RESTARTA R H I T E K T U R A U B O S N I I H E R C E G O V I N IA R C H I T E C T U R E I N B O S N I A A N D H E R Z E G O V I N A

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"It is a myth that after war therecan be stunde null or zero hour.A genuinely new beginning is anillusion. It is an inescapable factthat things will never again be asthey used to be, but it is equallytrue that the past can never beentirely erased. At most it ispossible to pick up the pieces andmake a new start."Hans Ibelings, 2010

Exposició /RESTARTArhitektura u Bosni i HercegoviniArchitecture in Bosnia and Herzegovina1995-2010

Comissariat de l’exposició original i editor del llibre /Hans Ibelings

Comissariat de l’exposició al COAC /Luís Angel Domínguez

Disseny de l’exposició original /FILTER arhitektura

Disseny de l’exposició al COAC /Nikola CarevichLuís Angel DomínguezFILTER arhitektura

Disseny i comunicació /SALA FERUSIC Arquitectes

Fotografia original del cartell /Gervasio Sánchez

Institució promotora /Asocijacija Arhitekata BiH

Intervencions /Representant del COACLuis Angel Domínguez / ComissariCarles Sala i Relja Ferusic / SALA FERUSIC

Amb el suport de /

Patrocinat per /

Amb la col·laboració de /

EXPOSICIÓCOL·LEGI D’ARQUITECTES DE CATALUNYA / COACPLAÇA NOVA 5 BARCELONA / 14 DE JULIOL - 3 DE SETEMBRESALA PICASSO / ENTRADA LLIURE

INAUGURACIÓ14 DE JULIOL A LES 19:00 H A LA SALA D’ACTES D E L C O A C

Hans Ibelings (1963), who selected the projectsand edited the book, is an Amsterdam-basedarchitectural historian and critic. He is the editorof A10 new European architecture, a bi-monthlymagazine which he founded in 2004, togetherwith graphic designer Arjan Groot.

RESTARTby Hans Ibelings

A decade and a half after the end ofthe war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, thescars and traumas are still visible in thebuilt environment. The signs of yearsof fighting and destruction areeverywhere in evidence. Despite this,city, village and landscape are startingto recover. The numerous buildingprojects since 1995 are a reason forhope. The act of construction is anunmistakable sign of faith in the future.Architecture is inconceivable withoutsuch optimism, without the convictionthat the world will, however slightly, bethe better for it.

Building is a perpetuation of thisconviction. And with construction, lifetoo resumes, however many painfulmemories remain, and there is room fora new ‘everydayness’ with, in the bestcases, architecture as a meaningfulbackdrop and entourage.

PAUSE/FAST FORWARD

It is a myth that after war there can bea stunde null or zero hour. A genuinelynew beginning is an illusion. It is aninescapable fact that things will neveragain be as they used to be, but it isequally true that the past can never beentirely erased. At most it is possible topick up the pieces and make a newstart. Apart from untold human sufferingand colossal material damage, war alsocauses an interruption to buildingactivities and stagnation in culturaldevelopments.

By the same token, the enforcedbuilding freeze often acts as a catalystfor the development of ideas. Not justduring a war, when nothing at all canbe built, but even in the earlypost-war years, when building activitiesare only slowly picking up again, theturnover of ideas is usually too rapid forconstruction to keep up. Constructionis in the pause position while ideasdevelopment is in fast forward mode.And to stay with this metaphor, in thefirst post-war phase, there is a tendencyfor some activities to play out in slowmotion, in the delayed realization ofprewar plans, and the resumption ofprojects that were already underconstruction. All too often, moreover,there is a replay of pre-war practices.

The simultaneous acceleration anddelay, the prolonged presence of thesigns of destruction alongside the startof new constructions – they are all partof a transitional period in which variousspeeds coexist. Now, fifteen years afterthe end of the war, everything is startingto get back into step and architecture,too, is approaching normality.

Normalization can be discerned, forexample, in Sarajevo, at the beginningof Zmaja od Bosne Street, where theAustro-Hungarian part of the city centremeets the new city.

