Design Studio Tirana B-Side

Tirana today resembles an urban ouroboros—a city that outwardly modernizes through gleaming façades, international architecture, and accelerated development, while inwardly consuming its own social and spatial fabric. In the name of progress, it erases the very layers that give it identity: informal neighborhoods, collective spaces, vernacular architectures, and the messy vitality of everyday life. Branded as a rising European capital, it has become a playgroundfor internationally celebrated architects and speculative development projects

In this studio, we tune into the B-side of Tirana—not the curated surface, but the raw, improvised, and contested urban layers that exist beside, beneath, or in tension with dominant narratives. Like the back tracks of a vinyl or cassette, these urban forms—informal extensions, improvised architecture, neglected communal spaces, and the so-called "ugly"—carry meaning, resistance, and value.

We will work on sites adjacent to the main areas of transformation and question the logic of hyper-commercial urbanism with grounded, site-specific design strategies.                                            
Through collaborative analysis and mapping, scenarios and urban designs will be developed at different scales.

The studio is part of collaboration with the Polytechnic University of Tirana