In 1993, during the war in former Yugoslavia, the Bridge was destroyed by Croatian forces in an attempt to divide the city's Croat and Muslim populations.

A "responsive" pair of screens is proposed as an architectural membrane to create a visual replacement of the bridge and remind us of the senseless act of its destruction.

The screens are formed by weaving fiber-optic threads over a structural ropes of stainless steel that are anchored on both sides of the destroyed bridge. The vertical weave is crossed with horizontal threads and optic resistors are installed on the intersections of fibers, forming large display surfaces.

On both sides of the divided city there are computer terminals that are connected to the display membranes. The picture of the standing bridge appears on two sides of the missing span and from a distance, it seems the bridge is still standing. In reality, the picture of the bridge is only a screen-saver, an image that is permanently stored onthe "read-only- memory" of the two computers and cannot be altered in any way.

The magnificent "stone crescent" reappears at any time the computers are not used for some other computing purposes such as communication between the two sides that now circumnavigate the globe so they can be displayed on the common screen.

There is only one structural link between the two membranes in form of an aluminum beam at the vortex of the former bridge. In better days, while the bridge was still standing, brave men of Mostar performed daring jumps into the Neretva River, 20 meters below. They can now climb the fabric and keep their tradition alive.

For others, the imaging membrane will remain the only mediator between the separated worlds and between civilization and bestiality of destruction. The membrane will remain an interface between the physical world of architecture and blurred, ephemeral world of electronic images. Indeed, it has always been a responsibility of architecture to express and instigate new knowledge of the world, the knowledge that has now rapidly escaped from the physicality of architecture into the immaterial world of pictures.

A responsive membrane for a responsible architecture.

Text by Leo Modrcin