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Culture · ·4 min read

Sarajevo — Neidhardt's archive burned in the siege, and MoMA bought what survived in 2021

Juraj Neidhardt's private working archive, forty years of Sarajevan modernist design, was largely destroyed in the 1992–95 siege. A portion survived at the Bosnian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Another portion was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2021.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

The Grabrijan and Neidhardt story covers the 1957 book and the intellectual arc. It does not cover what happened to Neidhardt’s working papers when the war started. This piece is that story.

The archive, before 1992

Juraj Neidhardt (1901–1979) worked in Sarajevo for forty-one years, from his arrival from Zagreb in 1938 to his death in 1979. Over that period he produced thousands of working drawings, sketches, technical plans, site studies, competition entries, presentation renderings, and correspondence, associated with his built and unbuilt projects across Bosnia and beyond.

The archive was, per the standard architectural practice of the period, kept in his studio and later in his home. After his death in 1979 the archive stayed with his widow. A portion was donated during his lifetime to the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ANUBiH), which had, by the 1970s, been building a systematic collection of Bosnian modernist material.

By April 1992 the archive was split between three locations: ANUBiH’s holdings in central Sarajevo; his family’s private residence, also in central Sarajevo; and a secondary storage at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Sarajevo.

What happened during the siege

The siege of Sarajevo began on 5 April 1992 and lasted until 29 February 1996.

During the four years of shelling, the Faculty of Architecture building was badly damaged. Records held there, including a portion of the Neidhardt secondary storage, were destroyed. The National Library, which held some of Neidhardt’s correspondence, burned on the night of 25–26 August 1992 (see Aida Buturović).

The Neidhardt family’s private residence was hit by artillery during the siege. Some of the private archive was lost. Family members were able to move some of the surviving drawings to safer locations during the war years.

ANUBiH’s central Sarajevo building was, by comparison, better protected. The bulk of the Academy’s Neidhardt holdings survived.

At the end of the siege, the working estimate, assembled by Sarajevan architectural historians in the years following, was that approximately half of Neidhardt’s total archival output had been destroyed. The exact figure has never been definitively established, because comprehensive inventorying was not done before 1992.

What survives

After 1996, the surviving material was divided across several institutions:

  • ANUBiH in Sarajevo — the bulk of the surviving working papers, drawings, and correspondence.
  • The Faculty of Architecture: a small remaining collection, mostly student-project material from his teaching period.
  • The Neidhardt family: private holdings that had been moved to safety during the war and returned afterward.
  • The Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) in Ljubljana: a small transfer to Slovenia in the 1980s, before the war, of material related to Neidhardt’s early collaboration with Grabrijan (see Letters to Sarajevo).

The 2021 MoMA acquisition

In 2021, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired a portion of the surviving private-family holdings. The acquisition was made through the museum’s Architecture and Design department, then under chief curator Martino Stierli, as part of a broader MoMA push to build systematic holdings of Yugoslav modernist material.

The MoMA collection includes working drawings and correspondence from Neidhardt’s major built and unbuilt projects, with particular emphasis on the Marijin Dvor master plan (1960) and the Ski House on Trebević (see our story). The exact contents of the acquisition have not been fully published.

The Ciglane funicular staircase running up the hillside through the terraced concrete housing blocks of Ciglane, Sarajevo.
Ciglane — the 1976 concrete mahala that carried Neidhardt's contextual-housing arguments into built form. Photograph: Adam Harangozó, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The acquisition is part of MoMA’s Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 project, which grew from a 2018 exhibition of the same name. Yugoslav modernism, in a specific New York curatorial sense, was made permanent in the world’s most-visited modern-art collection during the same decade that surviving Yugoslav institutions were struggling to maintain the same holdings.

Why the split archive matters

For a Sarajevan architectural historian, Neidhardt’s split archive is a working problem. A researcher who wants to trace the full development of any single Neidhardt project must now, in the standard case, work across at least three institutional collections in three cities on two continents. The ANUBiH holdings are accessible in Sarajevo but not fully digitised. The MoMA holdings are in New York but require an appointment and, sometimes, travel funding. The MAO Ljubljana holdings cover the early period only.

For a general reader, the archive’s history is a specific example of what siege-era destruction does to a country’s cultural record. Some of what was lost is lost. Some of what survived is now in the world’s richest museum. The country’s own institution has the largest and least-accessible surviving portion. That is, in twenty-first-century Sarajevan cultural terms, a common shape.

What to do with the story

Read the Grabrijan and Neidhardt piece for the intellectual biography. Then, next time you walk past Ciglane, or the Marijin Dvor axis, or the Skenderija sports centre, remember that the working drawings that produced these buildings are, at this point, in New York, in Sarajevo, in Ljubljana, and, in significant part, gone.

The Docomomo Journal 72 issue (December 2024), edited by Nataša Koselj and Mejrema Zatrić, is the fullest scholarly overview of what survives and where.

Sources & further reading

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