Tomà Berlanda is Professor of Architecture at the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town. His research interests focus on the implications that can be drawn from a non-stereotypical reading of the African city and the practice of architecture in non-Western urban settings and landscapes. He has co-founded asa studio and astudio.space, two practices that have produced internationally recognised design work. His collaborative projects are the result of an engagement with the role of quality design for underprivileged communities, an include school buildings, early childhood development centres, and health facilities. He is the author of Architectural Topographies (Routledge, 2014), and, together with K.H. Smith, of Interpreting Kigali (University of Arkansas press, 2018).
About the lecture / October/07/2020 CET
What is/ What belong to the Public?
Dr. Armina Pilav is feminist, architect, researcher and lecturer at the Department of Landscape Architecture, The University of Sheffield. She received the Marie Curie Individual Fellowship for her Un-war Space research (2016-2018) developed at the Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment – TU Delft. Armina research, practice and teaching intersects and focuses on politics of re-presentation and re-production of physical, mediated space, bodily experiences in extreme conditions of the war destruction or other disaster condition. Armina uses cross-media tools, psychospatiality and radical observations to explore ecologies of transformations of rivers, land and related natural forms, architectures and society during and after the wartime. Her work explores and creates in the same time different processes and spaces as are archiving practices, transitional architectures, impermanent organization of humans/non-humans within the post-traumatic landscape systems. She publishes in magazines and academic journals, exhibits regularly, and her recent research on destruction of Sarajevo, Mostar and inhabitant’s transformation of violence has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2018), as part of the Architecture of Shame project in Matera in July 2019. Armina is a member of the Association for Culture and Art Crvena in Sarajevo.
Currently, I am developing research projects on Neretva river in Mostar. The project is looking how river and Mostar inhabitant’s in relation to it and the city from different times as during the war between 1992-1996 and today are transforming violence. Involving different agents and environments, these transformative processes are creating hybrid spaces of organic and anorganic materials, flowing archives, site-specific symbiosis, disruptive landscapes, negative esthetics and beauty made of war trauma.
About the lecture / September/17/2020 19:30 CET
transitional archives of war: the body – the river – architectures – …
In this presentation Armina Pilav will question and show processes of making the system of archives of and about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992-1996. These archives contain, are made off and are performing the war destruction and inhabitant’s survival experience in Bosnian cities Mostar and Sarajevo. Based on her pluriannual research about military war destruction and human capacity to transform military violence, Armina will show different materials related to the body, nature and architectures as system of archives. She assumes human bodies that survived (or didn’t) the war violence as living archives that learned during the war and are still remembering its different conditions of bombing, fear and trauma that can be activated at any time and in relation to the other war context. The river Neretva, Armina observes as a flowing archive. The river and her organic system significantly changed during and after the war in environmental terms but also in its spatial and social role. In the wartime, the river started to collect and deposit anorganic materials, pieces of the exploded bombs, fragments of the bridges as are concrete and other rubble. Since than the river natural ecosystem is in constant becoming introducing natural and hybrid spaces and species. It is highly contaminated and productive environment containing war debris, waste of various origins, hybrid formations produced from the location itself but also by the immaterial remnants as are inhabitants war traumatic experiences. Finally, Armina will discuss through her own research archive un-war space, the transitional archive as certain space of mediation between human experiences of the war, images of the war and collective documenting practices, politics and modes of creating an archive, as well as its possible use or performance of the archive in form of an art project, film, exhibition or else.
Arba Baxhaku completed her PhD dissertation at the University of Florence. Her thesis ‘Suspended Identities – Interpretations on the transfiguration of the Architectural landscape of Tirana after the fall of the communist regime’, presents a project for the recovery of housing built in series during the communist regime in Albania.
Arba’s work is defined by a constant conversation between theoretical research and design practices: RE-WRITING or how to interpret the existing architecture as a dialogue between the past and modernity. Her projects have in common the path of re-building fragments of formal worlds that seem to link together, in an extraordinary affinity and surprising continuity over time, facts and experiences that were at first irreconcilable.
In 2019 she published along with Claudia Cavallo ‘Shadows of the Mediterranean, At the periphery of the Adriatic’ (Ombre del Mediterraneo, Alla periferia dell’Adriatico). The book recounts the experiences of two projects on the communicating banks of the Adriatic sea, Marche in Italy and Zadrima in Albania, two abandoned places linked by the signs of their ruins.
Arba is part of the General Directorate of Urban Planning at the Municipality of Tirana, where she is responsible for projects related to the culture and historical heritage of the city. Recently, in this capacity she was involved in the completion of the project ” House Studio Kadare”, a place dedicated to the study and memory of Ismail Kadare’s work, lead by Elisabetta Terragni. She currently teaches at the Polytechnic University of Tirana.
