Envisioning the future of Prishtina. An image shaped by the spatial experience

Prishtina grow up through the layout of large scale building or areas which constitutes specific units in the city easily recognizable. Then, after the war starting from 1999, an informal buildings boom affected the city structure (Sadiki 2015) both from inside and outside creating an extensive mass of insignificant buildings in which the historical landmarks were hardly identifiable. Still, despite this visual complexity, the image of Prishtina can be read through single objects or parts that appear repeatedly along a path which constitute visual and functional episodes that emerge in the shapeless city and recompose the image of the Prishtina as a whole. The space result contaminated by these heterogeneous objects and today in many cases degraded because of the decay of this large scale islands dominating the city. This idea of contaminated space by unexpected juxtapositions that creates ambiguity and continuous contrasts between horizontal and vertical, flat and depth, changes of scale etc., has been object of interest of Colin Rowe who finds interesting precisely this attribute of space. In this conception of space unity is given by the sequence created along the path which works as a system made of elements in contrasts and interruptions. The image of a certain path, in this case, depends on the composition of frames along a path.