Current trends in architectural practice such as an increased focus on sustainable design, integrated design, and the globalization of architecture are increasing the need for practitioners that are skilled in collaboration. Collaboration fosters innovation and creativity. It is a key operating principle for the 21st century and an important skill that an architecture student must be exposed to. The change in knowledge generation and creative problem solving is transforming education towards collaborative learning forcing architecture and engineering schools to address new course structures with “collaborative” aspect. The work presented in this paper draws its base from collaborative design learning. It describes an international collaborative design studio titled “International Design Studio: Green Transformable Buildings” conducted between three institutions, Y_ld_z Technical University (YTU)–Istanbul, University of Twente (TU)-Enschede Engineering Sciences and Industrial Design School, and Architecture Faculty of Sarajevo (AFS).

City of Sarajevo has clear spatial layers of built structures through the different periods of times. In the 15th century Sarajevo took its urban outlines. Relief itself as well as Ottoman division of city area split its overall layout in two seemingly separate structures, ��downtown�� valley with public and market structures, and surrounding slopes for housing. The second one makes a perfect place for establishing and development for both universal and genuine qualities of housing architecture. The later periods of city development, Austro-Hungarian, former Yugoslavia, pre- and post 2nd World War, left these areas almost intact in terms of interpolation of big scale projects. In other sense these areas are permanently heavily damaged with insuf ciently controlled widespread in ll of new small scale structures. This paper will examine general structural, spatial and architectural qualities of traditional housing on the slopes of Sarajevo, and compared these ones with several case studies made on smaller scale interpolation in this tissue made by author himself. Trough these examples we would like to make a research on contemporary design strategies based on premises of respect of both universal and genuine qualities of this type of housing.