Apartment Biographies: a travelogue; a book; an architectural (hi)story.

Idea by

Sonja Lakić

https://sonjalakic.wordpress.com/

Save Ljuboje 38, Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Human being. An architect and a researcher. Holds a PhD in Urban Studies. In love with the humankind and the (patterns of the) everydayness across the world. Operates across different disciplines and scales. Works visually, practices unconventional ethnography and does storytelling mainly through photography. Interests: the post-socialist urban transformation; privatisation; homeownership; (right to) housing; informality; urban commons; building narratives; buildings as living archives.

Call for ideas 2020

Intimate residing experiences: notes on social upheaval, freedom, power and demographic change.

# Social

Systemic changes

In the last three decades, hundreds of thousands of individuals contested the original architectural design of modernist mass housing objects across the former Yugoslavia by self-modifying their dwellings and illegally glazing their balconies.

“Apartment Biographies” visits the lives of these rebel residents and describes the contemporary intimate rituals of converting housing into a home. These individual residential portraits bring to light the perplexed love affair between people and dwellings, contemporary morals and ethics and new housing typologies. This is a thought-provoking story that defends housing as home, dwells on the future role of architects and stands for an innovative multi-disciplinary research method.

“Apartment Biographies” serves as a gentle reminder that, even in the most turbulent times, one is entitled to dream: everyone is an architect of our own destiny, even when the good life of ours comes in a form of a glazed balcony.