always existed. The fall of Austro-Hungarian Empire consolidated the way in which he expressed his own Mediterranean roots which he traced back to his father’s family origins in the Slovenian Kras and the Vipava valley. After the Great War, Italy took over the western and the coastal, Istrian part of his homeland, denying him direct experience of the Mediterranean environment.