Architect, researcher, and editor. Master in architecture from the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto and TU Munich. Based in Porto, Portugal.
Located at the intersection of Adriatic landscapes and Balkan geopolitics, Tirana has undergone one of the most accelerated urban transformations in Europe over the last three decades. Once defined by rigid socialist planning and political isolation, the city has progressively reoriented itself through a combination of informal growth, international investment, and strategic urban interventions that seek to redefine its public image and spatial structure.
Since the early 2000s, a series of urban policies, most notably those initiated during the mayoral tenure of Edi Rama (now Albania prime minister), have promoted the use of color, public space, and architectural experimentation as tools for civic reactivation. Rather than relying solely on masterplans, Tirana's development has operated through interventions, where individual buildings and public spaces act as catalysts within a fragmented urban fabric.
Architecture is often presented as the visible expression of its time, its desires, its faith in progress, its idea of order. Yet this reading tends to flatten the conditions under which buildings are produced. It suggests that architecture follows history when, in many cases, it actively participates in it. Few periods make this more evident than the twentieth century, when architecture became deeply entangled with political programs, economic systems, and competing visions of how collective life should be organized.
What is commonly grouped under the label of Modernism is often described as a coherent project, defined by formal clarity, technological optimism, and a break with historical styles. But this apparent coherence dissolves when we look beyond its canonical centres. The same spatial principles (standardization, functional zoning, industrial production) were adopted in political and economic contexts that differed significantly in their structures and objectives. A static movement unfolded as a flexible system continuously reoriented according to the priorities of each regime. What appeared as a shared language was, in practice, a set of tools applied to distinct agendas.
In 2026, Apple marked fifty years since its founding. Over the past two decades, Apple has developed a consistent architectural language that extends its brand into the built environment, transforming stores, workplaces, and public-facing spaces into active components of its identity. These environments guide movement, frame interaction, and condition the ways in which users encounter both products and the company itself.
From the handheld device to the urban interior, Apple has sought to maintain a high degree of control over form, material, and experience. Architecture becomes part of this system when the company begins to define how it is perceived and engaged with in physical space. Research on retail environments has shown how spatial layout, visibility, and circulation patterns can shape behavior and interaction, turning architecture into an interface between brand and user.
Some cities grow through continuity, others construct themselves through moments of acceleration. Baku, in Azerbaijan, seems to operate somewhere in between. Its historic core, the Icherisheher, still holds a spatial logic that resists expansion: dense, enclosed, defined by proximity and repetition. But just beyond its walls, the city begins to shift. Scale increases, distances expand, and the relationship between buildings becomes less about continuity and more about visibility.
Over the past two decades, Baku has been the site of a deliberate effort to construct an image of itself. Oil wealth provided the means, but architecture became one of its primary tools. Projects such as the Heydar Aliyev Center by Zaha Hadid Architects or the Flame Towers are symbols of this transformation, their forms designed to circulate as much through media as through the city itself. They are precise, controlled, and highly resolved objects. But they also introduce a different urban logic, one that privileges singularity over continuity and positions architecture as an agent of representation.
Blur Building, Lake Neuchatel, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, 2002. Image Courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Architecture is traditionally chronicled through the persistence of the solid. We define the discipline by the weight of the lintel, the mass of the pier, and the resistance of the wall. Even when lightness is invoked, it is usually understood as a subtractive act, the thinning of a section or the precarious reduction of a load. Yet there is a parallel history, less visible and harder to isolate, in which the primary material of construction is not what occupies space, but what moves through it.
To treat air as a medium is to move past the binary of the envelope. The boundary between the interior and the world ceases to be a line of absolute separation and becomes, instead, a site of filtration and pressure. We begin to see the building as a thermal valve, a series of gradients where moisture, velocity, and heat are not merely background "conditions" to be mitigated by mechanical systems, but are the very substances being shaped.
Architectural history often advances through iconic gestures or technological breakthroughs, yet some works remain influential precisely because they resist spectacle. Built between 1972 and 1974 in Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium, the Van Wassenhove Residence stands as one of those quiet but decisive projects. Conceived as a single, continuous concrete volume set within a wooded landscape, the house challenges conventional ideas of domestic comfort, privacy, and spatial hierarchy. Its presence is direct and uncompromising, yet it avoids monumentality, positioning itself instead as a lived structure shaped by everyday rituals and long-term inhabitation.
The house was designed by Juliaan Lampens, a figure who operated largely outside the dominant architectural narratives of his time. Working mostly in Flanders and often on private commissions, Lampens developed a body of work centered on radical spatial reduction, material honesty, and an almost ethical approach to construction. The Van Wassenhove Residence is frequently described as his most complete work, not because it introduces new ideas, but because it consolidates many of the principles that run consistently through his career.
