Architecture · August 22, 2026 ·9 min read

Sarajevo modernism began with 15,000 letters from Le Corbusier's Paris studio

Between 1933 and 1941, Dušan Grabrijan — professor at the Secondary Technical School in Sarajevo, occupied with the field research on the Bosnian oriental house that would become the 1957 book — received a steady stream of letters from Paris. They were written by Juraj Neidhardt, Milan Sever, Marjan Tepina, and Edvard Ravnikar, all of whom were then working at Le Corbusier's studio at 35 Rue de Sèvres. The letters sit at MAO Ljubljana today, 15,000 items in 60 boxes. What they say, and why they matter for the story of Sarajevan modernism.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

In the autumn of 1930 a thirty-one-year-old Slovenian architect named Dušan Grabrijan moved to Sarajevo. He was the first graduate of Jože Plečnik’s Ljubljana seminar and a former scholarship student at the École des beaux-arts in Paris. He came to take a teaching post at the Secondary Technical School. He stayed fifteen years, through the interwar period, through the German occupation (1941–45), until the socialist takeover in 1945, when he returned to Ljubljana to teach at the Technical Faculty.

During those fifteen Sarajevo years Grabrijan did the field research that would become Arhitektura Bosne i put u savremeno (1957), the joint book with Juraj Neidhardt, prefaced by Le Corbusier, now read as the founding document of Bosnian architectural modernism.

He also, and this is the part this story is about, received a lot of mail.

Between 1933 and 1941, four Yugoslav architects working at Le Corbusier’s studio at 35 Rue de Sèvres in Paris wrote letters to Grabrijan in Sarajevo. Neidhardt himself sent about 180 letters, postcards, and telegrams in that period. Milan Sever, Marjan Tepina, and Edvard Ravnikar also wrote regularly. Grabrijan kept every letter. His widow Nada kept the archive intact for fifty years after his death. In 2003, her relative Irena Confidenti donated the whole thing to the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) in Ljubljana.

The MAO Grabrijan archive fills 60 storage boxes and 14 folders of plans, about 15,000 items in total. It is one of the largest in the museum. Bogo Zupančič curated the working catalogue and, in 2024, published a compact digest of the Paris-to-Sarajevo correspondence in Docomomo Journal 72.

Why Sarajevo mattered as an address

Le Corbusier’s studio at 35 Rue de Sèvres, in the former corridor of a Left Bank monastery, hosted 17 Yugoslav architects between 1926 and 1940 (Zupančič 2024, p. 7). Ten of them were Slovenian, a group large enough that Le Corbusier himself referred to the decade as l’epoque slovène of his studio. The most prominent were Ernest Weissmann (from Croatia), Juraj Neidhardt (from Croatia, born to a German-Bosnian family), and Edvard Ravnikar (from Slovenia, later regarded as the most important Slovenian architect of the post-war period).

Grabrijan was not one of the Rue de Sèvres seventeen. He never worked in Le Corbusier’s studio. But he had already been in Paris in 1925–26 as a Plečnik-recommended ENSBA scholar, knew Corbusier’s early publications thoroughly, and had connections with almost every Slovenian architect who eventually did work at 35 Rue de Sèvres. Zupančič’s phrase for Grabrijan’s function is precise: he was the connective node between the Ljubljana Plečnik seminar, the Paris Corbusier studio, and the Sarajevo research on the Bosnian oriental house.

The letters went to Sarajevo because Grabrijan was in Sarajevo. Every Slovenian architect who left for Paris in the 1930s wrote him at the STS.

The Sarajevo valley — the city that Grabrijan wrote to Neidhardt about from Ljubljana between 1933 and 1941, in the letters this article traces. — Sarajevo. The city they were writing about. Photograph: **Julian Nyča**, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Milan Sever, first letter, 8 December 1933

Milan Sever (1904–1962), a Plečnik seminar contemporary of Grabrijan’s, arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1933 to work at Rue de Sèvres. Grabrijan had helped him get accepted at the studio. Sever’s first letter back to Sarajevo, dated 8 December 1933, is preserved at MAO. Its opening sentence reads:

“Dear Grabrijan, I’m over the moon! I got a place with Corbusier as soon as I arrived here.” — Milan Sever to Dušan Grabrijan, 8 December 1933 (MAO archive)

The rest of the letter describes the studio: “an enormous corridor of a former monastery.” Fifteen people of “all nationalities, ages and educational background.” The team of Corbusier, cousin Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand (Sever’s Ms Perriand, whose furniture designs were the studio’s most distinctive product). The project on the drawing boards that December was a competition entry for an insurance company in Zurich.

