| This project for
Sarajevo proposes both to retain the characteristics of a charged
site and transform the significance of those characteristics -
to walk a fine line between amnesia and trauma. It suggests a
neutral recognition of certain artifacts, in particular the extraordinary
figure of the Marshall Tito Barracks. It equally recognizes qualities
that make the site unique.
Even in a place with as difficult a recent history as Bosnia,
memory, as embodied in urban form, should not be eradicated. This
will induce a form of civic amnesia that the eviscerated central
district of Beirut most clearly evokes. There the demolition of
most structures in the downtown and the more extreme erasure of
the street pattern have produced an emptiness that will now be
filled by the forms of speculation and invented tradition. The
radical erasure and reformation of war-damaged cities in Europe,
east and west, after 1945 is another negative example of amnesia
as an urban strategy. In psychotherapeutic terms this is the equivalent
of shock-therapy, the erasure of traumatic memory, allowing the
recreation of personality in a more docile mode. In urban terms
it subdues cultural flux permitting an intensification of the
marketplace and a redefinition of cultural values. On the other
hand, the maintenance of traumatic urban form, the fetishization
of war damage as in the projects of Lebbeus Woods for Sarajevo
and Berlin, represents another extreme. Here the Pastoralism of
War becomes voyeuristic, and painful memory is institutionalized,
encouraging a numb indifference that is also extremely vulnerable
to the worst sorts of development. Traumatic retention of the
forms and damage of war, while possibly picturesque in a romance-of-the-ruin
way, can be entertaining only for those who have not lived through
the suffering and loss embodied in those ruins.
Our proposal acknowledges the importance of therapeutic urbanism
in equal relation to given landscape. Morphologies are identified
and reconfigured. The Tito Barracks are a literal example. Here
the form of the walled perimeter, fort-like and forbidding, becomes
the dense and accessible kasbah/pad of the university campus.
An armature of violence and authority is transformed into a new
center for civic activity and learning. "They shall beat
their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks."
This passage perfectly describes the strategy, for a plow is still
a blade and a hook still a lance, but their function and significance
are overturned.
The site sits at a point of maximum urban pressure. From the
north and south, hills pinch the city at this point. Like the
waist of an hourglass, the barracks area of Marijin Dvoru is a
narrow connector between the halves of the city. Axes of movement
- the river, the railroad and the major high-speed road that ties
the city together - define the edges and center of the site. The
flow increases speed as it is forced through a smaller passage
made by the mountains at the site. The design acknowledges this
law of physics but also bridges, cuts, even dams the flow from
north to south, connecting the hills and channeling the east-west
current. The new ring road will pass along the eastern edge of
the site crossing the river on a new bridge. This major route
will form the most emphatic of these north-south cuts. The intersection
of this vertical thoroughfare and the horizontal flow of the city's
main east/west artery, the former "sniper alley" of
Zmaja od Bosne, will make a center of gravity in the area, like
the train and bus station at the north-east corner of the barracks
and the parliament complex to the south east. These exert a force
at the eastern edge of the site that affects both program and
form. From east to west across the site, flow strata that are
accepted in our proposal as stripes. From north to south new routes
both cut and bridge the flow. Points of extreme activity generate
pressure on the development of the area. A nervous field is produced
where rules appear precise but edges and definitions remain fuzzy.
Alfred Jarry said, "You won't have destroyed everything
until you have destroyed the ruins." To avoid trauma and
amnesia, we have chosen to destroy the ruins, yet to keep a memory
of their destruction. The development of the barracks area as
the new university campus results in a dense filling-in of the
armature made by the nearly continuous 2-kilometer-long wall of
existing buildings. Like concrete poured into a form, the 151400
m2 of university program and an additional 80000 m2 of commercial
and social functions, flow into the 162500 m2 frame of the barracks.
New buildings cover 30% of the ground area in the campus with
an average of four floors. Dense foliage will fill in the rest
except for "memory voids," gaps left by the removal
of existing buildings. They are like forms taken away after the
mix hardens. They become gaps in the new mass of trees and structures.
In a literal application of a figure-ground reversal plan, all
arrangement begins with the absence of these original buildings.
These represent around 30% of the area of the quadrant. Thus the
physical fabric of the space is reversed (FIG.1). Void becomes
solid as in the castings of Rachel Whiteread. The rest of the
quadrant is colonized by buildings and trees - 30% each. The distribution
of trees is mandated by a template that places deciduous and evergreens
at optimal positions for sunlight penetration. Throughout the
seasons, the density and colors of the kasbah/pad trace the passing
of time, allowing more or less access to certain parts of the
plan, diluting or defining the edges of the “memory voids”
(FIG.2)…
The remaining 10% goes to circulation. Up to 6000 cars are parked
in a structure beneath the ground plane, occupying 132000 m2.
Vehicles enter from the south and move beneath the campus to any
point for service or close parking. A 9 x 9 m grid of structure
accommodates the cars below and the campus above.
