By Leart Mullaademi

A public space can look complete in a photograph and still give you no reason to stay. The paving is finished. The lighting works. There is a bench, perhaps, but it sits in full sun or faces a line of parked cars. The drawing has been delivered; the place has barely begun.

For architecture in Kosovo, I think this is a useful place to start: with the small decisions that determine whether a space belongs to everyday life. Can someone sit without buying a coffee? Can a parent stop with a pushchair without blocking the pavement? Can an older person find shade and a seat with a back?

These questions are easy to dismiss as details. They are also where a public project becomes public.

Manifesta 14’s work in Prishtina offers one example worth discussing. Its programme included the transformation of the former Hivzi Sylejmani Library into the Centre for Narrative Practice. The organiser describes a process shaped by neighbourhood consultations and workshops, followed by cultural and educational activities. The building mattered, but so did what people could do inside it.

That distinction should affect how we commission projects. A square needs a plan for cleaning, planting and maintenance. A community building needs someone responsible for opening the door. A path needs a useful destination. Without these things, an ambitious design can become an expensive promise.

I would like ONUP to make room for this kind of architectural criticism: precise, local and interested in use. A project review should ask what happens on an ordinary weekday, alongside who designed it and how it looks.

Before proposing another landmark, we could take one existing place and study it properly. Count the seats. Watch where people cross. Record when shade arrives. Ask who avoids the space and why. Then make a small change and return to see whether it helped.

Architecture earns its place in the city through those returns.

Reference: Manifesta’s December 2022 account of the Centre for Narrative Practice. This is an opinion essay, not a report of a personal site visit.