Sever’s assessment of Corbusier himself is the honest note of a young Slovenian meeting a legend:

“Corbusier himself is approachable, although a bit reserved, and he speaks German, too. No nimbus around him.”

Sever also enrolled, not at Corbusier’s separate teaching school (the École spéciale d’architecture, which he had a French scholarship for) but at the Sorbonne, in the urban design institute’s library.

The Sarajevo point: the young Slovenian architect who arrived in Paris in December 1933 knew that his mentor’s mentor was in Sarajevo. He wrote there first.

Neidhardt, from Paris, mid-1935

Juraj Neidhardt worked in Corbusier’s studio from January 1933 until mid-1935. He is by far the most represented correspondent in Grabrijan’s archive: about 180 letters, postcards, and telegrams in the fifteen years of Grabrijan’s Sarajevo period.

One of the more revealing letters was written in mid-1935, near the end of Neidhardt’s Paris stay:

“I have recently seen Le Corbusier and he advised me not to return to Yugoslavia and to go to Argentina instead.” — Juraj Neidhardt to Dušan Grabrijan, mid-1935 (MAO archive)

The reason Corbusier gave, Zupančič’s paraphrase, was that Yugoslavia would be “a waste of my talent”, whereas Argentina was “fertile ground”.

Neidhardt did not go to Argentina. He returned to Zagreb in mid-1935, and three years later, in 1938, on Grabrijan’s invitation, he moved to Sarajevo. The reason he moved was, at least in part, the Sarajevo letter he had received a few months earlier from Grabrijan: the Sokol club-house competition. Neidhardt writes in the same letter: “The eye-opener was the Sarajevo competition [for the Sokol club house] for which I am sure I submitted the best project.”

The Sokol competition, a Yugoslav sports club-house design contest for Sarajevo, was, on the surface, a small provincial commission. To a young Yugoslav modernist in Le Corbusier’s Paris studio, it was proof that his own home country could sponsor a modern architectural argument. Neidhardt did not win. But the exercise brought him back into the Yugoslav orbit, and by 1938 he was in Sarajevo.

The 1936 Sarajevo exhibition

The most concrete Sarajevo event in the Grabrijan-Neidhardt correspondence is the October 1936 Neidhardt exhibition that Grabrijan organised in Sarajevo. Neidhardt sent his drawings and photographs down from Zagreb. Grabrijan hung them. Neidhardt dedicated the exhibition to Le Corbusier.

The exhibition, a small show of Neidhardt’s Paris studio work and his early Zagreb designs, was one of the first modernist architecture exhibitions ever held in Sarajevo. Zupančič reproduces a photograph of the installation (Figure 7 in his article): the drawings pinned to boards, a small explanatory panel at the bottom-left.

Neidhardt was so grateful for the Sarajevo exhibition that on 6 November 1936 he wrote to Grabrijan enclosing a gift, an original Le Corbusier drawing. The drawing is a small pencil study, 13.5 × 21 cm, of a woman’s head in three-quarter profile. Zupančič notes (following the paper’s shipping-line stamp, from Compagnie De Navigation Sud-Atlantique) that Le Corbusier probably made it during his 1929 Argentina-Brazil trip; the subject is most likely Josephine Baker, who travelled on the same liner. The drawing sits at MAO today (Figure 9 of Zupančič’s article).

The exhibition travelled from Sarajevo to Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Belgrade. It was the first time Neidhardt’s work was shown in all four Yugoslav capitals.

The 1939 letters, Sever on Neidhardt on Corbusier

In January 1939, Sever wrote to Grabrijan from Ljubljana (he had returned by then) with a piece of gossip about Neidhardt:

“Neidhardt had criticised Le Corbusier already in Paris and I wrote somewhere that this was Neidhardt’s progress versus Le Corbusier.” — Milan Sever to Dušan Grabrijan, 12 January 1939 (MAO archive)

The comment was in reference to Le Corbusier’s book Œuvre complète 1934–38, which had just come out. Neidhardt, who had contributed to the studio’s work during those years, disagreed with the way Le Corbusier framed it. Sever added that Corbusier “wanted to be in control of every detail, like Plečnik!”, the parallel that Slovenian architects noticed but rarely voiced in print.

