A fragment of Prishtina city, through time and history

Pristina as a city has gone through different historical, political, developmental, architectural, and social stages. When addressing the history of the towns of Kosovo from the prism of urbanism and architecture inherited from the period of Ottoman rule and Serbian-Yugoslav rule from 1913-1945 and continuing further with a few aspects of the urban policies of socialist Yugoslavia, one can easily distinguish the overlaps, the destructions and the new urban fabric that would be established with the beginning of the era of modernism. These policies in the Kosovar environment were developed under the slogan of social reconstruction, “To destroy the old and build the new,” in which cultural wrongdoing of the Government at the time was very much evident. In a word, the urban development of Prishtina and the modern architecture applied in the city had been subjected to a syncretization of all architectural styles. The political development and urban development strategy from the 1960s to the 1990s, when Kosovo was part of the former Yugoslav Federation, was oriented towards the construction of roads and social/cultural buildings with a comprehensive character for the performance of the primary functions of housing and work without neglecting the cultural, artistic, and recreational. As a new political-social spirit, in addition to capital investments, which may still be partially functional, one can give importance to architecture and expression through architecture. The denominator of all the buildings- analyzed through observation, can be the style and the materials used. They tended to promote modernism, a new spirit, stripped of orientalism and inspired by the West and the Far East, to give a new identity. This new identity often seemed to have a dose of the country or an indicator with characteristic elements of the autonomy of that country or was expressly symbolic of a story that the building had to reflect or transmit - for the country and its population. With these iconic structures built, an attempt was made to show and achieve greatness, which would serve, in addition to the primary function, as an accelerator of people, culture, art, and development and give its own economic, social, and cultural contribution. Various monuments such as libraries, theatres, warehouses, sports, recreational centers, administrative buildings, etc., have the common unifying element of concrete. 52 | AACCP 2022 The intervention of politics, communist ideology, and destructive tendencies on the premises left their mark in Prishtina to the greatest extent, buildings which continue to stand as monuments even today, with truncated/reduced functions. Therefore, this research aims to give the interpretative dimension of the ideology and the current state of the city of Prishtina, including its cultural heritage on different (urban and city) scales.