WAR AND ARCHITECTURE -- Third in a series of four articles for A+U

[Davor Wagner]

(posted by BOSNET)

=09***********************************************************=09
=09This posting is provided WITH permission from the copyright
=09owner and it MAY NOT BE distributed further without
=09permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use".=20
=09***********************************************************=09

Lebbeus Woods
WAR AND ARCHITECTURE
SARAJEVO
Third in a series of four articles for A+U

"Every age has its own face; the face of ours is a
savage one; delicate spirits cannot confront it; they
swerve their eyes in terror; they invoke the noble and ancient=20
prototypes; they cannot look directly at the contemporary,=20
prodigious, and dreadful spectacle of a world
in painful birth. They want an artwork cut in the
pattern of their desires and fears. They watch
contemporary life exploding before them every minute with a
world-destroying demonic power, and yet they do not see it;
if they had seen it, indeed, they would have sought its
reflection, its mirror-image, in contemporary art."
=09=09 Nikos Kazantzakis

"Sarajevo is the first city of the twenty-first century.
The message we send back to you is not a happy one.
But we are still alive."
=09 Haris Pasovic

Standing at the reception counter of the Holiday Inn in
Sarajevo, my conversation was overheard by an American
woman, who introduced herself as a correspondent for a large
television network. She asked which news agency I
represented. When I told her A+U in Tokyo, an international
architectural journal, she was shocked. "What can you write
about architecture here? It's all ruins!" I answered that
there still was architecture in Sarajevo, and that it was
very much alive, if not altogether well. The destruction of
so many buildings had created very difficult living
conditions. Anyway, architecture plays an important symbolic
role in Sarajevo today, and not only because cultural
monuments have been destroyed by twenty months of daily
shelling. The condition of the architecture speaks more
visibly than anything else of the assault on the spirit of
the city, of the attempt to destroy it's community, its
complex tissue of civilized life. But, perhaps most
importantly, any discussion about the survival of this city,
its people and their culture, must involve a consideration
of its architecture. The past is preserved in it. The
present cannot endure without it. The future will be shaped
as its architecture is shaped. The woman was silent for a
moment, then shook her head. "But it's just ruins, all
ruins."
The Holiday Inn in which we spoke is a ruin, but a
living one. Built for the 1984 Winter Olympic Games, it was
one of many tangible symbols of Yugoslavia's singular place
among Eastern European communist states, one that was built
on relative openness to the West and to Western influences.
Its then-fashionable modernist form had little to say about
Sarajevo's own rich and lively culture, founded on centuries
of being on a border between empires---Roman and Byzantine,
Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman, socialist and capitalist---but
Sarajevo seems to have accepted it with characteristic
equanimity. Now this badly damaged building symbolizes
nothing much at all, unless it is the fragileness of
equanimity when it is confronted by a deadly mixture of
barbarism and indifference---the former on the part of the
Bosnian Serb army that surrounds the city, the latter on the
part of the Western democracies which, in spite of solemn
pledges to the contrary, have done nothing about the slow
and torturous destruction of a noble city. The Olympics are
finished, and so too, it appears, are the Olympians.
In the vast, dark, echoing atrium of the hotel, a
yellowish daylight filters through the window wall reaching
to the full height of the atrium on one side. Translucent
plastic sheeting has been placed over the fragments of
tinted glass that still cling to their frames, so that the
whole resembles a gigantic abstract painting. There is never
any electricity in this part of the hotel, so at night the
gloom is replaced by an eerie blackness relieved only by the
tiny lights at the plastic-sheeted reception desk and
flashlights swinging in the hands of the hotel's only
residents, a rag-tag coterie of the international press.
It is not only dark, but cold. Everyone in the great lobby
is wearing a coat, including the handful of Bosnian soldiers
who drift in and out, guarding the place against what or
whom it is not clear. In the mornings, men who are offering
their services as translators or drivers sit in the lobby's
conversation-pit, silently waiting for a journalist in need.
In the hotel's dining room is found the best reason to pay
the hotel's daily rate of eighty-five dollars: a breakfast,
lunch and dinner that always include some meat and many
potatoes. After dinner, a delightful pastry always appears,
and excellent wine can be ordered from the hotel's once well-
stocked cellars. By late November of last year, they were
down to the 1976 vintages, a very good year, indeed. Here
there is also electricity from a small generator, therefore
light and some heat. The waiters, who are dressed in pastel-
colored jackets and black bow-ties, serve their few guests
with a formality that almost makes you forget that this is
happening in the middle of war. They understand perfectly
when you ask them to fill several liter bottles with water
that is trucked-in each day. Upstairs in your room, which
has no light but that from your flashlight, only a trickle
of heat, and no water for the past several days because the
Serbs have once again cut all electricity in the city and
silenced (among other things) the water pumps, you save some
of the water for washing in the morning, and dump the rest
in the tank of the w/c. The bed has been turned down by the
maid, who has also arranged your things neatly on the desk
and table. In the first days, you checked to see if anything
was missing. Now, you don't bother, because nothing ever is.
Getting into bed, you wonder if you can fall asleep.
Outside, the sounds of automatic weapons firing on the front-
lines a few hundred meters from your bed chatter and pop
through the night, but you were more tired than you thought,
and at some point no longer hear them.

