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Architecture · ·8 min read

Sarajevo's pravo na pogled — the Ottoman siting principle Neidhardt turned into modernist housing

Juraj Neidhardt worked out three distinct answers to the question of how modernist housing could sit properly in Sarajevo. Each was tested on a specific site in the city: workers' garden neighbourhoods in Vareš and Ilijaš, the Alipašina Street ensemble in the Miljacka valley, the unrealised Koševo Valley project of 1967. Each was rooted in the same Ottoman-Bosnian principle Grabrijan and Neidhardt named pravo na pogled — the right to an open view. Nevena Novaković's chapter in Docomomo Journal 72 is the recent research digest.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Sarajevo sits in a long east-west valley, hemmed on both sides by steep hillsides. From the fifteenth century onward the city built those hillsides up in mahalas, Ottoman residential neighbourhoods where the houses stack one above the other on the slope. From the outside a mahala looks disorganised. Roofs at different heights, walls at different angles, gardens visible through gaps between the buildings.

Not disorganised. It follows a rule. Every house on a Sarajevan mahala slope was built so that the house below did not block the view from the house above. The uphill neighbour had, and still has, an unobstructed line of sight down the valley. Eighteenth-century Sarajevans had a word for the rule: pravo na pogled, the right to a view.

Grabrijan and Neidhardt, in Sarajevo i njegovi trabanti (1942) and their canonical Arhitektura Bosne i put u savremeno (1957), argued this rule was the operative design principle behind the entire Ottoman-Bosnian city. A house does not stand alone. It stands in a mahala. A mahala does not stand alone. It stands on a slope. The slope faces a valley. The house has to negotiate with all four levels at once.

Between 1938 and 1967, Neidhardt developed three distinct modernist neighbourhood forms that translated pravo na pogled into twentieth-century housing. Each was tested on a real Sarajevo (or wider Bosnian) site. Nevena Novaković’s 2024 article is the working reference here.

Idea one, the garden neighbourhood, 1938–1944

When Neidhardt arrived in Sarajevo in 1938, from Zagreb, at Grabrijan’s invitation, after training with Peter Behrens in Berlin (1930–32) and Le Corbusier in Paris (1933–35), his first major commissions were workers’ housing for Jugočelik, the state steel-and-mining conglomerate that had been founded to exploit the Middle Bosnian brown-coal and iron-ore basin.

Between 1938 and 1944, Neidhardt drew workers’ settlements for six towns: Zenica, Vareš, Breza, Ilijaš, Ričica, and Ljubija. All were mining or steel towns; all sat on the north-central axis between Sarajevo and Banja Luka. The Vareš drawing, reproduced in Grabrijan and Neidhardt (1942), is the archetype: a scatter of small-scale collective houses, arranged at equal distances along the contour lines of the slope, each with an open view down the valley.

Neidhardt named the form the garden neighbourhood. He credited Adolf Loos’s Vienna theory of terrain-adaptive urbanism, tall buildings on flat land, medium-height buildings on gentle slopes, small houses on steep slopes, but the operating principle was the mahala rule.

The most sophisticated of the garden types was the kuća-stan, the “house-dwelling”, a six-apartment cube in which each unit had its own entrance from the outside space and its own garden. The typology sits alongside Loos and Ernst May in the interwar European catalogue of low-density workers’ housing.

The Bosnian post-war economy was hard on these settlements. Vareš’s Jugočelik shut down in the 1990s. The workers’ housing survived; some of it is still occupied. Ilijaš’s original Neidhardt blocks were partly demolished in the 2000s. The Zenica garden neighbourhood, the largest of the surviving Jugočelik sites, is still visible from the town’s ring road.

The Bosnian Sarajevo you can see today: on the ascent up Ilijaš from the Sarajevo–Zenica motorway, look right at the switchbacks. The two-storey terraced cubes staggered up the slope are Neidhardt’s Jugočelik. They are not romantic. They are also not mistakes.

A panoramic view of Sarajevo showing the layered hillside housing that Neidhardt's right-to-a-view principle — keeping each house's sightline over its downhill neighbour — was designed to preserve.
The layered slope. What Neidhardt's right-to-a-view principle was protecting. Photograph: Julian Nyča, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Idea two, the backdrop, 1947–1954

The second neighbourhood form was Neidhardt’s answer to the first post-war Yugoslav housing crisis in Sarajevo. Wartime Allied bombing raids destroyed the city in patches. The socialist Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia inherited a housing shortage that had to be solved fast.

Neidhardt called the second form the kulisa, from the theatre term for the wing-flat, the painted backdrop that stands at the side of a stage set. The idea, elaborated in Grabrijan and Neidhardt (1957), was that a housing ensemble should read from the valley as a single continuous silhouette, with the individual apartment blocks acting as the “wings” of a landscape stage. The kulisa form was the modernist descendant of the mahala’s serial roofscape: each block is separate, but the composition reads as one long piece of built terrain.

Neidhardt’s first Sarajevo kulisa was designed in 1947 and built between 1952 and 1954. It is the ensemble on Alipašina Street, the north bank of the Miljacka, at the base of Koševo hill, on a sharply inclined site. The blocks step up the slope. Each apartment on the upper floors has an open valley view, Neidhardt’s pravo na pogled, translated into concrete-slab form.

The Alipašina ensemble is still there. Ten minutes’ walk from Marijin Dvor, across the Miljacka. If you want to see how Neidhardt applied the mahala rule to socialist-modernist housing, this is where to look. Novaković’s article reproduces the original 1947 site plan.

