Landscape of Ruins: Targeting Architecture

Abstract

This chapter discusses the wartime destruction of architecture in the besieged Sarajevo. By focusing on the targeting and shelling of major public buildings, the chapter analyzes the effects of such violence on the transformation of their forms, uses and meanings, as well as on the broader reconfiguration of Sarajevo’s urban fabric. The argument is that such violence operated as a means of socio-spatial purification of the ethnic heterogeneity and difference from Sarajevo’s cityscape. Although most of the buildings in the city were hit, destroyed institutions of civil society were located across the entire city, while ethnically identified buildings were destroyed where they were ‘out of place’. Moreover, new forms of exclusive ethnic identity were produced through the public reception of such violence in media and everyday spatial discourse.