Harmonizing the Old and the New: Urban ensemble as decoded and conceived in the texts by Dušan Grabrijan and Bogdan Bogdanović

This paper seeks to uncover terms of comparability between Bogdan Bogdanović’s and Dušan Grabrijan’s texts, building on a thorough translation and interpretation of the written work published by Bogdanović in Mali Urbanizam and by Grabrijan on Sarajevo between 1936 and 1942. From 1956 to 1958, at the beginning of a successful career as an architect of memorials and monuments, Bogdan Bogdanović produced a monthly column called ‘Mali Urbanizam’ (Small-scale urbanism) in Borba, the Yugoslav publication that bestowed the coveted yearly prize for architecture. This body of articles includes topics concerning urban design, architecture, art, and how reinterpretations and reflections of historical cities and heritage may suggest spatial features adaptable in the post-war reconstruction of Yugoslavia. It is no coincidence that his first article was dedicated to Jože Plečnik, whom Bogdanović considered a pioneer in small-scale urbanism. Through a comparative analysis of texts by Grabrijan and Bogdanović, this paper identifies the topic of historic urban ensembles both as precedent and as an area for modern design intervention, given the layered and multifold cultural built heritage that preceded the unification of Yugoslavia. The term ‘ensemble’ is here used to encompass the formal and historical peculiarities of Yugoslav cities, including the juxtaposition of eclectic buildings and Ottoman urban fabric, a townscape where buildings adapted to an almost untamed landscape, unlike the clashing of old and new in recent socialist urban expansions. Both Grabrijan and Bogdanović used newspaper articles as a medium to initiate an alphabetization process on the intrinsic values of urban heritage. Their efforts were embraced by a small group of students and fellow architects in an attempt to define a ‘national style’ that would capture all these complexities.