About the lecture / September/18/2020 18:30 Central European Time /
titulli i ligjerates: Kёmbёkryq nё divanhane ose hapёsira e pёrbashkёt e banesёs shqiptare: njё ekskurs nga oda zjarrit te eksperiencat e ndёrtimeve socialiste
Dr. Boštjan Bugarič is an architect, researcher and editor. He leads KUD C3, a collective for spatial research of contemporary urban trends. In 2011 he was awarded with the Golden Cube Award for the project Public city. As an artist in residence by the Ministry of Culture of Republic in Slovenia was in London (2016) and in New York (2012). In 2014 he collaborated at a community recuperation project in Mexico City within Casa Imelda and UAM University. For the University of Primorska in Koper he coordinated the accreditation and established the Faculty of Built Environment (2008-13), where he took a position of the acting dean (2011 – 2013). In same period was active as a president of the Society of Coastal Architects Koper, Slovenia. In 2012 he leaded an independent reestablishment of the Slovenian Cultural Center in Vienna. In 2017 was invited to be a visiting critic at Cornell University Rome. The same year was a research collaborator at Faculty of Architecture Ljubljana. He was a professor at the Faculty of Humanites Koper and a researcher and editor at Architectuul in Berlin. He collaborated at numerous lectures in Slovenia and abroad and exhibited as a selected author at U3 Triennale of Contemporary Art in Slovenia in MSUM+ Ljubljana in 2013, as a selected lecturer for the international workshop Wonderland Berlin – Funding Urbanism at DAZ Berlin in 2014. Same year he was leading Architectuul’s international project Unfinished,organized in Slovenia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, Austria, Albania and at the final event at the Serbian pavilion of the XIV Architecture Biennial in Venice. Since 2016 he is coordinating the Architcetuul’s associated partnership at the Future Architecture Platform.
About the lecture / September/24/2020 19:30 CET
Publicness lost in Translation
The historical city of Koper is composed by three historical landscapes, which shaped its present structure; the Venetian Gothic, the Socialist City, and the Neoliberal City. Each one was created in a specific period of time by the governance of the ownership and division of capital but the biggest changes took place throughout the last two decades. Nevertheless, the management of public spaces or buildings do not foster public life. The last comprehensive urban plan was prepared in the 1960s and in 2018 one of its last traces, the workers’ skyscraper, has been sold by the current policy to a private investor. The impact area around of the city centre is becoming the city of consumption. While capital started a new development without an urban plan, with public buildings either sold or demolished, the investor urbanism takes control over common areas. A strategy of the public space production is introduced as a ground for commons, contents and reclaim public spaces for encounters. This movement is but a first step towards building the new city walls against commercialization, including different narratives with open source online archives, forming a library of oral history, collecting the knowledge from the past in order to write a story for the future.
James Shen is Principal at People’s Architecture Office. He received his Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Science in Product Design from California State University, Long Beach. Shen has been a Loeb Fellow at Harvard, a Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies and an Innovation Fellow at MIT’s China Future City Lab. He has taught at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
People’s Architecture Office (PAO) is an international practice with offices based in Beijing and Boston. Founded in 2010 by James Shen, He Zhe, and Zang Feng, the firm is a multi-disciplinary studio dedicated to design innovation that leads to a more inclusive and connected society. Areas of focus include housing, education, urban regeneration and urban interventions. Domus named PAO as one of the world’s best architecture firms of 2019 and Fast Company listed PAO as one of the world’s ten most innovative architecture companies in 2018. Recognition for the studio’s work includes the Aga Khan Award, the Wold Architecture Festival Award, and Architecture Review Emerging Architecture Award. PAO’s work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the London Design Museum, and recently as a retrospective at Design Society in Shenzhen.
About the lecture / September/23/2020 19:30 CET
James will be presenting the work of People’s Architecture Office in the context of uncertain publicness. Founded in Beijing in 2010, our practice has matured within an environment of rapid change. Many of our projects designed for public use are built under conditions where function, ownership, and tenure is unclear. And when there is clarity, it is often fleeting. Today, the global community is united through uncertainty as the Covid crisis continues to unfold. For the sake of survival, space is continually being shifted around, reimagined and redefined, unfortunately, often resulting in greater social inequality.
From the moment we were founded, PAO has continued to develop strategies to engage the public in ways that adapt to tumultuous times while promoting greater social inclusion. Our designs are adaptable, flexible and open. They invite citizens to construct, interact, manipulate, occupy, and activate. We embrace the dimension of time, recognizing changing realities and the significance of speed. As we look towards the future, we hope these approaches create opportunities for greater social impact through architecture.
www.peoples-architecture.com
Arber Sadiki graduated at the Faculty of Architecture, Polytechnic University of Tirana. He holds a PhD degree from University of Belgrade with the focus at modernism in Pristina from 1945 until 1990.
