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 /
Aziza Chaouni is the principal of Aziza Chaouni Projects (ACP) based in Fez, Morocco and Toronto, Canada. Aziza was born and raised in Fez, Morocco. She is trained both as a structural engineer and as an architect, with 14 years working experience in Morocco France, and the USA.
Aziza graduated Cum Laude from Columbia University and with Distinction from Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her work has won several top design Awards and Recognitions including the Holcim Gold Award for Sustainable Construction in 2009, and has been published and exhibited widely.
Aziza is also an Associate Professor at the Daniels School of Architecture Landscape and Design, where she leads the Designing Ecological Tourism lab. In 2007, Chaouni co-founded Docomomo Morocco with the late Mohammed El Hariri.
Chaouni has rehabilitated several heritage buildings, including the Qarawiyine library, the oldest library in the Middle East. She’s responsible for the Sidi Harazem Thermal Bath Complex CMP, supported by the Keeping it Modern Grant offered by the Getty Foundation. She recently won with Mourtada Gueye another KIM grant for the conservation of the International Fair of Dakar, Senegal.
About the lecture / September/23/2020 18:30 Central European Time /
Public space, water and arid climates: projects by Aziza Chaouni Projects
UrbanaArchitettura are a collective of architects, teachers and researchers with an interest in the relation between architecture and the city via the formation, reformation, and de-structuring of institutions. We have taught at the AA, the RCA, Central Saint Martins, the Leeds School of Architecture, the Cass, the University of Cagliari, Anglia Ruskin University, and Universidad Católica del Norte. Our work and writings are published on AA Files, Domus, OASE, MONU, San Rocco, and the Funambulist. Sabrina is Marie S. Curie Fellow at KULeuven with the research project ‘Territories of Incarceration’. Sabrina and Paolo Emilio direct Casting Castaways, a Visiting School for the Architectural Association on the disused prison islands in the Mediterranean. Francesco is a researcher and senior lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University. His research investigates the space of the university as a paradigm for understanding the modern city, and he is the author of the book ‘The University as Settlement Principle. The Territorialisation of Knowledge in 1970s Italy’. Marco is PhD candidate at the University of Cagliari and visiting professor at Universidad Católica del Norte (Chile) where he led the Urbanism-Studio ‘Through the Looking Glass. Alteraciones del proyecto territorial’ whose results were presented at 16th Venice Biennale in 2018. Their research investigates the architectures of higher education.
UrbanaArchitettura is a collective of Sabrina Puddu, Marco Moro, Francesco Zuddas, Paolo Emilio Pisano who participated at the Future Architecture Platform 2020 call for ideas.
ACAN is a voluntary network of individuals from within architecture and its related built environment professions taking critical action to transform our industry in the face of the climate and ecological crises.
ACAN exists to address the way our built environment is made, operated and renewed in response to the climate emergency. As a network of individuals, we channel personal energy, expertise and action towards a common goal – the systemic change of our profession and the construction industry as a whole. We see this as a matter of urgency.
Our mission is to mobilise a new movement of professional activists towards this goal by building an open, supportive and inclusive organisation. ACAN empowers individuals to proactively seek change and facilitates collective effort through a shared platform built on collaboration.
ACAN has 3 overarching aims that guide all we do:
1 – DECARBONISE NOW
We seek to radically transform the regulatory, economic and cultural landscape in which our built environment is made, operated and renewed in order to facilitate rapid decarbonisation of the built environment.
2 – ECOLOGICAL REGENERATION
We advocate the immediate adoption of regenerative & ecological principles in order to green the built environment, prioritise communities and ecosystems at threat and promote the recovery and restoration of natural environments.
3 – CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION
We call for a complete remodelling of our professional culture. We must challenge and redefine the value systems at the heart of our industry and education system. We seek to create an open network to share resources and knowledge to aid in this transition.
ACAN are Future Architecture Platform 2020 Selected Creatives.
About the lecture & workshop / September/18/2020 19:30 CET
Lecture + workshop about the climate and biodiversity emergency, architecture’s part in it and how YOU can get involved to make a difference.
ACAN formed in London over the summer of 2019, in this talk we will take you through how ACAN was conceived, founded and is expanding. We will explain the principles and activities fundamental to the network, talk through some of the actions we have taken and explain the changes we are trying to bring about. We will discuss how to build effective campaigns and make an inclusive network of engaged individuals working collaboratively to address the climate and biodiversity crises.
There will be a short Q&A session before we divide the audience into groups. With a facilitator from ACAN you will be asked to discuss what issues affect your region and areas of expertise, how these could be overcome and what would be needed to make changes for the better.
This will not be the a run of the mill lecture and audience participation will be vital! Don’t be afraid, we will create a fun, inclusive forum for people to speak their mind and meet others who share their concerns. The movement is building and we want you all to be a part of it.
In the first 20 minutes we will take you through how ACAN was conceived, founded and is expanding, we will explain the principles and activities fundamental to the network. We will talk through some of the actions we have taken and explain the changes we are trying to bring about. We will discuss how to build effective campaigns and make an inclusive network of engaged individuals working effectively to address the climate and biodiversity crises.
There will then be a short Q&A session before we divide the audience into groups to discuss what issues affect your region and areas of their expertise, how they could be overcome and what would be needed to make changes for the better.
This will not be the a run of the mill lecture and audience participation will be vital! Don’t be afraid, we will create a fun, inclusive forum for people to speak their mind and meet others who share their concerns. The movement is building, and we want you all to be a part of it.
All interested to join the workshop can register through the workshop Link.
Renzo Sgolacchia is an architect and urban researcher based in Rotterdam and PhD fellow at IUAV, University of Venice.In 2020 with the project Learning from Films, he became fellow of the Future Architecture, a European platform that connects architecture institutions and emerging creatives.
