The second edition of The Bread & Heart Festival will be held in Tirana, Albania, from June 3 to 5, 2026. The annual event is organised by The Bread & Heart Foundation and co-curated with the NEWROPE Chair of Architecture and Urban Transformation at ETH Zürich. The Foundation's objective is to offer an open platform for dialogue on architecture, landscape, and development in Albania, a country undergoing rapid transformation and becoming one of the most active urban environments in Southeast Europe. The purpose of the event is to connect international figures from the architectural community, such as Francis Kéré, Jeanne Gang, Ma Yansong, and Sumayya Vally, with local practitioners, institutions, and a broader audience. As in 2025, the festival will take place at 51N4E's Book Building on Skanderbeg Square, bringing together participants under the theme "Landscapes of Abundance."
The Bread & Heart Festival's inaugural edition was held in June 2025 under the theme "Bring some salt, please," a cultural invitation referencing the ancient Albanian code of honour and hospitality, Besa. This year's theme, Landscapes of Abundance, shifts the focus from individual buildings to the broader ecosystems, territories, and living systems around them. Framed by the curatorial idea "From Portrait to Landscape," the Festival invites participants to explore how architecture, landscape architecture, planning, art, ecology, and culture can work and think collectively at a moment of significant architectural activity across Albania.
Approximately 200 international offices are currently engaged in projects across the country through open competitions, direct commissions, and collaborations with local firms, working across Tirana, the Adriatic and Ionian coastlines, and inland territories. To acknowledge and expand this growing network, the Festival invites these architects to gather in Tirana, each bringing along a guest of their choice, a new friend of and for Albania (hence, "bring some salt"). This year's edition poses the question of how Albania's development can work with, rather than against, the country's natural abundance, opening an invitation to explore the relationship between development and landscape, from coastlines and wetlands to mountains, rivers, villages, tourism, and urban growth.
Related Article
Tirana Architecture City Guide: Negotiating Identity Between Socialism and Urban ReinventionThe festival programme includes talks, exhibitions, workshops, and performances, creating varied opportunities for participants to meet and engage with one another. Rather than focusing primarily on individual practices and projects, the event encourages participants to contribute to broader conversations and shared questions. The public programme opens discussions, while a private workshop day gathers invited peers to collectively formulate new guidelines for landscape and development in Albania. The Festival also hosts an architectural model exhibition presenting built and unbuilt projects across Albania, architect-designed pavilions in the festival garden where offices present their work informally, and a parallel agenda of book launches, film screenings, and informal encounters.
Among the participants, in addition to the Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama, participating architects include Manuel Aires Mateus (Aires Mateus), Johan Anrys (51N4E), Iwan Baan, Petra Blaisse (Inside Outside), Stefano Boeri (Stefano Boeri Architetti), Caroline Bos (UNStudio), Minsuk Cho (Mass Studies), Jeanne Gang (Studio Gang), Kersten Geers and David Van Severen (OFFICE), Reinier de Graaf (OMA), Christele Harrouk (ArchDaily's Editor-in-Chief), Bjarke Ingels (BIG), Francis Kéré (Kéré Architecture), Pierre de Meuron (Herzog & de Meuron), Charles Renfro (Diller Scofidio + Renfro), Saskia van Stein (International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam), Sumayya Vally (Counterspace), and Ma Yansong (MAD Architects). Together with a long list of other designers, they are invited to explore the relationship between development and landscape, and the need to imagine more responsible, collective, and regenerative futures.
Related topics are being discussed at architecture gatherings elsewhere in the world. The 13th World Urban Forum, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, recently concluded after six days of discussions, exhibitions, and international exchanges centred on the theme "Housing the World: Safe and Resilient Cities and Communities." The Pan-African Biennale (PAB) has announced the official selection of participants for its inaugural 2026 edition, set to take place from September 7 to 11, 2026, at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre in Nairobi. Concéntrico Festival 2026 has also revealed the themes of the 24 urban installations to be built in Logroño, Spain, from June 18 to 23, with a programme structured around three thematic axes: Identity and Fiction, Urban Ecologies, and Ephemeral Agents.