From 2001, together with Gezim Sadiku (G + A Architects), is active as a practising architect realising numerous buildings, mostly, in Kosovo, Serbia and Switzerland.
He was assistant curator of Kosovo Pavilion at “14 La Biennale di Venezia”, and nominator at 2016 and 2019 cycle of Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Geneva. He was member of the MoMA team for preparing the exhibition and publication “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980”, MoMA, New York, on 2018.
Since 2012 he teaches at the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning, UBT, Pristina. In 2018 and 2019 as the part of Erasmus exchange programme of academic staff he taught at Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, Dessau, Germany.
About the lecture / September/22/2020 18:30 CET
Arber will be presenting his study on the Boro & Ramizi Sports Center and will be part of the “Prishtina Public Archipelago” panel together with fellow architects Donika Luzhnica, Eliza Hoxha, Nol Binakaj, Bekim Ramku as well as with the Prishtina Mayor Shpend Ahmeti.
Raza Ali Dada is a managing partner at Nayyar Ali Dada & Associates, a leading Architectural firm in Pakistan and recipient of numerous awards including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and the Arcasia Gold Medal. After an extensive design experience in New York, he now practices in Pakistan. As a supporter of eco-conscious practices and a responsible citizen of Lahore, he has been actively raising awareness of sustainable and localized design concepts.
Other than being a shadow-industrial designer, having authored custom objects such as award winning furniture and lighting, he is a visiting faculty at the Beaconhouse National University and a member of the Lahore Conservation Society. Through teaching and as an activist for the city’s environment and conservation, he has contributed to raising awareness among the youth towards critical urban and environmental issues.
Raza is a founding board member of the Lahore Biennale Foundation, which held its first Biennale in March 2018, and the last one in early 2020, with over 8o artists and 13 sites in the city, earning worldwide appreciation.
He is an advisor for the “Afforestation Lahore” campaign (an initiative of the Lahore Biennale Foundation) to reverse the loss of green cover in the city through public-private partnerships.
Raza is a member of the advisory committee of the AYDA – Asia Young Designer Awards and was selected as an On-Site Reviewer for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (2019 Cycle).
About the lecture / September/24/2020 18:30 CET
Return to Publicness
Raza will present a local account where the return to Publicness is on the rise and inevitable for the survival of a city following decades of corrosion and corruption.
In Lahore, a city full of vibrant life and history, the built environment continues to present a challenge due to neglect and inaction by its stakeholders, government and administration. For many, the precious accounts in the history books seem to speak of a very different city. We yearn for that place driven by literature, art and architecture – the city known as the city of gardens. The city that has lost almost three quarters of its green cover in less than two decades wonders if the skies will be blue again.
In a nutshell, we are a third world city where the only promises of a booming future come from developers and politicians whose exploits are universally obvious and ironically, being the only moving machinery in our system, have made it easier to motivate us to seek alternatives.
We Lahoris, finally driven by immeasurable ambition, have made strides in exploring ways to engage with the issues to find that much lies in understanding what we have been calling Public/s. A large complex city demands an understanding of the varying social fabric to create overlays and programming that presents context to brings them together.
Through our design practice, Nayyar Ali Dada & Associates and the Lahore Biennale Foundation, we pursue and seek to form and identify networks comprising of the government, activists and experts who will come together to create or claim spaces for public. This reverse-invasion if we may call it, is further strengthened in the philosophical sense by adding intellectual programming through the arts to prompt engagement for the public/s in a space that is their own to claim.
Jora, is a young practicing architect based in Tirana, graduated in Architecture and Sustainability from KU Leuven, Sint-lucas Gent. She has been working and exploring different orientations in architecture and her expertise has developed and focused on urban research, Interior design, industrial (furniture) and sustainable design. She is an activist and recently a big supporter and practitioner of Open Source culture and platforms. She is the initiator of the multidisciplinary projects combining Open knowledge and Open Source culture with Cultural heritage, like ‘The Albanian House’ and ‘PreservingTirana.city’, also nominated as the winning proposal from Albania for Smart Cities and urban development, in the World Summit Award. Some of her recent interior projects have been awarded with Big SEE Interior design Award 2019 (Ljubljana) and also nominated for German Design Award 2019.
She is a supporter of ethical design and architecture and she has been publicly active in sustaining the importance of issues like the city’s Identity preservation through projects and grassroots initiatives. She is currently engaged at Cultural Heritage Without Borders Albania, as a program architect.
