Walking on the grass.

We entered Sarajevo from the wrong side - by bus from Belgrade through Pale in Republika Srpska, the Serbian part of Bosnia, and arrived in the Serb neighbourhood of Dobrinja after dark. Taxi drivers had retreated to electrically lit safety some blocks away, and for half an hour we walked along the unlit street which now forms the border between two countries. In the dark, sporadically inhabited housing blocks looked deceptively normal, we could barely make out gaping holes in the walls, total absence of glass in what was left of windows, concrete panels frayed and pock-marked by bullets and shrapnel - the only reminders of war were a handful of anti-vehicle barriers across the road.

We stuck to paved surfaces as we had been advised, and hauled our luggage through the empty neighbourhood until we found a Muslim taxi rank and could pay our way into the city with a few German marks. The next morning we returned. The central reservation was being cleared of land mines by a UN team wearing helmets and body armour. Yellow plastic ribbons labelled 'Mine' had appeared since the night before, cordoning off the lawns beside the road on which we had walked.

In Sarajevo there is little architectural design. Though some big names are being tossed around as potential authors of redevelopment projects, the great mass of reconstruction has few glamorous aspects. It simply means repair. Taking the tram towards the suburb of Ilidza you pass the TV station, the former headquarters of the Oslobodenje newspaper, industrial areas, public buildings and innumerable Modern social housing blocks: all damaged, some totally destroyed. House after house is empty, damaged beyond repair, or with gardens mined: owners were too scared to stay when the shelling started, they belonged to the wrong ethnic group and had to flee, or they are dead.

Before the war, Sarajevo had approximately 500 000 inhabitants. Now there are 350 000. What is left is an environment stretched beyond breaking point, where nothing makes sense, and yet everything you see is the result of a merciless logic. An artillery shell hits the side of a house; its impact breaks through a wall or a window, the subsequent explosion blows out the whole side of the house, or takes the roof off, and the damage is the result of a precise equation depending on the trajectory of the shell, the angle of impact, the yield of the explosion, and the physical properties of the construction elements of the house - the brittleness of bricks and mortar, the elasticity of steel or timber or the density of concrete, the only material to provide any degree of protection.

My textbooks of building construction have no chapters on weaponry or ballistics, and say nothing about the city as a military landscape or how to deal with the damage caused by military tools. I am trained to deal with the slow destruction of rain and neglect, of seeping damp, subsidence and creeping dry rot, which takes decades or centuries to destroy a building. The protection ordinary materials offer becomes an illusion when you are faced with anything more threatening than drops of water. And steel, the red hot shards of a shell, cuts so easily through human flesh once it has entered your house. Contemporary architecture in Sarajevo is not created by letting Norman Foster or Zaha Hadid build along Sniper Alley. The contemporary architecture is there already, with a richness of detail and complexity of structure to rival any Lloyd's Building or Guggenheim Museum: the Oslobodenje building with its collapsed floor plates; the broken windows in the Papagajka block, where people collected water in the basement during the siege; the heaps of debris along the front line through Grbavica. These radical changes to the architecture of the city cannot be erased or ignored, they have a meaning to inhabitants and visitors alike and have to be taken into account in any future designs for the city. 'We only want three things,' said one of the professors of the Sarajevo architecture faculty, 'we want respect, we want safety and we want things to be the way they were.' The sentimental longing for the past is as understandable as the demand for safety.

But to give the destroyed city form again, a new building cannot simply copy what was before: it has to give shelter not only from the weather but from the memory of the terrible energy which shattered the earlier walls. Any city planning project has to consider that many of the inhabitants of Sarajevo are absent but may return.

On the way back we passed through Belgrade again. We left the hotel to look for a restaurant and walked for a while along the main street, brightly lit in the November night. A destroyed building is not a neutral thing. It demands your attention when you first realise that something is wrong, and your imagination then has to reconstruct the wall from the few broken bits of concrete and rusted steel. In places, Sarajevo is so broken that only memories of the inhabitants keep it together. You become so used to interpreting signs of destruction everywhere that when everything is intact it seems as if something is missing. In Belgrade, the evening bustle was peaceful. Cutting through a small park, we suddenly realised we were carefully avoiding stepping on the grass. We looked at each other, laughed, then stamped uneasily. We had lived a fragment of Sarajevan normality, and in only a week, any softness underfoot had become a danger sign.

