In mid-December, the Sarajevo Municipality of Centar published a presentation of the conceptual design for the hotel which, if built, would dominate the landscape above Sarajevo.
The investor is Mirsad Fikić, a businessman from Prijedor who runs a Bosnian restaurant in Berlin. After Fikić expressed interest in investing in Sarajevo, the Centar Municipality presented several construction localities to him.
At the locality of Zlatište Fikić offered to build a grandiose hotel, the Palace. Negotiations on this location were launched in February 2016 and the project should be implemented by the Centar Municipality and the investor together.
According to information known so far, the entire facility would be 80 meters high, 165 meters long, and 54 meters wide. Construction of this facility would permanently change the appearance of Trebević.
President of the Executive Board of the Association of Architects in BiH Vedad Islambegoić says that he already reacted on behalf of this organization and sent a letter to the mayor of the Centar Municipality in which he presented the experts’ opinion:
“I honestly hope that this hotel will not be built. It would be a construction failure. We would get another wall on Trebević, but this one would be huge. Even in aesthetic terms, this project is a failure, but that concerns me less than the urban aspect. In my letter to the Centar Municipality, I asked the mayor if they had the project documentation in front of them while considering this idea,” said Islambegović.
Nedžad Hrelja Meco from the architecture studio MecoLada claims that this project is entirely amateurish:
“In urban terms, as a composition, the entire facility is wrong, starting from its size and mass which are totally inappropriate for the site that is being considered. An 80-meter high facility on a 30-meter high cliff is not good and there is absolutely no chance of building a skyscraper at such a place, especially placed frontally towards the city. Also, the size of the facility would distort the landscape. Architectural expression is amateurish, an example of bad taste and quasi-oriental style which does not fit the architecture of Sarajevo. In my opinion, one such facility should not be built at all,” said Hrelja.
Architect Srđa Hrisafović thinks the same. According to him, this is a facility that does not belong to the situation nor which can stand on the hill above the city.
“The main question is how such capital projects could be built without an architectural tender which should be implemented in accordance with all rules and which should comply with all architectural and urban plans of the city which, as much as I know, never foresaw a hotel on Zlatište. Such key projects must be subject to public debates because they concern all citizens alike,” said Hrisafović.
This is what the hotel on Zlatište should look like:
(Source: radiosarajevo.ba)