About the lecture / September/29/2020 18:30 CET
Preservation of ‘the undesired buildings’ of the region, through Open Source and participatory architecture .
The continuous process of tabula rasa, in the urban fabric of the city of Tirana, has led to the evidence of a specific group of architectural works, which are the main surviving representatives of the ‘organic’ development of Tirana’s architecture, perceived as the ‘undesired buildings’. This state of affairs is a result of the lack of various forms of architectural preservation, despite the rich historical, cultural and architectural values of the buildings in question.
Being particularly vulnerable and endangered, the way found to protect these buildings in a situation where the institutional will to do so seems to be absent, was by re-bringing them and the values they represent to the community’s attention, re-activating the community’s collective memory about them and consequently about the city, re-appropriating the city through their re-valorization. The tool used is an interactive, digital documentation platform https://preservingtirana.city/, where the entire database was created as a combination of theoretical research with ethnographic community interviews, fieldwork mapping, and photographing. It represents a collaborative website and at the same time a public archiving platform, through the use of open knowledge, Open Source platforms, and open creative licenses for its content. Since these buildings are common assets for the city, acquiring knowledge about them and enriching this database comes as a common right and responsibility for all its citizens. Therefore this process of archiving the ‘stratification of history in space’ in Tirana is conceived as a continuous process in time, participatory, and sustainable. This project on Tirana created the adequate soil for the development of another digital documenting platform, reserved for a specific typology, ‘the house’, as one of the most neglected architecture in Albania. Giving birth to thealbanian.house Open Source platform, with the purpose to make more public and accessible information on these common architectural assets.
Lack of sensibility and indifference for a certain built heritage, happen to exist also in other cities of the region. Therefore the need to use preservingtirana.city as a pilot-project and apply it for these other cities of the region came very organically in the specific case of Pristina. We created a common main platform, under the umbrella of ‘preservation’ called preservingWB.city, that included also preservingpristina.city. The structure of the project and website is accessible and open so that anybody can make use and replicate it for the city he lives in, therefore making people from different parts of the region, connect through taking stance on a common issue, the state of ‘architecture neglect’.
Jora Kasapi webpage.
Prof. Dr. Heba Allah Essam E. Khalil is a professor of sustainable urbanism at Department of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University and the Senior Coordinator of the Architectural Engineering and Technology AET program at Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University with 20 years of academic and professional experience. She teaches and conducts research in community development, informal areas, urban climate, and integrated urban systems with several publications including books and journal papers. She has built several international research partnerships focusing on urban metabolism and improving urban micro-climate in highly dense cities through material flow analysis, simulation, and participatory action research.
More recently, she started a research project focusing on gender equity and cities and another on land governance. Professionally, she also works as an architect, urban planner, community facilitator and housing expert with multi-scale agencies, authorities, and clients both local and international. She has worked for multiple public agencies and international organizations on urban development, strategic planning and housing programs including: World Bank, Washington DC, USA; UN-Habitat, Egypt, and local authorities in Egypt. As an Alumna of SPURS, MIT, Dr. Khalil continuously seeks partnerships to support a new planning and design practice for sustainable urbanism in her region. Khalil holds a PhD in architectural engineering from Cairo University and has been granted the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship in urban studies at MIT.
About the lecture / October/02/2020 18:30 CET
Cairo’s Public Spaces of Informality: Needs and Responsiveness
Skye Duncan is the Director of the Global Designing Cities Initiative (GDCI) at the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO). Skye and her team produced the award-winning Global Street Design Guide and its recent supplement, Designing Streets for Kids. In support of these global resources, GDCI provides ongoing technical assistance to cities around the world on safe and sustainable street design and mobility.
Skye is an urban designer with over 15 years of experience in architecture, urban design, and planning, and was recognized as one of TUMI’s Remarkable Women in Transportation in 2019. She has worked as a Senior Urban Designer at the New York City Department of City Planning, as an International Urban Design Consultant, and as an Associate Professor at Columbia University in New York City, where she studied as a Fulbright Scholar.
The Global Designing Cities Initiative is a program of NACTO, a New York-based, 501c3, non-profit organization, with a mission to inspire a shift towards safe, sustainable, and healthy cities through transforming our streets.
GDCI is a team of designers, planners, and urban strategists committed to working in support of city practitioners to get projects on the ground. We focus on empowering local officials and communities to become changemakers, equipping them with the knowledge, tools, and tactics needed to improve urban mobility and fundamentally change the role of streets in our cities. Our work is informed by the strategies and international best practice captured in the Global Street Design Guide.
About the lecture / September/16/2020 18:30 Central European Time /
