Architect Yugoslav & post-Yugoslav (1960s–2010s)
Zlatko Ugljen
Zlatko Ugljen won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1983 for the White Mosque at Visoko — the highest prize in Islamic architecture, worth $500,000 that year and putting him on a very short list of Bosnian architects to receive international recognition. Almost none of his 200 built works are in Sarajevo. But for four decades he taught in the Faculty of Architecture in Sarajevo, and the generation of architects that runs Bosnia's built environment today — from the Historical Museum's restorers to the Marijin Dvor developers — mostly passed through his studio. A guide to the man who shaped Sarajevan architecture from a lectern, having built almost none of it himself.
Šerefudin's White Mosque, Visoko (1980) · Ph: Julian Nyča · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
- Born
- 1929, Mostar
- Died
- 2018
- Nationality
- Bosnian
- Trained
- University of Sarajevo Faculty of Architecture
- Era
- Yugoslav & post-Yugoslav (1960s–2010s)
- Key work
- Šerefudin's White Mosque, Visoko (1980, Aga Khan Award 1983) · Franciscan Church, Nedžarići (Sarajevo) · 200+ built works across Bosnia
Zlatko Ugljen (born 1929, Mostar) is the most decorated Bosnian architect of the second half of the twentieth century. He designed more than two hundred buildings, twenty-nine of them sacral, across five decades of practice. In 1983 he won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for the Šerefudinova Bijela džamija, the White Mosque at Visoko, one of the most-photographed modernist mosques in the world. He was, and remains, a Full Member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ANUBiH).
Almost none of his built work is in Sarajevo.
That last sentence is the reason this piece exists. Because Ugljen’s built work is, in the strict inventory sense, elsewhere, Visoko, Tuzla, Livno, Mostar, a scatter of villages across Bosnia and Herzegovina, his effect on the city where he lived and worked is easy to miss. But he spent his working life at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Sarajevo, teaching design studios from the late 1950s through the 2000s. If you know a Sarajevan architect over forty, they took a studio from Ugljen or from someone Ugljen trained. The Sarajevo he shaped is the Sarajevo his students built.
The recent scholarly reference is a 553-page PhD dissertation by Danijela Ucović, defended at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb in 2022 under the supervision of Sanja Žaja Vrbica and Dragan Damjanović. It is in Croatian, freely available at the Zagreb repository, and is the fullest catalogue of Ugljen’s sacral output to date. What follows draws on Ucović’s chronological catalogue and the two interviews she conducted with Ugljen himself.
The teaching career, in one paragraph
Ugljen studied architecture at the University of Belgrade in the early 1950s, then worked briefly under the older generation of Bosnian modernists at the Sarajevo studio of Juraj Neidhardt (see our Ski House story and the three neighbourhood ideas). He joined the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Sarajevo in the mid-1950s, was promoted to full professor, and held teaching duties there until his semi-retirement in the 2000s.
Ucović’s interview transcripts document Ugljen naming the specific architects who influenced his teaching approach: Neidhardt for the vernacular-to-modernism synthesis, Le Corbusier for the formal vocabulary (Ugljen visited Ronchamp several times and referenced it in his own studio critiques), Alvar Aalto for material culture, and a slightly surprising choice, Louis Kahn, whom Ugljen encountered through publications in the 1960s and whom he cited when designing sacral buildings. The Kahn influence is legible in the White Mosque’s monumental brick geometry.
The generations of Sarajevan architects who studied with Ugljen produced most of the post-1970 built city. That is not a claim of direct authorship on any specific Sarajevo building. It is a claim about the intellectual environment in which Sarajevo’s post-Yugoslav architects trained.
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The one Sarajevo commission
Ugljen’s single documented sacral commission inside the city of Sarajevo is the interior of the Church of St. Paul in the Franciscan monastery at Nedžarići, a western neighbourhood on the Sarajevo-Ilidža axis. The project dates to 1983; the interior was realised in 1987.
Ucović treats this as a minor project in Ugljen’s catalogue (Section 5.5 of her dissertation), but it is worth walking to. The Franciscan monastery at Nedžarići is on Aleja Bosne Srebrene, about a fifteen-minute tram ride west of the city centre on the number 3 line. The interior, pews, altar composition, ambo, tabernacle placement, liturgical furnishings, is Ugljen’s. The building envelope was designed by other hands.
The intervention is characteristically restrained. Ugljen’s approach to sacral interiors, per his own explanation to Ucović, was to allow the liturgy to organise the space and to avoid decorative gestures that would compete with it. Compare, in the same trip, with the interior of the Ashkenazi Synagogue on Ferhadija (1902, Karel Pařík): a Habsburg-era Orientalising interior with far more decorative density. Two different centuries of liturgical space-making, both in central Sarajevo, one Ottoman-Habsburg synagogue, one Bosnian modernist Franciscan church interior.
