MOUNTAINSCAPES
TU Delft, 2018
Studio: Graduation Studio, ExploreLab
Site: Mt. Trebevic, Sarajevo
Full project: Repository TU Delft - Mountainscapes
Nominated for preselection Archiprix
Mountainscapes is an academic research and design project that addresses the limitations of conventional planning and design tools in relation to complex, layered urban and landscape conditions.
Focusing on Sarajevo and its Olympic mountain landscape, including the abandoned bobsleigh track, the project brings together geological, political, social, and cultural dimensions of place. It explores how such sites cannot be understood through linear or purely analytical methods, but require approaches that account for lived experience, movement, time, and the multiple narratives embedded in the landscape.
The work examines the role of the designer within contemporary spatial transformation processes, questioning the traditional position of authorship in favour of more participatory and co-creative modes of practice. It responds to the growing complexity of urban development, where multiple actors shape space, and where design must move beyond top-down planning towards more open and relational methodologies.
Through cinematic narrative and film as a research method, the project explores alternative readings of the bobsleigh track as an open spatial condition. Rather than defining a fixed future use, it proposes the site as a void understood as potential: a space for appropriation, imagination, and unprogrammed activity shaped by its users over time.
By presenting multiple perspectives, the project seeks to preserve the openness of the site, allowing temporary appropriations and changing interpretations to coexist. It proposes an architectural approach in which time, transformation, and decay are not controlled, but actively incorporated as part of the spatial condition, enabling an open-ended and evolving urban landscape.
Tutors: Armina Pilav, Gilbert Koskamp, Tom Avermaete