Architecture has long been drawn to the idea of lightness. From early modernist experiments that sought to preserve landscapes, elevating buildings has been understood as a way to preserve the ground while maintaining continuity across the terrain. Volumes are lifted on columns, infrastructures detach circulation from the surface, and entire programs are suspended above the ground.
This was formalised in the early twentieth century through Le Corbusier's concept of the pilotis, which proposed the liberation of the ground floor from enclosure. By raising buildings on columns, architects sought to maintain continuity with the terrain, allowing movement, vegetation, and collective use to unfold beneath constructed volumes. The building would occupy the air, while the ground would remain open, accessible, and shared.
In recent years, Albania has undergone a rapid and visible transformation, emerging as one of the most active urban environments in Southeast Europe. This growth is not only reflected in the expansion of its built fabric but also in the scale and ambition of new architectural interventions that seek to redefine the country's image. Across its territory, a series of large developments, cultural institutions, and infrastructural projects are being introduced as part of a broader effort to reposition Albania and its capital, Tirana, within regional and international networks.
A significant number of these interventions are being designed by internationally recognized architectural offices, whose presence has become a defining characteristic of the city's current phase of development. Rather than relying primarily on incremental or locally embedded processes, Tirana's transformation is increasingly shaped through externally authored visions that introduce new formal languages, typologies, and urban strategies. These projects often operate as singular objects or large-scale fragments, contributing to a landscape where the city is assembled through distinct and highly visible gestures.
Death is a certainty, but its architecture has never been stable. Every period and culture has invented a different way of placing the dead in the world (close or far, visible or screened, monumental or almost anonymous), and those choices have always carried social and political weight. Cemeteries are where that weight becomes legible in space, turning belief and regulation into boundaries, paths, and names.
In that sense, a cemetery behaves like a piece of city-making. It needs access, limits, and an internal order that can grow without losing clarity. It depends on ground and water management as much as on symbolism, and on administration as much as on form. But its real architectural problem is how to make a large, evolving territory readable while preserving the intimacy of a visit. Names must be locatable; routes must remain legible; trees grow, paths shift, stones weather, records accumulate. What looks fixed is, in practice, a living system designed to be used and revisited, long after the first grief has passed.
Beneath the ground lies a material that has quietly shaped the architecture of the modern world. Petroleum is rarely discussed within architectural discourse, yet the extraction, circulation, and consumption of oil have profoundly reorganized the spatial logic of territories. Pipelines, refineries, drilling platforms, ports, highways, and petrochemical complexes form a vast infrastructural landscape that sustains contemporary life, composing a dispersed architecture of energy.
Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, oil became the material foundation of industrial society. It fueled transportation, powered factories, and supported the growth of cities whose spatial organisation depended on continuous energy flows. Yet the infrastructures that enable these flows rarely become objects of architectural inquiry. Attention remains largely directed toward form, typology, or urban density, while the material systems that sustain these environments tend to remain displaced within the discipline.
Architecture has traditionally been described as a discipline concerned with space, form, and material presence. Yet this understanding becomes increasingly limited when confronted with the conditions that shape contemporary construction. Buildings no longer emerge from a stable relationship between site, program, and material. Instead, they are produced within a dense web of technological systems that operate across territorial, ecological, and temporal scales. Energy networks, data infrastructures, extraction processes, and global logistics shape architecture as decisively as climate or urban context.
Seen from this angle, architecture is less a discrete object than a moment within a larger technical field. Supply chains, data systems, automated maintenance, and energy grids do not sit "behind" the built environment. In a certain way, they influence what can be built, what is affordable, how buildings perform over time, and what kinds of waste they produce. When architecture is assessed primarily through form, it risks overlooking the systems that condition its production and afterlife.
House with Seven Gardens / Civil Architecture. Image Courtesy of Civil Architecture
For centuries, domestic architecture throughout the Gulf has been organized around the courtyard. Houses presented thick exterior walls and limited openings to the street, turning inward toward a shaded garden that structured everyday life. This spatial arrangement responded to both climate and culture. The courtyard brought daylight into deep plans, enabled cross-ventilation, and provided a protected outdoor environment within dense urban fabrics. In the House with Seven Gardens, in Diyar Al Muharraq, Bahrain, the Bahrain-based practice Civil Architecture, one of the winners of the ArchDaily 2025 Next Practices Awards, revisits this spatial tradition through the conditions of contemporary suburban housing. Rather than reproducing the courtyard house as a historical model, the project reinterprets its environmental logic within the regulatory frameworks and spatial conditions that shape much of today's urban development in the Gulf.