The White Mosque at Visoko — day trip
Ugljen’s masterpiece, the building most commonly named when architecture critics list Bosnia’s contribution to the modernist canon, is the Šerefudinova Bijela džamija, the White Mosque of Serefudin, in Visoko, thirty kilometres north of Sarajevo on the Bosna corridor.
The project timeline in Ucović’s Chapter 5.1:
- 1967: Ugljen begins the project at the request of the local Islamic Community.
- 1970: the design is completed.
- 1980: the building is finally constructed and opened for worship. The ten-year gap between design completion and realisation reflects the socialist Yugoslav state’s ambivalence toward funding religious buildings.
- 1983: the mosque receives the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, one of six laureates that year. Jury included Charles Correa, Hasan-Uddin Khan, and William J. R. Curtis.
The building is white-plastered concrete, monolithic on the exterior, geometrically complex on the interior. There is no formal minaret; the call to prayer is issued from a stepped white masonry element that reads as sculpture more than tower. The interior organizes prayer around a Kahn-influenced central-plan geometry, lit by a triangular oculus that tracks the sun.
If you want to see Ugljen’s built work, this is where to go. Bus to Visoko from the East Sarajevo bus station, about an hour. The mosque is a 15-minute walk from the town centre. Non-Muslim visitors are welcome outside prayer times; cover, remove shoes, be quiet.
The wider sacral catalogue
Ucović’s Chapters 5 and 6 catalogue Ugljen’s other realised and unrealised sacral projects. The list is worth naming because it maps a specific pattern: Ugljen designed for both Muslim and Catholic communities during four decades of a socialist state that officially discouraged religious construction, and did so from a Sarajevan academic position. The commissions came to him because the profession trusted him and because his design philosophy was legibly modernist rather than sectarian.
Realised, in chronological order:
- 1980: Šerefudinova Bijela džamija, Visoko (see above).
- 1985: Church of Saints Peter and Paul with monastery, Tuzla.
- 1985: Chapel in the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul in Gorica, Livno.
- 1987: Interior of St. Paul, Franciscan monastery Nedžarići, Sarajevo (see above).
- 1992: Church of the Most Sacred Heart of Mary, Foča near Doboj — destroyed the same year in the Bosnian war.
- 1997: Chapel of Christ’s Ascension, Mostar diocesan cultural centre (partially realised).
- 2011: Chapel of St. Ives, Plehan religious and cultural centre (project 1993).
- 2012: Behram-beg medresa mosque, Tuzla.
Multiple unrealised projects, most from the wartime and early post-war years:
- 1972: Cathedral in Mostar (unrealised idea project).
- 1993: Hadži Alija Hadžisalihović mosque, Stolac.
- 1993: Church of St. Marko the Evangelist, Plehan.
- 1996: Catholic Church of St. Josip, Gornja Dubica near Odžak.
- 1996: Catholic chapel at Čapljina.
- Unrealised project of Sultan Selim (Careva) mosque, Stolac.
Twenty-first-century projects, mostly for smaller Catholic parishes across BiH, 15 catalogued by Ucović.
Why this matters for reading Sarajevo
Two threads join here.
First, the story of Bosnian modernism is not a story of Sarajevo alone. Grabrijan and Neidhardt built (or, in Grabrijan’s case, theorised) their vocabulary in Sarajevo. Ugljen carried that vocabulary forward from the same institution but applied it to sacral buildings scattered across Bosnia. The city’s contribution to modernist architecture is partly its non-Sarajevo output.
Second, the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Sarajevo is a working piece of civic infrastructure. It sits, unnoticed by most visitors, at Patriotske lige 30, ten minutes on foot from the National Museum. Its building is late-modernist, functional, unremarkable from the outside. Inside, it has trained every Sarajevan architect since 1949. Ugljen was one of a small number of professors whose reputation drew serious students through the door for four decades.
Walk past it on your way somewhere else. The Sarajevo you are walking through, most of the buildings built since 1970, was drawn by people who took a design studio inside that building.
Sources
- Danijela Ucović, Sakralna arhitektura Zlatka Ugljena, PhD dissertation, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2022. Supervisors: Sanja Žaja Vrbica and Dragan Damjanović. Zagreb repository.
- Aga Khan Trust for Culture, 1983 Aga Khan Award for Architecture, White Mosque, Visoko. Project entry.
- Nadira Ugljen Ademović and Ena Turkušić, A synthesis of modern and traditional features in Bosnia, chapter in M. Mrduljaš and V. Kulić (eds.), Unfinished Modernisations: Between Utopia and Pragmatism (Croatian Architects’ Association, 2012), 432–443.
- Ivan Štraus, Nova arhitektura Bosne i Hercegovine 1945–1975 (Sarajevo, 1977), the standard reference on the wider period.
- Faculty of Architecture, University of Sarajevo — the institution itself.
- Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ANUBiH), Zlatko Ugljen membership records.