Same month, 26 January 1939, Marjan Tepina, another Ljubljana architect then in Paris, wrote to Grabrijan proposing that Grabrijan take on a role as Yugoslav correspondent for the French architecture magazine L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. Tepina had joined the AA editorial board and wanted to bring Yugoslav modernism onto the French pages. Grabrijan declined. Zupančič suggests he judged the effort too costly in field trips, photography, and his own money.

Grabrijan turned down a Paris platform to stay with the Sarajevo field research. That decision is, in retrospect, the one that produced the 1957 book. If Grabrijan had spent 1939–41 filing quarterly reports to Paris, he would not have finished the Bosnian oriental house monograph.

Where the letters end up

The letters do not describe Sarajevo. They describe Paris. But they were received in Sarajevo, over an eight-year window, by the person who was then doing the most sustained scholarly work on the Bosnian oriental house.

The pipeline is legible in the archive: Corbusier’s studio → Neidhardt, Sever, Tepina, Ravnikar → Grabrijan’s classroom → the 1957 book → post-war Sarajevan modernism. The hardware output of that pipeline is not in Ljubljana. It is on Sarajevan streets.

Džidžikovac (1948, arch. Reuf Kadić) is the clearest single example. A small modernist residential complex on the north side of the centre, one of the earliest post-war modernist buildings in the city, drawn in a vocabulary Grabrijan and Neidhardt had been working out in Sarajevo classrooms during the 1930s. Kadić trained in that room. The simplified pitched roofs, the cantilevered upper floors, the terrain-adaptive massing at Džidžikovac are direct debts to what the letters brought in.

The Alipašina Street ensemble (see the three neighbourhood ideas), Alipašino Polje, and Ciglane (the mahala-in-concrete story) all descend in traceable steps from the 1957 book Grabrijan wrote using material sent to his classroom by his colleagues in Paris.

What is at MAO, and what a visitor can see

The MAO Grabrijan archive in Ljubljana is open to researchers by appointment. The public will not, in most cases, see original letters. What is regularly on display in MAO’s rotating exhibitions:

Grabrijan’s sketchbooks from the 1930s, his working drawings of Bosnian oriental houses on the Sarajevo mahalas. Figure 4 in Zupančič’s article reproduces two pages, showing Grabrijan’s analytical sketches of Sarajevo house facades with the doksat cantilever and šadrvan fountain marked in his handwriting.
The 1936 Neidhardt Sarajevo exhibition photograph, Figure 7 in Zupančič’s article, showing how the drawings were hung on rooftop-sun-shielded boards in the STS lobby.
The Josephine Baker drawing by Le Corbusier, the 1936 gift from Neidhardt to Grabrijan.
Milan Sever’s December 1933 postcard, the first Paris letter, small, folded once, still legible.

The 2006 MAO exhibition Plečnik’s Students at Le Corbusier’s Studio, which Zupančič curated, is the fullest presentation of the Paris connection to date. It has been updated and re-hung in Ljubljana, Murska Sobota, Split, Nova Gorica, and Firminy; the accompanying book is at MAO.

For a Sarajevo reader, the most tangible surviving trace of the pipeline is not in Ljubljana. It is on Sarajevan streets, the residential buildings from the late 1940s and the 1950s that were designed by people who had either received the Paris letters directly (Neidhardt) or been taught by Grabrijan (Kadić, and others). Walk Džidžikovac ten minutes north-west from the National Museum. Then walk the Alipašina backdrop ten minutes east. Neither building would look the way it does without a mailbox in an STS classroom in Sarajevo where letters arrived, week after week, from 35 Rue de Sèvres.

Sources

Bogo Zupančič, “Letters from Paris and Architect Dušan Grabrijan’s Archive”, Docomomo Journal 72 (2024/3), 7–15. Docomomo Journal.
Bogo Zupančič (ed.), Plečnik’s Students at Le Corbusier’s Studio (Ljubljana: Museum of Architecture and Design, 2017).
Dušan Grabrijan and Juraj Neidhardt, Arhitektura Bosne i put u savremeno (Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije, 1957; reprinted Sarajevo: ANUBiH, 2023).
Karlić Kapetanović, J., Juraj Najdhart. Život i djelo (Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša, 1990).
Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), Ljubljana, Grabrijan archive (60 boxes, ~15,000 items). Donated 2003.

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