Skender Luarasi

POLIS University · Department of Scientific Research

The planetary instantaneity that digital technologies have enabled is leading to an effacement of the divisions that separate the past from the future, ensuring that the present is ubiquitous. While contemporary architecture seems to have lost the capacity to conceive of the past as a transformative force, this book stresses the need to rethink tod...

More than a decade has passed since the heated debates on the destruction of the Pyramid of Tirana, and its substitution with the new Albanian Parliament, a winning competition entry by Coop Himmelb(l)au. Whether it should have been demolished or not, and whether there should have been a parliament in its place or not, were two diferent debates err...

The 23rd Issue of Forum A+P investigates and speculates on the relationship between the city and techno-science. The term ‘city’ is understood in two ways: first, in a discursive sense – as an object of study and a set of practices – episte- mological, aesthetic, architectural, political, economic, and social among others - that deal with such obje...

The 23rd Issue of Forum A+P investigates and speculates on the relationship between the city and techno-science. The term ‘city’ is understood in two ways: first, in a discursive sense – as an object of study and a set of practices – episte- mological, aesthetic, architectural, political, economic, and social among others - that deal with such obje...

In this year’s Venice Biennale, the Albanian pavilion named “In our home” proposed a notion of neighbourliness that presumably existed “less than 20 years ago,” yet one that has now disappeared as a result of “diving deep in the waters of globalization” and moving “toward an isolated indiference and uncertainty.”1 By ‘peeking sneakily’ at such real...

p>Este artículo explora la exposición Instrumentalities of an Eternal Baroque . El enfoque es la exposición como medio para investigar la historia del arte en nuestra era digital, a través de la curaduría, la creación y el dibujo. No sólo varios de los artefactos exhibidos se produjeron digitalmente, sino que muchos (tanto analógicos como digitales...

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, b...

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, b...

Gjirokastra. Between the "UNESCO City" status and the phenomenon of "Shrinking Cities". Gjirokastra is one of the most beloved cities in Albania and beyond in the region. The city with extraordinary historical values, and with unique traditions and landscape, is rightly included in the UNESCO list. Gjirokastra has always been, and continues to b...

During the last thirty years, Tirana, the capital of Albania, has taken the form of an archipelago, a city of islands. In what used to be a countryside of rolling hills, today one encounters gated communities of ‘smart’ mansions, private schools and shopping centers. These islands are expensive and exclusive utopias, literally, non-places. (Alas, c...

Dear participant of Tirana Design Week, Tirana Design Week (TDW) this year, in 2019, approaches Tirana’s 100th anniversary as the capital of Albania. Comparing photos of a bucolic Tirana in 1920 with what one sees from Polis University’s fourth floor today, inevitably raises doubts about the endurance of design, while conspicuously evincing the flu...

Tirana Design Week (TDW) in 2019, approaches Tirana’s 100th anniversary as the capital of Albania. Comparing photos of a bucolic Tirana in 1920 with what one sees from Polis University’s fourth floor today, inevitably raises doubts about the endurance of design, while conspicuously evincing the fluctuating tendency of what constitutes a norm in a w...

In his famous book ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ (1962), the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, coined the notion of ‘paradigm shift’, intended as a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. In opposition to the activity of ‘normal science’, a ‘shift’ occurs when the cur...

If we accept the premise that architecture is an academic discipline in addition to being a professional one, then what is its object of study? What does it mean to teach, research and know architecture, today? Such questions have a history. Gottfried Semper, for example, had similar concerns in the nineteenth century. He was critical of an over-sp...

POLIS University publishes the “Forum A+P” – Interdisciplinary Journal of Architecture and Scientific Environment”, the only scientific and cultural magazine in the Albanian –speaking countries on the fields of architecture and territory planning. This magazine is recognized by the Ministry of Education and Science, the Academic Degrees Evaluation...

POLIS University publishes the “Forum A+P” – Interdisciplinary Journal of Architecture and Scientific Environment”, the only scientific and cultural magazine in the Albanian –speaking countries on the fields of architecture and territory planning. This magazine is recognized by the Ministry of Education and Science, the Academic Degrees Evaluation...

POLIS University publishes the “Forum A+P” – Interdisciplinary Journal of Architecture and Scientific Environment”, the only scientific and cultural magazine in the Albanian –speaking countries on the fields of architecture and territory planning. This magazine is recognized by the Ministry of Education and Science, the Academic Degrees Evaluation...

POLIS University publishes the “Forum A+P” – Interdisciplinary Journal of Architecture and Scientific Environment”, the only scientific and cultural magazine in the Albanian –speaking countries on the fields of architecture and territory planning. This magazine is recognized by the Ministry of Education and Science, the Academic Degrees Evaluation...

POLIS University publishes the “Forum A+P” – Interdisciplinary Journal of Architecture and Scientific Environment”, the only scientific and cultural magazine in the Albanian –speaking countries on the fields of architecture and territory planning. This magazine is recognized by the Ministry of Education and Science, the Academic Degrees Evaluation...

This thesis offers the concept of Urban Ideograms. It is developed and crystallized through a strategic gathering and selection of specific textual and contextual information from various sources, such as the drawings of Henri Michaux, his poetry and literary commentaries, various architectural examples of park design, psychoanalytical texts that a...