Even back in the safety of my home in London, the sensation of walking on a lawn kept reminding me of Sarajevo. More than the mine tape or the grenade holes, more than the UN trucks and SFOR soldiers. The simple feeling of walking on grass.

INGERID HELSING ALMAAS

Ingerid Helsing Almaas and Pascal Schoning went to Bosnia with the Architectural Association Diploma Unit 3, 2-9 November 1997

Portuguese punctuation

Portugal's twentieth-century architectural history has been that of Western Europe in a nutshell; influenced by nationalism, the conquering of colonies from Macao to Angola, the grandeur of an empire building Beaux Arts style, alternatively right and left wing politics, monumentalism and social conscience, dictatorship followed by the 'carnation revolution' of 1974. Portugal was the theme of Frankfurt International Book Fair in October and the Deutsches Architektur-museum, in partnership with the Instituto de Arte Contemporanea and the Centro Cultural de Belem, displayed a century of Portuguese architecture. Over 130 projects, shown in architects' drawings, photographs, models and with original pieces of architect-designed furniture, many by Alvaro Siza.

At the opening of the century the pomp and richness of the aristocracy was being miniaturised and translated into apartment houses for the rising middle class at the same time as the crisis in urban worker's accommodation in Lisbon led to the first social housing project at Arco do Cego, 1919-33, designed by Adaes Bermudes, Frederico Caetano de Carvalho and Edmundo Tavares. New consumerism and mass entertainment were housed in buildings, like the Nascimento department store in Porto by Jose Marques da Silva, disguised as urban palaces. A short-lived Modernism between the wars expressed itself in Art Deco cinemas and theatres, functionalist Bauhaus styles, as in the Lisbon Dr Navarrode Paiva Institute, 1931, by Carlos Ramos, or futuristic monuments which began to herald in the fascist period, such as Portugal's pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Fair by Francisco Keil do Amaral. Despite dictator Salaza's friendship with Germany and his own home-grown national socialism, Portugal remained neutral during the Second World War and accommodated an influx of refugees, from artists to businessmen and simple handworkers. Portuguese tolerance at this time, in comparison to other Europeans, can only partly be explained by their world view, developed over centuries as a trading and seafaring nation with a multicultural mix. The same attitude in relation to new ideas in architecture has given this relatively small country, clinging to Iberia's Atlantic coast, examples of every twentieth-century European movement, not slavishly copied but adapted to the local terrain and climate.

In 1947 the first Architecture Congress was held in Portugal and the principles of the Modern Movement were enthusiastically adopted as an answer to social needs and to mark a new beginning. The harsh climate, extreme light contrasts, available craftsmanship and plentiful basic building materials lent themselves to a geometrical white architecture of minimal fenestration, plays of light and shadow and the use of screen and gazebo structures to filter and reduce direct sunlight. Housing, school and community building programmes were started. In the colonies expatriate architects, freed from the control of rigorous criticism at home, created some wild eccentricities such as the Maputo residential block in Mozambique, 1954-55, by Pancho Guedes, with free form concrete and coloured mosaic friezes. Overseas territories, like Macao, suffered from export of heavy-handed concrete wedding cake architecture and inappropriate European city planning while back home Alvaro Siza's City district of Quinta da Malagueira was a sensitive construction of a former squatter area using the grid of the old walled city and an aqueduct as a waterway spine.

