Ivan Kucina
Elvan Dajko
architecture workshop at Polis University Tirana
October 25 – November 6, 2010
bit of coexistence where there’s nothing left to lose but a lot to add
Minimal Commons is the architecture workshop that explores strategies to exploit Tirana’s physical and mental voids in creating common places for social exchange. Urban voids are the leftovers of the rapid urban growth followed by disintegrating process (social, functional, legal, economic, cultural, political, both historic and contemporary). Voids appear everywhere in the city at many levels, shapes and scales in both space and time. They could be seen to encompass the whole spectrum of urban phenomena: from informal to institutional, from temporal to eternal … This project will propose that urban voids signify the spaces in-between fulfilled individual ambitions, territories and interests.
Taking a multiplicity of urban voids as starting point, students are going to establish a provisional taxonomy of Tirana’s voids. After that each student will chose one void for further research. It will be scanned and mapped to expose a subjective network of vibrant relations between social actors, their behaviors and the built environment. In the next phase, using a series of diagrams to navigate through the mapped territory, each student will conceptualize a community managed public building, such as, local communication center, education and research laboratory, school of missing studies, station for urban activism, architecture and media workshop… Students will create a comprehensive variety of small scale outcomes with a diverse programs and shapes. Finally, a serial of architecture projects that are presented as Google Sketch Up 3D model will be planted in the Tirana Google Earth satellite map.
The potential of exploiting voids is providing a new model of urban development that is abandoning the ideal of the control and unification of the socialist system and the pressure of hostility and disintegration of the post-socialist one. Creating common capacity could lay claim on architecture in a different way, as part of an ongoing life full process in which production of the city is shared between the residents and experts. Common buildings should not take place thanks to ideological programs or market pressures alone, but under the impulse of social actors that are initiating new ways of producing frameworks in which to live.
Strengthening common capacity could have many positive outcomes in the city: interest and curiosity are stimulated, groups and persons establish their temporary identities, and new solutions are invented to old problems. Minimal commons should not seek to eliminate voids, but to understand how to maintain lively controversies instead of deadly conflicts, how to create smart means for constructive exchange among the various concurrent states of existence.
