Review article
https://doi.org/10.17018/portal.2023.8
The railway station complex in Karlovac: construction history and design
Dragan Damjanović
orcid.org/0000-0003-2589-8075
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Art History
Sandra Brajković
Abstract
The railway station complex in Karlovac represents a valuable segment of the industrial and transport heritage of Croatia from the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. In addition to the station building itself, it also consists of a whole series of various utilitarian, industrial, warehousing, residential and office buildings. These have lost their original functions, partly due to the deindustrialization of Karlovac and to changes that have occurred in the way trains are run and maintained. The construction of the oldest railway infrastructure in Croatia and Karlovac is inextricably linked to the political position of the Triune Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th within the Habsburg Monarchy and, after 1867/1868, the Austro-Hungarian. Before the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, the construction of railways came second to the interests of the economic and political elite of Vienna, the capital of the Monarchy. The first railways in Croatia were built by the Imperial Royal Privileged Austrian Southern Railway Company (Die k.k. privilegierte Südbahn-Gesellschaft). After connecting Zagreb by rail with the rest of the Monarchy via Zidani Most and Ljubljana in 1862, it built a railway to Karlovac that opened on 1 June 1865. The buildings of the Southern Railway Company in Karlovac were built immediately after the construction of the Karlovac-Zagreb railway line. These were mostly temporary wooden structures that no longer exist. They were designed by Wilhelm von Flattich, the chief designer of the Southern Railway Company. After the Croatian-Hungarian settlement in 1868, the construction of the railway infrastructure in Croatia was mostly controlled and led by the state-owned Budapest company Royal Hungarian State Railways (Magyar Államvasutak, abbreviated MÁV). In 1873, it completed the railway line between Budapest, the capital of Hungary, and Rijeka, the largest export port of the same country, via Zagreb and Karlovac. The Hungarian railway infrastructure on that route, as well as in the rest of western Croatia, was managed by the Transport Administration of the Royal Hungarian State Railways in Zagreb. The construction of the Rijeka railway was not initially followed by the construction of the rest of the modern railway infrastructure in Croatia. In Karlovac, the old station of the Southern Railway Company was used for almost four decades (from 1865 to 1900). The situation was no better in other parts of Croatia until the 1890s, when Budapest started investing in construction projects on the territory of Croatia. The construction of the Zagreb Glavni Kolodvor building (1890–1892) can be seen as the beginning of the investment cycle. The station in Karlovac would be built almost a full decade later. The designer of the new building of the Karlovac railway station was the Hungarian architect, Ferenc Pfaff, one of the main architects of MÁV, who, among others, was entrusted with the design of the stations in Debrecen (1894), Timisoara (1898–1899), Pécs (1898–1899) and Szeged (1902), and, within Croatia, stations in Zagreb (1890–1892), Rijeka (1892), Osijek (1898–1899) and finally Karlovac (1900–1903). The station in Karlovac, although more modest than those in Zagreb and Rijeka in terms of size and façade, far surpasses most of the other stations built by the Hungarian State Railways in Croatia. This is primarily the result of the fact that it was built on the most important traffic route in Hungary at the time. Simplified Neo-Renaissance, the style chosen for the façade, dominated public architecture of all (central) Europe at the time, and especially the architecture of the Royal Hungarian Railways. At the time, most of the stations in the Kingdom of Hungary were built in the neo-Renaissance style. The decision to choose façade brick as the basic material for the façade is probably a reflection of Pfaff's reaction to events in Hungarian architecture of the period when this material began to be used more and more frequently for the design of facades on both historicist and Art Nouveau buildings. The white, plastered horizontal lines, profiled cornice and corner ‘stones’ of the window openings contribute to the special elegance of the station's façade. The façade of the Karlovac station is not unique in Pfaff's body of work. Although he often plastered the facades of his station buildings and covered them with rich stucco decoration, as can be seen on the Rijeka and Zagreb railway stations, numerous other Pfaff station buildings, for example in Miskolc, Cegled (today in Hungary), Jimbolia (today in Romania), Vršac (today in Serbia) and elsewhere, very closely resemble the Karlovac station both because of the use of façade brick and because of the specific spatial and stylistic solution. Of the above-mentioned stations, the station in Karlovac is very similar to the one in Vršac, and it is almost identical to the station in Leopoldov (Hungarian Lipotvár, now in Slovakia), designed in 1908. The central part of the Leopoldov station is identical to the central part of the Karlovac station. The only difference in the basic spatial organization and design of the façade occurs at either end. Of the stations in Croatia, it is the most similar to Osijek due to the use of façade bricks. In addition to the central reception building in the complex of Karlovac’s main railway station, the water- and circular-heating plants, built in the first years of the 20th century, also stand out.
Keywords
Karlovac; railway station; Wilhelm Flattich; Ferenc Pfaff; Austrian Southern Railway Company; Imperial Royal Austrian State Railways; historicism; neo-renaissance; industrial architecture
Hrčak ID:
312366
URI
Publication date:
29.12.2023.
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