Forum A+P Vol.22
POLIS University publishes the “Forum A+P” journal, the only scientific and cultural magazine in the Albanian –speaking countries for the fields of architecture and territory planning. This magazine is recognized by the Ministry of Education and Science, the Academic Degrees Evaluation Committee and has an ISSN international registration code in France. The magazine is published in Albanian and English language and contains a package of scientific, informative articles and analysis.
Introduction from the Editors
SKENDER LUARASI
POLIS University
VALERIO PERNA
POLIS University
This year, 2020, marks Tirana’s 100th anniversary as the capital of Albania. Comparing photos of a bucolic Tirana in 1920 with the urban explosion witnessed from Polis University’s fourth floor today, inevitably raises questions about the form of the city: What is the form of the city? Can the city have a form? Such questions express uncertainty, but they also introduce the concept of normativity, insofar as they posit a distinction between the form of the city and its lack.
The nineteenth and twentieth century theorists and architects, as diverse as Cerdà and Camillo Sitte, adopted the normativity of organism in order to think the form of the ever-expanding modern city as self-generated. However, the frenzied and unbridled growth of our cities, especially in the current context of global pandemics, renders the concept of selfgeneration suspect. Theories like urban archipelagos turn out to be ineffective insofar they are preoccupied only with the normative islands but not with the non-normativity outside and between the islands. What is at stake today is precisely an updated normativity of the whole that is guided by a sense of self-limitation; that “contests production itself” and the “overriding principle”1 of infinite growth and self-generation. Read More
Workshop Reports
Invited Papers
Unlost Territories, Between Norm and Normative
ANTONINO SAGGIO
In Response to the Contentious: From Past Roots to Future Bridges
ALIREZA TAGHABONI
Our Contrary Normal Practice and Normative Attitudes Around Plastics Recycling
KIERSTEN MUENCHINGER
Scientific Research Papers
Theoretical Issues on the Socialist City and Reflections on Albanian Urban Landscape
ELED FAGU
Land Tactics of the Single Housing Unit in the Informal Urban Growth in Albania
ARTAN KACANI
TelQuel architecture
The National Theatre of Tirana: a Non-Normative DNA
SAIMIR KRISTO, VALERIO PERNA
Albanian Archipelagos: The City of a Non-Normativity Foretold
SKENDER LUARASI
Book Reviews
Thoughts on a Paradigm Shift / the IT Revolution in Architecture
VALERIO PERNA
Të Kompozosh Arkitekturën
LLAZAR KUMARAKU
Drawings
Imagining a Vertical Forest
ENDRI MARKU
