On the same site where the princely palace was located until the earthquake of 1895, the famous architect Joze Plečnik built his “shrine to intellectuality”, as he used to call his library. Construction began in 1936, but a German plane crashed into the building in 1944, destroying the reading room and 60,000 irreplaceable books. The library was rebuilt soon after the war. The present-day national university library with its outstanding facade was one of the last major commissions which the great architect, a pupil of Otto Wagner, was able to complete.
