The air was warm and soft, in Sarajevo, that evening at the end of the sweltering summer of 1992. I stood in a trench at the foot of one of the mountains overlooking the city and gazed at the partly destroyed skyscraper in the neighbourhood where I lived. The silence was shattered by the sound of machine gunfire from the Serbian army up in the mountains. Brap-brap-brrraaaap, and then again. Brap-brrrap-brrrap-brap, a staccato rhythm. I was listening to the strangest concert I had ever attended. Fire broke out in the rooms of the skyscraper where the bullets slammed home. It threw up a light sculpture twenty storeys high which together with the rhythmic bursts of the machine gun almost added up to an artwork. It seemed like madness to me, this combination of music and sculpture, destruction and death.

Sarajevo 2005. I am walking through the city centre. The war seems long forgotten. My gaze wanders off to the mountains. I think of the Dutch artist Armando's phrase 'guilty landscape' - a landscape that has observed all the horrors of war, done nothing and now looks out at me in silence.
In rounding off my study I wished to give something back to my city, a gem of special significance. I designed a museum of contemporary art that should be called the 'Sarajevo Museum of Art' (SmART). Sarajevo has never had a museum like that, though it did have an impressive array of art works donated to it by famous artists like Pistoletto, Kounellis, Beuys, Abramovic, Sherman and Kosuth.

Vidikovac, a former country retreat fifteen minutes from the city centre and reached by cableway, seemed a perfect location for the museum I had in mind. I heard that it was a safe place again. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The Serbian army had placed tens of thousands of land mines on the mountainsides around Sarajevo as an invisible defence line against the Bosnian army. The smell of combat hung in the air again. All memories of the war and of my childhood came flooding back. Seeing that eerie landscape, made impenetrable by the mines, was a traumatic experience. At the same time, you had the beauty of the surroundings and the view, but also the beauty of the memory of a lost idyll. The contradictions of Sarajevo had never been so clear to me.

A key departure-point for the design for SmART is the Bosnian house. This house says much about the respect people once had for nature, views, privacy. This house has a layeredness that is rich in meaning. Typical features of SmART's architecture are the concatenation of spaces, the logical routeing through the house and the hallmark oppositions at the cusp of high versus low, inside versus outside, light versus dark. So SmART is full of contrasts too. It has an internal and an external route. The latter is a 'mountain walk', a substitute for the surrounding landscape. The internal route consists of a necklace of chambers each with its own personality, light level, dimensions and heights. The alternating ceiling heights in the building create some spaces that are almost claustrophobically low-slung and others whose height is almost literally sky-high. The contrast between light and dark, open and closed, is most palpable in the outdoor area which on the middle storeys emerges from cramped, dark arcades into terraces bathed in light. The large roof overhangs, whose structure is concealed so that they seem to defy gravity, represent the duality of heavy and light.

Looking out from the terrace at the city you can see the lights of Sarajevo. The city seems to have been restored to its former splendour. You inhale deeply, the air is warm and soft. It is early evening somewhere near the end of the sweltering summer... I hear a melody. Or is it a bird singing? Perhaps it's the song of life.

Place of education: Amsterdam Academy of Architecture
Specialization: architecture
Tutors: Laurens-Jan ten Kate, Yttje Feddes, Moriko Kira