At the invitation of Dr Senka Ibrisimbegovic, we took part in a three-day visit to Sarajevo with my colleague Viktor Rozman and five MSc in Architecture students. Senka is not only a very agile professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Sarajevo, but also the curator of the Olympic Museum in Sarajevo and the professional leader of the museum project "Ars Aevi" designed by Renzo Piano.

Our acquaintance with Senka dates back to last year, when we participated together as guest lecturers and consultants in the Summer School of Architecture in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. It was there when she first mentioned the plans for the “Ars Aevi” museum and an urban project to not only build a new museum but also to completely regenerate the neighbourhood. The idea was to start the construction works of the museum in the autumn of 2025, but the specific decision-making process did not allow this, so we "only" saw the blueprints of the museum, and Senka gave a very professional, yet very personal account of the project and its circumstances.

But we also got a shocking and at the same time is very uplifting picture of everyday life in Sarajevo, where the physical and mental bullet marks of the South Slavic war three decades ago can be seen on almost every corner.

The city itself has undergone a very specific evolution, with a distinctive division between the medieval quarter, dating back to nearly 500 years of Turkish occupation, the monarchy-era streets and the modern neighbourhoods. Visitors can thus walk through a living architectural museum, where a few hundred metres separate the traditional oriental bazaar from the streets of a district that could be the 5th district of Budapest mixing the typical architecture of social realism.

It is planned to continue this diversity in Renzo Piano's building as soon as current policy allows.
(Cseh Zsolt)