TWO EXAMPLES OF CONTEMPORARY MOSQUES IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA BY ARCHITECT AHMET HADROVIC

The author had his first encounter with the design task of the mosque in 1986, when he was visited by a group of people (the building committee of the mosque in Solun on the Krivaja river) to design the mosque. For the author, winning the first prize at the All-Yugoslav Architectural Competition for the Islamic Center project in Rijeka, Republic of Croatia (1991), meant entering the world of architecture, in the former Bosnia and Herzegovina and the former Yugoslavia. Regardless of the fact that the war in Croatia (1991-1995) and in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992-1995) fundamentally changed the socio-political situation, this award opened the door to all later mosque projects done by the author. Working on the All-Yugoslav architectural competition for the project of the Islamic Center in Rijeka (1991), the author met all the important mosques in Sarajevo, Mostar and Banja Luka and the Sherefudin (White) mosque in Visoko, which was rebuilt (1980) on the site of the old mosque (1447). The projects of most mosques were done by the author (as winning solutions) through the institution of a call for tenders. Apart from the fact that the mosques presented here are “modern” (built in 1999 and 2006), they reflect the modern moment of life in Bosnia and Herzegovina: the contents of the mosque and the spatial solution (the mosque is not only a “place of worship” but a place of worship and place of complex social life), construction, materialization, overall design and design of certain traditional elements of the mosque (dome, minaret, mihrab, mimber…). Mosques have acquired the character of a true genius loci of a more or less wider city area, and according to some manifestations.