DAY IN, DAY OUT
In the past twenty-two months, nearly three-quarters of a
million artillery and mortar shells have fallen on Sarajevo,1
fired from Serbian gun emplacements on the mountain ridges
around the city. That is two for every person remaining in
the city today. These are the same guns that NATO fighter-
bombers buzz threateningly every day, and yes, the same ones
that Western leaders say will be bombed if they continue to
kill at random the innocent men, women and children of the
city. But continue they do, and as of this writing, not a
single bomb has fallen on these gun positions, nor on the
snipers on the same high ridges who even more deliberately
target Sarajevo's citizens for injury and death. So far,
more than ten thousand of Sarajevo's people have been
killed, and more than forty thousand wounded.2
Buildings are also targeted. In particular, architectural
symbols of the rich culture of the city, which for centuries
has held in its long valley differing religions and
cultures, must be destroyed, if the new Serbian monoculture
founded on racism and nationalism is to be imposed. Mosques
and churches have been primary targets. The great Mosque of
Gazi Husref Beg, built in 1530 has received eighty-five
direct hits from mortar and artillery shells. The Cathedral,
a Catholic church built in 1885, has suffered considerable
damage from shelling, and is no longer in daily use. The
Synagogue, enjoying a slightly less vulnerable position in
the center, has nevertheless been hit many times. Even the
Serbian Orthodox Church has been attacked, and is now
closed. It seems that all are guilty of simply being in
Sarajevo, of co-existing peaceably for centuries, and they
must now be punished. These are only the most prominent of
dozens of culturally significant buildings, built in the
Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian periods, that have been
destroyed by the killers on the hilltops, who are obsessed
not only with murdering the innocent, but also with erasing
whole epochs of Sarajevo's complex history and traditions.3

