During the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, efforts to protect the city’s architectural heritage resisted even under bombardment. At the Faculty of Architecture of Sarajevo, students and professors met in half-destroyed classrooms. Urban memory was preserved not only in buildings, but in acts of drawing, assembling, tracing. After the war, as international actors tried to “rebuild,” they often overlooked the complexity of the existing city. Projects imposed from outside failed to read the depth of the site its contradictions, its superimposed orders, its dissonances and continuities.

Sarajevo today is a city of visible and persistent urban layers. Ottoman neighborhoods climb the slopes in fine fabrics, Austro-Hungarian blocks define central axes, Yugoslav modernist buildings impose new grids and orientations. Post-war voids, reconstructions, and informal insertions cut through the city’s urban fabric. These layers do not simply follow one another: they coexist, interpenetrate, contradict. Unlike cities where time erases, Sarajevo accumulates. It does not present a coherent urban story, but a mosaic of contested narratives.

In this fractured yet continuous condition, the idea of typology takes on a new weight. Can architectural types be reactivated without replicating the past? Can they be critically reused, reconfigured, inhabited differently? What does it mean to retrofit a typology when the context itself is typologically unstable?

This semester will explore Sarajevo as a city of “songlines” drawn through memory: spatial, historical, emotional. They are traces that are able to connect fragments (a mosque courtyard, a socialist square, an abandoned lot) not in continuity, but through echoes and resonances. In this sense, retrofitting is not a technical operation, but a cultural one.

We will question how housing, understood as both a program and a spatial condition, can be used as a way to reactivate urban memory.

The studio will involve an excursion to Sarajevo, where we will walk these “songlines”, begin to draw the city through observation. We will use mapping, narrative, spatial analysis, and typological research to build our own tools of reading and intervening. Our focus will span from large-scale strategies, to precise, situated interventions, retrofits of typologies in tension. Through design, we will explore how new ways of dwelling can engage with the urban, how memory can become form, and how architecture can respond to specificity without nostalgia.