uRED Architecture

The Old Bridge spanning the Neretva River in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina was built in 1566 by Mimar Hairedin the Younger in honor of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, the Turkish ruler of Mostar. In 1993, during the war in former Yugoslavia, the Bridge was destroyed by Croatian forces in an attempt to divide the city's Croat and Muslim populations.

A "responsive" pair of screens is proposed as an architectural membrane creating a tangible replacement of the bridge to remind us of the senselessness of its destruction.

The screens are formed by weaving fiber-optic threads over a structural skein of stainless steel that is anchored on both sides of the destroyed bridge. The vertical weave is crossed with horizontal threads, and optic resistors are installed at the intersections of fibers, forming large display surfaces.

On both sides of the divided city are computer terminals that are connected to the display membranes. The picture of the standing bridge appears on two sides of the missing span; from a distance, it seems the bridge is still standing. In reality, the picture of the bridge is but a screen-saver, an image that is permanently stored in the "read-only-memory" of the two computers and thus proof against any alteration.

The magnificent "stone crescent" reappears any time the computers are not being used in other computing applications, such as communications between the two sides that now circumnavigate the globe so they can be displayed on a common computer screen.

There is only one structural link between the two membranes, in the form of an aluminum beam at the vortex of the former bridge. In better days, while the bridge still stood, brave men of Mostar performed daring jumps into the Neretva River, 20 meters below. They can now climb the fabric and keep that tradition alive.

For others, the imaging membrane will remain the only medium between the separated worlds, and between civilization and the savagery of destruction. The membrane will remain an interface between the physical world of architecture and the ephemeral world of electronic images. Indeed, it has always been the responsibility of architecture to express and initiate new knowledge of the world--knowledge that has now rapidly escaped from the physicality of architecture into the realm of electronic media.