PAESAGGIO INTERROTTO

Title _ Paesaggio interrotto
Period _ 2020
Location _ Durres, Albania
Status _ Research, Investigation project

The interrupted landscape is a place on the fringe, straddling the city and the open countryside, where urban and agricultural territory intersects, creating an unresolved landscape with great future opportunities.
Productive landscapes relate to the city; they are social connectivity and food production systems that complement and integrate with existing infrastructures and networks to reinforce and support them and create a healthier and slower way of crossing the city. What it can build is not a different reality from the town but an alternative way of experiencing it and belonging to it, giving rise to a new urban identity.

The project is developed in Durrës, Durrës in Albanian, a coastal city that fits into a large regional context. Its proximity to the capital Tirana makes it the closest and most central port of the country. The territory between the two cities is one in which the mixture of urban and rural is a distinctive hallmark .
Our goal in this research is to preserve and sustain them in a way that preserves the nature of these places and makes them into driving centers and model cities that are applicable and futuristic. What is built is then not an extraneous reality concerning the city, but is an alternative way of experiencing it and belonging to it.

In Durrës, we see how the city seems to be embedded within a space defined by limits and natural boundaries: the promontory protects the former marsh from the sea, the hills of Vrinas and Rrashbull hug the road that connects it to Tirana, and finally the Këneta, a former marshy area subsequently subjected to recovery and reclamation operations, which have left the obvious traces and a recognizable grid.

Our research therefore, starting from the selection of the axis of rruga Aleksander Goga, aims to identify a set of emerging and already existing centralities, whose potentialities are latent, to build an organization that can project the current situation into the future. Precise interventions will seek to articulate already recognizable concentrations of public life into more enduring patterns of centrality, designed to resonate in the urbanized surroundings. The selected poles will be propulsors of the project on a grand scale, in an 'acupunctural action that will consist of stitching together the urban fabric and integrating it with the environmental systems that structure the city, starting from the promontory and to the Këneta.
The Këneta irretrievably distinguishes the layout of the city. First a swamp, then reclaimed land during the socialist regime, it also found itself used as agricultural land for extensive cultivation for more than 50 years, and then terrain vague abandoned to itself.
To understand this fragmented urban fabric, where form arises from experiences instead of imposed patterns, a key element was identified from which to activate a transformation of the whole area: the street.
The street in general is straightforward, simple, usable, and everyone's. The complex layering of different rhythms that coexist in the street is only a consequence of the different speeds and variety of populations that inhabit the city.
The project interprets this multiplicity as a resource, preserves the promising hybrid nature of the street, and recognizes the figures that manifest their presence in this system, fixing all the stages of this possible metropolitan theater and giving a face to the characters that animate this stage. This tool, therefore, helps us in the section and analysis of the urban fabric.

In the design reworking, then, the elements typical of the informal architecture of the Këneta will become fundamental, at first glance elements with no apparent architectural value, but which instead recur later throughout the city and define the landscape and mark, sometimes radically, the identity of a place and a community. The fence, the threshold, the stairs, and the pillars: are all elements that although used without architectural consciousness, suggest ways of experiencing the city and public and private space.
The project, therefore, feeds from the input of the territory, in all its parts, formal and functional, and is spread throughout the Këneta area with a kermesse of interventions: starting from the small scale of residences that speaks to the extent of the existing fabric, to taking built form in the urban voids, where it interfaces with the medium to the large scale of infrastructure, particularly landmarks and condensers of public services in the neighborhood, which is found to be the great lack in the Këneta neighborhood.

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PAESAGGIO INTERROTTO

informal practice