Architecture is the means to create a common language of living

As an active member of civil society, he engages with communities to develop a common educational platform in the field of architecture and urban planning. He holds a PhD in architecture and urban planning, with his work focused on city morphology and urban catalysis and their role in the trans- formation of public spaces, research that is a result of his experience as a project leader of many urban regulatory plans in Albania. His scientific activity includes with mono- graphs and publications, as well as work as a jury member in various international competitions. He also serves as an Inde- pendent Nominator for the EU Mies van der Rohe Award, as appointed by the Fundacio Mies van der Rohe for Albania. Since its establishment, he has been a board mem- ber of the Fundjavë Ndryshe philanthropic foundation.

How Tirana changed in the last 20 years?

With regard to the weather, it was much rainier. It used to be the rainy city in Alba- nia 20 years ago, when I come back from Greece. It changed radically in other ways, too. In 2004 there were not even proper bars. Of course nobody cared about bars at the time, as the country was just coming out of a difficult period from the civil war in 1997, where pyramid schemes tricked many people and took their money. Fifteen years ago I was not really sure if we would be able to escape from this closed territorial system, but today we face a different prob- lem, that people are leaving, with massive waves of emigration. The problem I’ve faced as an individual but also as an architect in the last 20 years has been working in re- mote areas of Albania. When I first came back there was this amazing energy where people wanted to change the country, they wanted to escape from those enclaves, from the past. There were many cases of informality in the 1990s, many cases of wild development, but there were also people with amazing energy. Whenever we had problems we could always solve them, be- cause there were enough people and there was enough energy. This was even true if you went to the rural areas of Albania. Lively villages were very much present in the land- scape of the county, but today are almost empty. Villages that once had a thousand inhabitants now have only 13. The desire to move into big urban centres in the 1990s was very strong, and so huge numbers of people left the countryside. And it’s still happening today. When I moved to Tirana there was only around half a million people, and now there’s a million. So of the two and a half million Albanians who have left their villages and small towns, about one million now live between Tirana and Durrës, the main port city. Meanwhile, the whole coun- try is around 29,000 km2. These migrations are very important when we speak about how Albania changed.

So architecture is not the central thing when we think about what has changed?

I think it’s hardly about the architecture at all. Architecture is a way to justify, to cam- ouflage, to improve and to manifest things that people are much more sensitive about. It is a means to deconstruct mentalities but also a means to educate people, to improve their surroundings and create a common language of living, of being. All these years of architecture in Albania have not been about the use of innovative ap- proaches, but instead a way to change the identity of the city, of Tirana. I have a very clear image in mind, from 1990 when the main Skanderbeg Square had only pedes- trians, only one bus and one truck. People thought we had a very organised square with the right amount of people – whatever that means – and public transport with one bus. Now what if went back to this situation? That could be very dangerous, because the reason why there were no cars in Skander- beg Square wasn’t because people didn’t want one, but because they couldn’t have one. People also didn’t feel that the square was a real public space, as it was really the main space for the propaganda of Hoxha’s authoritarian regime. Today’s public spaces might seem like they’re organised in a more contemporary way, but they are still made only for events, either a political meeting, music concert or sporting event. The real life happens in such squares after midnight or in the early morning, where there is no urgent need to be there but people go out of pure pleasure or desire. Architecture was and is still used to express political domi- nance and authority. To have a beautiful architecture we have to present it properly and experiment. But I don’t like to use the word educate in this context, and think it’s better to think about developing relation- ships of co-ownership with regard to proj- ects that people really want.