ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, September 21, 1996 TAG: 9609230031
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: LESLIE HAGER-SMITH SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
Twice this century, ethnic extremists in Eastern Europe have threatened to bring ruin to the world. This decade, they've reduced their patches of turf in the former Yugoslavia to tatters. Survivors of the most recent Bosnian civil war now live in ethnic ghettoes while their future as a nation hangs in the balance.
Some 4,500 miles away, students and faculty at Virginia Tech's College of Architecture and Urban Studies put their heads together a week ago in an intensive three-day design exercise to help reconstruct Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Architects call such a marathon design session a "charrette." This one was led by Jay Craig, an architect and urban designer whose initiatives on behalf of the devastated country have begun to attract international attention.
Leading the Blacksburg charrette were Amira Dzirlo, a Bosnian architect, and Andrew Euston with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Craig left his job as a city planner with Birmingham, Ala., in 1994, and joined other professionals in a trip to Bosnia that would ultimately change the course of his life. When he returned to Alabama, he founded the Birmingham Bosnia Task Force. He now works full time at building a network of financial support and expert services to aid Bosnian reconstruction. Plans are to develop a Global University for Building via the Internet.
"Everything we've worked to create has become a target," said Craig at the Sept. 13 outset of the charrette. "And the better job we've done, the better targets we've made." Nearly 40 students, professors and practicing architects crowded before drafting tables, ready to roll up their sleeves and begin. Craig's soft Southern lilt riveted their attention as he spoke of what he'd witnessed.
A 12th-century arched gateway to the old city of Sarajevo no longer stands. The grand library, once the city hall, is today an unrecognizable brick footprint. First, it was set aflame, and then snipers surrounded the landmark to pick off police or firefighters who responded to the emergency.
In fact, historic markers made buildings more vulnerable during the hostilities, not less. Craig fights emotion as he speaks of the objects that were attacked because of their beauty: the heart of Jesus shot out of a stained-glass window; bullet-riddled relief work on ancient stone buildings.
It is a landscape that seems to dominate Craig's imagination so completely that the listener must finally know why.
"Growing up in Birmingham during the civil rights movement must have something to do with it," Craig said. The more he learned about Bosnia, the more lessons he drew from his homeland. "I realized that if the world had turned their back on Birmingham, Martin Luther King would have never been successful," Craig said. "It took people from outside to focus on what was happening, to make people do the right thing. It will take the same in Bosnia."
All this in Sarajevo, a city that had running water before Paris did, and was once filled with architectural treasures dating to the Ottoman Empire. The running water is no more and the architecture now lays in heaps only an archeologist could love.
In Sarajevo, the time is 3 p.m. Sept. 14. National elections are under way, the first since the end of the 31/2-year-long war. They are proceeding without violence, and turnout appears to be nearing 70 percent. International guidelines allow citizens to vote where they were previously registered or at their current residences. Few venture back to their former districts.
In Blacksburg, the second day of charrette activities has just begun. Participants awoke to news reports of the distant elections. A tense calm descends over the room. Denim and flannel have replaced yesterday's upscale dress, even for professors. Sackcloth and ashes would not be out of place here. The teams were up until nearly midnight, and it shows.
Vertical shades are shut tight against a bright blue sky. The teams sit huddled amid a gaggle of gooseneck lamps, drawing and redrawing site plans and maps. Heaps of discarded tracing paper form thickets on all sides.
Here and there bright markers glint in a pool of dark pencils. Professors David Dugas and Catherine Clark-Albright float among the teams, casting directives to some and food for thought to others. A call rises up for yet another map.
A satellite photo of Sarajevo stretches six feet square, large enough to drape a table. It won't do. Graduate student Khaled Hassouna rips a leaf of tracing paper smartly across the edge of the table to site a new market square. His teammate Tom Mazcko dashes out in search of a color copier.
At the next table, students consider whether redrawn transportation routes could help to reunite a fractured Bosnia. Angela Ojeda looks on pensively. This group's maps are all drawn in the three primary colors: Serb, Muslim and Croat.
Sunday morning arrives in Sarajevo. Those synagogues, temples and churches left standing in the old section of the city are filled with expectant worshippers. Initial reports of the elections are mixed. A Washington Post analysis declares them a success. Wire service stories will focus on irregularities and the menace of Serbian secession.
In Blacksburg, the assembly at Squires Student Center is also reverent. Men and women enter quietly and begin to hang their final offerings about the room. Dress is formal today. It could be a measure of their professionalism, or maybe it's a bow to the Sunday meeting time.
For three hours the congregants share their hopes and visions. If somehow Sarajevo can be saved, the rest of this small nation will follow, they are sure. One team sees the former front lines transformed into a greenbelt, with recreation facilities and mass transportation to and from the outlying suburbs. Another would build a shining embassy row on the hill where artillery once threatened. The streets and paths would be paved with rubble, the "gold" of Bosnia's centuries-long heritage. They would serve as enduring reminders of the destruction.
Tomorrow Jay Craig will pull up stakes and move on. He will gather their overlays, schematics, and maps to take along. Craig expresses his hope that the students will leave with a new appreciation for the importance of their professions.
They now join the multitudes who have undertaken charrettes at Louisiana State, Maryland, Massachusetts and other universities. Will their efforts one day shape a new Sarajevo? Only a prophet could say. But their own lives have been altered by trying.
LENGTH: Long : 120 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Lora Gordon. 1. James Davis (left) and Apichoke Lekagulby CNB(right) explain to William Hulver (between Davis and Lekagul) and
other members of their design group ideas for how to progress on the
concept of designing parts of Sarajevo as a museum. 2. Pernille
Krusell Bertelsen explains that she is having difficulty locating
the train station in Sarajevo as she, Jim Woody (left) and Apichoke
Lekagul talk about tehir ideas for Embassy Row in that city. color.