Donika Luzhnica, born in 1991 in Suhareka, is an architect based in Zurich and Prishtina. She is currently holding a position as a design architect at CH Architekten in Zurich. In 2018 she obtained the Master Degree from the Technical University in Graz and her Master’s Thesis – “Gërmia center for contemporary creation. Reimagine the relationship between the city, its past and art”- was nominated at GAD Awards and won the third Prize.
During her studies, she has been working as a research and student assistant at the KOEN Insitute at TU Graz and has as well collected experiences working with various practices, LOVE Architecture and Pittino & Ortner amongst other, for many project related collaborations.
In 2016, together with three other colleagues, she has won the first prize in a realisation competition “Revitalisation of steps in Arberia Quarter and construction of a new pedestrian bridge” and co-founded ARS Atelie – an interdisciplinary architectural practice based in Prishtina later that same year.
In 2018 she has been part of the design team of the Kosovo Pavilion at the 16th Architecture Biennale in Venice.
Her work focuses on typology research and design.
About the lecture / September/22/2020 18:30 CET
This lecture examines and argues the reuse of the former department store Germia, and its transformation into a center of contemporary creation, using architecture as an instrument to resolve a specific urban vision and reimagine the relationship between the city, its past and art. The focus lies in the typological transformative reuse as well as in reactivation of an important architectural socialist modernist heritage in a specific context. Through contextual analysis as well as typology research, this work, in addition, tries to answer the question of how to deal with the yugoslav modernist legacy in Prishtina, what do these landmarks represent and based on an example explore their reuse potential as well as give an answer to the unfinished utopia.
Donika will be presenting her study on the Germia and will be part of the “Prishtina Public Archipelago” panel together with fellow architects Eliza Hoxha, Arber Sadiki, Nol Binakaj, Bekim Ramku as well as with the Prishtina Mayor Shpend Ahmeti
Malkit Shoshan is the founding director of the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST), an Amsterdam- and New York-based think-tank that develops projects at the intersection of architecture, urban planning, and human rights.
She is the author and mapmaker of the award-winning book “Atlas of Conflict: Israel-Palestine” (Uitgeverij 010, 2010), and co-author of the book “Village. One Land Two Systems and Platform Paradise” (Damiani Editore, 2014). Her additional publications include “Zoo, or the letter Z, just after Zionism” (NAiM, 2012), “Drone – Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series” (dpr-barcelona, 2016-2018), the journal “Spaces of Conflict” for Footprint, TU Delft Architecture Theory Journal (JAP SAM Books, 2017), “Greening Peacekeeping: The Environmental Impact of UN Peace Operations” (The International Peace Institute, NYC, 2018), and “UN Peace Missions in Urban Environments. The Legacy of UNMIL” (FAST, CIC-NYU, 2019).
In 2016, Shoshan was the curator of the Dutch Pavilion for The Venice Architecture Biennale with the exhibition “BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions.” Her recent exhibitions include “Love in a Mist. The Politics of Fertility” (Druker Gallery, Harvard GSD, 2019), and “Border Ecologies” (Harvard GSD, 2017), and the exhibition “Watermelons, Sardines, Crabs, Sand and other Sediments” for the upcoming 2021 Venice Biennale.
She is the Area Head of the Master in Design Studies in Art, Design, and the Public Domain (ADPD) at Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she taught the courses: “Architecture of Peace,” “Spaces of Solidarity,” “Exhibit: Designing for Decentralization,” “Forms of Assembly,” and “Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices.”
Her research and design work has been published in newspapers and journals including the New York Times, The Guardian, NRC, Haaretz, Volume, Surface, Frame, Metropolis, and exhibited in venues including the UN Headquarter in NYC (2016), Venice Architecture Biennale (2002, 2008, 2016), Experimenta (2011), Het Nieuwe Instituut (2014), The Istanbul Design Biennale (2014), The Israel Digital Art Center (2012), and The Netherlands Architecture Institute (2007).
About the lecture / October/01/2020 19:30 CET
Notes on Forms of Assembly and Solidarity
The city, and the built environment at large, is an entanglement of complex socioeconomic, cultural, and political systems. In its public spaces, we come together, inform and form one another. These spaces of physical and social encounters are critical for democracy, freedom, and a just society.
Confronted by a global pandemic, we become confined within a minimal space. Our bodies are physically locked inside the domestic environment, and when outside, they are masked and at six feet apart. Intellectually, our virtual and online exchanges, which are seemingly open, remain highly edited and surveilled. We communicate with a world of similarity, gated in social and professional networks. Not only the pandemic imperils our public spaces, and, by extension, our freedom, and rights. We live in times of changing climate and environmental destruction that have immense consequences on humans and other species’ lives and habitat. These growing stresses threaten to solidify policies, culture, and spaces of isolation, exclusions, and violence. Walls and detainment camps are forming vast landscapes along national political borders. At this time of public health crisis, precarious public life, and environmental catastrophe, we need to come together, assemble, in solidarity more than ever before and imagine our way out of isolationism, and perpetual systemic violence.
This lecture will explore how art and design tools can become agents of change that help us by engagement to empower the public imagination, conceive, enact, and mobilize forms of assembly – spaces of unedited and uncontrolled open exchange, and places of solidarity and care.
Doreen is an architect based in Kampala, Uganda. Her practice, Adengo Architecture, is grounded in research and multidisciplinary collaboration.
