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Architecture's Grand Tourism:
The Emergence of Prishtina within a Global Discipline
Abstract
This project proposes a 2015 World’s Fair in Prishtina, Kosovo to redefine the relationship between tourists and local places within the global landscape. Globalization has created an explosion of world tourism; however, it has homogenized the global landscape and therefore the tourist experience. To counteract this erosion of the identity and sense-of-place, leadership in new nation-states feel that they must consciously exert a new individual identity. This scenario is flawed as well; groups in power seek to instrumentalize a false uniform and idealist identity to serve their own interests.
If the global is overrun by the tourist, and the local is hijacked by the idealist, where does this leave the global-local debate in the discourse of architecture? Creating an ambiguous, complex condition that confronts and reinvents the most polarizing tendencies of the tourist and the idealist will meet the needs of the largest number of parties that have a stake in the architecture. As the world’s newest nation, Kosovo has declared Independence and is partially recognized by the global community. From is decade under international jurisdiction, Kosovo has a complex relationship to the global; in this sense, Kosovo has many similarities to a post-colonial state.
In recognizing that this global connection is economically essential to Kosovo, the new country needs to use this international presence to satisfy its own pressing need to establish the legitimacy of its new government. The international presence currently operating in Kosovo will provide a network of structures for an International Fair introducing Kosovo to the world. This global tourist program is inherently subverted; The parameters for the Fair ensure that the architecture will be seamlessly repurposed into Kosovo’s new National Capital complex. This coupling of programs not only funds the new Capital Complex, but meshes together two forms of national identity: the idealistic/heroic (the position of the nationalist) and the pragmatic/ economic (the position of the tourist). The uneasy alliance between the two programs necessitates a redefinition of both.
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The Cast:
Tourist and Idealist
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The Problem:
Different and Competing demands of a place
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Project Proposal:
Two Programs within same Architecture respond to different demands on place
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Project Proposal:
Dual-programming creates a new mediating hybrid condition to the benefit of all
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