Architect Contemporary architectural scholarship
Boris Trapara
The Sarajevo scholar whose 2019 dissertation turned 'Sarajevo looks like Vienna' into a specific claim about which architect drew what where.
The Main Post Office (Vancaš, 1913) — Trapara's sharpest Vienna twin. · Ph: Fred Romero · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0
- Nationality
- Bosnian
- Trained
- INALCO Paris (École doctorale 265 CREE) and International Burch University Sarajevo, Department of Architecture
- Era
- Contemporary architectural scholarship
- Key work
- From Vienna to Sarajevo (2019 joint PhD, 414 pp) · Chapter 4 — the five Sarajevo–Vienna twin pairs · Chapter 3.7 — biographies of Vancaš and Pařík
Boris Trapara defended a joint PhD (thèse en cotutelle) on 13 December 2019 at two institutions in parallel: INALCO in Paris (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, École doctorale 265 CREE) under Taline Ter Minassian, and the Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Department of Architecture at International Burch University Sarajevo under Maja Popovac. The title is From Vienna to Sarajevo, role models and replicas in the architecture of Austro-Hungarian period. It runs to 414 pages, in English, with a French summary. It is freely downloadable from HAL, the French national theses archive.
Trapara is a contemporary Bosnian scholar of architecture, not a Habsburg-era builder. Most tourists and readers know the general point his dissertation starts from: Sarajevo’s Habsburg quarter looks Central European because it was designed by Central European architects. Trapara makes the general point precise. Building by building, he argues that Sarajevo’s Habsburg-era architecture is legible as provincial-scale replicas of named Vienna originals, drawn by known hands from known drafting rooms.
The five pairs
Chapter 4 of the dissertation pairs five Sarajevo buildings with five Vienna twins. Each pair is read through the lens of genius loci to distinguish translation from copy:
- Academy of Fine Arts (originally the Evangelical Church, Karel Pařík, 1899) ↔ Protestant Chapel, Vienna.
- National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Pařík, 1909–1913) ↔ Künstlerhaus and Musikverein, Vienna, on the Ringstrasse.
- Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina (originally the Land Government building) ↔ Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), Vienna (Heinrich von Ferstel, 1868–1871).
- Marienhof (Josip Vancaš, 1893) ↔ Baldiahof, Vienna.
- Main Post Office (Vancaš, 1913) ↔ Postsparkasse (Postal Savings Bank), Vienna (Otto Wagner, 1906).
The pairs are not identical reproductions. Each is a translation: the Vienna template shrunk, adjusted for the smaller square, re-detailed for local materials, but with the same underlying architectural DNA.
Beyond Chapter 4
The dissertation is not only the five pairs. Chapter 3.6 treats the Neo-Moorish style as political voice, useful companion reading to Maximilian Hartmuth’s ERC work on Orientalizing architecture. Chapter 3.7 carries the biographies of Vancaš and Pařík, with attributions for roughly forty of Vancaš’s surviving buildings and a shorter list for Pařík. It is, on its own, a working reference document.
The chronological range extends beyond Zahra Kadkani-Schmitt’s 1903 cap (in her UC Berkeley dissertation on the same period) all the way to the end of Habsburg rule in 1918. That means Trapara covers the late-Habsburg Secessionist works — the Main Post Office in 1913, the Ashkenazi Synagogue from 1902 onward — that Kadkani-Schmitt does not.
Where to read him
The dissertation lives at HAL, the French national theses archive: tel-02992615. English text, French summary, 414 pages, no paywall. A PDF cache is also kept in the site’s editorial materials/ folder for internal citation work.
How this site uses him
Twenty-six pages on this site cite Trapara at chapter or page level. Alongside Zahra Kadkani-Schmitt (UC Berkeley, 2017) and Maximilian Hartmuth (ERC Vienna, 2020), he is one of the three scholars whose archival findings anchor the site’s Habsburg-era coverage.
Where Kadkani-Schmitt argues the political logic (why the Habsburg administration built what it built), Trapara maps the building genealogy: which Vienna model each Sarajevo building descends from. Hartmuth extends the argument outward, showing that the Vijećnica has five provincial siblings in northern Bosnia: Brčko, Bosanska Gradiška, Kostajnica, Bosanski Novi, and Odžak. The three sources together give the fullest current picture of Habsburg Sarajevo.
Trapara’s contribution is the one you can put on a map and walk.
The walking key
Print the five pairs. Do them in one afternoon. The Academy of Fine Arts, the National Museum, the Presidency, the Marienhof, the Main Post Office. Every one within a thirty-minute walking radius of Marijin Dvor, every one on this site with its own page. The dissertation, 414 pages of it, sits in your pocket as a PDF.
Sources & further reading
- Boris Trapara, From Vienna to Sarajevo, role models and replicas in the architecture of Austro-Hungarian period (joint PhD dissertation, INALCO Paris and International Burch University Sarajevo, defended 13 December 2019). HAL: tel-02992615.
- Zahra Kadkani-Schmitt, Framing Bosnia (PhD dissertation, UC Berkeley, 2017) — the political-administrative companion piece.
- Maximilian Hartmuth, Orientalizing architecture in northern Bosnia under Habsburg rule (ERC 758099 Working Paper #4, University of Vienna, 2020) — the wider-programme companion piece.