An International Symposium on Architectural and Urban Design and Preservation

“NEW CITIES IN OLD CITIES” IN ALBANIA

29 May 2025
The Faculty of Research and Development at Polis University, presents the international symposium “New Cities in Old Cities”, in Albania, organized in the framework of the Executive Master Program in Restoration, Conservation and Valorization of Cultural Heritage. We invite architects, urban planners, conservators/restorers of built heritage and all those interested to submit contributions aligned with the proposed theme. The following abstract of the Symposium contains some of the suggested lines of research from which to draw inspiration freely.

Abstract Submission in the link:
16 April 2025

Notification of participants:
29 April 2025

For any questions and info: restauro@universitetipolis.edu.al

In the last 30 years, Albania in general, and Tirana in particular, have witnessed unprecedented urban transformations. Large towers are going up every day, changing both the urban skyline and the very shape and experience of neighborhoods. The city is densely verticalizing (in) the center and endlessly sprawling across landscape. This urban growth has not only erased or violated a large number of structures of the former historic city but has also changed the latter’s very structure and image. Unbridled urbanization and the endangerment of the city from such growth is by no means unique to Tirana but is rather an old, modern problem. The aim of this symposium is to speculate, both from disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, how such growth could enhance and coexist with historical heritage, rather than oppose or undermine it.

Urban growth is not only an economic problem but also an epistemological one. Modern urbanization does not know where to stop: it takes over the city, the land, the world… The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the expansion of European cities beyond their medieval walls, even as they were still relying on a Baroque formal paradigm, by tethering their expansion to the center(s). The new cities of the New World, like Chicago and New York relieved urban expansion both from the (concept of the) center, thus enabling both horizontal and vertical expansion, but without ignoring the relationship of the street wall with the ground, which would eventually erode with the early modernist utopias. The demolition of Pruitt Igoe in 1972 allegedly marked the end of modern urbanism and the beginning of postmodernism.

The modern disposition toward total urbanization runs parallel with a seemingly opposite yet equally modern tendency, characterized by a love of the past and historical heritage. In the nineteenth century, John Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc reevaluated such heritage, without separating its preservation from the architecture of their time. Camillo Sitte derived artistic principles from the traditional towns to plan new ones. Gustavo Giovannoni, in his timely and aptly titled book New Buildings in Old Cities, which this symposium explicitly refers to, outlined a methodology of “pruning” that enabled both the preservation and update of the historic cities. Postwar modernism, in contrast with the anti-historical avantgarde of the 20-s and 30-s brought history and phenomenology in architecture, to rethink and construct meaningful architecture.

Without uncritically conceding to current urbanizations as paradigms of future urbanisms, yet without falling into a nostalgia of an embalmed past, this symposium invites inquiries that focus on how to build new cities in old cities by rethinking an intersection of architectural design and preservation. The larger discursive aim is to re-assess what Françoise Choay has coined as the “competence to build: our capacity to articulate among themselves and with their content, through the mediation of the human body, the elements, positive or negative, solitary but never autonomous, whose deployment on the earth’s surface and in the course of duration signifies both the one who speaks and indissolubly for the one who hears him” (Choay, 172).

We are looking forward to spend a productive day together!
On behalf of the Organizing Team:
Prof.Asoc. Skender Luarasi, Dr. Malvina Istrefaj, Rest.Arch. Marsela Plyku Demaj