Palace Ploech
address: 6 Trpimirova StreetPeriod: Historicism
Kind: Immovable material heritage
Century: 20
Year: 1888
Purpose: residental business
The commissioner and owner of the grandiose palace was the Austrian mechanic Annibale Ploech (1826 – 1884), who made a fortune by working in the Torpedo Factory in Rijeka. The project was made by Giacomo Zammatti (1826 – 1927), a young architect from Trieste, who had just finished schooling in Vienna and arrived to Rijeka (1884). He built the edifice in the spirit of central European high historicism. The lot, bordering on its shorter part with the Capuchin property on the then Zichy Square (today Žabica), and on its longer part with the road Via Alessandrina (today Trpimirova Street) which leads eastward towards the then (old) Governor’s Palace and the Elisabeth Park in front of it, was chosen as the site for this family palace. This also represented a fantastic urbanistic solution, modelled according to the great Viennese corner houses with the emphasis on the elegant cupola on the top of the rounded corner. Two building façades form two high rustic bases, two-storey representative zones with balconies and gigantic Corinthian columns reaching up to the loft cornice. During construction, particular attention was paid to the architectural sculptures and internal, neo-Baroque stucco decoration. Two telamon sculptures (strong male characters lifting or supporting the architrave with their backs), which support the balcony above the portal, direct towards the interior of the building with extremely elegant and rectangular staircase, as well as a rich ornamental iron rail. The building has a specific L-shaped layout and an arrangement with a long hall, separating business offices and facing the inner yard. Zammattio applied this type of high corner house with a cupola, remembered from the time of his studies in Vienna and the architecture of Fischer von Erlach, on the corner house for the Rijeka Savings Bank from 1896 (corner of Barčićeva Street and Dolac).
One version of the project design from 1887 has a clearly visible simpler solution with a cut corner of the house, which was luckily given up for the benefit of the rounded corner. The commissioner himself did not enjoy in his beautiful palace because he passed away in 1884, but his heirs lived there until 1988.
Valorization:
Protected immobile cultural good.
Bibliography:
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