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Architecture · ·4 min read

Sarajevo — the two architects who fixed the city with three staircases, and won an architecture prize for it

Sarajevo runs on hills. The public rooms locals actually use aren't squares — they're the staircases and the small landings between them. Nermina Zagora and Dina Šamić rebuilt three of the city's stepped streets, added seating on the landings, restored a buried Ottoman fountain, and won the 2017 Collegium Artisticum prize for it. One of them is the climb every first-time visitor makes to Žuta Tabija.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Most cities are drawn on flat ground. Sarajevo is not. The residential fabric climbs the hillsides on both sides of the Miljacka, and the pedestrian public space of the city, the place where people actually meet, wait, and gather, is not squares. It’s staircases.

If you’ve been to Sarajevo you’ve walked stairs every day. The old mahalas on the north and south slopes of the Old Town are connected to each other by stepped streets with small landings at the corners. That pattern is Ottoman-vernacular urbanism, houses built into the slope, narrow stepped access, gathering room at each turn, and it survives into the modern city as the specific spatial condition for pedestrian life.

The book Urban Rooms of Sarajevo covers five case-study courtyards. What we hadn’t named is that the same two authors, Nermina Zagora and Dina Šamić, won an architectural prize in 2017 for three built urban staircases.

The 2017 prize

The Collegium Artisticum Prize for Contemporary Architecture is one of Bosnia’s principal architectural awards, given annually by the Association of Architects of BiH for built work of contemporary merit.

In 2017 it went to Zagora and Šamić for a joint project titled “Urbane akupunkture / Urban acupunctures: Three Sarajevo Stairs.”

The “urban acupuncture” concept the two architects work with is small, precisely-placed interventions in public space that have disproportionately large effects on how the neighbourhood functions. The medical analogy is exact: small needle at a specific pressure point, effect on a broader system.

The three staircases

From the book’s Foreword footnote 1 on p. 8:

1. The Vratnik ascent, Kovači steps. The stepped-street sequence rising north from Kovači cemetery toward the Vratnik ridge. The renovation put in new stone paving, three small landings with seating, and restored an Ottoman fountain that had been buried under post-war concrete. This is the pedestrian route locals use to reach Žuta Tabija from Baščaršija below. Every first-time visitor walks it at some point.

2. The Bistrik stairs. The stepped sequence descending from Bistrik south-east of Baščaršija toward the Miljacka at the Šeher-Ćehaja Bridge. The renovation resurfaced the treads, put in a new water-drainage system to replace the one that had failed during the siege, and added handrails that reference the traditional Ottoman-Bosnian metalwork practice.

3. The Marijin Dvor to Ciglane connector. The Habsburg-era stepped street that connects the Marijin Dvor axis south of the Miljacka to the socialist-era Ciglane housing estate on the ridge above. The renovation restored the 1970s concrete detailing that Neidhardt-influenced Sarajevo modernism had used, and added a small terrace-landing halfway up that serves as a gathering room for Ciglane residents.

Why staircases are urban rooms

The theoretical argument in Urban Rooms of Sarajevo, Chapter 4, is that pedestrian public space in the city is organised around an alternation of corridor and room. Narrow stepped streets are the corridors. Small landings between them are the rooms.

Sarajevans stop on the landings. They talk, they wait, they buy from a vendor if one’s there. The corridors are just how you get between rooms.

A “square” in the flat-city European sense, a large open plaza, is mostly a Habsburg-era imposition. The Ottoman city had no squares in that sense. It had avlije (enclosed courtyards) and stepped-street landings, which functioned as the meeting places of the residents.

Zagora and Šamić’s staircase renovations are, in the theoretical terms of the book, restorations of the pre-Habsburg urban-room typology.

Since 2017

Since the 2017 award, the practice has completed about seven more urban-staircase projects in Sarajevo. Most are municipal commissions from the Old Town municipality (Općina Stari Grad). Roughly one built staircase per year.

That’s an unusual pattern for a Bosnian architectural practice, where most public-sector work is intermittent and most commissions are private residential. Zagora and Šamić work in a mode that responds to how Sarajevans actually use public space, at the scale of the small landing.

What to do with this

If you walk from Baščaršija up to Žuta Tabija for the sunset view, you are walking the Kovači steps Zagora and Šamić renovated in 2017. The new stone paving, the three landings with seating, the incorporated Ottoman fountain, that’s their work.

Stop at the highest of the three landings and look back down toward Baščaršija. That small public room on the stairs is what an urban acupuncture intervention looks like when it works.

The book is a free download from the Faculty of Architecture, University of Sarajevo.

Sources

  • Nermina Zagora and Dina Šamić, Urban Rooms of Sarajevo (Faculty of Architecture, University of Sarajevo, 2021), Foreword p. 8 (fn. 1).
  • Association of Architects of BiH — Collegium Artisticum Prize records, 2017.
  • Općina Stari Grad Sarajevo — public-space commissioning records, 2017 onwards.

Sources & further reading

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