What has developed there can beconstrued as a magnification of thetransitional period of the last fifteenyears, with old, new and renewed inamicable juxtaposition. There is the stilldilapidated Museum of Bosnia andHerzegovina, a consummate buildingby Boris Magaš, Edo Šmidihen andRadovan Horvat, next to the stillundeveloped site of Renzo Piano’sMuseum of Contemporary Art, andStudio Non Stop’s stylish ImportanneCentar. A little further along is anotherwork by the same architects, the AltaCentar, opposite Juraj Neidhardt’srestored dynamic parliamentarycomplex, and nearby two powerfully

expressive works by Ivan Štraus thathave been revitalized since the war, theHoliday Inn hotel and the UNISskyscrapers. Modernism (Magaš et al.),late-modernism (Neidhardt and Štraus’sUNIS), postmodernism (Štraus’s HolidayInn) and what could be described assupermodernism (Studio non stop)stand side by side. Half a century ofarchitecture and history is on displayhere, with all the continuities andinterruptions and only one building inwhich is the war still clearly visible.

All over Bosnia and Herzegovina, fromMostar to Banja Luka and from Sarajevoto Brcko, the built environment testifiesto how life is resuming, how things arereturning to normal, to the fact that notonly is the burden of the past beingborne, but that it is once again possiblefor the everyday to come to the forefront.Idealistic mega projects and grandioseambitions to change the world areabsent and that is no great loss,because those kinds of pretensionsrarely turn out well for either architectureor society. What is being built in Bosniaand Herzegovina at the beginning ofthe twenty-first century is noworldchanging architecture; at most itis an architecture that makes practical,aesthetic and functional amendmentsto the world as it is.

ARCHITECTURAL PIONEER PLANTS

The reconstruction of the builtenvironment runs parallel with thereconstruction of society andcommunity, of which architecture canbe both the product and the producer.

Architecture is a slow profession andthere is usually a gap of many yearsseparating the intention to build and therealization. So also in Bosnia andHerzegovina, where there was relativelylittle new construction between 1995and 2000, but where the years sincehave seen a steady rise in constructionactivity.

The way momentum has returned toarchitecture is comparable to whathappened in the former GDR after thepeaceful revolution and reunification, inother East Bloc countries after the fallof their respective communist regimes,and in the independent, ex-Sovietrepublics. Nowhere was the transitionfrom communist to post-communistsociety free of hitches and obstacles.Bosnia and Herzegovina has had tocope not only with the switch from acentrally planned to a free-marketeconomy, but also with an enormouspost-war reconstruction and repair task.Nonetheless, broadly speaking thesame process is visible as in otherformer communist countries. In the newcircumstances, the same building typesemerged, like pioneer plants on sitesthat had become wasteland in the wakeof the social upheavals.

The architectural pioneer plants of thepostcommunist societies are petrolstations, car showrooms, bars,restaurants, shops and supermarkets,in short, all the relatively small-scalecommercial infrastructure in whichprivate initiative and enterprise canblossom. These pioneers are followedby a generation that is made up of largercommercial projects such as banks,office buildings, shopping malls, andspeculative (upmarket) apartmentbuildings that provide a counterweightto the onesided housing stock of thesocialist era.

A third phase, which has been evidentfor some time in most post-communistcountries, is now starting to emerge inBosnia and Herzegovina. After repairingthe damage to the economicinfrastructure, the focus of attent on andresources is now turning to publicinfrastructure, witness the as yetcautious ambitions to construct newlibraries, museums, sporting facilities,theatres and educational buildings, as

well as moves to transform publicspaces and the revival of urban planningin the development of new urbantypologies.

DIVERSITY

To say that Bosnia and Herzegovinahave always known great culturaldiversity may be stating the obvious,but that does not make it any less true.Without wishing to deny theproblematical aspects and withoutignoring the fact that diversity is lessself-evident since the recent war, thereexists a cultural multiformity, includingin architecture, however fragmentedarchitectural culture in Bosnia andHerzegovina may be nowadays.

In a way, European art and architecturesince the nineteenth century has alwayshad a more or less multiform character,but in a country like Bosnia andHerzegovina that was even strongerthan elsewhere. Even an outsider cansee that apart from all the individualdifferences between architects, thereare also big regional and culturaldifferences. The architecture, includingcontemporary architecture, is differentin Banja Luka than in Mostar and inZenica different than in Brcko.

SELECTION

Diversity is also evident in the selectionI have made from the 380 entries bymore than 100 design teams. It is partlydictated by differences in origin andorientation but also, as always, bygenerational differences. Just as everygeneration has a musical preference,formed in the years of adolescence andyoung adulthood, so every crop ofarchitects has its own frame of referenceand own preferences which, though notimmutable, remain an anchor duringsubsequent professional development.