A companion project, the Grbavica neighbourhood, on the south bank of the Miljacka, was designed by Neidhardt in 1953–54 to the same principles. It was never realised in Neidhardt’s form. Grbavica was built later, by other architects, along different lines. What survives of Neidhardt’s Grbavica is a set of plans and elevation drawings, held partly at the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ANUBiH) in Sarajevo and partly at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (which acquired the archive in 2021).

The primary residential building type Neidhardt used in the backdrop form was what he called the “house-ship” (kuća-brod), a conceptual design he had first formulated in Paris in Le Corbusier’s studio. The name deliberately alluded to the Corbusian paquebot. The house-ship’s main feature is that all apartments are accessed from an open outdoor gallery rather than an interior corridor. The gallery replaces the dark central hall, provides a covered outdoor walkway for children in the rain, and, critically, extends pravo na pogled to every apartment: each front door opens onto the shared open valley view.

Idea three, the beehive, 1967

The third neighbourhood form was Neidhardt’s late-career response to the high-rise mass-housing wave of Yugoslavia’s 1960s. By that decade, Yugoslav construction was producing about 150,000 homes a year. Most of them were tall slabs on flat sites, the anti-mahala. Neidhardt publicly criticised the wave. In his 1967 article in Arhitektura urbanizam, he argued the tall Yugoslav slabs neglected human scale, placed skyscrapers badly in the urban fabric, and copied foreign models without considering context.

The counter-argument he offered was the beehive neighbourhood, a housing form for higher density that still preserved the mahala’s terrain-articulated silhouette. He tested it in a 1967 project for the Koševo Valley in Sarajevo, on the ridge behind the Zetra sports hall.

The Koševo project was a collaged photographic model. Novaković reproduces it as Figure 8 in her article. Two modules: a vertical triangular prism carrying the circulation and the utilities, and horizontal apartment volumes cantilevered from it in three directions. The plan looked, from above, like the cells of a beehive. In section it stepped up the ridge in the same rhythm the Ottoman mahala had used four centuries earlier.

The Koševo Valley project was never built. The 1970s Yugoslav construction economy moved in exactly the direction Neidhardt had warned against. The beehive form survives in the drawings and in Neidhardt’s own model, photographed in Arhitektura urbanizam 47 in 1967 and in the ANUBiH archive.

What holds the three ideas together

The common thread, Novaković’s argument, and the reason to read her chapter, is that all three forms were Neidhardt’s attempts to apply a single Ottoman-Bosnian rule (the right to a view) at increasing densities.

  • Garden neighbourhood, low density. Small houses, generous open space.
  • Backdrop neighbourhood, medium density. Multi-storey apartment blocks arranged as a serial landscape.
  • Beehive neighbourhood, high density. Vertical clusters that still articulate the ridge.

The rule stays the same. Only the density changes. Grabrijan and Neidhardt formulated the argument in one sentence in the 1957 book:

“The oriental house is not as much in pursuit of sunlight as it is of views, wherever they may reach.” — Grabrijan and Neidhardt, Architecture of Bosnia and the Way towards Modernity, 1957, p. 148

Which is the argument for reading the mahala not as an antique but as a piece of urban design theory that modernism could learn from. It is also the reason Ciglane (see our story on Ciglane) works better than most Yugoslav post-war neighbourhoods: it applies the same principle at a different density, by different architects, in the same city.

Where to walk these ideas today

  • Alipašina Street, north bank of the Miljacka, the backdrop ensemble. Designed 1947, built 1952–54. Still occupied. Ten minutes on foot from Marijin Dvor.
  • Kovači, above Baščaršija, the eighteenth-century mahala the modernist forms tried to translate. Half an hour up the hill from the Sebilj.
  • The Koševo ridge, the site of the 1967 beehive project, unbuilt. From the Zetra area you can stand where the model wanted to sit. Nothing is there.
  • Zenica, Ilijaš, Vareš, the Jugočelik garden neighbourhoods. Day trip out of Sarajevo along the Bosna corridor. The Zenica settlement is the largest survivor.

Sources

  • Nevena Novaković, “Landscapes of Housing: Juraj Neidhardt’s Contextual Approach to Modern Neighborhood Design”, Docomomo Journal 72 (2024/3), 81–89. Docomomo Journal.
  • Dušan Grabrijan and Juraj Neidhardt, Arhitektura Bosne i put u savremeno (Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije, 1957; reprinted Sarajevo: Akademija nauka i umjetnosti Bosne i Hercegovine, 2023), especially pp. 148, 257, 302, 324, 348, 382.
  • Dušan Grabrijan and Juraj Neidhardt, Sarajevo i njegovi trabanti (Sarajevo: Tehnički vjesnik, 1942).
  • Juraj Neidhardt, “Komšiluk” (Neighborhood), Arhitektura 1 (1954), 22–23.
  • Juraj Neidhardt, “Susjedstvo: kuća-stan” (Neighborhood: house-dwelling), Arhitektura urbanizam 29 (1964), 45–46.
  • Juraj Neidhardt, “Anketa o posleratnom razvoju Jugoslavije” (Survey on post-war development of Yugoslavia), Arhitektura urbanizam 47 (1967), 35–36.
  • Karlić Kapetanović, J., Juraj Najdhart. Život i djelo (Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša, 1990), the canonical Neidhardt monograph in Bosnian.

Sources & further reading

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