U r b a n r o o m s o f S a r a j e v o : Tr a n s f o r m i n g u r b a n p u b l i c s p a c e s u s i n g i n t e r i o r d e s i g n t o o l s
From the Habsburg Era to Early Yugoslav Sarajevo
Context: The final stages of the Habsburg administration in the city of Sarajevo, which had a population of 52,000 in the first decades of the 20th century, were marked by the rise of secular nationalism among ethnic groups, when neighbouring countries used Bosnia and Herzegovina as a battlefield for their mutual extraterritorial aspirations (Donia, 2006). The political and social upheaval culminated in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie on 28 June 1914, during their official visit to Sarajevo. This event led to World War I and put Sarajevo in the historical spotlight. The end of World War I was marked by the cessation of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, when Sarajevo and Bosnia and Herzegovina became part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. During the Early Yugoslav period of Sarajevo’s development, the principles of the modernist architectural movement of the first half of the 20th century were embraced. A group of Bosnian architects14 who graduated from prominent European architecture schools in Prague, Vienna and Zagreb designed the city’s first modernist public and residential buildings. They discarded the historical eclectic styles and ornamentation of the previous epochs, as well as the national, regional and ethnic architectural expressions of the past, and promoted the principles of functionalism and an international, ethnically unbiased, architectural idiom. The acceptance of modern architecture corresponded with the multinational identity and socio-political ideology of the Early Yugoslav period.
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The most prominent architects from the interwar period in Sarajevo were Mate Bajlon, Helen Baldasar, Jahiel Finci, Leon Kabiljo, Muhamed Kadic, Reuf Kadic, Emanuel Samanek and Dusan Smiljanic.
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