“Sarajevo is not a sum of streets –
it is a cross-section of time.
…

Sarajevo is not just a city –

it is a pause in history.
A moment in which a person asks themselves:
‘Am I the city, or its consequence?“

Metaarhitektura Sarajeva, Bernard Bostjančić

In front of Hotel Evropa, one might find oneself standing on the border of times: on one side, a Viennese café; beside it, the ruins of the Ottoman Tašlihan, where a different ritual of coffee was practiced centuries earlier. Next to them, a socialist concrete wing and its post-war reconstruction, together a single building that carries the timeline of an entire city.

Sarajevo was shaped like this, through overlapping worlds and layers. The Ottoman Čaršija and hillside Mahala followed “unwritten laws”: the right to a view, human scale, houses that grew horizontally, and soft thresholds that prepared one for entering or leaving a space. A few centuries later, under Austro-Hungarian rule, orthogonal grids, boulevards, and monumental buildings were laid over. Yet the Ottoman fabric remained visible, interwoven with the new structures.

Under socialism, the new vision of a “Concrete Utopia” produced housing blocks, cultural halls, and public squares, ideals of collectivism that were soon interrupted by inequalities, shortages and the rise of informal growth on the city’s edges.

But circumstances changed for the far worse after the terrors of war in 1992–1995, following the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Sarajevo was besieged for nearly four years, its infrastructure and buildings destroyed, hundreds of thousands forced to flee. Destruction, exile, and return scarred the city and left behind new forms of unregulated building. Today, speculative apartments financed by the diaspora rise across Sarajevo, many left empty for years, while prices climb beyond the reach of most. Along the city’s axis, architectures of different epochs remain close, their relations ambiguous, their language incomplete.

Dževad Karahasan once wrote, “Sarajevo contains within itself, like a crystal sphere, what is in the world and what should be in the world.” Today, it mirrors global contradictions more openly and more rapidly than elsewhere, a city where the future has already arrived.

This semester, we will look into these layers, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, socialist, informal, speculative. We will analyse and explore these typologies, and find ways in which new forms of housing can be blurred into the city, staying in dialogue with its many worlds.