A monument is usually the most conservative building a state will commission. It is expected to stabilize memory, to make history legible, and to give public form to a shared narrative. Eastern Europe's twentieth century produced an entire body of work from the Baltic to the Balkans that resisted precisely those expectations, challenging the conventional relationship between monument, memory, and representation. Commonly grouped under the name spomeniks, these architectural exercises are perhaps the best-known examples of a much broader landscape of memorial architecture that emerged across the region. These were societies emerging from occupation, civil conflict, or revolution, and none of them possessed a single symbolic language capable of accommodating the complexity of their histories. Rather than searching for new heroes or new icons, many architects and artists turned to space itself as the medium through which remembrance could be constructed.
These monuments occupy an unusual position between sculpture and architecture. At one scale, they read as deliberate abstract compositions arranged with the clarity of a drawing by Kandinsky. At another, they seem less resolved, as if testing the limits of a spatial language still in formation. Their forms often appear caught between certainty and experimentation, the same monument readable as a controlled geometric object and as an open-ended search for how collective memory might inhabit space. But these readings coexist and give many of these works their enduring ambiguity.
Bread & Heart Festival 2026. Image Courtesy of Bread & Heart Festival
Something has been happening in Tirana that the architectural world has not quite found the language for. In the space of a few years, a city of less than a million people in one of Europe's least-known countries has become the site of an extraordinary concentration of architectural ambition — a place where offices that rarely work in the same city, let alone the same decade, are building simultaneously, and where the questions that preoccupy contemporary architecture seem to arrive with an unusual urgency.
The second edition of the Bread & Heart Festival, held in Tirana from June 3 to 5, brought together more than two hundred architects, urban planners, developers, and professionals from across Europe, the Americas, Asia and beyond to discuss "Landscapes of Abundance", a theme organized around the curatorial premise of moving from portrait to landscape, from the individual building to the territory as a whole. The room it assembled would be difficult to replicate anywhere else in the architectural calendar: Francis Kéré, Jeanne Gang, Sumayya Vally, Pierre de Meuron, Bjarke Ingels, Reinier de Graaf, Stefano Boeri, Kersten Geers, Benedetta Tagliabue, Ma Yansong, among them.
The context of the ongoing war marks Ukraine's place in the international consciousness. Architecture, however, most often transcends the span of a human life and can therefore be a tool for imagining the future. The practice of architectural design, whether speculative, conceptual, or practical, serves as a means of bringing to life ways of living and interacting beyond our current realities. In this selection of conceptual projects submitted by ArchDaily readers, we see material, spatial, and symbolic strategies that seek to address contemporary contexts in the residential, educational, and commercial sectors.
As the line of conflict has been relatively static since late 2023, Ukrainian cities continue to be subject to new architectural and urban development projects. In this article, we have compiled a selection of unbuilt projects in the cities of Vinnytsia, Lviv, and Kyiv. The selection includes residential, commercial, and mixed-use architectural designs, as well as an educational complex. Two residential projects have also been designed as prototypes without a specific location, as a potential response to the loss of infrastructure and unstable conditions in the region.
A housing block in New Belgrade appears orderly from a distance. Concrete slabs repeat with disciplined consistency, windows align into measured grids, and balconies stack with the confidence of a system certain of itself. However, proximity changes the reading. One balcony is enclosed in aluminum glazing, another softened with improvised shading. Insulation thickens part of a façade while laundry frames another edge like an accidental elevation study. The district still reads as planned, though occupation has made its order less uniform. Within that order, repetition has gradually been rewritten through occupation.
Located at the intersection of Adriatic landscapes and Balkan geopolitics, Tirana has undergone one of the most accelerated urban transformations in Europe over the last three decades. Once defined by rigid socialist planning and political isolation, the city has progressively reoriented itself through a combination of informal growth, international investment, and strategic urban interventions that seek to redefine its public image and spatial structure.
Since the early 2000s, a series of urban policies, most notably those initiated during the mayoral tenure of Edi Rama (now Albania prime minister), have promoted the use of color, public space, and architectural experimentation as tools for civic reactivation. Rather than relying solely on masterplans, Tirana's development has operated through interventions, where individual buildings and public spaces act as catalysts within a fragmented urban fabric.
Eastern and Southern Europe is enduring a severe heatwave, with temperatures reaching over 40 degrees Celsius in many countries including Greece, Croatia, Macedonia, and Romania. Driven by hot air from North Africa, this prolonged heatwave has raised significant threats for residents and has strained the cities’ mechanisms for protection and climate mitigation. As the heatwaves expose the vulnerabilities of urban infrastructures, cities across Europe are striving to implement measures to address these challenges.
