While the Vjesnik skyscraper, which we see through the window of our temporary editorial office of the Zagreb column in Odranska Street, is getting smaller and smaller every day under giant scissors, we decided to take a peek into its history.
With the grandson of the author of the Vjesnik project, an architect Anton Ulrichtranslator Gioioma-Anom Ulrich Kneževićthe owner of the Lector publishing house, we talked about the interesting life of her grandfather, but also about the family, which has been known for a long time in Zagreb.
Vjesnik’s skyscraper was finally completed in 1972. In the video, the granddaughter reveals, among other things, that she and her grandfather never talked about Vjesnik in their private time.
– I have nothing to tell about his anecdotes about the construction of Vjesnik. But we have preserved this photo of him reading a newspaper in a tram. Newspapers were very important to him, he bought them every day, it was like a little ritual: he would come home to Mesnička, where he lived, and put on the Vjesnik, spread those big newspapers on the table like sheets, and then he would read with coffee for two hours until lunch. He used to wash his hands from the ink because the newspaper left a mark on his fingers, which the younger generations probably don’t know – she described to us.
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Architect Antun Ulrich, known as Tunč, was one of the key promoters of Croatian modernism. He was also an original kayaker, a charming and original conversationalist.
– He was very sociable, cheerful, he liked to eat and drink, he always joked with me when I was a child… and a very strong personality, and when he got angry, if he raised his voice and thundered, everyone would be scared because he was an authority figure. He loved women very much and was in two marriages… – his granddaughter told us, among other things, in the video attached to the article.
The Ulrich family was well known in Zagreb. At the end of the 19th century, his father was the owner of a glass factory and a workshop for framing pictures at Ilica 54, which, after moving to Ilica 40 in 1909, became Salon Ulrich, a gathering place for intellectuals and artists, especially painters.
– We are originally Sudeten Germans, today it is Heb in the Czech Republic. Our first ancestor arrived in Đakovo at the end of the 17th century and, as he was an organist, he got a job in the Đakovo Cathedral – says Ulrich Knežević.
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Around 1900, the Ulrich family bought a house at Mesnička 25, where their youngest son Antun was born in 1902.
– Antun got his first knowledge about architecture from his professor Vjekoslav Bastl at the Secondary Technical School – says his granddaughter and adds that he studied in Vienna at the Kunstgewerbeschule at Josef Hoffmann.
Graduated architect Ulrich returned to Zagreb in 1927 and began to apply contemporary architectural ideas of an international style in his hometown. One of the first realizations was the wooden Rowing House of Uskok on the Sava from 1931.
– The building that is there today is actually not his rowing home, because it has been upgraded and rebuilt. It was his first realized project after he returned from Vienna, where he designed a wooden rowing house as his graduation thesis and called it Uskok, and then it was built. In the last twenty years, there have been initiatives to restore its original appearance… – he concludes.
