2019-02-12
1 小时 3 分钟My guest today, Alessandra Sapanovic, was born into a nation soon to be at war.
Growing up in then Yugoslavia, she found herself entering adulthood in the middle of the bosnian war.
And while she lived in the relative safety of Belgrade, at least in the early parts of the war, she also felt like she needed to leave and head into the heart of the war zone on a quest to discover the truth, not just the highly filtered stories being reported in a state controlled media, but the truth on the ground.
And she joined local media efforts, became a reporter, then an editor and analyst, where she spent years documenting and sharing what was actually happening as her country literally split into pieces, became decimated from violence, leaving so many lives destroyed and entire areas riddled with what she describes as swiss cheese like buildings and neighborhoods.
And that experience left her not only longing for truth and justice and peace, but also with a belief in architecture as a symbol of perseverance and the human need to rebuild and move on.
Alexandra eventually made her way to New York, where she discovered a love of design and pursued a degree at FiT, that's fashion Institute of Technology here in the city.
And that program awakened an inner eye for detail and also kind of reconnected to her passion for architecture and interiors and the idea of home and blending this experience of seeing a brutal war destroy so many homes and homesteads and places that people called and felt their home.
With a renewed passion to help people find and create beautiful homes, she co founded a real estate company in New York called Igel Properties Group, which has actually now grown into a leading residential real estate firm in Brooklyn.
And it's really fascinating to see this sort of full circle journey of, of where she came from, the incredible experience of being in the middle of this war, seeing what happened to people's neighborhoods and homes and towns and cities, and then coming to a new place and rebuilding her life and her livelihood around the idea of finding people a place that they can call home.
Really excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
I find your story fascinating.
I'm 53, so I'm of an age where I remember in the late eighties and the nineties, there was a very different story dominating even the us news than we have going on now.
We have a lot of stories about conflict, but you lived through the conflict that really dominated in this country, a lot of the news cycle a number of years.
You were born in, I guess, what's now formally known as the Republic of Yugoslavia.
Yes, I was born in former Yugoslavia.
You know, fast forward all these years.
Now I say that I'm from Serbia because there is no Yugoslavia anymore to refer to.
And it was an interesting time and an interesting place.
And then it all fell apart.