SARAJEVO THEN. . . .
Sarajevo---the capital of Bosnia-Hercegovina, an independent
nation recognized in early 1992 by the United Nations and
all major nations of the world---was, before the war, a
thoroughly modern city, with some very old parts. A linear
city stretching out along a narrow mountain valley, it
formed a visible time-line of its long historical
development. At the eastern end is the Turkish old town,
founded in the 15th century, with its dark wooden houses,
intimate shops, courtyards, coffeehouses and restaurants,
its Moorish-style library, and the Gazi Husref Beg Mosque.
In the Turkish period, Sarajevo already had water
distribution and sewage systems. Jews came in the 16th
Century (part of the Spanish Diaspora) and were accepted as
nowhere else in Europe, to such an extent, in fact, that
Sarajevo also had the name of "little Jerusalem."
Abruptly abutting the old town is the Viennese-style, late
19th century Austro-Hungarian part, forming the modern city
center, with its many institutions of culture and civil
life: the national library, the grand Hotel Europe, the main
post-office, the national theater, the main market, the
cathedral, the tobacco factory, and the state museum.
Then comes the between-the-wars residential part of the
city, with its early modernist houses, institutional
buildings and blocks of flats. Then, extending far to the
west, comes the post-WW2 city with its industrial buildings
along the Miljacka River, and tall, stereotypical blocks of
housing so beloved of modernist ideologues, and socialist
planners in particular. The city effectively ends at the
airport, which---before the war---readily connected Sarajevo
with all of Europe, and the world. Yugoslavia's liberal
travel policies for citizens and foreigners alike insured a
lively exchange of goods, people, and ideas.
Sarajevo was a genuinely cosmopolitan city---a melting pot
of east and west. While it was in some ways a provincial
capital, it nevertheless nurtured a high level of
intellectual and cultural life. It was, together with
Belgrade (Yugoslavia's federal capital), a center of the
world-class Yugoslav film industry. It was a center of
Yugoslav literature and poetry. Sarajevo's theaters staged
European-class productions of the works of both local and
international authors. It's concerts and musical life were
of an equally high quality. In the latter stages of
Yugoslavia's communist regime, its homes, university and
coffeehouses bristled with intellectual life, always
leavened with strong doses of Slavic irony and Bosnian
jokes.

.. . . AND NOW
The war in Bosnia and siege of the city has greatly affected
the character of life in Sarajevo. Gone are all but a few
foreign visitors who have come in support of the city and
its people. Gone is the atmosphere of happy debate and the
prospect of a brighter, freer future. As the siege
approaches the beginning of its third year, with no end in
sight, Sarajevans---trapped in their once open city---are
courageous and calm, and still with their humor. But they
are becoming exhausted by cold, perpetual deprivation and
darkness. Most of the day (defined by the literal hours of
daylight) are spent in scraping together the basics of food
(mostly from UN food packets---the markets have little fresh
food), water (to be taken in large plastic containers from a
few sniper-ridden and often-shelled points in the city) and
heat (the trees in most parks have been cut, and this winter
people are often seen digging deep for their roots). How
people are surviving materially is something of a mystery.
Most industry and commerce is shut down (although the new
tobacco factory is still managing, in spite of all
shortages, to produce a quite respectable Marlboro, printed
packet and all). People are earning small salaries working
for the Bosnian government and for NGO humanitarian aid
organizations such as CARITAS, The International Rescue
Committee, and the Red Cross. Otherwise they are trading,
inventing, and sharing.

