Ecoweek Prishtina 2014: Lectures 1 to 4

During the first day of ECOWEEK Prishtina 2014, there were four lectures shared with the students and young architects. Among these lecturers were there international and one local architects.

The first lecture was “Symbiosis: Ecological landscape design, principles and practice” by Thomas Doxiadis, a landscape architect from doxiadis+ studio in Greece. Doxiadis started the lecture with his principles on what makes landscape sustainable, among which he called for understanding and sensitively analyzing the context, acting and working locally, combining all the patches, corridors and matrixes while making them interact among themselves, and finally minimizing the damages during the whole concept of design. He emphasizes that landscape is a dynamic process, saying “In landscape you never have a final result; it’s a dynamic not a static system”.

He shared different projects of his studio with the students, such as the project of Community-created Public Space in Athens, Public Beach and ecological park design in Varkiza, Island villas development in Antiparos, the Installation in an old neighborhood in Athens, etc. In all the projects, regardless of the scale, they used materials found in the site and tried to maximize the impact from a minimum of resources, thus creating beautiful and ecological places. He concludes that landscape architects’ responsibility is to make the scaffold or main principles of designing and not the final result.

“Globalocal” was the second lecture given by Maciej Siuda & Rodrigo Garcia, a Polish and Spanish collaboration. They started they lecture by switching the famous quote of “Thinking global and acting local” into “Working global and acting local”. Thus they presented their innovative and creative approach and use of local materials in small to large scale projects they did around the world. Among them were the DEVEBERE pavilion in Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2012 where they created a common ground created by “Waste, air and people” using plastic bottles; Rotunda in Warsaw; the site-responsive school in Jamcel, Haiti, which won a Holcim Awards Acknowledgement with its contribution to sustainability according to the local weather, culture, environment, and people; and the non-architectural projects, such as the following suitcase Hop!, the Propaganda workshop, the WOW bike, and the eatable water package Ooho!, which was awarded with the Lexus Design Award 2014.

Rusty Smith from Rural Studio in USA, gave the third lecture “Firmitas, Utilitas, Venustas: Teaching Building Performance, Ecological Stewardship and Social Relevance”. Smith explained the work of students from Rural Studio, the undergraduate program of the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture at Auburn University. Their works are community-oriented, where the community is involved in all phases of the working process. Some of these projects they made, Smith shared with the audience, among which were the Rose Lee’s House, Turner’s House, the Lions Park Playscape, the Lions Park Skatepark, the Perry Lakes Park Birding Tower, the Antioch Baptist Church, the Newbern Fire Station, etc. All these projects are based on clients’ priorities, necessities and lifestyle; they engage the community into design and building process and encourage social interactions; and are built by recycling, reusing and remaking. Smith concluded by saying “Architecture is about acting”, thus encouraging to start with actions (“verbs and not nouns”) and caring more how the buildings act rather than look.