He graduated cum laude from the Faculty of Architecture of Roma Tre University in 2010. His graduate thesis, developed at TU Delft within the MSC Public Building, dealt with a housing project of a compact block in the city centre of Havana, Cuba. In 2012 he participated at the Istanbul Design Biennial with the exhibition Re-reading Giancarlo De Carlo, based on a collective research. The exhibition was also presented at the New Museum in New York and at the Limewharf in London.
In Rotterdam he worked as an architect at KCAP Architects & Planners, Atelier Kempe Thill and Studio Marco Vermeulen. Since 2015 he was commissioned for conceptual masterplans and researches on urbanism.
He is the founder of Cinema Architecture, a project combining research and film screenings, which investigates architectural space through cinema. Since 2015 this project is supported by Creative Industries Fund NL and City of Rotterdam. The screening events became an important cultural reference in the city.
Renzo is a Future Architecture Platform 2020 Selected Creative.
About the lecture / September/15/2020 18:30 CET
Learning from Films
The outcomes of a common architectural project are only verified when a building is constructed or inhabited. Architects mainly operate through abstract procedures and conventions such as technical drawings and financial measurements, which become tangible only during the final steps of a design process. Film reveals and simulates “a bodily experience of space”, and it can be considered as a complementary discipline to architecture, an accurate tool to perceive, articulate and verify architectural spaces.
Within the film discipline the architectural space is the real or reconstructed location where a film is shot, while the cinematic space is the viewer’s mental reconstruction during a film screening. The peculiarity of the cinematic space is concisely described by Juhani Pallasmaa, a Finnish architectural theorist. “Cinema constructs spaces in the mind of the viewer”, as he stated. A film director “constructs” the cinematic spaces and the viewer creates own mental maps that localise his/her position and re-construct the single spatial fragments.
Filmmaking is intrinsically an architectural project and the case of single location films is emblematic to understand the cinematic space. The single location films such as Last Year at Marienbad (directed by Alain Resnais, 1961) and High-Rise (directed by Ben Wheatley, 2015), are perceived as entirely shot in a single building. The film Marienbad takes place in a baroque hotel, which is, in fact, an imaginary building created by editing scenes shot in several locations, namely three royal palaces in Munich and a film studio in Paris. High-Rise is situated in a brutalist-styled tower that consists of a monumental garden and a leisure centre in Bangor, a ferry terminal in Belfast and a 3D model that simulates the exterior of the multi-storey building. In these cases, the cinematic space can be considered as a “Frankenstein” location, a mix of different rooms and buildings, which appears to the spectator as one. It is a re-composition of various fragments that are retroactively constructed by the viewer during the screening.
In order to demonstrate that filmmaking creates a tangible architecture, the lecture will explore how film directors have cinematically re-composed different and separated spatial fragments into an imaginary room, building or trajectory. The presentation will focus on selected films that are crucial to understand the configuration of their physical and inhabited spaces.
Goda is a spatial designer from Lithuania, currently based in The Netherlands. After graduating from the master of interior architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, she has been working in several architecture and urban research studios. Next to this, she is part of an experimental collective-platform for architecture and arts called No Purpose, which seeks for process-orientated, ephemeral, spatial experiments with a DIY approach. Also for several years she has been collaborating with TAAT (theatre as architecture, architecture as theatre) collective that operates as a performative spatial practice in between the fields of architecture, performance and artistic research.
In her personal work Goda combines architectural practice with more interdisciplinary approaches, such as video, mapping, recording, writing, and other media. She looks into speculative designs as tools to imagine future narratives. She has published several articles in different architectural magazines and platforms and also has presented her works in group as well as solo exhibitions. Her project Recycling Utopia received an Honourable mention at the Archiprix, 2019, and was one of the selected ideas at the Future Architecture Platform in 2020.
Goda who is a Future Architecture Platform 2020 Selected Creative.
Recycling Utopia. Bolo# Pleasure Futurists, 2018
Author: Goda Verikaite
About the lecture / September/16/2020 19:30 CET
Recycling Utopia
This talk focuses on the complex nature of mass-housing districts in the post-socialist cities in Lithuania. This industrialized housing was the physical outcome of the Utopian promise to provide every Soviet family with its own apartment. In the 1990s, Lithuania underwent radical changes in the wake of its transformation from a Soviet communist system into a democratic and independent state. However, the Soviet mass housing neighbourhoods remained unchanging relics of what had been built sixty years earlier. What is the next step for these prefab house-machines?
By embracing speculative narrative as a method, my project “Recycling Utopia” (2018) adopts the theory of bolos, which are independent and decentralized units of people. Represented as a visual narrative, it travels through different scales, starting from country infrastructures to urban neighbourhoods. Via this project, the first mass-housing district in Lithuania, Žirmūnai, is transformed into an experimental neighbourhood by using different concepts of luxury, equality, collectivity, and affordability.
The second case (my ongoing project ‘’What Is Eiguliai Talking about”, 2020) focuses on a new location, Eiguliai, another socialist mass-housing district in Lithuania built in late 1980s. This project aspires to listen to the existing stories of local people, yards, buildings, surroundings, and in doing so proposes a fresh look at the neighbourhood as a district of various micro-utopias. The project at its culmination will invite people to take a walk in Eiguliai district by listening to a narrated speculative audio-tour.
By presenting several projects, the talk suggests a creation of new narratives for socialist mass-housing districts as a tool to showcase different social, historical and political layers in these particular urban settings. By using different artistic media, my projects expand the traditional architectural research in order to imagine less conventional urban futures.