Today projects seem as diverse as they are plentiful, including restoration of many religious institutions as well as new social and private commissions, individual buildings and planning projects. Portugal's horizontal rock strata and hillside settlements have led to the particular exploitation of internal and external ramps, for example at Oporto University's Architecture Faculty by Alvaro Siza, 1986-94, and the National Veterinary Research Laboratory at Vila do Conde, 1993, by Joao Alvaro Rocha

and Jose Manuel Gigante. Not only the heat and destructive UV rays but the very function of Oporto's House of Art, 1981-91, gave Eduardo Souto Moura the opportunity to build a virtually windowless structure in which only reflected light enters. Despite the lack of outside views visitors are constantly aware of the site's topography by their progression along ramps. The recent university building programme, booming tourist industry and EU membership which has attracted investment, have all provided work for an increasing number of architects in a country with only 6 per cent unemployment.

For the Lisbon 1998 Expo, Manuel Graca Dias and Egas Jose Vieira have designed Cracking Tower, a landmark structure created around a former oil refinery chimney, with a top of the tower restaurant, spiralling ramp and bridge approach and scenic lift. The project bears comparison with Tatlin's 1927 model for a monument to the III International, combining as it does a relic of labour-intensive heavy industry, which was once progressive, with futuristic deconstructionist forms developed from the Russian avant garde of the same period, a fitting punctuation mark to a century of European architecture.

LAYLA DAWSON

'Twentieth Century Portuguese Architecture'. Exhibition originally at Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, and next year at Expo '98 in Lisbon, Portugal. Catalogue/book: Portugal, published by Prestel, 352 pages, 560 illustrations, Portuguese and German text, 68 DM.

Addenda

The photograph of the house at Mar Vista, California (AR November 1997, pp11 and 73) was taken by Dominique Vorillon.

Credits for the Marian Shrine (Delight, AR November, p98) should read designed by Susan Jones, with Stephen Lee and Donald Brubeck of The Bumgardner Architects.

letters

Titanic Triumph

SIR: The review of the newMetropolis Science and Technology Centre in Amsterdam (AR December p54) displays an all-too-familiar bias. To provide an appreciative overview of spatial and formal qualities in a new building is fine, but to privilege these above the satisfaction of user and client needs seems to me at best self-indulgent and at worst misleading and insulting.

newMetropolis is founded on an overtly participative educational mission. It is hardly fair, therefore, to offer superficial and derogatory comments on the Centre's exhibition content and its design without at least attempting to outline and understand the range of communication problems it purports to address.

The development of exhibits in a hands-on science centre is a process that demands a carefully managed rolling programme of prototyping, testing, production, maintenance, evaluation and renewal/replacement. Such a programme is driven by an educational rationale and direct feedback from the visiting public. This generates an exhibition which continuously evolves as weaker and worn-out exhibits are gradually replaced with new ones, often of radically different design and communicative intent.

The 'noble factory' therefore is a perfect metaphor upon which to conceive the building that will house a production facility which organises scientific and technological information into a form which visitors can process and experience. I suggest that, from the client and visitor points of view, the success of the building is best judged on how well it protects and sustains these purposive activities. The reason why no daylight is admitted into the exhibit areas is because it would compromise their flexibility and purpose. This is far more important than whether or not the 'splendid spatial sequence' is revealed by architectural means. I agree, the present lighting scheme is fragmenting, but the services of a good theatrical lighting designer could soon put that right.

Whether or not the building works as an architectural exhibit is of interest to architects. But, are not architects committed to the wider public interest and therefore entitled to a broader-based appreciation of wonderful buildings like Piano's Titanic?

Yours etc

GEOFFREY MATTHEWS

Hull, England

Emap snap

SIR: Your September issue featured an item on the winning entry for the Emap competition for a millennium tower. Much to our surprise this tower bore a remarkable resemblance to a tower we designed back in 1995.

We wanted to inform you of the existence of Altior, our entry for the International Student Contest on High-Rise Building. We designed the tower as students within the scope of the scientific research on structural efficiency led by Patrick Lints at the St Lucas Institute of Architecture in Ghent.

Regulations asked for a 400-metre building, to be situated in the polders in the Netherlands. As the polders' subsoil is swampy and has low bearing power, we came up with the principle of an inversed cone, driven into the ground down to its rim, as bearing surface. The cone was to be filled with water, as any excavation in a swampy soil would naturally be. We thus designed a tower stretching 200m both above and under ground level. Three stabiliser beams are in fact access tubes connecting the circular parking levels in the cone (broader edge) to the centre of the tower.

