Mapping and connecting the cultural puzzle across Albania …

In every town, and in many villages across Albania today, a central space in the public square is dedicated to the shelter of the local community. In the past, these spaces actively produced our common culture and shaped the notion of national identity.

Broadly conceptualized across Europe as a typology of a decentralized cultural body capable of providing and preserving educational and cultural content, the house of culture was officially introduced in Albania in the 1950s under the umbrella of socialist realism and the totalitarian regime. It went through several phases of transformation until it lost its spotlight in the 21st century.

Travelling across the country, I came across the local archives of these houses—preserving costumes, instruments, documents, books, and newspapers, from literary classics to local journals long lost in the nation’s memory. On the peripheries of the country, beyond the reach of the main discourse, many of these houses still organize summer camps for children, student exhibitions, chess games for the elderly, folk concerts, and dancing and singing classes—small but caring attempts to hold together fragments of communal life.

While the houses in major cities are currently under renovation, many others in the periphery are still waiting for a caring hand. Despite the constrained environment of Albanian architecture in the last century, the house of culture—due to its close link to art and its public importance—represents a sophisticated evolution of architecture, following in the footsteps of contemporary modernism, critical regionalism, and postmodernism.

Over two years of gathering information—from archival maps and drawings to conversations with researchers, archivists, artists, house of culture staff, municipalities, mayors, police officers, guards, and random citizens from Ksamil to Bajram Curri—a collection of drawings, sketches, and photographic documentation of more than 100 cultural objects, including 50 houses of culture, has been built. As a collective effort to reconstruct the story of Albanian Houses of Culture, it became necessary to share the research midway, before the finish line, as a step to open dialogue and engage the public.

This project began as a PhD research study by Tea Mersuli at the Faculty of Architecture and Design, STU Bratislava, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ing. arch. Henrieta Moravčíková. On the road around the country, we encountered dozens of curious people eager to contribute to rebuilding the story of the houses of culture. Thus, it was decided to share the ongoing research and to build a small open platform around this discussion.