END OF THE LINE
While the news media report the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina
and the siege of its capital as "a civil war" and an "ethnic
conflict," the reality is far different. For whatever
reason, the West cannot seem to grasp that this is a war
against cultural diversity for which Sarajevo is today the
most obvious symbol and target. The richness of this city's
cultural life evolved slowly, over the centuries of its
history. Old line Yugoslav political leaders, attempting to
re-solidify their power after the fall of Communism, have
exploited the healthy creative tensions within Bosnian
culture by provoking national, ethnic and religious fears
where they did not exist before, gathering them together
into a weapon of hatred and war aimed at Bosnia's foremost
symbol of tolerance and of hope, Sarajevo. This has been
made clear by the especially brutal nature of the siege
against this city. Its aim is to terrorize people, to
humiliate them, forcing them into a surrender not only of
the physical city, but of the conceptual one as well.
To a large extent the siege is a war of the rural
against the urban, of xenophobic mountain people egged on by
unscrupulous politicians against the complexity and subtlety
of a cosmopolitan city. The implications of this siege are
more universal than they might at first appear. Cultural
richness and complexity are themselves under attack. As
anyone can see by reading newspapers or watching television,
this is occurring not only in Sarajevo, but wherever
fundamentalism, ethnic chauvinism, and nationalism are on
the rise. Sarajevo is, however, the city where the crisis is
revealed today in its most naked form. The struggle to
preserve Sarajevo is today a vital part of the struggle to
preserve the very idea of city.
THE CAPITAL OF UNCERTAINTY
The destruction of culturally significant buildings is a
great loss, but that of ordinary buildings is even greater.
Just as the most terrible damage from the siege has been to
the people of Sarajevo and to the fabric of their everyday
life, so the worst architectural damage has been to the
ordinary buildings comprising the everyday fabric of the
city. Many shops, schools, hospitals, apartment and office
buildings have become uninhabitable. Their walls have been
penetrated by artillery shells, their windows are shattered
by blasts, and their interiors are gutted and burned. The
majority of other buildings damaged by shelling are still
habitable, once repairs have been made, but often only
partly so. In the cold weather, only one room in a flat may
have heat from a gas or wood stove, and this is where people
live. Also, some rooms are more dangerous than others
because their windows and walls are exposed to sniper-fire
or to the shrapnel of artillery shells exploding nearby, and
cannot be used. These and other forced revisions to the
planned use of spaces present a serious challenge to the
idea of planning in itself. In a field dominated by
uncertainties, it is not possible to design according to pre-
determined programs of use, even those which claim to be
'multi-functional,' flexible, or 'hybrid.' Sarajevo, if it
is in fact 'the first city of the 21st century,' presents
architecture with new and fundamental questions, for which
the answers of the 20th century are clearly inadequate.
No other condition In Sarajevo demonstrates this as
well as the fate of the the city's many modern high-rise
buildings. Dependent as they were on urban infrastructures
of electricity, water, gas or steam for heating, they can no
longer be inhabited, at least above the first few floors.
Not only are they the most exposed targets, but also the
most difficult for people to climb with the large plastic
containers of water that must be drawn and carried by hand
from the city's few public sources. This is not only a
matter of functional inconvenience, but more so of a
critical exposure of the relationship of architecture to
centralized structures of authority. These buildings were
designed not for their inhabitants as much as for the social
order that sponsored them, an order based on predictability
and central planning. Now that this order has collapsed, the
buildings are useless, except as monuments to the death of
not only of certainty, but of its enforcement through the
promulgation of large-scale plans.
The real scale of life in Sarajevo today is rather
small and, in a very tactile sense, intimate. Before the
war, the architects of Sarajevo designed buildings that fit
neatly into the grand designs of the bureaucracy, or
concerned themselves with ornaments on those plans, like
public parks and elaborate urban villas for a new
aristocracy who were to oversee the transition from
socialism to a free-market economy. All that optimism has
melted away now, in the heat of a reality that will not be
so easily ignored, which is one of unresolved deep
structures. The siege is a manifestation of this reality,
and offers as a solution to its problematics the scale of
the individual, who must shape his or her life within a
matrix of shifting probabilities. The scale of living---
therefore of design---is the room, the street, the
'intrapersonal' spaces of the conversation, the handshake,
and the embrace.

