The national competition’s topic focuses on revitalizing monuments of culture and military structures in Albania in an effort to transform them into real tourist destinations
TIRANA, May 8 – Albania has launched a national competition to select four projects representing Albania in the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale. The national competition’s topic focuses on revitalizing monuments of culture and military structures in Albania in an effort to transform them into real tourist destinations, says the Culture Ministry in a statement.
“Interventions in monuments of culture and proposed concepts must take into consideration the adoption of new functions in the existing structure of a monument, respecting historical and architectural values but at the same time leaving room to contemporary architecture through volumetric composition, the kind of material and program used.”
The competition will select four projects, among which two designed by university students. A national jury composed of 5 personalities of architecture, art and history will decide on the winning projects on June 20.
For Albania this will be the second participation in the Venice Biennale of Architecture after the 2010 debut with Beyond Color exhibition which showed problems and emergencies with Tirana’s architectural and urban heritage as well as the potential of this heritage to shape the future. The pavilion was composed of a multimedia presentation of Albanian architectural traditions, featuring the colourfully-painted buildings of the capital city of Tirana
The 13th International Architecture Exhibition, directed by David Chipperfield and titled Common Ground, will run in Venice from 29th August through 25th November 2012.
“The emphasis of the 2012 Biennale – explains David Chipperfield – is on what we have in common. Above all, the ambition of Common Ground is to reassert the existence of an architectural culture, made up not just of singular talents but a rich continuity of diverse ideas united in a common history, common ambitions, common predicaments and ideals. In architecture everything begins with the ground. It is our physical datum, where we make the first mark, digging the foundations that will support our shelter”
The Exhibition will be complemented by 55 National Participations organized, as usual, in the Pavilions at the Giardini, at the Arsenale and in the city of Venice. Five nations among which Kosovo will be participating for the first time.
Common Ground will consist of a single exhibition through the Central Pavilion at the Giardini and the Arsenale: David Chipperfield will present an Exhibition with 58 projects, by architects, photographers, artists, critics and scholars. Many of them responded to his invitation with original proposals and installations expressly created for this Biennale, involving in their projects other colleagues with whom they share a Common Ground. There will be a total of 104 participants.