We made a model of the project using single-CD discs (the old small format appeared perfectly scaled) for floors. With well-positioned lighting, the tower glowed as if it were glass.

A self-indulgent thirst for acknowledgement inevitably leads us to wonder whether the winning project was inspired by our work. A model of our tower was indeed submitted to an exhibition in The Netherlands ... but then again, the odds are that no-one ever noticed Altior. Assuming that all scientific research in related fields tends to come to similar conclusions within a limited period, let's say it's a nice example of how the same structural concept can emerge in different environments.

Yours etc

FILIP COPPENS, SIGFRID GIES, JOS TANGHE, BENOIT VAN SANDE

Ghent, Belgium

Prince Charming?

SIR: The article on Poundbury by John Walker (AR July) may have some truth in it, but is it necessary for it to be phrased in such offensive and negative language? Even the editorial postscript can't resist a final jibe after damming the scheme with faint praise. At least it was the means of the Review publishing one of the finest photographs of the year on p68. There must be some good there somewhere.

Yours etc

DON DONNITHORNE

Christchurch, New Zealand 

People's front

SIR: On the subject of people in architectural photography, the Voelckers (AR November 1997 p 18) should take heart and continue with their subscription! The front cover of AR July 1997 (photographed by Ian Lambot) shows people and buildings in happy harmony in downtown Frankfurt, and is in my view a model of what good architectural photography can do.

Yours etc

A. E. P. ZALESKI

London SW19

Scottish geography

SIR: The two unavoidable things on Earth where there is civilisation are Music & Architecture, and generally they both are, or have been, indigenous to their particular location.

In this shrinking world these distinctions are becoming blurred, witness the global appeal of many pop groups and the work of renowned architects designing buildings all over the world. Local character is being eroded as a result. With many new office buildings there is little to link them with their location. Many look as though they have landed from a stage set, each trying to go one better than their neighbour. They could easily be in Berlin, London, Dallas, Edinburgh or Paris.

The new Scottish Parliament Building will probably be the most important public building to be built in Scotland, well into the next century. We must not squander the opportunity to make it unique, a landmark building recognisable the world over as the Scottish Parliament Building.

Value for money is most important, and rightly so, but on what basis? Short or long term? In political terms 'value for money' might only suggest one political term. In historical terms it might suggest 200 years. It may be expedient to go the developer route but what guarantee do we have that the building will have the longevity befitting its purpose. What might lie beneath the quality of the veneer or glitzy facade. It must have an intrinsic quality, for without it, to be part of Scottish history, it cannot be value for money.

There is much discussion about the location of the building. With the preferred location being the capital, Edinburgh, with sites suggested at Leith, Haymarket and Calton Hill. Why? Many cities are now having to look hard at traffic pricing to ease congestion and pollution, keeping traffic out of the city and suggestions are being made to site the parliament building in the very heart of it all. With Information Technology and efficient air travel at our disposal there is no reason for the Scottish Parliament not to be elsewhere in Scotland.

Reports in the Press and on Radio Scotland suggest support for a new town or city in northwest Sutherland, near the north-west corner of the Scottish mainland. Land costs are cheap, the air is clean and transport links would improve dramatically should such a proposal go ahead. The Highlands were one of the first areas to benefit from a substantial investment in Information Technology infrastructure, allowing easy communication links to the rest of the world. With all this technology on hand there is no reason why the Scottish Parliament should not be in the Highlands. Political correctness dictates otherwise.

Our practice is near John O'Groats, seven hours by train from Edinburgh, about as remote from Edinburgh as Scotland is from Westminster. It is of little consequence to most people outside the central belt where the parliament is, as long as the building is well designed, of a high quality and is well constructed. It must be Architecture ... but more central locations such as Stirling or Bannockburn might be suitable.

Yours etc SHANE RODGERS Caithness, Scotland