The development of Blizina Raške began with field research, observation, and interviews in Novi Pazar. This phase focused on how the city discloses itself through circulation, trade, building surfaces, repair, and everyday routine. The research moved across historical relics, brutalist landmarks, renovation sites layered over older foundations, commercial pattern, and the Raška river corridor. These visits established the city as a stack formation shaped by successive political regimes, religious histories, trading systems, and local adaptations.

Dr Semir Poturak, architectural researcher, contributed a locally grounded reading of this formation. His guidance clarified the historical role of Novi Pazar as a trading city and emphasized its organic growth pattern, produced through commerce, kinship, religion, and incremental construction. This account sharpened the project’s understanding of palimpsest as an active urban structure, where older formations remain active within present-day surfaces and habits.

Jelena Suka, Coordinator at Mikser, contributed a comparative perspective shaped by her position outside the region. Her observation focused on the social patterning between Novi Pazar and the north, especially in the visibility of cultural, religious, and ethnic distinctions within everyday life. Her contribution linked historical divisions to daily phenomena, economic structures, and public rhythms. This reading extended the project beyond architecture toward the ways locality is sensed, performed, and negotiated at an intimate scale.

Together, these encounters defined the project’s conceptual ground. Novi Pazar emerged as a city whose spatial complexity appears through adjacency, overlap, and incremental forms of coexistence.

The visualisation phase focused on shaping a temporary intervention for the site. Drawing on the concept of palimpsest, the project developed a spatial language that remains legible in public use while retaining interpretive openness. The format was defined as temporary, reversible, and low-impact.

The concept drew from the coded structure of the sports field. Its floor layout became the starting point for a graphic system shaped by line, regulation, rhythm, and possible passage The project reworked these elements on the river edge to open more varied forms of negotiation, participation, and encounter within a space usually read through separation and functional division.

The intervention took form as a two-part visual system: ground marking and projection. On the ground, lines, thresholds, and graphic cues derived from sports markings were reorganised across the riverbank as a field of invitation. These elements structured ways of sitting, crossing, slowing, watching, and gathering without fixing the site into a single program, hierarchy, or use.

Projection formed the second layer. The rear façade or arch-facing section of Hotel Vrbak provided a surface where moving image could extend the intervention beyond the ground plane. The footage combined built surfaces, river textures, and scenes of female teenagers in athletic training. Their training introduced rhythm, repetition, discipline, and momentum into the composition. These gestures brought bodily tempo into contact with the roughness of the river edge and the exposed condition of the surrounding structures.

This phase established a temporary, site- responsive form that made the research publicly legible through use.