A WALK IN THE PARK
Sarajevans, under assault though they are---and contrary to
expectations raised by the Western media---refuse to behave
like victims. Beginning at first light, Sarajevans are out
in the streets, walking everywhere, because gasoline, when
it can be found, is thirty dollars a liter, and therefore
very few cars can run. And because electricity is
intermittent at best, the tram system was shut down long
ago. But the people of Sarajevo do not mind walking. They
have always walked. They are social and like to see one
another. They stop in cafes---now mostly hidden in
courtyards---to sip coffee with friends, smoke cigarettes,
and talk. They go to their work---now mostly some kind of
self-employment or for humanitarian-aid agencies. They shop-
--mostly for meager goods: scarce foods or second-hand
clothing or appliances. But they are on the move, not
cowering, still alive.
More than merely alive, the people of Sarajevo are the
same as people anywhere---they are trying to live their
lives as normally as they can. But unlike people anywhere
else, they are forced by abnormal conditions and sub-normal
people to live a nightmare of violence, deprivation and
death.
Walking in Sarajevo has its hazards. Because the snipers
are shooting from the mountain ridges into the city during
all daylight hours, people must find a path screened from
the view from those high and deadly points. Across some
intersections it is advisable to always run. Across others,
barricades have been built of steel cargo containers, or
steel plates These cannot stop the bullets from a high-
powered sniper's rifle, but they frustrate the killers'
views. There are, of course, the mortar shells that may fall
at any moment, and which no amount of care can avoid.
And then there are the obstacles, terrible and trivial.
Burned out cars and trams---targets of choice for the bored
snipers in the hills, who prefer the occasional rapidly-
moving target to break the boredom of shooting at the slower
moving human targets. The surprisingly infrequent litter
from an overflowing trash container, amongst which one sees
unexpected things, such as Yugoslavian dinar notes---money
without any currency at all. Holes in sidewalks and
pavements from exploding mortar shells and grenades. Too
often, figures of the wounded and the dead.
Passing Sarajevo's many parks, people no longer find
trees. They have been cut down for firewood (last winter,
when a law was passed in the city government to permit it).
Instead they find a new type of grove composed of rows and
rows of grave markers. One enters these parks only under the
cover of night, or out of the deepest reverence for the
dead, for these places are the most exposed places in the
city, and thus the most treacherous killing fields of them
all.

CRACKS IN THE WALL
There is an almost impenetrable wall around Sarajevo today.
It is not a wall that protects the city and its people, but
is instead one that isolates them from direct contact with
the world. The wall is made of several layers.
The first layer is the front-line on the ridges, where the
Bosnian army holds at bay the invading, besieging Serbian
army, but cannot prevent the continuous sniping and shelling
of the city below. This is the principal layer, onto which
the others have been constructed.
The second layer of the wall is the UNHCR4 and its
military component, UNPROFOR5. Their main function is to
operate and protect cargo planes that contain humanitarian
aid flown daily into Sarajevo. Because the city is
surrounded by Serbian military forces, these flights are
effectively the only ways in and out of Sarajevo. Because
these UN agencies do not consider art and culture as
humanitarian aid, artists and their work are not allowed
into or out of Sarajevo on UNHCR relief flights, even though
there is room on the aircraft for them. Because these
agencies do not consider the transport of people (not
soldiers) severely wounded by the snipers and shelling as
humanitarian aid, their planes fly out of Sarajevo's airport
several times a day with empty cargo bays, and the wounded
are left to suffer in hospitals without heat or light,
without proper medicines, equipment or anaethetics. It has
been said that Sarajevo is the world's largest concentration
camp, a prison and a ghetto, where people are being tortured
and killed before the eyes of the world. And it is true.
The third layer of the wall is created by the mass-media,
with its scores of journalists and television news crews,
and is composed of images that suit the media's conceptions
of the war, which in turn are formed by expectations in the
various countries it serves. Victimization themes play
better 'back home' than stories about Sarajevo's concerts,
plays and exhibitions of the works of artists who oppose
brutality with creativity and poetry. Perhaps this is
because people elsewhere believe that art and culture shrink
to insignificance in the face of suffering and death. If so,
then they do not understand the role that art and culture
play in the survival of humanity not only in its most
desperate hours, but in its day-to-day struggles against
more insidious forms of attack. In Sarajevo, art and culture
make cracks in the wall of the ghetto, from which emerge
strong signs of life and hope.

MILLENNIAL NOISE
Time is short in Sarajevo. In a sense, time is running out.
With the winter once again upon them, but, more critically,
with the attrition of materiel, population and hope for an
end to the war, with people being killed each day, people
have difficulty looking to the future.
Sarajevo has become the city of amateur architects, of
people who repair their own windows, walls, roofs,
storefronts with a patchwork of found and scavanged
materials. Just as there is a darkly alluring aesthetic to
be found in ruins, there is a spirited visual quality in the
juxtapositions of plastics, cloth, metals, wooden boards,
and vivisected auto-body parts used in Sarajevo's buildings
to close the wounds of war. Not unlike those found in the
favelas of Sao Paulo, these constructions arise from the
cruellest necessity but attain, by virtue of their
spontaneity and an inevitable human instinct for beauty,
something beyond it. The canons of architectural history
provide no help for this work, because they has always been
reserved for the monumentalization and codification of
authority. In Sarajevo, where both history and authority
have betrayed people, there is not the luxury of time to
wait for either to catch up with reality. The reconstruction
of Sarajevo has already begun. Tomorrow must be today. The
future is now.

'ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT LIMIT'
Sarajevo creates a crisis for architecture that architects
can ignore only at the risk of architecture's meaning in a
human world increasingly affected by political and social
changes.
Still, many well-known and presumably astute architects
outside of Sarajevo are strangely silent when they confront
the destruction of a city not unlike the ones in which they
carry on their practices. Stranger yet, they maintain a not
very credible innocence of the role their practices of
architecture play in games of political power.6 Their
designs sanctify existing hierarchies of authority by
monumentalizing them with 'art,' and it is these same
structures that are active in the struggles for power that
lead to war and its destruction.
But the attitudes of corporate architects towards Sarajevo
are understandable when compared with the hypocrisies of
architects who have become quite famous for their 'avant-
garde' positions in architecture, yet who are paralyzed when
confronted with human conditions that actually are avant-
garde. Even though invited to come to Sarajevo, to discuss
with architects and others there about ways to cope with the
destruction and to prepare for the future, many have ignored
the call, or refused it on grounds that they are afraid that
their going to Sarajevo will give them 'bad press,' in other
words, that they will appear in some way to be exploiting
Sarajevo's crisis for their own publicity. What they never
consider, of course, is that Sarajevo needs the kind of
publicity their presence would bring, a publicity about
optimism and hope for the future of the city. It is Sarajevo
that benefits from their presence, from their energy and
inventiveness, even though they must take the heat of some
criticism in their own uncomprehending countries.
But since when has the 'avant-garde' been afraid of
criticism---if, that is, it is any avant-garde at all? So
long, it seems, as many of these celebrated innovators are
working within a sanctuary of social stability, they can be
daring in their thinking and work. But when these conditions
are destabilized by change---which, in the case of Sarajevo,
is extreme---and demand nothing short of daring, they become
confused and timid. The lesson from this is disturbingly
obvious: many of today's alleged avant-garde are really not
up to the task of helping in society's most difficult
transformations, whatever their claim to new ideas, but only
in playing within a status quo. The corporate architects are
at least clear in their loyalties. The 'press conscious'
radicals who cannot pit their ideas against the radicality
of human existence that their architecture---with all its
references to new thinking---purports to embrace, give only
the appearance of taking great risks. In reality, they are
only playing it safe.
Apropos of the role of foreign architects in the struggle
for Sarajevo today, Ivan Straus7 has said and written,
addressing Sarajevans:

"How difficult and how responsible is the task we have in
front of us. I have a feeling that we, architects from
Sarajevo, are still not aware enough of the real measure of
this responsibility and so collegial help will be of great
support to us. Of course, only if we are ready to listen
will we be able to understand advice coming from those that
are not under the pressure of devastation and
destruction itself, under the pressure of killing and
mutilation, from those that are willing to help us to
restore our faith in ourselves, to help us to articulate
new spaces for a new and better life."8