Before the digital turn, architecture's memory was largely tangible. It lived in the weight of drawings, the patina of models, and the thickness of books. To preserve architecture meant to preserve its traces, the documents, sketches, and photographs through which buildings could be remembered long after their material form had changed or disappeared. The modern architectural archive, as it developed in the 20th century, was both a refuge and a device of legitimacy. Institutions such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Casa da Arquitectura, or the Deutsches Architekturmuseum were built upon the conviction that to preserve architecture was to preserve its documents.
However, these archives didn't merely store knowledge. They determined what counted as architecture, who belonged to its canon, and how history would be told. To archive is to edit the past — to decide what enters, what is omitted, and how it will be interpreted. The archive, as theorised by Michel Foucault and later by Jacques Derrida, is never neutral; it is an instrument of power, a space that selects and excludes. In architecture, these dynamics are especially evident as they record the visible while silencing what falls outside their categories. The act of collecting has always been, implicitly, an act of judgment.
Porous City / MVRDV and The Why Factory. Image Courtesy of Frans Parthesius, MVRDV and The Why Factory
This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field.
Every architectural epoch has been defined by its instruments. The compass, the drawing board, the camera, and the computer have each altered how architects think and produce. Yet the current moment feels qualitatively different. As artificial intelligence and generative systems enter daily workflows, tools cease to be passive extensions of the architect's hand and begin to operate as semi-autonomous agents. They propose, optimize, and simulate, producing outcomes that are, at times, beyond the author's full anticipation.
Set on the edge of the Mediterranean and shaped by centuries of continuous occupation, Naples is a city where architecture is inseparable from time. Layers of Greek foundations, Roman infrastructures, medieval churches, Baroque palaces, and Modern interventions coexist within a dense and compact urban fabric. Naples reveals itself as an accumulation of structures, adaptations, and reuse, where buildings are rarely isolated objects and more often part of a larger spatial, social, and historical system.
The city's architecture is deeply tied to its geography and construction culture. Built between the sea and volcanic terrain, Naples developed vertically and inward, relying on courtyards, narrow streets, and thick masonry walls to mediate light, climate, and movement. Underground spaces, reused Roman cisterns, and carved tuff structures extend the city below ground, creating a parallel architectural dimension that supports daily life above.
Perched above the cliffs of Crimea, the Druzhba Thermal Sanatorium appears less as a building than as a landed spacecraft. Its circular forms, suspended decks, and spiraling ramps evoke a scene from Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), where architecture and psychology merge into a single landscape. Built between 1978 and 1985 by Igor Vasilevsky, the complex was conceived as a thermal resort for workers of the oil industry, part of the Soviet Union's extensive network of sanatoria dedicated to health and recreation.
Beyond its function as a place of recovery, Druzhba, meaning "friendship", embodied a broader political and aesthetic ambition. It sought to merge technological prowess with the restorative ideals of socialist modernity, translating collective well-being into concrete form. Rising from a steep coastal slope overlooking the Black Sea, its massive structure defies gravity, supported by a central concrete core from which radial wings extend like the blades of an enormous gear. Seen from a distance, it feels simultaneously mechanical and organic, a hybrid of infrastructure and landscape.
Architectural heritage is often described as what survives time. Yet survival does not explain why certain buildings are preserved while others disappear. Many works now protected as cultural heritage were once criticized, contested, or openly rejected; they were accused of being socially misguided, materially flawed, or symbolically excessive. Over time, however, these same shortcomings have become central to their meaning as heritage emerges as a slow and unstable process of interpretation.
Contemporary architecture operates under intense scrutiny, pressured by environmental responsibility, social equity, economic volatility, and accelerated technological change. Buildings are expected to perform ethically, efficiently, and symbolically, often simultaneously. As a result, architectural failure is no longer an exception but an increasingly common condition. Projects age faster, materials reveal limitations sooner, and urban strategies quickly fall out of sync with shifting political, social, and environmental realities.
A long table can sit almost anywhere and still do the same work. It can stretch beneath a market canopy, run along a school dining hall, or occupy the center of a shared living room, and it immediately changes the room's temperature.
That is why the long table is less an object than a spatial instrument. It does not guarantee a connection, and it rarely looks "inclusive" by default. Instead, it sets conditions: a shared edge, a common rhythm of arrival, a field of mutual visibility, or a rule that turns eating into a scene with others. Food studies describe this practice as commensality, the act of eating together and the social order it can create, reinforce, or contest. But what matters here is not a specific dimension or the table's function, but the way a long surface holds difference, conversation, and silence; intimacy and distance; the decision to join and the right to hesitate.
