In that unbounded moment I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one impressed me more than the fact that all occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous: what I shall write is successive, because language is successive. Something of it, though, I will capture: the inconceivable universe.

(Borges, Aleph)

The song and the land are one; to know the song is to know the path, and to follow the path is to keep the land alive. Each verse corresponds to a stretch of country,its features and its stories. Together they form a map, sung from start to finish, that is both geography and memory.

(Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines)

Sarajevo is a city that cannot forget. Its urban structure is written in lines. Each line refuses erasure. As such, nothing in Sarajevo is removed: its narratives do not workby substitution, but by addition and juxtaposition.

Sarajevo and its lines are one; to know the line is to keep the city alive. Each segment corresponds to a stretch of streets, its buildings and its stories. Together they form a map that is both geography and memory. Sarajevo’s lines are not only abstract geometries, but physical traces of moments in history: Ottoman bazaars still suggesting the rhythms of daily movement; Austro-Hungarian grids holding their ceremonial alignments; socialist housing ensembles stretching along meticulously planned axes; improvised post-war insertions weaving into gaps and scars. Each line belongs to its own time, yet they coexist in the same terrain, inscribed into an elongated valley, following the chants and times of muezzins’ melodies, the tolling of church bells, the quiet processions of synagogues. Sarajevo’s lines form a palimpsest in which what is visible today is a mixture of stories encapsulated in the city’s urban scape. They are not simply layers stacked in time; they are coexisting systems, each with its own orientation, scale, and spatial rules. Moving through Sarajevo means crossing from one set of spatial instructions into another — an abrupt shift from the intimate enclosure of a courtyard to the perspectival reach of an imperial boulevard, into the open, gridded plains of socialist modernism, and finally into the tight-knit, improvised paths of hillside settlements. 

This linear mosaic gives Sarajevo an urban metabolism opposed to that of cities built on erasure. Here, tabula rasa never accomplished its project. Newness and political systems have coexisted together, sometimes colliding with the already existent, sometimes overlaying without correspondence, sometimes blending or confirming spatial dispositions. The result is a fabric of mismatched scales, adjacencies, and cultures — a city whose multiethnic past remains embedded in its present form.

Anamnesis here is not simply the archaeology of memory but the recognition of underlying structures and systems — cultural as well as spatial — that are still forming the city. It is the practice of working within Sarajevo’s inherited geometries, retrieving their capacities, extending their reach, and discovering how they can generate new forms of inhabitation without being reduced to relics. Not a singular image. Not a clean diagram. Rather, a set of architectures capable of holding several times, different spatial conceptions at once, in which the past is neither erased nor embalmed, but remains active as a generative force that asks to be unveiled by architecture.

The studio will start by redrawing some of the most exemplary buildings built in Sarajevo and sourroundings in the last one thousands years, in order to rediscover songlines that are hidden or forgotten. We will work on continuities, overlaps, hidden alignments and invisible coexistences, includin the informal lines of post-war settlements, and operate on those points where housing and public life intersect. The studio will spin around the intriguing hypothesis that ‘housing +’ could truly discover and affirm ways of inhabiting the city, in which architecture as a civiv art is truly affirmed.