Sarajevo needs international visitors, to know it is not
forgotten in a world where fashions in news and
(consequently) people's concerns are as short-lived as any
others. In their struggle to survive, and to save the city,
Sarajevans need the moral and intellectual support of people
like themselves, people committed and working towards the
enrichment of urban life in their own cities, people who
understand that all cities are part of the same city, that
the crisis of one is the crisis of all. The best way to help
is not to do projects for Sarajevo, but in Sarajevo.
Sarajevo also needs ideas. Its people face extreme
conditions of living and severe limitations that demand the
highest level of creative thinking and inventive action.
While they are doing everything they can to achieve this,
they realize that they need fresh input and stimulus. This
can only be given by people from outside the midst of the
present conditions and limitations, and only in Sarajevo.
There is a further reason for creative people from all
fields to go to Sarajevo, and it is well recognized by many
Sarajevans. Their city can never again be what it once was.
The happy amalgam of a cosmopolitan yet provincial culture
is gone forever. Sarajevo, because of the unhappy fate that
has overtaken it, is now an internationally known city, but
it must become truly international, which means in terms
other than UN military presence and tragic news headlines.
It must open itself to the world in creative ways, achieving
a new level of cultural diversity. In recognizing this,
Sarajevans at the same time want to avoid the extremes of
intellectual colonization and commercial exploitation. This
can be achieved only by an unselfish collaboration between
the most creative thinkers, artists and architects now in
Sarajevo and those coming from outside. Many in Sarajevo
understand this clearly, while many more outside this city
as yet do not.

RECONSTRUCTION AND RESISTANCE
Several architectural initiatives are underway in Sarajevo.9
The most international of these is the seminar-workshop
SARAJEVO: Reconstruction and Resistance, to be held in
Sarajevo March 21st to March 26th, 1994. This event,
organized by the author in cooperation with Haris Pasovic of
the Sarajevo International Theater and Film Festival's
'Dystopia' Project, has offered invitations to a number of
architects10 respected for their innovative thought and work,
which are pre-requisites for addressing the critical
conditions of living imposed by the siege.
There are two purposes to this event. The first is to
discuss among the invited architects, as well as architects
and others from Sarajevo, a number of critical issues
clarified as nowhere else by the continuing siege and
destruction of this city. Among these are: the
identification of building projects for the survival and
regeneration of urban life in Sarajevo, during the siege and
after; the need for new types of spaces demanded by the
conditions of war and rebuilding in its aftermath; the role
of long-range planning in unpredictable urban, social and
political situations; the relationship of design to
uncertainty; the need for new methods of construction in the
face of destroyed or damaged urban infrastructures, scarcity
of building materials, and lack of capitalization; the role
and responsibility of architects in direct relation to
people of the city; the
relevance of these issues to the practice of architecture in
other cities undergoing rapid or violent changes.
The second purpose is to work with architects, students
and citizens of Sarajevo in workshops directed by the
invited architects. The purpose of these workshops will be
the creative analysis of damaged sites in Sarajevo which
have critical importance for the present and future. The
goal of analysis will be to consider how the sites might be
used in new (or old) ways, what kind of reconstruction
should happen, what rebuilding means in the context of the
siege, and other related possibilities. The goal is not,
therefore, to provide 'quick' architectural design
solutions, but to provide a stimulus to thinking about many
critical issues and as an impetus to creative architectural
work by architects and others in Sarajevo.

THE ELEVENTH HOUR
The war in Bosnia-Hercegovina and the siege of Sarajevo have
stripped away the superfluous and redundant elements that
accumulate in peaceful times, exposing both the best and the
worst in human nature. The worst is seen in the violence and
cruelty perpetrated by people who in other times would be
condemned as criminals, but who rise to the surface when
civil order is disrupted. The best is seen in the resistance
that people offer to the brutalization of their persons,
families and cultures, and in the noble instincts for
cooperation that must continually overcome fear and despair.
These are qualities not only to be found in Sarajevo, but
also in London, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles and Mexico,
wherever the forces of change are steadily and in some cases
rapidly overturning an entrenched and stable order. However,
in Sarajevo the best and the worst---creativity and murder--
-exist in such extremes that the triumph of one over the
other, when it comes, will reverberate throughout the world.
There the struggle to initiate new ideas is not an option,
but a necessity. Sarajevo is a test of will and creative
powers. It is also a test of humanity. There are great
things to be accomplished by architects in Sarajevo, not the
least of which is the manifestation of a new architectural
sensibility within the ruins of the old, a new spirit of
collaboration, and a new architecture created from extreme
conditions of existence that will help in the building of a
new way of life. If these can be achieved, they will not
only serve Sarajevo, but a world that is everywhere in
transformation.

