Postdisaster Social Housing and Urban Design, by ZA Zuroweste Architecture
I was commisioned by Zuroweste Architecture Studio to photograph the Neighborhood “Shote Galica” in Fushe Kruje. The Project is a Postdisaster Social Housing and Urban Design, by ZA (Zuroweste Architecture), developed in response to Albania’s devastating November 2019 earthquake - which left 51 dead, 3,000 hospitalized, and 32,000 homeless.
ZA worked with the National Territorial Planning Agency of Albania, the Albanian Development Fund, and the Office of the Prime Minister Edi Rama to design a 1,200-resident, 24 acre postdisaster masterplan featuring a combined 200,000sf of residential, educational, institutional, commercial, and community-based programs. 15 multi-family buildings flow along the western edge of the site, providing homes to 93 displaced families on formerly agricultural land. These buildings are radically thin in section; single-loaded corridors provide access a mix of one, two, and three bedroom units. The ground floor of these multi-family buildings are left open to evolve in a flexible way as the community grows and self-organizes patterns of social exchange and ritual. These activities will unfold along a horizontal ground plane, a visually continuous pastoral datum navigated by paths linking landscape events such as gardens, plazas, and recreational fields. East of the multi-family strip, an intimate 120-house neighborhood consisting of one, two, and three bedroom homes extends towards the horizon along “green fingers,” linear parks which weave together wild nature, cultivated landscapes, pavilions, kindergartens, and nurseries.
What I love about Architecture Photography is to have the opportunity to turn back on site after the project is implemented and to see how architecture has been appropriated and metabolised by the local residents. A neighbourhood is like a child, in all its stages of development. In the first years after the baby is born, he starts to walk and learn to speak, to ask, to complain, to socialise, to create personality. The neighbourhood “Shote Galica” is a 3 year neighbourhood. The people affected by the earthquake have started to inhabit the apartments. They are in the first stages of creating a community with a distinctive personality. Walking in the neighbourhood I found some design features very positive for the community; the ground floor with the open colonnade gives a sense of openness and free flow of movement so everyone can enter in the neighbourhood, but also a sense of vigilance because of the inner courtyards. When I was shooting I felt a sense of surveillance, although few people were passing by, like the buildings have eyes, which gives the neighbourhood a sense of protection. It will be curious to turn back after some years, when the shops and the playgrounds in the ground floor will be finished to see how the neighbourhood has evolved.