After completing her undergraduate and graduate studies at the Catholic University and Yale, respectively, Doreen worked for design firms in London, Washington DC, and New York. She has taught at The New School and Pratt Institute in New York and at Uganda Marty’s University, and until recently served as a visiting critic at University of Johannesburg’s Graduate School of Architecture.
Much of Doreen’s work is focused on communicating the value of professional design services in African cities. In a context where non-designers often build their own homes, schools, and other structures, she believes that it’s critical to make the case that architects and urban planners can improve people’s everyday lives, helping neighborhoods and cities develop cohesively and sustainably.
To this end, Doreen often collaborates with institutions and individuals from different fields to find new ways to communicate about design in Kampala. In 2018, Doreen served as a regional collaborator for the African Mobilities: This is not a refugee camp exhibition at the Architecture Museum in Munich. Her team explored the impact of Congolese migrants on the Kitenge trade in Kampala. As part of the process, Doreen coordinated the Kampala Exchange workshop at the Goethe Zentrum Kampala, bringing together architects, photographers, and social scientists to seek new approaches to architectural representation.
Doreen recently facilitated the African Modernism: Kampala workshop along with German architect Manuel Herz and Kenyan photographer James Muriuki, also at the Goethe Zentrum Kampala. The workshop, which explored the relationship between architecture and photography, led to an exhibition that included new photographs of modernist buildings in the Ugandan capital. Doreen co-curated the exhibition with Manuel Herz.
About the lecture / October/09/2020 18:30 CET
Kampala Markets as Public Space
Dr. Rezai is an engineer, a design visionary and an educator. One of the initiators of the concept of “fusion engineering”, he is the first and only engineer to receive the coveted title of “Designer of the Year” from the President of Singapore. He is very passionate about the process of advanced computational design, and a holistic approach to architecture + structure + environment. Dr Rezai’s high- profile contributions to industry discourse include his involvement on the 13th cycle Aga Khan Award for Architecture’s Master Jury in 2016, as a jury member for the Singapore President’s Design Award (2017 – 2018) and as Vice Chair (2019-2020). Dr Rezai is founding Director of Web Structures and Web Earth. His latest initiative, on Advanced Computational Design aims to redefine the collaborative nature of designers working with machines to overcome the compound challenges faced by the building industries, and the environments within which they are deployed.
Dr. Rezai lectures extensively, and has covered ongoing crit and consultation in various architectural schools including those at the National University of Singapore (NUS), the Singapore University of Technology and Design and Politecnico Di Milano.
Dr Rezai is a proponent of highrise and dense urban development, with emphasis on innovative structural systems for tall, supertall and mega tall structures.
About the lecture / October/08/2020 18:30 CET
JUSTICE, DESIGN AND PUBLICNESS
This talk will address key issues facing contemporary design professionals, including our evolving relationship with the environment, the purpose and hierarchy of design, and the multiplicity of clients; as well as pressing political and social agendas for the built environment.
Drawing on his nearly four decades of innovative design and engineering collaborations with some of the world’s best architects, designers and centres of research, Dr Hossein Rezai will share insights on the current status and potential future directions of design for the built environment, all the while seeking to apply lessons from the wisdom of the past.
In particular, Dr Rezai will share some provocations for the audience to reconsider our contemporary norms; seeking new ways to translate the current generation’s unprecedented access to data and information into true knowledge and insight, and asking how current parameters for assessing sustainable development might be expanded.
Alessio Rosati (1971) was born in Rome where he studied architecture.
After working for some of the main Italian cultural institutions, in 2010 started his collaboration with MAXXI, The National Musem of 21st Century Arts where he curated exhibitions and events, edited publications, headed the Research Department and is currently Head of Institutional Projects.
He is regularly invited as guest lecturer and critic by north American architecture schools such as Cornell, Pratt, and Waterloo.
About the lecture / September/25/2020 18:30 CET
You Have To Pay For The Public Life. Sometimes.
A story by Alessio Rosati featuring Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher, Ralph Erskine, Herman Hertzberger, Enric Miralles, Charles W. Moore and Paolo Portoghesi.
In 2020 MAXXI, Italy’s national museum for contemporary arts celebrates the 10th anniversary of its opening to the public, a decade during which the cultural institution has tried to define its public role and, being the country’s first museum of contemporary architecture, to provide the public with tools and methods to know, analyze and understand the space in which we live.
Through a palimpsest of exhibitions and cultural activities MAXXI has recurrently addressed the theme of publicness, questioning its own role, in a time when the idea of public institution is undergoing a profound rethinking and the concept of public space is facing a radical transformation.
Today urban public space is indeed used more intensively than ever and is often organized specifically for consumption. For decades, this was perceived as a negative development and it has been said that such regimented spaces were not “open” places where people can spontaneously meet the “other” or where groups could can together. They were deemed as places unable to satisfy the definition of the public sphere provided by thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas: a place for debate and democracy, for the exchange of opinions.
However, something is changing and the negative opinions of recent decades are being questioned. Fears and concerns about the disappearance of the public domain seem to be giving way to a more positive and sophisticated point of view, capable of creating the conditions in which the public can claim a space as their own.
You Have To Pay For The Public Life. Sometimes is the Italian version of the story, presented as a documentary with contributions by some of the key figures of contemporary architecture.
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
