TAW 2016 will become a platform for imagining the role of architecture in the upcoming Europe. Learn more.

Tirana Architecture/Design Weeks (TAW/TDW) aims at promoting the exchange of knowledge between professionals at the national and international level in order to cultivate a larger public interest in architecture, art and design. These are disciplines that affect the contemporary development of cities, enhance interaction between professionals and the public with the city, and encourage participation in decision-making and development processes. Activities will be based on various issues and disciplines around artistic production, education, capacity building, research and development, etc.; and will be followed up with a detailed description of activities in each area. Tirana Architecture/Design Weeks include 4 working groups: Architecture, Art Design, Workshops, and Public Events, working with conferences, exhibitions, competitions, workshops, open forums etc. TAW is organised by Polis University in Tirana.

Future Architecture at TAW 2016:
Weaponized Architecture: A Political Manifesto for Architects
LECTURE #02 by Léopold Lambert on 27 September at 11.00 Universiteti Polis
Architecture is a political weapon. From Palestine to the walls of "Fortress Europe" via the segregation of American and French suburbs, its intrinsic capacity to organize bodies in space is instrumentalized in order to materialize (geo)political programs. This lecture will examine several examples in order to illustrate architecture's violence on bodies and to propose a manifesto for architects to engage with politics of bodies (anti-racist, feminist, queer, and disable struggles).
Derivate Architecture
LECTURE #03 by Jack Self on 7 October at 11.00 Universiteti Polis
Derivative Architecture is an attempt to expand the remit of the architect as a social figure, to include models of ownership and finance. It understands capital and governance as spheres for architectural intervention. In Britain particularly, although also in other parts of the world, the mortgage-home has been used to polarize society and redistribute wealth to the top 1%. By designing financial products in a feedback loop with formal outcomes Derivative Architecture seeks to achieve the opposite – to use universal housing as a mechanism for social equality and the promotion of stable democracy.
WORKSHOP#01: BIOplarch Experiencing eco-materials from 3rd to 9th October
OPEN LECTURE by Esen Gökçe Özdamar on 5 October
The workshop aims to raise curiosity in sustainable and experimental biobased material design by enabling an ambiguous and practice based design process. After lectures on starch based bioplastic and design, chemistry and material performance provided by the lecturers, participants will be able to gain basic information to produce their own bioplastic and bio-based material design.
Due the nature to the nature of hand-crafting and cooking skills, and the nature of experiments, the participants are expected to handle ambiguity. Trial and error method will be the crucial core of the workshop.WORKSHOP#02 BEYOND FORM: Drop the Ionalism from 3 to 9 October
OPEN LECTURE by Sara Neves on the 4 October
Beyond Form aims to stir the students’ restlessness, to cross from the idyllic scenarios of technical speculation, to the search for real solutions to the complex social frame that surrounds each one everyday. Taking into account the architecture’s base concepts, facts and information acquired through formal learning (like scale, proportion, light, ventilation, program relationships, interior/exterior, etc.) this workshop will explore the application of this knowledge into a concrete situation of the city that needs intervention. The students are invited to choose a specific place in the city, and make a transversal survey on it, in order to develop a small project at which the place will be the object of the workshop.  Beyond Form intends to share how we as architects work beyond the strict commissions, taking the responsibility for, in collaboration, identify “less visible” necessities and auto-propose tailored interventions, always “refusing the abstraction and generalization of principles, means and purposes, in the architectural process.
WORKSHOP#03 CAMPing in Tirana: Architecture for Refugees from 3 to 9 October
OPEN LECTURE Bence Komlosi on 6 October
”CAMPing in Tirana” turns the focus of the architectural society on the architectural aspects of the refugee crisis. The workshop invites all the stakeholders – refugees, architects, activists, politicians to discuss the built environmental aspects of the crisis and to co-design and co-produce potential solutions and strategies. The course and its participants will collect information and discuss it together. Experiences from the past and present will be used to study the situation on a local and global scale.
Check out the full TAW 2016 calendar!