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."

+ 4

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.

+ 15

This week marked World Health Day, observed annually on April 7 by the World Health Organization. This year's edition issued the call to "Stand with science," inviting renewed engagement with scientific knowledge as a foundation for collective action across disciplines. In architecture and urban design, this imperative resonates through projects that translate research into spatial strategies: from the deployment of digital twins to inform urban planning and decision-making, to rewilding initiatives that integrate biodiversity as a tool to mitigate climate change, and materially informed practices that engage resource-conscious construction. Within this broader framework, recent works also foreground architecture's social agency at multiple scales, including a landscape-driven cancer support center in Kent that aligns wellbeing with environmental sensitivity, an urban installation in Brescia operating as a civic awareness device around life in prison and pathways to reintegration, and the transformation of a street in Mantua into a pedestrian-oriented, biodiversity-rich public space.

+ 30

Architecture is shaped not only by buildings, but by the ideas that make them possible. Before the constraints of capital, regulation, and procurement, there is a moment when architecture is allowed to think aloud. The first confrontation with this fertile moment usually takes place in academia, in the thesis. It is not merely a requirement for graduation, but a space of speculative freedom where architecture formulates hypotheses, builds arguments, and tests positions.

For many, it is also the first opportunity to think beyond the structure of academic programs — a first chance to explore something more personal, unresolved, or even unreasonable. While often seen as an endpoint, the thesis is better understood as a beginning: the first engagement with architecture as a form of reasoning, where the project is not yet a response, but a question.

+ 27

+ 9

+ 11

+ 18

Albania's architecture is tied to the sea and the country's cultural heritage. Bordered by Montenegro, Kosovo, North Macedonia and Greece, the republic spans both the Adriatic and Ionian Sea as it connects to the Mediterranean. Over time, Albania has seen a confluence of different civilizations and cultures, each shaping the built environment as we experience it today.

+ 7

Past, Present, Future is an interview project by Itinerant Office, asking acclaimed architects to share their perspectives on the constantly evolving world of architecture. Each interview is split into three video segments: Past, Present, and Future, in which interviewees discuss their thoughts and experiences of architecture through each of those lenses. The first episode of the project featured 11 architects from Italy and the Netherlands and Episode II is comprised of interviews with 13 architects from Spain, Portugal, France, and Belgium.

+ 8

+ 6

Videos

+ 89

Videos

+ 23

+ 16