ACSA New Instrumentalities

Healing the City: Elemental Constructions and the Universal Language of Architecture International Proceedings

Author(s): Mersiha Veledar

There is a bridge in the city I knew in my childhood, a bridge so breathtaking, one would not believe that within its many layers of smooth tenelia stone, there lie millions of eggshells tectonically binding what was once known as the widest arch in the world of that era. Having lived through the dissolution of the seven states that comprised the melting pot of former Yugoslavia and the 1992–1995 brutal genocide of Bosniaks in Mostar, a city of ancient bridge-keepers known as “Mostari,” I’ve directly witnessed the effects of man-made disasters as a strategic form of cultural erasure. This paper aims to critically explore my search towards ‘universality’ in the language of architecture vis-à-vis a sequence of elemental typologies as the new design objective that could challenge and begin to heal variant sites that have endured political, economic and cultural injustices across the world.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Intl.2018.40

Volume Editors
Ángela García de Paredes, Iñaqui Carnicero & Julio Salcedo-Fernandez

ISBN
978-1-944214-18-0