On top of that, every architecture is alsorecognizably of its time. Every age hasits own fingerprint, which changes everyten or twelve years. The architecturaltrend of the 1990s differs from that ofaround 2000, and what was built tenyears ago is different again from whatis being built today. In Bosnia andHerzegovina there are also projects thatwere delayed by the war, and for thatreason there are also one or twoinstances of the late 1980s in thisselection. The selection is based onwhat was submitted, at the invitation ofthe Association of Architects of Bosniaand Herzegovina. Not every architectof reputation and consequence wasprepared to submit work, which is whyZlatko Ugljen, to mention the bestknownof the absentees, is not represented inthis selection.

NO BALKANOLOGY

In making my choice, I have tried toreconcile several considerations. Firstly,I wanted to make a generous selectionof work that stands out in a positivesense because of the architecturalquality and the cultural and socialambitions and intentions it reveals.

In many countries in southern Europe(and the Balkans have a reputation tomaintain in this respect), there existsalongside the formal, official architecturea parallel universe of mostly semi-legal,informal architecture. Every now andthen, this informal architecture producesan exuberant cheerfulness, but often itresults in buildings that are quite simplydepressing. This parallel universe, whichhas come to be known as ‘turbofolk’ and‘Balkanology’, has recently attractedmore than its fair share of internationalattention, and more even than the officialarchitecture. This publication is a fittingcounterweight to that one-sidedattention to architecture that, in thewords of the architect and critic EdwinGardner, lends itself to ‘intellectualdisaster tourism’, a perverse form ofentertainment whereby you get to stare

all you want at other people’s miserywithout having to be confronted with iton a daily basis. Such forms of buildingare not interesting as architecture, oreven as a source of architecturalinspiration; at best as a sociological oranthropological phenomenon. Thearchitecture of Bosnia and Herzegovina,and of the Balkans in general, deservesa more serious interest than thepostmodernist cultural relativismperpetrated by so-called Balkanology.

Secondly, within the top echelon ofentries, I have looked forinterconnections so that thispresentation would be more than a meresuccession of individual projects. I havetried to discover and to apply asense of coherence by groupingprojects and arranging them under thesame heading. No projects wererejected because they did not fit into thecategories that arose as I worked, atmost because the category alreadycontained related or similar projectsthat I found more convincing.

The selected projects reveal apanorama of contemporary architecturein Bosnia and Herzegovina and,indirectly, what they stand for in termsof society and community, in otherwords, how architecture is helping toshape postwar Bosnia andHerzegovina, which can be seen as a“totum pro parte” for the themes thatare addressed here: identity, community,privacy and society.

Every arrangement a critic or historianapplies to contemporary or very recentphenomena can be no more than a veryprovisional snapshot. If this is indeedthe state of play, it is of necessity nomore than a half-time score. Having saidthat, I think, or at least hope, that thisselection gives an impression of themerits of a post-war architectural culture,a culture that in many respects had tobegin all over again, had to pick up thethread, break new ground, and hasdone this in an intriguing manner. Itsvery breadth and variety is what makesthis culture interesting. Despite thediversity, there emerges a commonimage which is best described as ‘81eamixture’81f. Typically, there are fewprojects that adopt a radical position,whether that be conceptually radical orformally radical. There is not a lot ofarchitecture in Bosnia and Herzegovinathat goes to extremes, that seeks outthe limits of architecture. A simpleexplanation might be that the meansand conditions are not there, or at anyrate not yet. But it could have deeperroots.

All mixtures tend to be harmoniousrather than rich in contrasts, congenialrather than hard. And although it wouldbe a gross generalization to apply thischaracterization to each individual work,it is what strikes me most about thearchitecture of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

It underscores the extent to whicharchitects here go their own way.They are only partially in step withinternational trends and tendencie. Inmany European countries architectureis above all more of the same. Andwithout wishing to speak in terms ofexoticism, that is much less the case inBosnia and Herzegovina. Here, too, ofcourse there are good and bad imitatorsof international fashions, but mostarchitects seem, in defiance of all thedominant trends, to express their ownview, to articulate their own world.Because of this it is possible to findbuildings and projects in Bosnia andHerzegovina that are quite unlike whatis happening elsewhere, and in the ageof globalization and attendanthomogenization that is not aninsignificant merit.

(Ibelings, 2010, p.6-13, "Restart 1995-2010,Architecture in Bosnia and Herzegovina",Sarajevo Buybook, ISBN 978-9958-30-092-9)