For a large majority of the student body of TU Delft, the four-year-long siege of Sarajevo (1992-1996), is a thing they might have learned from history books. However, for the inhabitants of Sarajevo, the small red-raisin-filled craters from mortar damage are a daily reminder of their tragic past and what became the longest siege of a city in the history of modern warfare.

Since the beginning of the academic year, the new chair of Urban Architecture offers studios in the Architecture track. The graduation theme of this year is spolia. A term from archaeology, spolia are the left-overs or ‘spoils’ of a building, which find themselves back in a new structure. The students were asked to introduce themselves together with a personal piece of spolia.  The spoils, taken to the studio by students, illustrate that every-day artefacts can change function,  carry emotional narratives or transform in meaning.

January 2016, the seismic tremor made the porcelain statue tremble on the floor. As I ran down the stairs to help my grandparents, shivers ran down my back. Sadly, the worst was yet to come... Being born in the eastern end of the Himalayan seismic belt, my personal experiences have been the driving force of this research. Traces of the events that I have witnessed in the Indian city Shillong, have created an urgency to meet more rational living standards. In this article, I discuss my graduation project and how it reacts to this urgency by local traces of timber construction.