In some of the videos shot during the war, kids on their way to class, with their backpacks on their bent backs, are hurtling through a devastated street. With the sound of sniper bullets in the background, children gather under an entrance porch in Emile Zola Street in Dobrinja, chatting while waiting to the enter the small basement room where school will take place. In single file, children hurry up the trench with big defiant smiles. The primary school of Hrasno, a neighbourhood on the direct line of siege, was protected by the UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Forces) with concrete panels wrapped around the perimeter of the building. It was cold and dark in the classrooms on the first floor but children could study, and came to do it. In the makeshift classrooms, school desks are generally missing, sometimes a table is turned up to become a board, and often children have oil lamps for light.
war, play and the architectural agenda In besieged Sarajevo, schooling gave way to what I call play by default : common elements of daily life were played out to become extraordinary; even the path to school was an adventurous slalom where children had to thwart the snipers. Schooling does occur in extremely dangerous conditions, but danger is an abstraction for children and that is why they can play out school. Risk is a fundamental aspect of play according to Lady Allen of Hurtwood, the designer of adventure playgrounds in postwar Britain; in Sarajevo children assumed risk and canalised it through their schooling activity. The war lasted four years; children died because they went outside to play. But how to keep a child in the basement that long? This also changed their involvement in the socio-public sphere. For Maria Montessori, play is a fragment of space and time situated between the individual and the world where a child builds up his own self as well as his representation of the world. This is why it is such an essential activity. Space is decisive – in the sphere of the local community, in a spatial context adapted to new ways of life, the playing out of school is a form of childhood survival. The Sarajevo story shows education is turned into play. This is also a détournement in the relation between these two programmatic activities in architecture. Play had never been on the functional agenda of urban planning unless it had noble objectives – the instillation of values, otherwise it was considered a disturbing, unsocial activity whose disorders – noise and dirt, should be avoided. Playful inclinations of children had to be civilised into play that teaches respectable behaviour. In the CIAM congresses recreation figures among the four dimensions of the functionalist city: living, working, recreation and transport. This doesn’t explicitly imply children, rather the dweller in general, with recreation as time off work. In the first congress after WWII, CIAM 6, recreation is referred to as ‘the cultivation of mind and body’; the spatial contours of leisure activity are not defined beyond the aspects of open air and green spaces. It is not until the 1951 post-war congress, CIAM 8, The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life , that activities pertaining to the public sphere are more clearly put. The new definition of the heart, the core of the city, tries to overcome the much-criticised modernist anti- humanistic programmatic city to create liveable environments in neighbourhood units with social, psycho-social and spiritual functions.
Amina Avdagić
The teacher’s route: a drawing by Amina Avdagić, the director of the Treca Gymnazija during the siege. It shows a zone in a quarter of Hrasno to which the Treca Gymnazija was relocated in July 1994. Loris is a shield building, very long (relatively high) on the frontline, the border with the belligerent army on the other side. People ‘integrated’ it spatially to their itineraries because it was good protection from snipers In their war jargon, it is a Pančirka, a bullet- proof jacket. A fuller discussion of this specific school is found in Darine Chouieri, ‘Sarajevo Schooling Under Siege’, Mémoires en Jeu / Memories at Stake , numèro 18, Printemps 2023. https://atablewithaview.com/mapping-schooling-under- siege-an-interview/
13
on site review 44 : play
Made with FlippingBook - PDF hosting