ABSTRACT

In the early 1990s, Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn became a well-known symbol of the Bosnian conflict. As the hangout of choice of the international press corps covering the war, the unlovely yellow hotel became something of an icon, its battered façade appearing with regularity on television screens around the world. Throughout the siege, the fact that the hotel – considered by some to be among the world’s ugliest buildings – remained standing amid the surrounding destruction was for many observers one of the most poignant of the war’s many ironies. As the American journalist Peter Maass has written in his account of the Bosnian war, “from an architectural standpoint, it’s quite a pity that so many ancient monuments were shelled to their foundations in Sarajevo while the Holiday Inn survived” (1996: 122).