Brutalism is a deeply dividing architectural style - a subcategory of the Modernist movement that featured bare concrete finishes, unusual shapes, and an undoubtedly unique aesthetic. Whilst emerging into prominence in 1950s Great Britain, the most iconic examples of this architectural style are arguably found in Eastern Europe - particularly in the territory formerly known as Yugoslavia.
A city of electric architectural diversity – Belgrade’s Modernist structures give the Serbian capital a unique character. The grey of Belgrade’s Brutalist concrete is one of the city’s architectural signatures, existing in both complex volumetric facades and monolithic rectilinear forms. But while a plethora of architectural appraisals has been conducted on the external qualities of brutalist structures in Belgrade and beyond, photographic documentation of Belgrade’s brutalist interiors is relatively rare – something that photographer Inês d’Orey has sought to change in her most recent exhibition.
When cities grow, fuelled by an expanding population, housing becomes an essential component of the urban character of a metropolis. Across the world, housing experiments have been propagated by governments and states, with mixed results, and undoubtedly mixed opinions. The Soviet-era housing estates of Central and Eastern Europe are particularly interesting in that regard. These mass housing projects have been dismissed as eyesores and viewed as unimaginative monolithic structures. The legacy of these developments, however, is a lot more complicated than that.
The Hungarian Pavilion at the 17th Venice Biennale explores the often challenging socialist architecture and looks at how this heritage could be reconsidered and given a new future. Titled Othernity – Reconditioning our Modern Heritage, the exhibition curated by Dániel Kovács presents twelve iconic modern buildings of Budapest and the visions of twelve architecture practices from Central and Eastern Europe for their reconditioning. The Hungarian Pavilion's project looks into how architecture can build on its past to foster resilience, sustainability and strong cultural identities.
Recent years have prompted a rediscovery and a re-framing of some of the more controversial architectural phenomenons of the past century, with Brutalist architecture coagulating significant interest through its sheer scale, powerful expression and purist forms. Brutalist architecture across the former Eastern Bloc is inextricably associated with the totalitarian regimes that marked the history of this part of Europe during the last half of the 20th century. Following in line with the architecture of the Eastern Bloc, Poland’s urban landscape is dotted with large-scale prefab housing estates and stark brutalist public buildings constructed during the country’s Communist rule.
Remnants of the Socialist era, the large-scale architecture and urban spaces of the Eastern European Bloc still constitute a challenging legacy, at odds with contemporary urban environments and the values shaping cities today. This ideologically charged architecture is being reclaimed either through the reconciliation of the public opinion with this part of history, adaptive re-use, renovation, or through its re-contextualization as architectural heritage. By (re)introducing the human scale within these monumental architecture projects and public spaces, these entities are being restored to the urban and cultural life of cities.
Croatia has long been a crossroads of culture. Located along the Adriatic Sea, it borders five countries and has some of the richest biodiversity in Europe. The built environment reflects influences from Central Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as both the Roman and Byzantine Empires. Today, a series of new housing projects are reinterpreting the country's past as architects and designers look to reimagine what the future holds.
Cover of Architecture in Global Socialism by Łukasz Stanek, Princeton University Press, 2020.
In the course of the Cold War, architects, planners, and construction companies from socialist Eastern Europe engaged in a vibrant collaboration with those in West Africa and the Middle East in order to bring modernization to the developing world. Architecture in Global Socialism shows how their collaboration reshaped five cities in the Global South: Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait City.
We made a difficult decision to postpone CANactions Festival 2020 for 2021 due to the global outbreak. New Festival dates will be announced soon, as well as the opening of ticket sales. At the same time, Festival speakers will perform on CANactions School Talk online that runs weekly on Thursdays: https://eng.canactions.com/events.
CANactions International Architecture Festival is one of the biggest annual architecture gatherings in Europe, running since 2008.
Post World War II, Brutalism found its way across Europe, redefining modernist architecture and establishing a new style for mass housing and communal buildings. Although most of the light was shed on concrete landmarks in major cities, European suburbs have also housed many exceptional brutalist buildings such as the 'Hammer-shaped Tower Blocks' or the 'Houses on Chicken Legs'.
_Gent_Onuzi.jpg?1603920105 "The Pyramid in Tirana. Image © Gent Onuzi")
