About the Festival
ABOUT
THE FESTIVAL
After last year’s inaugural edition, the Bread & Heart Festival returns to the Book Building in the center of Tirana as an annual rendezvous with the future. Under the theme “Landscapes of Abundance”, this year’s edition shifts its attention from isolated buildings to the spaces between them: the landscapes, ecologies, infrastructures, and living systems that shape Albania. Framed by the curatorial idea “From Portrait to Landscape”, the Festival explores how architecture, landscape architecture, planning, art, ecology, and culture can collectively respond to the rapid transformations happening across the country.
Albania is increasingly becoming a meeting ground for international architecture and design practices. Currently, around 200 international teams are contributing to projects throughout the country through competitions, commissions, research, and collaborations with local offices. To acknowledge and expand this growing network, the Festival invites these architects to gather in Tirana, each bringing along a guest of their choice, a new friend of and for Albania (hence, “bring some salt”).
More than a conventional architecture event, Bread & Heart is conceived as a shared environment for dialogue, reflection, hospitality, and exchange. Through talks, exhibitions, workshops, films, performances, publications, food, and informal encounters, the Festival creates opportunities for local and international practitioners, institutions, artists, media, researchers, and audiences to meet and engage with one another. Bread & Heart is not only conceived as a celebration, but also as a space for reflection, critique, and open exchange around the role of architecture, development, and culture in shaping shared futures.
This year’s edition asks how Albania’s development can work with, rather than against, the country’s extraordinary natural abundance. From coastlines and wetlands to mountains, rivers, villages, tourism, and urban growth, the Festival explores the relationship between development and landscape, and the need to imagine more responsible, collective, and regenerative futures. Rather than focusing only on individual practices and projects, the Festival encourages participants to contribute to broader conversations and shared questions. The public program opens discussions, while the private workshop day gathers invited peers to collectively reflect, debate, and formulate new “recipes” for landscape and development in Albania and beyond.
The Bread & Heart Festival is organized by the Bread & Heart Foundation and co-curated by the NEWROPE Chair of Architecture and Urban Transformation at ETH Zürich.
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Gathering & Networking
Bread & Heart is not just a festival, it’s an invitation to come together. From the opening evening, designed as a welcoming moment with music, visuals of the city, and selected speeches, the spirit of the event is set: to create space for genuine encounters. Before the formal program begins, participants, international guests, local collaborators, and new allies connect in an informal setting that favors curiosity, conversation, and camaraderie. It’s the soft start, the shared smile, the first handshake that opens the door to deeper exchange.
Visions of Development / Model Exhibitions
Get to know the vision shaping Albania. This exhibition showcases Albania’s development through architectural models, both built and unbuilt, from competitions and commissions across Tirana, the coast, and other regions. A large model of Albania will serve as a reference, pinpointing the locations of the individual projects. Individual models will be displayed separately due to varying scales and formats (pre-existing models and newly created ones). The exhibition will be announced in the main venue and open for individual visits. Together, these models offer a rare, physical glimpse into the ideas and ambitions currently transforming the country’s urban and rural fabric.
Through the Architects’ Eyes /
Short Input Discussions
Listen in and engage. The Public Day of Bread & Heart invites you to a series of short input discussions, where speakers share revealing stories of missteps, hidden layers, cultural encounters, and future dreams. It’s an open stage for humility, humor, and imagination. These conversations bring together voices from international architects to local artists, urban sociologists, and invited guests from the “SALT” list. This is where you don’t just watch, you listen, respond, and get to know Albania through the stories, frictions, and visions shaping its spaces. It’s a space for reflection, dialogue, and shared understanding, one voice at a time.
Architects’ Pavilions /
Meet Your Favorite Architect
Meet your favorite architect up close. Set in the festival garden, these architect-designed Pavilions are informal spaces for connection and exchange. Created in collaboration with their Albanian clients, each Pavilion offers a table for spontaneous conversations, a screen streaming the main stage with live commentary, and curated architectural objects: books, models, and materials of choice. Some may even serve drinks and snacks from the architect’s home country. A roaming camera crew and an architect-journalist will capture these encounters live, making the garden a vibrant space of discovery, dialogue, and unexpected connections.
Albanian Hospitality in Action
More than talks and panels, Bread & Heart is an invitation to experience Albanian hospitality in action. Throughout the festival, moments of music, movement, and shared meals bring people together, offering space to breathe, taste, and connect. From live cello and dance performances to open-air lunches on the terrace and curated dinners for invited guests, the program flows with rhythm and warmth. These are not just breaks in the day; they are part of the dialogue, where architecture meets cuisine, and exchange continues over a glass, a plate, or a melody.
Brainstorming Sessions /
Reflecting Back, Building Ahead
Here, the festival turns inward, into a space of reflection, imagination, and co-creation. After days of listening and exchanging, participants gather to reflect on the past and build the future together. In small working groups, architects, thinkers, and decision-makers dive into key themes, guided by moderators and framed by careful preparation. Each group is invited to explore, debate, and define ideas that matter, distilling their conversations into manifestos that are later shared with the wider community. These sessions are not about final answers but about collective direction. They offer a moment to pause, think deeply, and contribute to a shared vision of what Albania’s spaces could become.