The campus is both dense and open. It can be entered from any
point and includes community activities. Like most great university
campuses, it is also a programatically flexible and penetrable
labyrinth. The old kasbah of Sarajevo finds a dense equivalent
at Marijin Dvoru. The traumatic form of the old barracks remains
but is filled with new significance. Its actual walls are retained
in some places. At other points, the plan of the barracks becomes
a landscaped ring around the new campus. It is used for leisure
and exercise. The old footprints of the barracks can be appropriated
in predictable and unpredictable ways by the users of the campus:
surface parking, informal piazzas, sports terraces, running loops,
children sandpits, skating rinks, snow collectors, pet cemetery,
reflective pools, outdoors sculpture gardens, flea market with
temporary cover structures, flower pads, zen gardens, architecture
students 1:1 constructions, war memorials, urban agriculture…
The rest of site C and the available areas of site C1 are developed
with the remaining commercial and social functions. 185200 m2
of program are housed in a forest of towers and a field of low
bars accessible from all sides. The towers will mostly contain
office functions except for those close to the river that will
be new hotels. One of many possible versions of this development
is shown in the attached drawings. In the current example there
are 14 towers with an average footprint of 17 x 26.5 m and an
average height of 20 floors. In this they correspond to the fabric
of this part of the city where existing tall buildings produce
a range of landmarks that are seen from the surrounding hills
and reflect the height of those hills. The new towers sit on or
next to 17 bars of commercial and social functions. The towers
can attach to bars that then become their bases or can sit separately
in the spaces made by the bars. These bars, of an average of three
floors and a footprint of 15 x 80 m, host retail and public functions
on the first and second levels and commercial offices above. Larger
programmatic elements - theaters, dance halls, expositions, concert
spaces, etc. - can fit in these structures or protrude from them.
As with the pad/kasbah again the local existing fabric of the
area, one of towers and low commercial structures, is repeated
here but with a very different urban attitude.
The whole site, campus included, is designed to be viewed from
the hills above (FIG.3). The towers produce a field of objects
at the scale of the skyline. The bars, in their frequency and
proximity, produce a series of spaces of many scales. They read
as definers of urban space. Streets and plazas of various proportions
are shaped by these bars and towers. Like the Plaça Real
in Barcelona, a paved field is heavily landscaped and flexible
in its vehicular use while mostly pedestrian. The entire zone
of towers and bars is floored in stone, like villages and cities
of the region. This paving is then interrupted by lines of trees
running east-west, lawns, sports grounds and ponds. Vehicles can
move anywhere on this surface if necessary although parking largely
occurs beneath the bars except during exceptional events when
thousands of cars can be accommodated on the surface. Major paths
are determined by "desire lines" and thus run generally
north-south reiterating the cuts across the flow of landscaping
and connecting to the university to the north. Several paths rise
and bridge the high-speed Zmaja od Bosne and cross the campus
penetrating buildings and foliage to span the train tracks at
the north side of the site. They continue as well across the river
to the south. They stitch the site and hills, together (FIG.4).
The logic of this development can pertain to areas near the site
that are not part of the competition. The zone of the bus station
directly to the north of the campus can be developed as a series
of bars that serve transport with commerce on upper floors. The
proximity to the train station assures that this will be the transportation
hub of Sarajevo and also presents a second location, along with
the strip along the river, for more hotel towers. In fact, this
system can extend to various areas in the city, especially those
heavily damaged by war.
The system of spaces and objects proposes a general strategy
for producing new density in suburban sprawl while avoiding the
nostalgic recreation of archaic urban structures as has been mandated
in Berlin, for instance. Vast new programmatic areas can be accommodated
and urban spaces that address the concerns and activities of a
progressive community are generated. An urbanism that now seems
lacking in the immediate area of object-buildings, an urbanism
that values space as much as object, is reasserted here in contrast
to the density of the new campus which projects the intimacy of
the ancient city, of the "kasbah" that was Sarajevo.
The rest of the proposal, the field of bars and towers, presents
a play of open and linear space that spatial characterizes the
city of the post-Industrial Revolution.
The examples given in the drawings are flexible. Program can
be determined by need, thus more towers or bars can be developed
and connected or produced separately as the market dictates. The
spatial relation between them will conform to certain urban requirements
however. Large, medium and tight urban spaces are mandated in
exact relation to each other and form the major elements of a
code. The buildings fill in the gaps between these voids, a reversal
of the barracks strategy. Maximum formal diversity is encouraged
here within the urban limits. The actual position and function
of the bars will be determined by need but also by a strict relation
of the spaces that are left upon their construction. The towers
will conform in their placement to the open-space requirements.
Cut-outs and garden terraces are also required. The buildings
in site C1 cover 27.5% of the area.
Diversity is encouraged not just in the configuration of the
buildings and their program but also in the spaces that form between
them. As the project develops, a system of envelopes for building
construction will interact with a series of urban spaces, changing
with the seasons and the flow of users (FIG.5). Like the game
of Go, a certain inevitability will link the infinite variations
of what can never be random development.
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