February 5, 1994
New York City

****************************************************

1 According to the official UNPROFOR count.

2 On the day that this article was completed, a shell fired
by Serbian gunners fell on the main market in the center of
Sarajevo, killing at a stroke sixty-six people, and wounding
nearly two hundred.

3 The extent and details of this destruction are contained in
two publications made under extremely difficult conditions
in Sarajevo during the last year. Both are by members of the
Association of Architects of Sarajevo (SABIH). The first of
these is a special issue of the Association's magazine ARH,
No. 24, Sarajevo, June 1993, entitled WARCHITECTURE (text
entirely in English), which includes essays by Sarajevo
architects and extensive photo-documentation of war-damaged
buildings of cultural significance, including modern ones.
The second publication, URBICIDE - SARAJEVO, is the
catalogue of an extensive exhibition made in Sarajevo of war-
damaged buildings, but includes as well maps of damaged
urban areas and many related statistics. This exhibition,
which was meant to travel, cannot leave Sarajevo because the
United Nations refuses to carry cultural materials aboard
its departing, and empty, relief planes.

4 United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

5 United Nations Protection Force.

6 See the author's essay, "Architectural is a political act,"
A+U 92:05, pp.3-5, and introductory essay for
Anarchitecture: Architecture is a political act, Academy
Editions, London, 1992, pp.8-18.

7 Ivan Straus is one of Sarajevo's leading architects and
intellectuals, and a member of the former Yugoslav Academy
of Arts and Sciences. He built many modernist buildings in
all parts of Yugoslavia before the war, and published---in
1991, just before the outbreak of war in Croatia---a history
of modern architecture in Yugoslavia. All the realized
buildings he designed in Sarajevo, including the Holiday Inn
and Unis towers, have been severely damaged or destroyed.

8. . . Oslobodjenje. . . .

9 In October of last year, Fran=E7ois Chaslin, architect and
chief editor of the Paris journal L'Architecture
D'Aujourd'hui, came to Sarajevo and stayed for some time.
Apparently, his experience of the city and its people made a
deep impression on him. Chaslin is a man of action, no
doubt. He returned to Paris and immediately published
articles about Sarajevo in L'Architecture D'Aujourd'hui and
the Spanish daily El Pais. Even more, he circulated a letter
among prominent French architects encouraging a creative
mission to Sarajevo, one that would address critical
questions that affect both architecture today and the
present and future of the city. Thirteen architects have
signed Chaslin's letter. At least the most committed of
these will overcome all the difficulties and go to Sarajevo.
The group, which Chaslin cheerfully describes as 'eclectics,
neo-Corbusians, townplanners, typo-morphologists, high-tech,
ex-Stalinists, leftists, transparentists, no-futurists,
etc., includes Michel Cantal-Dupart, Roland Castro, Paul
Chemetov, Henri Ciriani, Christian Devillers, Pierre-Louis
Faloci, Massimiliano Fuksas, Antoine Grumbach, Jean Nouvel,
Dominique Perrault, Christian de Portzamparc, Pierre
Riboulet, and Phillipe Starck.

10 Zaha Hadid, Wolf Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky of Coop
Himmelb(l)au, Steven Holl, Daniel Libeskind, Thom Mayne,
Eric Owen Moss, Hani Rashid and Liseanne Couture of Studio
Asymptote, Michael Sorkin, and the author.

=09**********************************************************=09
=09BosNet is a group/forum run by volunteers. Its goals are
=09to present and distribute information relevant to the
=09events in/about Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina (RB&H); and
=09to initiate and coordinate various initiatives, etc.

=09The group is moderated, which means that only selected
=09contributions are published. The contr./opinions presented
=09on BosNet do not necessarily reflect personal opinions
=09of the moderator or the member(s) of the Editorial Board.
=09**********************************************************