Architect and urban planner Etleva Dobjani, BIG SEE Nominator and Lecturer as well as Head of the Department of Architecture and Design at Barleti University in Tirana, Albania, brings a critical academic perspective to our 2026 festival theme ‘Too much? What is just enough?’, exploring the importance of restraint and responsibility in today’s built environment.
“Just enough is not a stylistic commitment to minimalism, but a rigorous, scientific calibration of the minimum viable intervention.”
The Threshold of Necessity: Architecture as an Act of Restraint
The recurring tension between “too much” and “just enough” is the defining crisis of contemporary spatial production. In a landscape saturated by hyper-connectivity and technical surplus, the architectural act has largely shifted from solving problems to performing them. When skylines become inventories of visual noise, excess is no longer a matter of scale; it is a systemic loss of measure, a failure to recognize where an intervention should cease.
The standardized efficiency of globalization has inadvertently created a “placeless” vacuum. By prioritizing universal performance over vernacular intelligence, we have replaced site specific spatial practices with a globalized technical hegemony. The danger here is the homogenization of human experience: a world where architecture functions everywhere but resonates nowhere.
“Just enough” is not a stylistic commitment to minimalism, but a rigorous, scientific calibration of the minimum viable intervention. It is the search for the precise moment where form achieves maximum social and atmospheric utility without descending into decorative surplus. This is the “critical threshold”, the point where an architect stops adding and begins to allow the space to inhabit its own context. It is an inquiry not into scarcity, but into the essential.
To design within this measure is to act as a mediator between global systems and local realities. It requires the courage to prioritize the human scale and the “readability” of a place over the spectacle of a render. This transition from architecture-as-performance to architecture-as-deliberate-intervention is fundamentally an ethical one. It demands a move toward environments that are not just “sustainable” in a technical sense, but are grounded, legible, and profoundly sensitive to the specificity of their own existence.
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